Episode 228: How do I keep my horse from getting bored?

 

I often get questions like, “How do I keep my horse from getting bored?”
or “How do I keep repetitive things from becoming boring?”
or statements like “My horse got bored with that, so I changed it up.”

One reason this is interesting to me is because…I don’t have bored horses.
Yet, if you were to watch me day to day…I seem to do a lot of repetitive things that could easily be seen as boring.

In this episode, I share and explore the topic of boredom from both the human and the horse perspective. I share the problems that I often see occur when riders try to solve the problem of ‘boredom’ when the actual issue is something entirely different.

Episode 228_ How do I keep my horse from getting bored_.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 228_ How do I keep my horse from getting bored_.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Ultimately what is often created when you keep trying to change the surroundings to solve this problem is that you become a reactive and distracted rider.

Speaker2:
Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the 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.

Speaker1:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall and I'm here to help you understand, enjoy, and successfully train your own horses. In this season of the podcast, I'm going to be answering listener questions and discussing subjects that come up while I am interacting with people in real life and on Zoom calls. I just came home from Lexington, Kentucky, where I was at the Road to the Horse Colt starting event, and while I was there I was able to visit with many podcast listeners. When I came home, I became inspired to visit with more of you. So I'm going to do a coffee conversation on Saturday on Zoom so all of you could make it where I will be live, answering questions and catching up with you. If you're listening in real time, you can find the registration link on the home page of my website if you're interested. If you're listening afterwards and the event has already happened, go ahead and sign up for my email list because that is how you will be informed in a timely manner of the next time I offer something like this. Okay, now on to the podcast. Today I'm talking about boredom. I often get questions like, how do I keep my horse from getting bored? Or How do I keep repetitive things from becoming boring? Or maybe somebody says, My horse got bored with that, so I changed it up. And one reason that this topic is of interest to me is because I never have the thought.

Speaker1:
My horses are bored. Yet if you were to watch me day to day. You would see me do a lot of repetitive things that could easily be viewed as boring. So for the sake of this conversation, let's just pretend that I'm accurate about none of my horses being bored, or at least not in the negatively implied manner of boredom that I think was implied by those previous statements that I read. So this is the next question. If I don't believe my horses are bored, then where is the concern about horses being bored coming from? I think that most concerns about horses being bored come from a rider's perception of the horse's behavior. So if you think back to a time that you thought your horse was bored, what was the behavior you were seeing? Usually if I ask somebody a question like that, they'll say things like, the horse was looking around a lot. They were whinnying to other horses. They were going along and offered to stop out of nowhere. They wanted to leave the arena. They offered to go without being asked to. They offered to turn when I didn't want them to. And when a rider sees this type of behavior and then thinks my horse must be bored, it's very common for that rider to then react by changing the plan. So the idea goes like this.

Speaker1:
If the horse liked what we were doing, then the horse wouldn't be bored and therefore wouldn't be offering this behavior. So when the writer sees this behavior, they try to solve the problem by writing a different pattern or going over obstacles or changing locations. And on the surface, I can see why riders go to this, because oftentimes when you change the scenery, horses will offer you different reactions. But the problem is. They're still not often interested in you. Imagine it like this. Let's imagine you go out to coffee with a friend and you notice that your friend is checking their phone a lot. So you think, okay, great. The next time we go to coffee, I'm making a reservation at a place with a rooftop view of the city. And we're going to have coffee there. When your friend shows up, they sit down and now you notice that your friend is busy taking pictures of the beautiful scenery. So you think? Okay, great. Okay, perfect. I got this figured out. Next time I am booking a coffee stop at an underground, literally underground coffee shop. Yes. I've been to one of these underground. No cell phone service, no view. Can you hear what's going on here? Each time that you went to a different location, you did get a different behavior from your friend. But none of them led to a deeper conversation with you.

Speaker1:
But you did get different reactions. Ultimately what is often created when you keep trying to change the surroundings to solve this problem is that you become a reactive and distracted rider. The first step in understanding this issue is to take a closer look at what being bored really means. Most of the time, if I get to see a horse that someone says is bored, I end up seeing a horse that's distracted. And to me that means their mind is jumping around like pinging from over there, looking out the door over there, looking at that horse over there, looking at the cat over there, looking at that obstacle. And because their mind is jumping around, their body is also, even if it is just whipping their head around, that I would label distracted sometimes. Someone will tell me that they have a bored horse and I will see a very curious horse. A different version of the distracted, but more intense. Almost like the horse is dragging you to get to an obstacle or trying to take your hat or dragging you to go visit the horse so distracted might have a more insecure feeling to it. Possibly, and the curious might have more of an intense feeling to it. But both have the common not focused on the rider's desired task. Both have offering lots of ideas, and this is often what I see people label as bored.

Speaker1:
Now the dictionary defines bored as feeling weary because one is unoccupied or lacks interest in one's current activity. So I think it's worth looking closely me at your relationship with the word bored, because when I was prepping for this podcast, I looked up, bored and learned that there are now five different types of boredom. Without going into all the details, here are some of the different descriptions of ways that people experience boredom. One kind of boredom includes a feeling of relaxation and cheerful fatigue. A different way that people experience boredom involves wandering thoughts, not knowing what to do, and a general openness to activities unrelated to the present situation. And yet another description is an unpleasant level of restlessness in an active search for ways out of the boredom mindset. What's even more interesting is that people range all the way from completely against any form of boredom, all the way to fully embracing boredom as a positive thing. Listen to some of these quotes that are for boredom. Boredom is nearly always essential to creativity. It isn't true that creativity is mostly sparked by having a specific problem to be solved. It's far more likely to arise because the person is bored with the way something is been done a thousand times before and wants to try something new. Boredom stimulates the search for a better ways to do things like nothing else does. Adrian Savage. If you want to cure boredom, be curious.

Speaker1:
If you're curious. Nothing is a chore. It's automatic. You want to study? Cultivate curiosity and life becomes an unending study of joy. Tony Robbins. Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short circuits to the learning process. The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents. Will you learn how to focus and move past the boredom? Or like a child, will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction? Robert Greene. We're trying to swipe and scroll the boredom away, but in doing that, we're actually making ourselves more prone to boredom because every time we get our phones out, we're not allowing our mind to wander and solve our own bored problems. And the final one, make sure you listen closely for the contrast at the end is. A person accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid craving for Pepper who comes last to be unable even to taste the quantity of pepper which would cause anyone else to choke. There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement. And too much excitement not only undermines the health but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure. Substituting titillation for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom and jagged surprise for beauty. Bertrand Russell. What I love about that last one is the contrast between jagged surprises for beauty, because often when people think their horses are bored, the way that I see people handle it is with what I could describe as jagged riding.

Speaker1:
Because in trying to keep things more interesting, they end up riding in a much less predictable way, which often backfires in the long run. It makes sense to me that people could be using the word board in different ways because they could be experiencing the sensation of boredom differently. So when we leave the world of people, what I like to do is think about how do horses experience boredom? But I think it's valuable to contrast how people experience boredom, because then you can ask yourself, Would my horse experience it the same way for the same reason? I think how you perceive the word bored matters a lot. Substituted out if it doesn't work for you and find one that does. But if we were to use the definition of boredom that says boredom includes a feeling of relaxation and cheerful fatigue, that sounds like it could be a positive to me. Many years ago I heard the saying a broke horse is a bored horse. And it's this type of context that it was spoken in. It was the concept that a horse that knew its job well, which is the cowboy definition of a broke horse, by the way, that horse would be a relaxed and confident horse.

Speaker1:
Think about boredom in all the definitions that we had. It generally does not involve any external threat. Because if you had an external threat, you wouldn't be bored. There's another quote Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time. Serenity. That nothing is, Thomas says. Let me say that again. Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time. Serenity is the opposite. Serenity is that nothing is a waste of time. How many horses have you met that were worried about wasting time? I don't think horses worry about wasting time the way humans do. When I try to imagine a horse being bored, I either perceive it as peaceful or I end up changing the word creative. Full of questions. Distracted. Unlocking doors. Untying ropes. Digging holes. Emptying water troughs. Dismantling things. Can you feel how full of energy those things are? If you're around that type of energy with your horse, harness it like the wind, shape it into something useful, Direct it. Guide it. But I wouldn't label it boredom. It is so easy nowadays to stay entertained and distracted to the point where being bored would seem like a curse. Yet so many influential people claim it's useful that it's worth pausing to consider what you believe. My hand is now healed enough that I'm regularly riding again and I'm doing what I recommend. I recommend that my students record their rides and watch them.

Speaker1:
And I also do this. And when I watch my rides and my groundwork, I can easily see where people could say, My horses look bored. When I allow them to stand still between groundwork exercises or when I stop in between written exercises, they assume a stance like they might in the pasture. I would describe it as relaxed awareness. It's close to neutral. It's not negative, but it's not highly energized either. But I'll bet too many people that would be watching the video. They might look bored. I want you to imagine there are extremes on a spectrum, like a teeter totter. One end is highly alert. The middle is relaxed with awareness and the other end is very distracted. My horses often look relaxed with awareness. And on video, I think it looks kind of bored. They stand with one leg cocked, their heads level their ears, gently follow me when I move. Their eyes are often halfway shut, not unlike when they're dozing in the sun. Yet they're still very aware. When my horses can achieve this. I know they're on a plateau of confidence and the better they get at being there and then doing something physically challenging, like going faster in the Canter or a spin and then they return to the state quickly. The better they get at that contrast, the more I know they're becoming confident in that faster thing.

Speaker1:
So my ideal is to keep pushing the edge of the comfort zone. That's what's going to advance them. But I'm always measuring how quickly they can return to this relaxed awareness state or this relaxed, bored state. When I'm with a horse that's in this relaxed awareness state, they're at peace. I can go out and spend an hour or five hours with Willow or Gabby right now and they will maintain this state for the entire time. There won't be a time at 45 minutes or 2.5 hours where they'll just be like, okay, time's up. I need to go now. They will stay in this relaxed awareness state the entire time. They're not resisting the work. If we're working, they're fully accepting the circumstance and they're completely aware, relaxed and ready. Listen to this phrasing and see if you can feel the difference. Can you feel the difference between being bored? Imagine how that feels with your body. Now compare that to being at peace with yourself and your circumstance. To me, they're completely different. Let's go back to the coffee shop example. In my earlier example, the coffee shop location, which changed three times in hopes that it would change the friends behavior. In that example, not once did the person booking the coffee spots try showing up different to solve the problem. Being more curious, being more engaging, leading the conversation, noticing the little things when that seems like the much more obvious choice in the human interaction.

Speaker1:
I think that possibly the biggest problem with questions like how can I keep my horse from being bored is what lies behind the question. What if my horse thinks I'm boring or I think I'm boring? If you think what you're doing is boring, now we have something different to solve for and you don't need a new coffee shop to solve for it. It's much more likely that you need to improve your conversation skills of being able to listen, understand, and communicate clearly. What I would like you to take away from this episode is a willingness to explore your thoughts around boredom or relaxed awareness. Are there places in your life where you experience boredom as a good thing? And if you don't like the word bored, that's okay. Are there places where you can maintain a state of relaxed awareness? You are half of the equation when you ride. Knowing your answers will help you see the dynamic that you have with your horse more clearly. If you want to discuss this more, join me on Saturday or sign up for my email list if you're listening after Saturday. So you'll be notified of upcoming opportunities to meet up. And if you have a question that you want to call in for the podcast, you'll find that information on my website also. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Speaker2:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit Stacy westfall.com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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