Episode 11: Season One Q & A: Evaluating Horse, Confidence & Desire, Limiting Beliefs

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Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the 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.

Hi, I'm Stacey Westfall, and I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horse. Before I move on to Season 2 next week, I want to take the time to answer a few of the questions that have come in. These questions actually come from Canada, the United States and France.

We're getting some reach out there. The questions are going to cover evaluating a new horse, overcoming loss of confidence and desire and how to overcome the limiting belief. The horses hate being ridden. If you have any words of encouragement for these people, please leave a comment underneath the podcast, show notes that you will find over Stacie Westfall dot com. Let's jump in to our first question.

Hi, Stacy, it's Liane. I'm here in Canada. It's minus 10 Celsius. Sunny, windy day. And I'm loading one hundred and thirty bales of hay. Listening to your podcasts. Just want to say thank you for sharing your wisdom and insight into the age and schooling idea. I love the idea of kindergarten to high school and I feel that I'm in different places with different horses. Give us your perspective perhaps on when you acquire a new horse. How do you best assess each of its phases and where it is and what we need to do to bring it to a new level of understanding? Thanks for your clarifications and keep the podcast coming. Love your work.

Thanks for your question, Liane. When I am evaluating a horse, I'm keeping two things in mind at all times. Number one, who are they? And number two, what training level are they at? And to me, those are two separate things. When I look at who they are at their core. The way that I see that at first is just how they interact with each other and how they interact within the herd. Now I'll also see patterns develop that keep revealing that and deepening my understanding of them as the training progresses.

So let me give you a couple examples right now. My husband has a 2 year old that he raised and her name is Jewel. And she's really interesting because when you watch her in the pasture, she's very bold in some interesting places. A good example of this would be a month or two ago, my husband went and rented a big piece of equipment and was towing it on a big trailer behind the dooly. And when he came pulling into the driveway, other horses were running around just for the silliness of an excuse to run around. But she kind of boldly ran up towards the fence. And there are quite a few moments like that with her where you can see this bold ness inside of her curiosity. It doesn't mean that she's never spooky or jumpy because she lacks training right now. But it does mean that there's this glimmer of something different that I'm labeling boldness and in a similar way, I have other horses that have different quirks like that. So Willow is a horse that you'll be seeing me post quite a bit about in 2019. And she's much more naturally timid. This impacts her in different ways. And what's really interesting to note is that just because she's more naturally timid isn't all negative. It's almost easier sometimes to get a naturally timid horse to follow a strong leader. So if I'm the strong leader, because that horse actually needs a strong leader or craves a strong leader, then I've got another horse that you'll also be hearing me talk quite a bit about this year is Gabby.

And she's a granddaughter of Roxy and she's a mare. But I call her my stud mare because she's bold but in a different way than little Jewel is. She's very confident and she has a lot of what we would label presence that you often see in a stallion. But she's a mare, but she thinks she's she's got a lot of that kind of presence and that attitude of a stallion. And it's a really interesting combination. So when I say that, I'm always evaluating who they are. That's the kind of stuff. So I see that Willow is easier to scare in training. So when I'm doing things, I am more aware that she could take something as scary where Gabby can essentially right off the bat handle a lot more pressure because she's a lot more like. Mm. Yeah I'll consider that she's not the same as Willow is with that, that natural timid ness. And so at their core there is a way that the horses are now where it gets interesting and confusing at times to people is that the training can accentuate or mask certain habits. So for example with Willow who's naturally more timid, I'm teaching her to become more brave. But where you'll see it most strongly is going to be when she's with me, because she's got a high likelihood of reverting back to who she really is at her core when she's not with me.

But I can potentially train her and I'm already seeing happen where she's brave with me. And again, it's really interesting because that makes her want to be with me because she likes feeling brave and she doesn't know how to get that naturally. Gabby cracks me up because she's a little bit more like. There was early on. I say that it took my call bion when they finally like that, it's kind of like they see the system and they're like, oh yeah, that could work. Gabby took forever to get to buy into the system of like what's going on around here and how I'm thinking. And then for the longest time it felt like she was like, I will take this into consideration. She's I give voices to my horses and she's always very queenly. Anyway, I'm always evaluating who they are and what their training level is. A great way for you to really wrap your head around. This is actually already out there in the YouTube series that I did with Weaver Leather on YouTube, where you look and find Stacey's video diary. Jack and. This is video diary. Jack was a series where I followed the last fall that Roxy had and the training of him. And if you watch episode one, you will see day one of me evaluating a horse. And you'll also notice that it's mostly turned out loose because I am watching for who he is at his core.

And then if you watch episode two, you'll actually get to see a lot of the body language between me and him. But especially it's interesting because you'll see how I'm asking questions of the horse and doing this evaluation. And then you'll see me translating what I'm seeing. I'm saying this is how I see that he's bored. This is how I see that he's frustrated. This is how I see that he doesn't understand. And you can actually see the communication between the two of us when he's pawing, how he's looking. What really cracks me up, though, possibly my favorite. Now, I've got a few real high favorites in that whole series, but Episode 3 is definitely one of them because it was the second day that I really worked him. And it was so funny because the first day that Episode 2 is where I worked him. And then in episode 3, you can clearly, if you watch the two episodes back to back, see that he is working me. So he went in to the stall after the episode two overnight. He contemplated everything that happened that you see in episode 2 and he comes out the next day for episode 3 and you can see him going. And what about this? And what about this and what about this? And this is revealing on the surface.

You can see that it's revealing his training level because he literally drags me out of the camera man's angle several times. But you'll also see that he's saying something about who he is at his core. I'm going to throw one more kind of new idea out there. And that is the idea that I'm constantly training and then testing. And so what you'll see a lot with this early evaluation is that I'm doing these like pop quizzes or these tests. There's a pretty good chance he doesn't know the answer, but that's kind of how I'm going to fast forward my knowing it's OK if he doesn't pass the test. That wasn't the point of the test. The test was there to say. Does he know this or does he not? And that's why I think it's super funny that an Episode 2, I'm testing him. And in episode 3, you can clearly see that he turned around and he starts testing me. I also in future episodes, when I get to the horse's mind in the horse's body series, I'm going to talk a lot more about the idea of where some of these different things fit in, meaning like grade school. What does that mean for a horse in high school level things? What does that mean in college level things and what does that mean? Because in my mind it's very clear because I do really love training horses from beginning to end, which is why you can see my passion kind of played out there over what you've seen me do in the horse industry.

So you'll see me at Road of the Horse doing a Colt starting championship and then you'll see the bareback bridles, freestyle training at a really high level. And because I train my horses from very first rides, from very first faltering, because I train them from start to finish. I've got this very clearly in my head, all these levels. So in my mind, it is these grade levels, kindergarten all the way up through to college. Well, what I need to do to get it out of my mind and more easily consumable for you listening is I need to break it down and be more clear and say, OK. You know, a horse that's up through like a kindergarten through eighth grade will call that grade school is a horse that is, you know, leading and basic riding and basic tailoring. But what what separates that from high school is that when you get into high school, you're doing lead changes. You're working on NEC training and a lot of the foundation movements that are sports specific things. If you want to look at it like that or even in high school, you might do liberty work if you're taking groundwork to a higher level. But that's still different than college, because if you look at college, when you go to college, you take a lot of the specialty things.

So you might have learned math in high school. Hopefully you learn math in high school, but you're gonna go take it to a whole new level if you specialize in that in college. And so that's what I see when I go up into the college level with horses. So interestingly enough, if you watch that YouTube series with Jack, the Stacie's video diary, Jack, just go to my YouTube channel, which is just Stacee was. Well, Stacy L. Westfall, I should know that. But anyway, you can see Jack go from kindergarten in high school, but not into college. So I clearly track the number of hours of training that are going into it. Keep in mind that because of my experience, I'm able to get a lot of information across to a horse in a shorter amount of time. But you'll see that I tracked the time, tracked what I was doing, and you get to see that whole arc and you can actually see a horse go from kindergarten through high school, which I think is super cool, which is why we did it. I. And constantly, again, just to wrap it up, evaluating who are they? Because I'm constantly learning about that, but they are telling me who they are at their core and I'm evaluating what they know. And that's something that I can more mode the moldable change. It's a never ending circle. I do go back to the beginning very frequently with my horses.

So I believe that my horses should be excellent at doing the basics, not just a checklist of, you know, kind of. Oh, good. We got past that test and we never have to go back. I don't look at it like that. More coming up in the following seasons in Season 3 and Season 4 when I tackle the horses mind and the horses body. Thanks for the question, Liane. Let's move on to our second question.

Hi, Stacey. I am 62 years old and have written that my whole life. Seven years ago, I lost my Western pleasure show mayor and just decided not to even bother writing anymore. This past year, I bought a lovely three year old who was green, a gelding. Sweet. I trusted him with all my heart. However, I have lost so much confidence and so much of my writing ability. When we go to a horse show because he was never trucked anywhere, he only acts fresh as a young horse. Well, but I just automatically freeze. Have got him or the confident trainer now in taking lessons. But I'm still not have the desire and the drive to keep going. I want to take and show him this year because he is a one in a million horse. But I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it, or are there any ways for me to get my confidence back.

The first thing I want to say is I'm sorry for your loss. When I listened to your question, I had to listen to it several times because I have felt something so similar that it keeps circling around me. And so I'm just gonna go ahead and talk about that because I had a similar experience of losing a horse. And the way that it affected me could be part of what's going on with you. So when I listen to your question, there are three things that stand up to me confidence, ability and desire. When I when I talk about what was going on for me back in 2012, I lost my horse Vacarro, and it was so close to losing Roxy that it kind of slipped underneath maybe the radar from from a lot of people because I just was emotionally exhausted and didn't really talk a lot about it. But. It really affected me because it just shut me down. If you look on YouTube, if you look online, I didn't do a lot for the next two years and I took some time to really try to figure out what in the world was going on because I didn't have the ability to just put it down and walk away. I was still going out to the barn for other horses and other reasons, but it was very interesting how much impact it had on me.

And it got me thinking about how much of my confidence I had actually hung on this particular horse. And while I was in the middle of that struggle, I was doing things to try to move myself forward. For example, that's the time period when I got my miniature horses because they made me laugh. I called them my therapy mini's and my husband was like therapy mini's. I'm like, they're therapy for me because they made me laugh. What became clear to me as I was going through it was that one of the reasons I was having trouble moving to another show type horse was because I was really stuck on some of the things that I hadn't accomplished with him because. I do a great job of visualizing things ahead of time, and so I had this big map that was going on and all these things and then it was just boom cut off and cut short. And looking back now, I think I could have moved through that time period a little more intentionally. If I had thought about the idea that what I was running into was that I needed to accept some of the things that I would never accomplish with him, things that I was just I could see them so clearly. But it really just kind of had me all tangled up. And that's some of the stuff that occurred to me while I was listening to your question, because it's still very easy for me to pull up all the emotions that went around there.

One thing I'll say for sure is that it gave me this state of feeling like I was living in between two different worlds. You know, it was like I hadn't completely let go of the dreams and the goals and the relationship that I had with him. And so because I hadn't let go of that and accepted or changed, I was also stuck from moving on and looking back, I'm not even sure if it would have sped things up if I had known. I think it might have felt different, but. Time is a piece of the puzzle, at least for me. Let me reflect a little bit more specifically. So when I listed confidence at the beginning, I hear you questioning about confidence. So I went ahead and looked it up in the dictionary. Confidence is the state of feeling certain. Well, as soon as we read that, you and I can both say, gees, like my world was shaken by the loss of this horse. So of course, I would be mentally uncertain because I have had a loss of certainty when that happened. Well, if confidence is the state of feeling certain, then something that shakes you would shake your confidence.

What also occurred to me quite a while later, and it's not nearly as emotional, but it's still factual and it's still there is I actually could feel myself later on dragging my feet, knowing the physical amount of time that was going to go into creating this next masterpiece of a horse.

Because for the level of riding that I was doing with Vacarro when I lost him, it was going to be a lot like, let's say a thousand hours. So even starting from scratch or even starting from halfway, I had a lot of hours. So I think that certainty in that confidence. I think that there's a mental side to it. But I actually think there's a physical side to it. I couldn't just choose to be highly effective on another horse because there were physical hours. I had to go into it. But for sure, on the emotional side, I had been shaken to the core. So if confidence is a state of feeling certain, I think you need to reflect on what that means to you and how you can become more certain. Another word that came to mind while I was reading it, you brought up desire. So another dictionary search here reveals that that desire is a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen. And the way this impacted me around a loss and I'm wondering if it's going on with you would be that I needed to separate out the desires that I had with the vacarro from the next horses that were to come. And because it was an incomplete feeling, that was a different thing for me to process through than I had ever done before. And I realized that there was an overlap or the temptation to have an overlap, you know, that another horse could come in and fill this and do that.

And even as I say it, I know it doesn't sound very realistic. But until I look at it, until I picked it up and looked at it went, what am I doing here? Why am I avoiding this? What am I desiring here? I had to actually look at that and analyze it. And so the question I have for you is when you say that you're not sure if you have the desire, you mention having this one in a million horse. So is the desire for your horse this one in a million horse? Is it a desire for your horse to be seen as a one in a million horse? Or is it a desire for you to accomplish something with this horse because they're suddenly different? For example, if it's a desire for you to have this horse be seen as this one in a million horse, then that might be something that the confident trainer can accomplish. If you have a lack of desire, it's almost pointing a little bit towards either it's being shut down by one of these other things we're talking about or it's pointing towards is this this secondary desire, like a desire for the horse to have the the possibility to reach this potential. So if you can play with that thought and decide, because I don't think you can force desire on yourself because it's a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.

So get clear about what that is. It could be that you're a little bit too vague on on this desire. Is this a misplaced desire from your mayor? Is this a desire for this next horse? And where do you fit into this whole thing? Because you're expressing that you're not sure if you have that desire. So reflect on that a little bit and then you bring up your ability. And one thing that I've talked about quite a bit on the podcast and you're gonna hear it for sure in the next season when we're talking about the writer's body, is that when we talk about ability, if you look that up in the dictionary, it is the possession of the means or skill to do something, which means that if we're going to have a mean, the means or the skill to do something, that's going to require some practice. And since this is a physical sport, there's a physical aspect. And I remember back when I was quite a few years younger, actually, I took some time off to visit family. And when I came back and started riding again, I went to a massage therapist that I had been seeing over the last year. And I went and I said, Wow, I can't believe how sorry I am. And she just said, you're not 20 anymore. And it was one of those moments where it was like, oh, yeah, good point.

So I can feel more as I age that I have to work a little bit harder or different to be able to maintain or improve things with my body. So some of the ability stuff that you have going on, if you set down writing six years ago, you might need to pick up some kind of a physical training program for yourself outside of horses is what I've done. But you could do that inside and outside of horses because these all tied together, the ability, this possession of the means or skill to do something is tied together with a confidence or a state of feeling certain. And these are pieces that I would like you to reflect on because they're all affecting things. And for me, I personally do a lot of journaling. I write down notes. I have notes everywhere. And that would be the way that I would break it down, because each one of these single words, you could just write down a whole page about what the word ability means to you or how you see it playing out in this scenario. And possibly one thing that's just kind of I'm going to put out there. Give yourself permission to miss your mayor and move on. Thank you so much for submitting your question. I could hear the difficulty of doing that even in your voice. Thank you. And our final question of the day comes from France.

Hi, Stacey. I'm Sophie. I do talk to you from France. But I guess you already heard it was my beautiful accent. And we still are in season, the writers mind. I would like to have your thoughts about it, really, but I have four black horses. And that, I now realize is the main belief that keeps me from having fun at leisure when writing my mate here D. I strongly, deeply believe that horses hate being ridden. I started to ride at the age of three during my time waiting for Wednesday. The day I had my first riding lesson whether torture, I was only leaving for that single power of unlimited happiness. My dream was to own my own horse. I fight at the age of 23. From that day I became really serious. I took it as a huge responsibility. I have the responsibility of making her happy. So you can imagine from that day I felt as if I was ticking off the gas pedal and the brake at the same time. On the one hand, I really love and enjoyed writing on the other hand. I unconditional love my mare. But as I'm sure she doesn't like being read them, I have no pleasure writing her. However, I can give up your writing. You fight. So priding. It's a depression, for sure. Do you have any thoughts on this topic? Thank you very much.

I can definitely see how you would feel like you had the gas pedal and the brake happening at the same time as you said. What strikes me in this is that it is absolutely true that everyone gets to and does draw their own lines for what they believe in and and where they believe. And this is a little bit where the podcasts where I talked about pressure comes in. There's this line that everybody draws depending on how they're viewing things. And that's very normal. You happen to have drawn your line between mounted and not mounted. So it sounds like you have a line that when you mount up, this becomes where you're sure that the horses hate being ridden. Now, here's a thought, if we can say that there's a line currently drawn for you between written equals, they hate it. But on the ground, she's okay. What I would challenge you to actually do is move your line backwards. So see if you can figure out how you've come to this line between writing versus not writing in the way that I would explore that is in this idea of her being happy. Then what we do. What I would say is say, OK, she's unhappy when I writer, but she's happy when I'm not writing her. So try moving your line backwards. What if she's not happy standing for the farrier? Is that something that you would accept? Would you say, OK, you don't want to have your feet taken care of? So we're going to give that up because your happiness comes above having your feet cared for regularly.

So at some point, what I'm interested in you feeling out inside yourself is where you've drawn that line and what you are willing to do that she may not be happy with. And in this example, we'll just put the farrier or the vet there. She might not be happy with the farrier or happy with the vet, but how in your mind are you justifying making her do those things? That she's not happy with. So that's the first challenge I have for you is to explore moving that line backwards to find out how you have decided where it is drawn. Because I think you'll find there's places that she's probably not happy even when you're not writing her. A second step here would be to actually take a piece of paper and this one would be really kind of fun to do. I'd actually love it if you shared the paper with me, but if you don't, that's totally fine. What I would love you to do is write down everything that horses could possibly hate about being ridden. Just one line after another. You could say they could hate the bit being in their mouth. They could hate the saddle being on the back. They could hate the girth being around them. They could hate the weight of the rider. They could hate sweating or breathing hard or their muscles being sore or just go on and on like they could hate the. It just everything you could think of, like the lack of freedom of choice, like be very specific.

The key here is to not just say hate being ridden, but you need to break it down into very specific things.

And if you really believe that horses hate being written, this could be pretty easy because you could just pull up a video on YouTube of a horse being ridden and just just open up your mind and write down line by line everything you see that they could possibly hate. And I would challenge you to keep adding to this list over a time period until you feel like it's really, really complete. And then I want you to hold onto this idea, cause we're gonna come back to this list idea in just a minute. Another way that I would look at this when I have a limiting belief that I feel could be holding me back, I like looking across the board to challenge my belief. And I do it in two different ways. I challenge my belief by exposing myself to people with a different belief.

But I also, interestingly, look to my own life because it's very possible that you might have a belief in one area. Let's just say that in this example, I'm going to make up that maybe horses hate being ridden because it's too hard. And then I go, well to Hard's a little bit vague. Will horses hate being ridden because it requires them to sweat and work and exercise and they might become muscle sore. And then I would look around my life and I would say, do I believe that across the board, can I apply this to my own life? And so the idea here would be to figure out if you have a different belief system that could actually be conflicting with the belief of happiness for your horse. So to continue on with that example. And this is a little bit of a mind stretch. Do you believe that discomfort can be for your benefit? I think normally when we think of discomfort, we automatically think of discomfort equals I'm walking and there's a rock in my shoe.

And the discomfort of the rock in my shoe is making me painful. And that is true. But discomfort can also be exercise and exercise can have a element of being uncomfortable. But it's for a benefit. The rock in the shoe wasn't a benefit.

So I think that sometimes we have to be a little bit curious about challenging ourselves. So if I believe that exercising my own body causes both discomfort and a benefit that is worth the discomfort, then I can pretty easily transfer that over to my horses and say it's natural to have a slight dislike of exercise. Like personally, I'm trying not to say out loud that I dislike exercise, but I will openly say there is a level of discomfort that comes with exercising, and I feel it every day that I choose to exercise because I can feel me as I lead up to that for the hour before I can feel the resistance in my own brain to like the idea of it.

And then once I start exercising, I'm good with it. And then when I'm done exercising, I'm really happy that I did it. And it cracks me up that I see this cycle over and over and over, because you would think that after a year of exercising regularly, that I would just be like, well, who would know?

But I see it as a discipline in my own life that has a benefit that's worth going through the uncomfortable because I have that belief in my life. I believe this with my own body. I believe this with my horses. I believe this with my children. And so some ways to look at this would be explore some other words that might be triggering you. So I lined up a few of my favorites that popped in my mind here and explore your idea between confidence and insecurity. And when I look at confidence to get confidence, you're going to have to do some work that might make you uncomfortable. But I can also tell you that if you're insecure, you're uncomfortable. So we're not avoiding discomfort here, learning versus ignorance. Again, learning comes at the cost of challenging yourself. Ignorance also has a cost board versus stimulated. Here's a favorite of mine, mature versus immature. This is what I see a lot of times with horses is people that are trying to take care of them in a way that actually ends up keeping them immature. You have to be able to see that that immature horse that really struggles and fights the vet and farrier is actually doing something that is harmful to itself. But the it's being done out of love like the the lack of wanting to discipline the horse at some level to create a horse that's mature enough to stand well for the vet and farrier could be still being done out of love and yet still having a negative consequence for the horse. So I love the idea of creating maturity in the horses. And I'll throw another idea out there which is using treats. Back to my exercising. Heck yeah.

I use rewards for myself to reward myself for exercising. And whether that is a, you know, a piece of chocolate or whatever I'm going to do to reward myself, it's okay to build in some rewards. And actually, I encourage it. And I do use treats with my horses. So I don't think it's 100 percent, you know, like, hey, you know, you just did an hour worth of riding and so you get an apple. I don't think it's quite measured exactly the same. But what I'm saying is you might be able to change your belief system around it if you start focusing on the idea that there can be rewards inside of here. In the very interesting thing about rewards is that whenever you have two contrasting things like hot and cold, you actually have a broader experience than if you're just trying to avoid any rattling of the boat. So it's it's kind of funny because when I think about treats, what can go wrong with treats or horses that are spoiled by horses that are working and they get treats, it has more of that balanced out effect.

Now, one other observation I will put out there is that I love to watch my horses in the round pen and turned out in the pastures together, and I have observed that the horses do not look happy all the time when they're turned out together. I see them having disagreements.

I see them having different opinions. I see the ones that are challenging the position. I see the ones that are holding the position. They're having these little discussions and disagreements all the time. So not all the time, let's say 50/50. But it's not 100 percent bliss. Even with the horses that get along the best.

So it's kind of an interesting thing to challenge is happiness even 100 percent of the time, what your horse is after. It's just another thing to think about now. Another piece you could consider is that some horses really do enjoy work more than others, which kind of make sense. Some people enjoy work more than others and some horses enjoy work more than others. I personally had the privilege of growing up with a mayor that got really excited about going off on rides and my mom's horse was the opposite.

If you tried to take him and ride out of the driveway without another horse, he looked like it was a slow march to a funeral. He was dragging. You had to really make him go. He was not happy. My mare would come running and as soon as you got on, she was taking me down the road like she wanted to go. And it's a personality difference. So that would be an interesting thing for you to keep in mind, is that there are temperament differences between the horses, which is going to lead me into.

Remember that list you made everything the horses hate. Now, what I'd like you to do is I would like you to take all the evidence of why horses hate being ridden. And I would like you to go back and rely heavily on the Internet. And I want you to look for evidence that contradicts each one of those things, even if you don't believe it. You just need to look for it and find it. So, for example, if you have down that you think horses dislike saddles because they never fit right.

Then I want you to find a saddle fitter online explaining how saddles can fit properly and not cause discomfort. And I'm not telling you which side you have to believe. I'm just asking you to do the homework of finding both sides, including finding horses that appear to be happy. And you might find that, you know, maybe you're watching a rider that just got done competing and they're saying they're being interviewed, they're holding their horse. And so they're not in the competition anymore. Maybe it's a video on a beach or maybe it's a video. I don't know. But I'm challenging you to look for any evidence that there could be any horses out there. Not necessarily yours. Any horses out there that could enjoy being ridden. And while you're doing that, this is also a good time to say. Are you possibly hanging out in a group of people online where the focus is a lot of negative talk around horses being written, for example? I'm not saying it's wrong to think and consider different things, but I do want you to remember that whole idea that you become a lot of what you hang out with. And when I have gone into some of the groups where the major vibe is really negative towards something very that people feel very, very passionately about, like, for example, barefoot shoeing, not not shoeing, barefoot sharing, that was kind of a contradiction, but barefoot versus shoeing. If you find people that are really, really, really passionately strong on one side, it's very you're you're gonna be surrounded by it.

And if you're questioning whether you want to believe that, you need to also think about balancing out your thoughts. And so this isn't saying anything about barefoot, but I've noticed that there's some trigger items out there. Barefoot bit lists, some of these different things become triggery things that really set people off. And you can find groups and just evaluate that vibe inside that group and question whether or not that's the vibe you want to surround yourself with and become. As I wrap it up, the one line that I wrote down here is I have the responsibility of making her happy and I personally look at my responsibility with my horses a little bit more like I do with my own children. My job with my horses is to keep them healthy, safe and to equip them for the world that they live in. And what I mean by that is that there's a good chance that something could happen to me. And let's just say that I was in a car accident tomorrow and that the horses had to go live somewhere else. Would my horses be equipped for the world that they live in? And that can be groundwork that can be ridden. If I'm keeping them healthy and safe, it's okay to draw the line wherever you want to draw the line.

I'm completely fine if people want to draw the line and not ride their horse. They have no problem with that. The reason I'm answering this question is because you are on one side of it, but wish you were on the other side. But that does not mean that I believe that it's wrong if you decide you don't want to ride. I'm telling you ways that you could stretch yourself and consider that not all horses hate being ridden.

I hope that helps you. Guys, I really want to just thank you all for the comments that you've left on the blogs, for the voicemails that you've left, the feedback that you've left, the reviews that you've left on i-Tunes. I listen to and read them all. I respond to as many as I can and you'll see lots and lots of my replies on the blog. But if you have any questions you would like to hear discussed in upcoming podcasts, whatever way is comfortable for you to interact.

It could be a voicemail like these people did over at Stacy Westfall dot com. Or you can leave a comment over underneath one of the podcasts. I have so enjoyed spending this time with you and I look forward to the upcoming season. Thanks for listening.

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

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