Episode 10: Make Mistakes in the Right Direction

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Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Hello, I'm Stacey Westfall, and I teach people how to understand, enjoy and successfully train their own horses in this first season of the podcast. I've been discussing issues that frequently affect the way that riders think. As I wrap up the season and prepare for season two, I want to cover just one more thing. I have hundreds and hundreds of thoughts, but I'm going to actually use that Foursquare model that I introduced to you early on. The one that says Ryders Mind Ryders body horses mind horses body. I'm gonna use it on myself right now to make sure that I give you a balanced view of all the different places I see riders getting stuck or struggling with. So I'm going to stick to this one, go through the riders mind, and then move on to the riders body for the next season. Today's episode, I want to discuss the idea of making mistakes and I'm going to break it down into three different things. Why you should make mistakes, which mistake you should really try to avoid and how to measure the direction of your mistakes. During my clinics, I often tell riders that they need to make mistakes in the right direction. I'm actually thinking I should make a T-shirt that says make mistakes in the right direction. At my last clinic, a lady said, I'm waiting for the T-shirt. I'm ready to buy it. The little saying implies two things. First, it implies that it's OK to make mistakes.

And then it also implies that there's some kind of way to measure the mistakes that you're making and how that's working out for you. My idea is that if you can free yourself up to the idea that making mistakes is okay, then it's easier for you to get started. And we all know that getting started with something is often the biggest key is just being able to get started and holding yourself back in that way. And it's interesting because when I see writers kind of tense up against the idea of making mistakes, it immediately makes me think, OK, what if we were gonna do this with a horse? When I think about training my horse? I know that my horse is gonna make mistakes and I'm not going to judge or criticize. I know that it's part of a learning process. That would be the same for the rider. I even learned how to laugh at a lot of the mistakes that the horses make. If you want to see a great example of me laughing at my own horse while he makes a bunch of mistakes, I actually a really great video on YouTube and I'll link it up in the show. Notes here of my horse knew when I was teaching him to step up onto a pedestal. So most of you have seen a horse stand on a pedestal at some point. This wasn't really that high.

It was maybe. I don't even think it was 12 inches high and it wasn't really that small. Maybe it was 3 feet by 3 feet. And I was teaching him how to step up on it, not with me riding him. I'm standing back behind the video camera, sending him up on. But I was letting him take his time figuring it out. And it was really funny because if you watch I've got a short one video and I'll really long like I think it's like an hour long video watching him slowly work his way through it. Because what kept happening to him was he would go to pick up that last leg and he couldn't figure out that when his last leg came off the ground, he had to change the height of his head neck. So he kept not lifting his head and neck. And he would he would like he would tumble over forward off the front of this thing, which wasn't a big deal, because he'd basically just stepped down a few inches. But it was really funny. There was even a place in there where you could see him lift his last leg off the ground, but he sticks it out behind him as a counterbalance to his head neck because he's trying to work this out. And the whole time I'm laughing because it's OK that he's making these mistakes. And with me laughing, it's easier for him to feel the freedom.

He doesn't feel pressure when I am doing that. If you're training yourself, if you're out in the barn and you're riding, you need to be your own coach and you will find laughter brings more power than criticism. And before you're gonna be able to laugh at your horses mistakes or your own mistakes, you're gonna have to be okay with making mistakes. If you're feeling some kind of resistance to the idea of making mistakes, do keep in mind that there is one kind of mistake that you should not make. The mistake you've got to try to avoid is a mistake that risks your safety. Either your safety or your horse's safety. So what this means is if you take this idea of mine and you decide to go saddle up a horse that's been known to Buck and you're like, well, she said, make mistakes. And you go out there and you're gonna just jump on and you've got a pretty good idea. This isn't going to go well, especially not go well in the sense of somebodies safety is in danger. Don't make those kind of mistakes. Those you've got to figure out how to break that down in a much smaller possible steps where one mistake in that step isn't going to cause anybody harm or danger. When I was saying that you needed to make mistakes in the right direction. That's what I'm talking about. You're going to learn that as you're training the horses, you need to be able to measure the trend or the direction where things are headed.

The best way that I can tell you to do this is that you've got to look at things over a longer time period. So in this example, I'm going to say over a 30 day time period, it could be over 60 days. I'm going to say at times that I look at it over a week, but a week is one of the smallest segments that I look at it in. And so I really need to be looking over multiple weeks, 30, 60, 90 days, because we've got to be look at a trend. And if you look too close and you try to measure every single 10 minute increment of your ride as being, is this headed up or down? You'll drive yourself crazy. You'll be really tense and you will have a lot more trouble allowing for mistakes. So try to think of this more as a trending direction. And again, when we look at trends, there are three different options that are going to come up. Number one, it's going to be trending down. Number two, it's going to be kind of staying the same or a flat line. Number three, it's gonna be trending up. So in the example of going out and jumping on a horse that you think might buck, that would be obviously choosing to trend down. Don't choose something that's going to take you trending down.

You might make mistakes that take you trending down, but don't actively choose them. What you're going to need to be able to do here is decide your end goal and then you can measure towards whether this is trending up or trending down. Let me bring this into a real life example so I can put it into action for you, a place that I will make mistakes on purpose is actually when I'm teaching the horses to change leads. Most of my horses I start from on broke and train them all the way through till finish. That's what I really enjoyed doing. And right now, I've got a couple of horses that I'm doing this with. One in particular is Gabby in Gabby is a granddaughter of Roxy, the famous mare from the bareback Bradleys. And right now I've been doing lead changes, started doing lead changes months ago when I started doing lead changes with Gabby. I actually started asking for lead changes before I had the full control. So I had the ability to walk, trot, canter. I could rider really pretty good. two-handed not so much one-handed. That means she's not great with neck reigning. I can move her hips. Okay, I can do lateral work. Okay, but it's not really pretty and it's not super finished. But that's okay with me because I actually like asking my horses to change leads when there's a pretty good chance I'll get it, but almost as much chance that I won't.

And the reason for this is that I'm teaching not only myself but them that mistakes are OK. So maybe I asked for the first lead change and the horse doesn't move its hip enough. So changes leads in the front end, but not in the hind end. I don't panic and I don't punish the horse for it. I make a mental note of it and then I think, oh well, either I need to use more of a leg cue there or set up further ahead. Or maybe she just doesn't know the answer. So I'll play around a little bit more and then I'll ask again. Well maybe she throws a different mistake out there, maybe she slows down too much, so it makes it really difficult and then I'm able to think, oh well you know we can work on making sure that she keeps the correct cadence and rhythm and that she doesn't, you know, excessively speed up or slow down. And so I'm not afraid to ask her to do something like a lead change, even though I'm not guaranteed a perfect outcome. I use it as feedback. What's really interesting is that over the years I've taught lead changes to lots and lots of horses and I have experimented with waiting longer and making everything more and more and more correct. Before I asked for the lead change. But the one thing that you have to be careful with if you do that is that it doesn't necessarily equal out to being like, Oh, I waited longer.

I did all the foundation work. Perfect. And now these lead changes are going to be perfect because the problem was going for perfect in both of those situations is now if you've done all of that work and you've got everything perfect, when the horse goes to do the lead change, it actually thinks it's doing something wrong because it's never done it before. And so now all of a sudden they're being asked to move from their left lead over to their right lead and they're like, oh, no, I haven't done this before. And then we only do perfect things here because the lead change is kind of a bigger move. So it's really interesting to me that sometimes when we really, really try to avoid mistakes at all costs, we actually end up creating horses that tense up. If everything isn't perfect and learning new things isn't perfect. What I would really like you to take away from this and put into action is the first thing. Realize that you're going to need some sort of consistency or you won't be able to measure the trend. That means if you ride once every 30 days, you're not going to be all to map out a trend. So if nothing else, I hope this gets you motivated to get into some kind of a rhythm.

If I could just give you a default bare minimum, I would love to see you guys working the horses three days a week because this will give you a minimum of feedback. Do whatever you can, whatever fits in your schedule. But three days a week is great because you can actually start to see trends a lot more clearly. And if you are going along and you're working your horse three or more days a week, you need to make sure that you're reviewing the trends at the end of every week. But also with kind of this running total over a longer period, if you have difficulty remembering back then simply set a video, you can take your cell phone, video camera, something, balance that on a bale of hay, videotape yourself and a month or two months later, go back and use that to compare to what you're doing now, because odds are if you've been working, even though it feels like you're making mistakes, a lot of the times you'll actually you should be able to see the trend and it's not going to all be perfect in the middle of it. A lot like raising kids. Training horses is not something that just gets easier and easier as you get further into it, as most parents or people who were children once can all identify. When I look back at the really famous bareback braless ride, I think it would be interesting for you to know that when I watch the ride I can feel the ride again in my body.

And the interesting thing is that I can feel the imperfections in the ride so I can feel the teeny tiny mistakes that were happening inside of that ride. Because something you might not know is that the more you can feel, the more details of the ride that you become aware of. That means you're going to feel a lot more stuff that's not working. So when I go out and ride, I can feel a lot. That doesn't mean everything I feel is perfect. There's just a feedback loop that's going on. So even inside that really famous ride, when I watch it, I can feel in my body the little spots where there was a little bit of resistance and communication going back and forth between the two of us, even though you can't see it. And the more you understand it, the more you learn, the more you're gonna feel the details. And you're going to need to get okay with the idea that it's not going to always feel perfect, because even on my very best horses, everything doesn't feel perfect all the time. Thanks so much, guys, for joining me. This has been a really fun first season. Next week, I'm going to be answering questions that people have asked by leaving voicemails over on my Web site. If you have a question you'd like to have answered here on the podcast.

You can go over to Stacy Westfall dot com on the right hand side. You'll see a way that can leave a voicemail. And thanks for listening. Share this podcast with somebody you think might enjoy it. Thank you.

If you enjoy listening to Stacie's podcasts, please visit Stacey Westfall dot com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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