Here goes the first pancake.
Lucinda Green had a video recently circulating/recirculating where she is coaching a rider on a green horse, and the horse stops at a vertical with those blue barrels as filler. She instructs the rider to let the horse stand for a couple of seconds, and then back the horse up– but, not just a couple of steps. She has the rider continue backing the horse until he is 5-6 canter strides away from the fence, now halted, and has the rider come again, on the straight line. The horse refuses the second time, and she has the rider back him, step by step, the same distance, again.
She makes the comment, I’ll paraphrase, that, you know, the good cowboys often teach a horse to back up before they teach them anything else.
And, who in this sport hasn’t approached a ditch or other question and had an unsure horse stop at its edge, and back them up to reapproach, with successful results the next time.
There is a reason when the questions get difficult, we back them up, facing the obstacle, instead of turning them away and just coming again on the same line. We keep their attention forward and on the obstacle, so he doesn’t lose sight, literally, of the objective, but his mind gets split — it shifts from mental anxiety to a required physical awareness. With careful steps, the thoughts turn from fear and doubt to what are the surroundings and footings to consider, not to bump into anything, respond to the bit and the leg and wait for the cue to stop backing. It is a strategy of forcing the mind to shift from fear to reality.
Perhaps this moment of dual focus is what makes the obstacle a bit less intimidating the second or third time. It takes the horse’s mind out of flight mode “OMG THAT DITCH IS HIDING PREDATORS” to, “where are my feet?”, what ground is under me, what is my rider asking up there — it becomes a sense-driven, grounding shift in their mind.
It works this way for starting horses, too. When they want to run through, react, or lose focus, the trainer backs them up. It puts their mind to work. It’s a submissive gesture, and takes their mind out of the flight response, into a posture of responsiveness. They literally have to find their feet before they can do what is being asked of them. The reaction becomes secondary to the required self-awareness of backing up.
Perhaps we can learn from the cowboys, too.
That next time we have a task, a challenge, a life change, a breakup, a frog to eat …. That we of course, give the stressor the attention it deserves, but as anxiety and avoidance and negativity creep in, that we remember to take some time to back up … while facing our challenge, and note our realities. Who is standing with us, what is the zoomed-out perspective of what we’re dealing with, what are the actual feelings we are dealing with, and what are we doing to sure up our own step. I have a tendency to go into flight mode, myself. And today, needed to back up and find my feet. The sitaution also gave me the push to finally create Life’s a Ditch.
In my (limited) experience of training and bringing along horses with difficult pasts, I have found that humor and humility will get you through the tough days, sometimes even better than actual knowledge does. I hope to make a few connections between 30-something life and candid experience with training and competing horses, and hopefully share some good laughs.
Cheers to the ditches that we’ve gotten over, and those still in front of us. And, to the horses and people who help us find our feet.