A Leader Worth Following

A good leader is aware of the horse’s preferences. Hefner enjoys touch as a reward and to affirm he did the right thing. One of my other horses does not enjoy touch, and would prefer you leave him alone as a reward. Was there a teacher in your life as a student that left a lasting impression on you in a good way? A teacher who inspired you to be your best, reach your highest potential, and all the while made learning fun?

Perhaps you even thought to yourself, I’d like to be like Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so one day. They were not just teachers, but true leaders in our lives.

We can be that leader for our horses, the one that inspires them to try for us, and leaves them liking us in the end, while respecting our leadership and guidance. So what are the qualities that could allow us to be this fun, cool, and yet highly effective leader with our horses?

A good leader always has a plan about how they are going to go about something. The key here with plans, especially with horses, is you are equal part planner, and plan abandoning rebel! This equates to flexibility. Flexibility to think of a new plan, on the fly, based on what our horse needs in that moment to understand the step in our plan that will lead us to the next level. Often times we aspire to do a certain exercise with our horses, take a flying lead change for example, but discover some holes in our foundation along the way that would impede us reaching our goal for the day. We need the flexibility to abandon flying lead changes for now, and address being able to move different body parts, at all three gaits instead, so we can put in place the pieces necessary to get the flying lead change another day. This flexibility that is so important as a leader is mental, to change plans, and also emotional. We must be emotionally flexible, or fit, enough to feel our feelings, but not let them run us. When we allow our emotions to run out of control we can end up reacting, rather than responding, which rarely produces desirable results. A good leader remains calm and thoughtful, even in adversity. This flexibility also has a physical aspect. If we are expecting athleticism of our horses to perform different maneuvers, it is highly beneficial to ourselves have the fitness needed to be effective, both for riding and even groundwork. This physical fitness helps our balance, evenness, precision, and endurance.

While flexibility or fitness is awesome, all the mental, physical and emotional fitness will yield little fruit if we cannot

effectively communicate. Learning to communicate our ideas to our horses is a process that starts with listening with our whole being to what the horse is saying through his body language, so that we can then respond accordingly. We need to get to the point where our diagnosing precision as to what is being said by the horse, without words, is so accurate that we aren’t just throwing communications at the wall, like noodles, and seeing what sticks. Imagine if someone did that to you. You kept saying the answer you thought they wanted, and they just kept saying the same question louder! Talk about wires crossing. We need to eventually hone the skills of reading horses to get good. If we pursue this skill with some passion, we can get to the point where we see the things that are going to happen, before they

A respectful leader would read the horse as she mounts, and responds accordingly. Allowing the process the time it takes to ensure the horse’s confidence is preserved and built, especially while doing a colt start like I am here.

actually do, and save ourselves and our horses a lot of trouble.

Finally, there is probably the most overlooked ingredient, and yet maybe the most important one of good leadership. The ability to inspire!

Inspiration seems a bit airy fairy, and yet it really isn’t with horses. We don’t need to be able to give a good motivational speech to inspire our horses, though it couldn’t hurt! We just need to be able to slow ourselves down, apply our focus solely on our horses and the task at hand, and release when we get the slightest try in the right direction. This try may look like the horse’s slightest shift in weight or flick of an ear.

Horseman Martin Black gives a terrific illustration of this “rewarding the try” concept to his students. He asks them to write the letter “A” on a paper. He then looks at it and asks them again, to write the letter “A” on their paper, and again and again he asks them to write the letter “A” on their papers. Some students eventually get mad, some quit, some keep trying different ways of writing “A,” capital, small, cursive, block letters. The point of this exercise is to shed light on what we sometimes do when teaching our horses. They give us the correct answer, similar to the student who jots down an “A” when Martin requests it, and instead of rewarding them for doing what we asked, and leaving them alone, we ask again and again. This leaves the horse wondering what it is you truly want. Whereas if we reward them with a release for the correct response, even if it is just for a minute or two, they get the message that this was what we wanted.

Similar to the situation in a herd when a dominant horse is applying pressure, when that dominant horse stops applying pressure, the less dominant horse understands they did what the dominant horse wanted, and it is over. So, we as horsemen and women need to truly work on our awareness, so we can detect a try, reward it, and thereby inspire our pupils, the horses to hunt the right answer. This allows them to feel a sense of relief, satisfaction, purpose and dignity. And these are the gems of horsemanship we all greatly desire!

God bless, I hope this was helpful even just as a review of what you already knew about good leadership. I pray we all aspire to be leaders worth following. Allowing Soda to experience the rope in many ways on the ground before I rope off his back is how a good leader would prepare the horse for success.

Elisha Bradburn and her husband, Clay, own Faithful Farm, an equestrian center in the Fraser Valley. Elisha’s passion with horses lies in psychology based horsemanship, with a strong consideration for the horse’s point of view. Elisha is available for clinics, expos, demonstrations and speaking engagements and can be followed on her Legacy Horsemanship pages on Facebook and Instagram or e-mailed at legacyhorsemanship@shaw.ca.

(See her listing in our Business Services section under TRAINERS)

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