Episode 7: Setting SMART Goals With Your Horse In 2019

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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.

Hello and Happy New Year.

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'm discussing issues that I frequently see impacting the way that riders think. In today's episode, I'm discussing a New Year's favorite goal setting, and I would specifically like to talk about setting smart goals or goals that you have control of as well as accidental goals. Yes, I did just say accidental goals. Those are goals that you can't control the outcome of, but you can set yourself up for success with. Let's break this down. So a smart goal is actually an acronym for the word smart is specific, measurable, actionable or relevant and time bound. If you didn't catch all that. Don't worry, I'm going to slow down and go over a little bit more specifically here. I believe in setting specific goals and then leaving room for some magic to happen. The first thing that we need to discuss is what a specific goal would be. So examples of non specific goals are maybe the better way to start. So I jumped in to my email file and started to dig out phrases that people have sent me over the years, like improve my writing, build a solid relationship with my horse, get my communication where it needs to be, or work on my confidence. While those are all pieces of a goal, they're not broken down far enough to be smart goals because they're not specific, measurable, actionable.

So let's go ahead and slow this down a little bit more. Some of my most frustrating memories have involved really poor goal setting. One of my perennial favorites until I had a breakthrough was I just want to win this class. It didn't feel that far out of reach because it was specific. It was measurable. It was actionable. It was relevant. And it was time bound. But what I left out was that it was also outside of my control. So you can set a smart goal, which would be I'm going to ride my horse five days a week for an hour a day. It could be that makes it specific and measurable, actionable, relevant to the possibility of winning the class and time bound because it's daily measurable. As far as five days a week. What you have to keep in mind is that at the end of the day, you can't necessarily control the outcome of the show, but you can set yourself up for success in 2018. I set a goal for myself to exercise three times a week, either running or strength training plus yoga two to three times a week. This was a very smart goal because it was specific. I didn't have to wonder what I was going to do. It was measurable. I could write it on my calendar every day, whether I did or didn't do it. I could add up at the end of the week. What I had done or where I had fallen short.

I knew it was attainable because I had done different pieces of these goals. I've done some of the strength training. I've done some of the couch to 5K running. I had done some yoga, so I knew that the independent pieces were attainable. But I also knew that I was aiming to make myself more consistent. It was really relevant to me in 2018 because I knew that I needed to start exercising to improve my writing and anything that I do that improves my writing improves my joy. So I knew that it was relevant because I'm over the age of 40 now and I could feel a difference in my body where it was naturally maintaining itself as compared to when I was younger. I knew I needed to add exercise and it was time bound. I could measure daily, weekly, monthly and I could see how I was doing. So this was a very smart goal as far as exercise went, but it also left room for that accidental goal I was talking about. I didn't even have the goal of running a 5K, but six months into this program that I had developed this smart goal, I looked up one day and thought I could actually run a 5K. And it was really kind of funny because I signed up for it. I when I ran and when I got done, I texted my mom, who's really sweet woman, and I said, Mom, I ran a 5K and she texted back.

Did you say you signed up for a 5K? Because if you actually knew me growing up or until just the last about a year, I really never had exercised before. So the idea that I had run a 5K was way outside of my norm, which was why it was so cute when my mom sent that back. And it just proves that if you set specific, measurable, smart goals that point in a direction of, say, fitness for me in this example, it can lead you to bigger places than what you might even imagine at the beginning of the year. I actually view showing and training my horses in the same way. So I set daily and weekly goals that point in a specific direction. So right now, presto is two and a half years old and I'm pointing him in a direction of getting him started under saddle. I can't control exactly where he's going to end up, but I can set goals of working him three to five days a week. I can set goals of the intensity. I can set goals of the regularity. I can set goals that I can't control, even though I can't control the outcome of what he becomes at the end of this process when I'm showing my horses. I can't control that. Judges sometimes make mistakes. There's a lot of things I can't control. So I really need to focus on what I can control.

I learned this the hard way in 2003 when I was showing a man named Can't Carmelina. And if you do a YouTube search with my name and can't Carmelina, you'll find it. Maybe throw in 2003 and you'll find a video of me winning the NRA, a fatuity freestyle bridles. And that was my first BRIDEL. This horse can't camelina, but that was not my first BRIDEL show. My first BRIDEL is showing on her was actually in October, about a month before a little more than a month before the video you see online. And what happened to me there was I had actually earlier in 2003 nearly quit being a professional in the horse industry because over and over and over again I kept setting goals where I measured myself against an outcome that I could not control, like winning a class. So I would say I just want to win this class with this horse to prove that this horse can really do this, to prove that I can really do this. And then I would make a mistake or I would be clean the horse and I would do really well as far as what we were capable of. But another horse and rider would beat us. And then I would say this wasn't good enough. The magic really didn't happen for me until I showed. Haley is what we called Can-Can Lina until I showed Haley at the quarter horse Congress in October and actually completely bombed like I left out a maneuver.

So I ended up hitting a score of zero because I didn't perform all the required maneuvers and it was devastating to me. But what I didn't realize was that it actually was a turning point where it changed my view on goal setting dramatically. The video that you end up seeing on YouTube in December was only possible because I changed my goal from winning or finishing in the top five because after I completely didn't finish in the top anything because I left out a maneuver and got taken out of the class penalty zero, I realized that even though I knew there was a possibility I wouldn't win. I also, in the back of my mind, had to admit after the fact that I had thought, well, at least, you know, I'll be in the top. I mean, my horse is really good. The routine is really good. It can go all the way down to being completely, you know, at the bottom. But what it changed for me was that when I went down to show in Oklahoma City, I had released the outcome of the judging of what I did without realizing it at the time is I made it a smart goal. I made it specific. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. When I went into the arena. I made it measurable. I knew what I was capable of. I knew I was gonna be to check it off a list.

It was attainable. I'd done it over and over again. And practice is very relevant for my sanity. I needed to be to prove to myself that I needed to be able to go in there and just execute this pattern without putting on top of it that I had any control of the outcome. So by completely releasing the outcome and just going and doing the best that my horse and I could, it happened to be that that opened the door to let the magic happen. And we actually won that class and that was my first major win. And for me, it was just an amazing feeling to realize that I didn't have to carry all of that stress with me. I could actually go show with this freedom of doing exactly what I knew I could do and then releasing whether or not the judges liked it, whether or not any of the other things I couldn't control, whether or not there was a horse that was more talented, that was all out of my control. I went and did what I knew I could do when I was looking through my emails to come up with some of the phrasing that I used at the beginning, like connecting with the horse and different things. I came across a few different pieces of feedback. And so Kathleen had in her email that her goal was to be able to get onto her horse without using her three-step mounting block.

Now, I love that she was that specific because also inside the email she said that she began December 7th working at a fitness center four miles from her house. She said that her goal was to build her arm and leg strength to accomplish the goal, and that an additional goal after the holidays was to lose 20 pounds. So when I just briefly read through Kathleen's email, I can already tell from the way she's thinking there's a really good chance that she's headed towards reaching her goal because she's made it very smart. I think she could. If you're listening, Kathleen, take the acronym Smart, break it down even more and then for sure, go for it and go ahead and send me an email when you're done because I can see it's within your reach. You're doing the work to get there. I also found an email from Lisa that says that her goal for the year is to get the high point award in the club where she shows. And this is probably because of the story I just told you in my mind, although Lisa had a whole bunch of other stuff to say unrelated to goal setting. It was a much longer email. What I see inside of this is that I'm not suggesting that you take winning off the table, Lisa, but I am suggesting that you define your goals inside of things that you can control, so you can make it so that, you know, you're going to get your horse fit and be at your maximum.

By this show date, you're going to do that by riding X time a week. You're going to do that by going and riding under a judge, taking a lesson and understanding what they're looking for. You're going to review video work once a week. You're going to compare videos from January shows to February shows to March shows. There's all kinds of ways that you can break this down into very measurable things that you could check off a list. And then I would suggest leaving the outcome of the Highpoint award as one of those goals that you admit is out of your control, because, again, some superstar horse could pop up and you could be competing against the next world champion in the division and in you if you come in second place, does that mean you did any less then just because you didn't win? That would be my challenge to you is figure out how to play that game. And absolutely. I hope you totally crush it and end up with the high point award. I just want to make sure you don't crush yourself with the goal because if you come in second place, but you and your horse both did your best. I doubt you'd criticize your horse at that point, but it's very tempting as humans to criticize ourselves at that point. I know that there are a few of you out there listening because based on the feedback that I've gotten from the first six episodes, there's quite a few of you listening that are interested in either becoming trainers or growing a business inside the horse industry.

And I would suggest that you challenge yourself to set specific goals. So instead of saying something like I want to have six more clients in two thousand nineteen, you could set a goal that would lead to that. Like I'm going to run twice as many ads in 2019 as I did in 2018. Or you could say something like I want to increase my profits. Well, that's a great goal, especially in the horse industry where there's not a huge margin. But maybe your actual measurable goal would be to review your expenses weekly so you can figure out how to make more profit without even having to make more money. Just because you start figuring out what's going on with the expenses. You can control some of these expenses. You control running these ads and then you can see how that then picks up those other more intangible things. If you've been listening these podcasts and you have a question or a comment, I have a really cool way that you could be featured in an upcoming episode. So Jackie found this button on the right hand side of my Web site. When you go. So take a listen to what Jackie had to say.

Hi, Stacey. Just want to let you know how great I think your podcast was. And I'm very excited to continue to hear them. And you did. Really wonderful. And you're just so bright and smart and thank you.

Thank you, Jacki, for sharing that. And if you have a question you would like me to answer, or if you have any feedback that you want to have possibly featured in an upcoming episode, you can go to Stacy Westfall dot com.

And on the right hand side of the screen, you can see that there's a tab that says leave a voicemail. Kind of runs vertically up and down the side. And it does Max out at about a 90 second recording. I look forward to hearing from you. And thank you for listening.

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

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