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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Stable Parenting Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today talking about horses and humans, like always.
You know, I like to say the only thing that matters is everything. Everything matters. Sometimes I say that and people kind of freak, you know, they're like, “Ah, everything matters. I mean, I must be doing so much wrong, or I'm afraid to do anything because it matters, you know. I’m afraid to make a mistake or do it wrong. I might be doing it wrong and it's not the way I mean it.”
I mean, we all are doing the best we can with what we have to work with at the time that we have. And that's good enough, you know, it is good enough. And that's just fine. But I do think it, I know it's important to become more and more aware of things that matter because things do matter. Everything does matter, and then do the best we can with that.
One of the things that matters a lot with horses is what we communicate by not communicating. And we communicate volumes to horses by not communicating.
I think it's something I've been thinking about and noticing a lot. It really matters in training horses and in horsemanship.
I had a lady that came to me because she was having trouble with her horse. She came to me to help her with the problem she was having with her horse.
What was happening is that her horse, she would go to step on or mount her horse. She'd start to put weight in a stirrup and the horse would bolt and run away, run away a hundred yards. And she would be clinging to the side. Sometimes the horse got away from her and, or if it didn't get away from her, she'd be clinging to the side of it trying to hold on and eventually the horse is galloping away and she’d get her leg over and eventually it stopped.
I mean, she hadn't got killed yet but this is getting to be an extremely dangerous situation.
What can happen is that if you get your, you know, she could get her foot stuck in the stirrup and that horse could take off and drag her and step on her, and people die like that. One way that people do die, it's a pretty common way that people die with horses. And so this is a serious problem, right, that she's got.
The question is, at the end of our first lesson, her and I and the horse, she looked at me and she said, this is going to take a while, isn't it? And I said, yeah, this is going to take a while. This wasn't created in a short period of time. This is created over a long period of time. And this horse really believes that this is what you want him to do.
And so in order to change what this horse believes life's about, it's going to take a minute. This isn't going to be a quick fix for this horse.
So let's just take a look at what had happened with this horse. Okay. Because they don't, by the way, they don't come made this way. They don't just do stuff like that. We train horses into most all of their bad behavior. Okay. Most all of their bad habits.
And then a lot of times we do it unknowingly. We just don't know any better. And that was the case here with this lady. She didn't know what was happening. She was trying to get along and just didn't know what she was communicating with the horse, and she created this big problem.
That's what happens a lot with horses. We create, we train bad habits into them and then we're mad. We are mad. Eventually we get to a place where we're either going to get hurt or we already did get hurt bad. We've been physically injured bad or we're just fed up and we feel like we're being taken advantage of.
We feel like the horse is a bad horse. We feel like they're spoiled. We believe that they're just not willing and they have a bad attitude and all this stuff. When in fact, almost a hundred percent of the time, nearly a high percentage of the time, nearly all of it, we have been training the horse on purpose, whether it was on purpose or not, into these bad habits.
So here's how it goes in this example. Okay.
In the beginning, the lady would go to step on her horse and the horse would take a step. She didn't do anything. Whatever, he just took one step forward, so she'd swing her other leg over and off they'd go. Okay.
And then it was two steps. Hey, whatever. He can take a step or two. I can swing up while he's taking a step, it doesn't matter, and off we'd go.
Then pretty soon, as you can imagine, it's three and four and five steps. And then he's just flat walking away while you step on and you can't—as soon as he thinks you're ready to step on—he starts marching away.
Then he starts trotting away. Okay. And now eventually over a long period of time, he gets to where you are trying to hold onto him. And as soon as he thinks you're ready to put, lift your foot up, he's running. Okay. You can barely get your foot up and start to get half your weight in it and he is going 90 miles an hour away from you.
So let's just look at the beginning. Was, when he took that first step, was that what she wanted? I would have to say probably not. Okay. And I think that she would agree that that's not what she wanted to have happen.
But it did happen. And so what did she do? She did nothing, right? She did nothing. She just, off they went. She didn't communicate with the horse anything. So by communicating nothing, she communicated that's what I'd like for you to do every time I get on.
And then it just built from there into something that was extremely dangerous, a terrible hard habit to break.
Why is this important? I've experienced this. I mean, it's very, very, very common in horses. And if I'm not careful and I have a lot of experience in training horses, I can do similar things.
Here's one more quick, easy example. I have a lot of young horses and a lot of times in saddling or bridling, or when I'm preparing to ride, horses can, you know, I’ll lift my hands near their head to bridle them and they'll move their head away. They'll resist a little bit. Or I'll go to throw the pad on, the saddle pad goes before the saddle, and then I'll go to get the saddle and they'll step to the side or something like that.
Now, I could still get the saddle on if you step to the side, if you resisted me a little bit. If I'm trying to bridle you and I put my hands up near your head and you move your head away, I can kind of, I can do two things. I can either, if I got a halter around your neck or on your head still, I can bring you back and hold you.
This is important. I can hold you.
We do the same thing with people. I can add pressure the whole time I'm bridling you by holding you, even though it's a small amount of pressure. Or I can do nothing. I can, you know, keep going with you and letting you keep kind of resisting me and clear over there, I'll eventually get you, but I accomplished my goal.
But what does that mean? What did I communicate to you in that process?
Back to the lady, and same things here, right? Did I say to the horse when I put my hands near his head and he moved his head a few inches away, did I say that's okay? Or did I bring you back and hold you and just force you to be here?
Or one of the things I could, another option, is to add pressure, bring your, the horse's head and face back over where I want it to be, and then let all the pressure off. That's the happy place, right? Pressure in the unhappiness, in the thing I don't want, and then total release when you're, when I'm getting the desired result, when your head's in the position that I can easily bridle you where I want you to be, over here where it's easy, where I don't have to chase you around to get your halter or your bridle on.
Same thing with stepping on, okay? The point is what we do a lot of times is we don't do anything about it. We just accept it. We let people, we feel like they're pushing on us when it's people. This is the language I hear. They're pushing on me. They're running over me. They're taking advantage of me. And we feel the same way about horses.
But you know what the thing of it is? Almost all the time, the horses don't know. Okay. They don't know. They're only reacting to what we're doing. And we think that they're taking advantage of us. We think that they don't want to get along. We think they have a bad attitude. We think that they're spoiled and they're no good and they're this and that.
And, I mean, we didn't ask them to do anything different. She didn't ask anything until she finally came to me with this serious problem. Did she recognize that there's a problem to do anything about? For a year or longer, she had communicated to that horse that this is acceptable behavior for you to move away while you're trying to get on. By doing nothing, she communicated that that's the desired result.
Okay, and so with people, it's the same thing. They do things where they feel like they're pushing on us. Like I said, that's a language I hear in my coaching and I've experienced too—we all have, right? It's like, oh well, but I'm not going to say anything because they might think blah, blah, blah about me, or I want them to think this about me, so I'm not going to say anything.
You keep asking me to do this and I keep doing it. You keep doing that thing. And then eventually you do it so much or one day I've kind of had it and I just snap and then I blow up. Right. I'm going to boundary you.
Here's the question. Why don't we make the communication? We are communicating volumes by not communicating. Why are we not communicating in the beginning? Okay. Here's why. Because it's not easy. It's not comfortable.
I had a lady in my coaching and she said her son's a slob. He's a teenager, he's like 17, and he's a slob, damn slob, and she's had it with him. He won't keep his room and he destroys the bathroom every time he goes in there and she's had it, she's about ready to throw him out of the house. That's enough of that.
But you know, as we talked and it came down to it, what specifically, I asked her, did you say to him to let him know the expectation of how you want his room and the bathroom to be?
And when it came down to it, you know what the words were? Her words were things like sarcastic comments, like, “What, did a bomb go off in there?” She'd say that when he came out of the bathroom, right?
So, I mean, that's almost like adding shame to the kid coming out of the bathroom. And that doesn't seem like that's going to get the result that you want. That doesn't really describe how you'd like the bathroom to be cleaned or sanitized or whatever.
And so the point in this, with this lady and her son, she had really never set the expectation. She just assumed that he was doing this and didn’t want to get along and hadn’t really just said, “Hey, I love you, man. You're old enough to do this. And I'm going to show you. If you're going to live here, here's how it's going to be. And I'm going to, here's the products and here's the this. I'm going to show you exactly how you want it to be. And if not, there's going to be a consequence. This is the consequence. And I love you. I love you to death. I love you forever. I need you to do this thing for me. And if you don't, here's the consequence. I love you.”
Okay, she hadn't done any of that. Why? Because it would be a little bit uncomfortable? I mean, or maybe she just really hadn't thought about it? But inside, she's getting angry and mad and causing this conflict. And you know what's happening? The connectivity, the connection, the bonding—nothing's happening that's good that we want to have happen to parents.
Okay, and we do this with adults too. With horses and minor children, we get to have consequences, right? With adults, adults get to do what they want. We try to control them too, but it doesn't ever work well with adults.
What the best thing for us to do is to have boundaries. And so how that works is, “Hey, you're doing something that's not acceptable to me. If you continue to do that, I'm going to do this. If you smoke in this car, I'm not going to ride with you anymore. Okay. That's, I mean, you can smoke in your car, but if you smoke, then I'm not going to ride in your car anymore. ”Something like that.
I love you. If you do boundaries right, it's not like I'm boundering you. You've been running over me. If they've been running over you and you feel like you're taken advantage of, I would seriously ask you: have you clearly communicated what your expectation is and what you want? Because most of the time the answer for me, and for the people that I coach, and for people with horses, the answer is no, because it's too difficult.
So here's why it matters the most. It matters the most because we're damaging the relationships that we want to strengthen, that we want to have strong connections in, that we want to have this love and this bonding and this connectivity and all of it.
We're kind of sabotaging it. Why? Because of a difficult conversation? Because we can't set our expectation or set our consequence and let it be known?
And so what we end up doing is creating conflict and resentment by a failure to communicate. Yeah, we're communicating by a failure to communicate, and it's not ending up getting us what we want.
So I encourage you to consider this, to consider, here’s the keys here. Okay. Here's what to consider when you feel like you're being pushed on. It's kind of language I hear: I'm being, they're pushing on me.
When you feel like you're being run over, when you feel like you're being disrespected, when you feel like you're being taken advantage of, any of those kinds of things, do you have any of those thoughts or feelings?
Just stop and consider: Hmm, that's interesting. Have I clearly communicated my expectation and what I want? Is a consequence or a boundary appropriate in this situation? And do I have the courage and can I, with love, can I get my mind right and my thoughts right and feel good about this to where I can have this conversation with love, with unconditional love, regardless of who it's with?
Can I do that? And I can tell you from my experience and my coaching clients' experience, which is incredible to watch, both mine and theirs, is that when we have the willingness to have the difficult conversations and when we communicate, let people know what the deal is, we get what we want more.
But more importantly than that, we can't control horses and we can't control other human beings either. Whether we got a consequence or a boundary, they're all going to do what the hell they're going to do. They're going to do what they're going to do. Okay.
But we have better odds of our influence. We have better odds of getting what we want, what we think is best, if we're clearly communicating our expectations, okay, rather than not. Because not is a communication by itself.
Think it over. It's an important one.
So, I appreciate you taking your time to be here with me today and just remember:
You cannot fail as long as you Don't Ever Stop Chasin’ It.
