Intuition, Trust, and Horse Training

I’m thinking about trusting intuition. Or even recognizing intuition. Or comprehending trust, for that matter. Those words are made of hope or dread, nested in thin air. You can see right through them. What is the difference between intuition and a wish? How can a woman of a certain age trust the idea of trust? Wouldn’t be smarter to not value such flimsy words, and instead, keep our wits about us. That’s what horses do.

Honestly, you should not trust me on this topic. I do not have a degree in philosophy or psychology. Not only that, I pride myself on having common sense. However, since I make my living as a horse trainer, you shouldn’t trust my common sense either.

I am currently sharing methods for working with a reactive horse with an advanced class online. I have videotaped it all for over two years. It’s the first time I’ve done something like this. Every session shared in all their unvarnished glory. There are days I just work toward a habit of ordinary interaction with him. Can I get the halter on peacefully? Other days, I take a slight risk and present a challenge. The art is to not care about the answer, to not judge things in black and white terms. The horse I work with it’s so filled with fear that anything can happen. So I keep the windows open for opportunity to blow through. Even now, he is capable of brilliance.

The most frequent question asked is, how do I decide what to do and when to ask for more? They know there isn’t a one-size-fits-all technique, and with a reactive horse, tiny things can escalate quickly. They wonder how to take a step, not knowing how it will turn out. How do I weigh options and decide, (as if I’m always right?)

Well! I am an international clinician! An award-winning author! Drum roll: I take a guess. I can absolutely trust horses to be horses, but I have no idea what will work.

Horses seem to attract more than the usual number of perfectionists and we hate to make mistakes. When I was younger, there were times I was so frozen with self-doubt and fear of failure that I’d lose time running lists in my mind. Instead of helping my horse, who was unraveling in real time, I was trotting laps in my frontal lobe. Train wrecks like this start slow. Until it’s too late. Then they are remarkably quick. Wrecks are how I learned to hate indecision. Over-thinking doesn’t have a high side with horses, who are hard wired to run.

Maybe we shouldn’t believe our own minds. Since I was a kid, I was taught to ask someone smarter than me. And to believe everyone was smarter than me. But I’m a bad learner. And who wants to live that way? When does my self-respect wave a tiny hand from the back of the room?

So I made a rule because rules can be a perfectionist’s friend. The rule is if the same thought crosses my mind twice, I go with it. I do it when working with my own horses or other people’s horses. Now it’s just a habit and I do it everywhere in life. You can’t imagine how it simplifies things. I don’t break my rule because it gives me confidence. I worry less. My emotions don’t get all wound up. Sometimes it gets me in trouble, but mostly, it passes as creativity. Or is that intuition?

The thing that I call intuition is part feeling the environment, part listening to calming signals, and part clearing my mind of railbirds. Then I take a guess.

I might change my mind later, but when my intuition tells me something twice, I just believe it. Not because I’m right or wrong, but because the inconsistency of doubt is something that horses read easily. When we get confused or anxious or just plain over-think it, horses wonder what we know they don’t. Soon they are giving the horse trailer a side eye. It’s group think, the way herds work. Studying them, I think horses would rather we be wrong than confused. Soon, I felt the same way. Not to be arrogant or bull-headed. There will be bumps and splats, but horses got to move and so do we.

But does that guess just materialize out of the blue? It must come from somewhere, and once I clear my mind, it isn’t ego. I like to imagine the universe as a big computer and we can all share space. Xenophon reads to me there, and Nuno Oliveira leads me in a waltz. My childhood horses graze around me. I have access to centuries of wisdom, if I can only lay down my defenses and quiet myself enough to listen for a distant echo of a hint. Maybe the reason to trust yourself is to have the peace of believing, even if you are less than a piece of lint on a gnat, the world is on your side.

It’s infinitely better to take your best guess than to flounder blindly on, wrestling indecision and worrying about judgment. I’ve done it enough to know being wrong isn’t the worst thing. A lot of times, being wrong is an opportunity for things to turn out even better than expected.

Eventually, a crazy thing happens. The more you go with your intuition, the stronger it gets, like a muscle made robust by good work. Soon, you can rely on your intuition because of its clarity and success rate. Almost an afterthought, trust stands tall in broad daylight because that’s how you built it. It ends up that trust is bigger than horses and training. Bigger than spring following winter. Trust is a way of being that shows in our body language. That’s why horses and dogs recognize it in us sooner than humans.

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