Episode 255: Lessons from Outliers: Horses not on the ‘traditional’ path

Episode 255_ Lessons from Outliers_ Horses not on the _traditional_ path.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 255_ Lessons from Outliers_ Horses not on the _traditional_ path.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
These very small things will eventually begin to snowball. It's actually no different than what happens in the traditional path. It's just a different timeline. All we're trying to do in both scenarios is create these habit patterns that turn into a snowball, where the horse starts to see the pattern and starts to see the game.

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've been answering questions that, if left unanswered, could hold you back when you head out to train your horse. Today's question is about working with older horses, but I'm going to also broaden it to include young, injured and a lot, as in possibly the majority of horses that fit into the category that I call outliers. This question came in on my podcast voicemail system, so I'm going to hit play in just a minute. But before I do, if you have a question that you would like to ask, you can leave that as a message and you'll find that link over on my website. Let's go ahead and listen to today's question.

Speaker3:
Hi Stacy. I first want to say that your podcast has become the soundtrack for my everyday short time here on the farm. I'm the caretaker of a therapeutic riding program here in North Carolina, and one of the problems I've been coming across is that I have an older herd, many with arthritis or old injuries, that I have to be careful not to aggravate. And I was wondering if there were any alternative techniques that I can use that will be gentler on joints. For instance, yesterday I was trying to catch one of our horses and I was moving her through the pasture and she broke into a gallop. And I was concerned about the effects that that might have on an old injury she has. And I still want to be able to move the horses in an effective way, but not aggravate an injury. Please let me know what you think of this and if you have any suggestions.

Speaker1:
First, thank you for your question, because when listeners like you send in questions, it gives me the sense that this is a collaboration, which is what makes it worth continuing. Plus, when questions come in, they give me a new angle to think about things from, and it allows me to approach the subject from that slightly different angle. That makes me excited and gives you a chance to hear or listen for what I'm going to call the common threads that tie concepts together. I've recorded over 250 episodes now, so you're going to start to see as you listen to those, these common threads, especially as I weave the concepts together across what seemed like possibly contradicting areas in the horse world. So listen for that today. Instantly when I heard your question, it made me think of the importance of understanding what I call outliers. In your question, you mentioned older horses that might need different handling. Even while you were asking it, I could instantly picture in my mind young horses. Foals that have just been born haven't even been touched yet. Foals still on their mother's sides, weanlings that have just left their mother, yearlings and so many others that don't fall into what I'm going to refer to as standard or traditional. Or you could even call that the that middle group. So in order to have outliers, basically you have to first understand what the standard or the traditional path would be. Or if you want to call it normal, whatever. That label is, what we're doing when we talk about there being outliers is we're talking about comparing them to something else.

Speaker1:
And I find this interesting because oftentimes it is easier to find information on this theoretical normal path. But when I go down rabbit holes on equine research for usually it's nutrition or exercise or rehab from injuries, I often find that I'm reading about young thoroughbred racehorses. And this makes sense because thoroughbred racehorses get studied a lot. Some of the reasons for that is that they all have the same goal. There's a large number of horses going through this pipeline and basically because there's so many things similar, the process is easier to study. So even if you're not interested in the performance horse world, one of the benefits of the performance industries is the research that comes out of it. And I didn't make this connection until a veterinarian mentioned it to me. Once that human advancements are often moved forward because of human athletes. So when you think about a surgery, let's say, on a shoulder that improves a human athlete's performance, when they can figure out how to do that surgery with a quicker recovery time, a less invasive process, and it gets that athlete back into what's essentially their business more quickly then that shoulder surgery in this example that happened for the performance human Athlete is probably the surgery that you're going to end up with down the line, even though you may not have been a human athlete, when you end up with that injury, you benefit from the research that was done to advance the human athlete.

Speaker1:
So it makes sense that a lot of our standards or normals, when we're looking at whether that's horses or humans, I think it's kind of normal that we look towards some type of performance industry. Human athletes or horse athletes. And in a similar vein, this is what I was thinking when I recorded the YouTube video series Stacy's Video Diary Jack because when I was making that series, I was very aware that I was talking to a lot of people that were not involved in the performance horse industry, and what that meant was it was hard for them to anchor into what was a predictable route, or what would be a normal to ask, or what would be fair to ask or what would be reasonable. And some of those things we have to start seeing something consistently and repetitively done so we can start to find some of those answers. And so when I started into that series, my purpose of doing it was actually to show all the things that go wrong while you're on that path for the first year of training a horse, because oftentimes when people look at one of my finished horses, they're just seeing the moments where I go to a show or whatever becomes very public, and they're not seeing all the behind the scenes kind of stuff. So my point in doing that video series was to find a horse that was going to follow a somewhat traditional path so that you could see what that path was, and then you could also see that even inside of what I'm going to call the normal path.

Speaker1:
There's still a lot of issues. I just remember off the top of my head. Early on, he had issues with his teeth, and so the way he was displaying some things gave me red flags. Took him and showed the dental work being done. I also remember because at the time I was editing the videos together, and I remember trying to figure out how to make a calendar flip through days and days and weeks and weeks, because part of what I did in that video series was I tracked the amount of time I was putting in on a regular basis, because if I say in the first year of training a horse, I'm also inside of that, thinking about doing it on a regular basis and a certain amount of time. I didn't want to leave that to the imagination, so I actually tracked my time. All of this was done so that those who watched could get a sense of what a possible baseline and what all the problems could be, including losing a huge chunk of time that I had to represent with a flipping calendar. So I think it's really valuable to study a traditional or a baseline path. And that's happening in your human world without you thinking about it when you go through school or different things like that.

Speaker1:
And I've always been fascinated with what the outliers also have to teach us. For me, the outliers have so much that they can teach us that if we take what we learn from them and apply it to the traditional or the baseline path, that's when we can really create some magic. So if you've never heard or watched Kyle Maynard, I will put a link to it in the show notes. But he was born with no arms and no legs, and his parents refused to let his disability dictate his life. And it's amazing the things that he's done. He's an incredibly inspirational person to watch because he would fall into my definition of an outlier. So when I'm thinking about a horse, my definition of that outlier would be a horse that has an issue you have to work around or factor in. Those could be things like very young or very old or injured, or even just the horses that are different thinkers. These are some of the things that you might have to work around in a more traditional sense. Having been around a lot of performance barns, there are some horses that are just like young athletes, where you can see a young kid playing baseball and it just looks like they have all this potential, and then as they go, it just keeps working. The path just keeps opening up and they work to get there. But it's also opening up for them and it looks like a more traditional path forward.

Speaker1:
These tend to be your top athletes in the human world and in the horse world. It's also a tiny piece of both worlds. So when I'm looking for advice on exercise or diet, I'm going to look for that traditional path, because there's a lot of valuable information that can be learned there. And I'm going to look at the outliers, whether that's in the horse world or Kyle Maynard in the human world, because there are lessons that you can learn. So three lessons I've learned from working with outliers would be one. Plant tiny seeds regularly. Two keep the ask small and the reward understood. And then three keep the ratio of success high. So outliers, which I think the majority of us are humans and horses and the majority of us are working with. And the reason I say this is because we often have many other factors to work in. If we look at that human athlete that dedicates 10 or 20 years to spending their entire day working on that, we start to see that they're, you know, they're not interacting with as many different variables as some of us are in our life. So that alone can also make your situation feel a little bit like it's nontraditional or that you could be an outlier. That's what I feel like. That's what my horses, with the exception of one I thought my stallion Vaquero, followed a more traditional path. He just kept saying yes, yes, yes, and that those doors just kept opening.

Speaker1:
But the majority of my other horses have definitely been outliers. Horses that I could also say wouldn't have made it through a traditional training path. So the people that are on the path, remember, we've got to keep going back and forth on this contrast. The people that are on that direct, traditional path, or like my horse vaquero, what is often going on there is that they're maximizing near the edge of what's possible physically and mentally, and they're creating repetitive habits that give consistency. So what happens if you look at the performance horse world is that if someone is pushing on the edge of what's physically possible, then the obvious problem with that would be pushing over the edge and causing a physical breakdown. You could also have pushing on the edge of what's mentally possible. So there can be a stress related piece to that. So there's an edge mentally also. And again, if you get pushed past that edge, you can imagine that there can be a version of a breakdown. What's interesting though, in performance horses and athletes is that there's also creating repetitive habits that give a consistency, and that's actually what increases the odds of success. It's actually what also decreases the odds of going over the edge mentally or over the edge physically. So there is this third thing that you have to remember. That's not often, as we could say, glorified, because often the physical edge and the mental edge, the possible breakdown is often vilified when people look at the performance horse world.

Speaker1:
But if you actually look at the fact that they want this to work because no one wants to invest this much time and money and whatever else and have it break down, the breakdown is not the goal. The breakdown is the accident that happens on the way of pushing the edge with human or horse athletes. But under there, what you also could look at is how skilled they are at creating repetitive habits that give consistency, because that is going to be that thing that increases their odds of success. And they do want success. So professionals are very skilled at all three, pushing the edge of the physical, the mental, and figuring out how to get this consistency. Outliers will teach you how to rely more on the consistency angle, because you're going to be working around something else. And I've already said often those something else are either physical or mental. So let's go ahead and use your example. You've got horses that tend to be old. And especially this particular horse has a past injury. I can 100% see where this would challenge your thinking, because a lot of times if you grab a YouTube video, you're going to see a horse being lunged, or you're going to be seeing a horse running around inside of a round pen. And so it's going to look like a lot of physical exertion turns, things that are going to be physically challenging for a horse with arthritis or old injuries. So the stretch.

Speaker4:
Is.

Speaker1:
To.

Speaker4:
Think.

Speaker1:
What is the concept that's being taught to the horse? And how can I do pieces of that concept in a stall where they're literally not really moving? They can kind of turn here or turn there, or how can those same principles be applied when I'm leading the horse from the time I catch it all the way to wherever I'm going with it during that interaction, how can I be applying these principles? Or even when you go out to catch and the way you are when you're out in the pasture and the way that you catch the horse, not just like the way that you physically put the halter on, but the engagement between two separate beings, you and the horse, and what the horse sees when they look at you and how you respond, and whether you step back or whether you step forward, or whether you step to the left or the right, whatever you're doing, these are all these feedback loops. The horse is getting information and you're getting information. So you got a lot of information when that horse took off, if you go back and you mine that for what you were seeing. So let's just go slow this down yet another level so I can paint this picture a little more clearly. So if I take a horse into a stall and I have done this routinely with very young horses, I do not want to lunge a very young horse, and in the stall I can take a horse, and I can stand in the doorway and I can take any type of extension of my arm.

Speaker1:
My favorite one is actually I have a really, really long like carriage whip. So imagine a very long lunge whip but doesn't have the tail. Or you could just get the really long lunge whip and just wind the tail of it up. So you've just got the long reaching part. And I'm going to use that to direct the horse to move around the stall. It's not a speed game. The stall literally is a limit to remind both of us. It's not a speed game, it's a puzzle. And so if I'm standing in the doorway so the horse can't leave the doorway, and so I can step out if this happens to be. I also use this technique if I've got a completely wild horse that's young, and I want to be able to catch it and put a halter on it, but I don't want a round pen and I can't lunge it because, you know, it doesn't have a halter on it yet, and I still don't want to lunge it, even if it did, because it's the young and I don't want to stress it like that, then what it starts to become is a puzzle. And so let's say I want the horse lined up parallel with the back wall facing one of the corners.

Speaker1:
Whichever corner does not put their butt near me. And so this tiny little adjustments and feedback and information I'm going to have to give is this little puzzle for both of us to work out. And even with the young ones that theoretically could jump around, I'm not wanting them to. So I'm going to adjust my speed and move that around. Or let's go to a different example. So leading them, I've said it before and I'm going to say it again, there's so much in your daily Handling that you can utilize for getting that horse more dialed in and learning more about the horse that most of the time people aren't taking advantage of. So even when you're leading them, adjusting your speed slightly, and if that means you're leading an older arthritic horse, and it means that your adjustment is somewhere between slow and slower, that still counts. Any adjustments of speed, any adjustments of direction, any amounts of turn. You can adjust this as you factor in those limiting things. But if the horse is capable of turning a gentle, gradual and you can lead them a slightly different path, you'd be surprised how valuable it is even to vary with these big, slow weaving turns, because it gives them an opportunity to engage their brain and ask questions. Now, the true challenge to this.

Speaker5:
Is.

Speaker1:
That what the outliers tend to have in common is also what's going to challenge you and your comfort zone. What the outliers tend to have in common is that they require additional time. So that might be what takes them out of that traditional path. Because if a trainer has a traditional goal and a traditional path, and this horse is requiring additional time to slow down to work around an injury, or to slow down to work around something else, that will often be what takes that horse off track. But in the day to day world, when you're working with outliers, what you'll often find is that added time is very, very valuable, and that will often push the edge of the human comfort zone, because sometimes the human in this scenario wants to be very efficient in their time and very efficient with their practices. And there's nothing wrong with that, because technically, that's exactly what the traditional horse trainer is doing when they're deciding who makes the cut to fit into that traditional role. Because there's an efficiency to being able to get things done in a certain amount of time so that you can be ready for a certain particular show. But when you're over here with the outliers, one thing to keep in mind is that that added time is often what that horse needs. Now there's a little variable I'm going to put into here.

Speaker1:
Because when I say added time sometimes, like with this older horse and this scenario, and going out and catching and leading the horse in that added time is actually not as much as you'd think. I mean, let's say it takes you five minutes to bring the horse in and now you make it take ten. You actually need to start putting numbers on this because it's not like I'm saying now. You need to spend an hour with this horse. Not to say that you couldn't, but what I'm saying is that added Time is also something you have to closely look at, because the edge of your comfort zone will actually probably come in. Your perceived amount of like, this shouldn't take this long, but what you actually want to be looking at there is that sometimes in something as simple as going out and catching the horse, you may have more resistance than you think to a task that would typically take five minutes. Walk out, catch, walk back. You may have a lot more resistance than you think to making that task. Take ten minutes. That's why I say it might push the edge of your comfort zone. But here's what I want to say is, if you justify that extra added ten minutes here, ten minutes there with these different horses, I don't know how many you have, but if you do this for a time period, these very small things will eventually begin to snowball.

Speaker1:
It's actually no different than what happens in the traditional path is just a different timeline. All we're trying to do in both scenarios is create these habit patterns that turn into a snowball, where the horse starts to see the pattern and starts to see the game. Now let me put this into a different example, so maybe you can hear it from yet another angle. If I were going to compare your pasture catching to a performance situation, I would say you going out to catch the horse in the pasture. That's your horse show. So what that means is I'm going to train here at home. I'm going to train each component. I'm going to stick with the reining because it's just easy for me. But it's not just me training a spin, a slide and a circle. I'm going to be training and looking at how the lead departure into the circle goes. And I might do ten of those lead departures in a ride. Or I might look at something like the spin. Even a performance horse can't do 20 sets of spins in a session. So even athletes have limits. We want to think like outliers, the only ones without limits. But even athletes have limits.

Speaker1:
So what I have to do in that performance situation is I have to look at what is working. So I spin the horse and I stop and I evaluate. Maybe that's in my mind, maybe that's on a video and I have to think about what parts worked and then what isn't ideal. And because I can't just spin for 45 minutes because physically the horse cannot do that much spinning, what I have to do is I have to engage my brain and look for similar issues that are happening in the spin and think, how can I find a tiny micro version of that in an area that's less taxing? So let's say I spin my horse and I realize that the horse is tipping its head excessively, and maybe they're offering to put a lot of bend in their body, and that's actually kind of cramping up their ability to fully spin at speed. So I'm going to see that reflected. I'm going to see that happen in the spin, whether it's from my memory or whether it's from watching a video. And I'm going to tell myself, I will go now, find where this is happening in other places. If it's happening there, it is happening in a tiny amount somewhere, like on a circle or steering in a corner. The secret is to look at the spots that look like they're not working, that are kind of magnified, that show situation, that full blown spin, and then go look for the tiny pieces that show up in other places, like steering in a corner.

Speaker1:
So for you, you go out to catch you have this happen. Now you need to go look for the tiny ways that this horse is maybe doing this in other places. So basically, as a horse trainer, you have to be a very good detective. And so I'm a really good detective when I look at something like the spin, and then I see those little tiny components that I actually know are in other places, any type of a turn. That's what you need to be. You need to look at the catching, the level of engagement between you and the horse, and that's your show environment. And then you need to go see the tiny versions where it's if you literally don't look for it, you're not going to see it when you're leading. How do you see a tiny little similar thinking and behavior from either you or the horse during leading? If you become a detective, when you have them, stand in that one location in the stall, and then you look for how this their lack of ability to focus for five minutes straight, you start looking at these different things. This will allow you to see the horse in a different light.

Speaker1:
And then as you start to look at all these nuances, what will start to happen is that you'll start to find moments where things are working, where the horse is offering you the answer you want. So let's go back to catching them in the pasture. You walk out to the pasture, the horse turns and looks at you. Do you just keep on walking and not even acknowledge that? Or do you have a way that you can acknowledge that? So for me, if I'm walking out there and they turn their head and they look at me, oftentimes I'll stop because that's a response from my body to their body. They offered me looking. I responded and acknowledged it by stopping. This actually, for me, is the first door to open for the horse approaching me, because often people will walk out to catch the horse and not realizing that they walk in. The horse looks. And then that continued. Walking for some horses is experienced as almost a driving type pressure. So I'm always going back to these fundamentals of like, how can I be inviting? How do I leave this gap to see what else the horse might offer? Because that's going to make me better at reading them, and it's going to give them something changing and different in me.

Speaker4:
So that they.

Speaker1:
Have.

Speaker4:
Something.

Speaker1:
To read again. Lessons outliers can teach you. Plant tiny seeds regularly. Keep the ask small and the reward understood. Keep the ratio of success high. This is the stuff that's required for outliers. And if you take this and you apply it to performance horses, it is golden. It's amazing the results that you get. Thanks again for the question. And remember, if you have a question, you can find the voicemail link over on my website. 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.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including collaboration tools, generate automated summaries powered by AI, transcribe multiple languages, advanced search, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.