Making A Difference
Deepening Our Relationship With What We Already Have
It’s easy to feel in our lives that something is lacking – we’re not enough, we don’t have enough, and things will always be the way they are.
So we look outside of ourselves and our situations for validation or something new beyond what we already have. The quest is insatiable.
However, there’s a different mindset called sufficiency, which is a perspective from the inside out that views things in a much different light.
Sufficiency believes that regardless of our situation, we are enough, we have enough, and the possibilities are limitless when we appreciate and focus on the resources we already have.
Those resources include who we are within: our personal talents, values, and abilities, as well as our perspectives and what we’ve already learned. Other personal resources include the magnificence of the horse(s) we are blessed to spend time with, as well as the fantastic people who have our backs, including family, friends, and mentors.
Getting ‘better’ in our riding is not about achieving some external ‘more’ validated by others, but instead, deepening our relationship with what we already have: with ourselves, our horses, and the people we cherish.
Through the lens of appreciation and a desire to delve deeper, we can continually expand our experiences and skills within the abundance of our own lives. New and unforeseen opportunities often arise when we least expect them.
Deepening our connections within ourselves, with horses, and with people is one of the richest experiences of our lives.
It’s a journey of the soul that’s rich right now.
In this moment, you’re enough. Your horse is enough, and so much more is to come in the most meaningful and fulfilling ways.
Enjoy the adventure of deepening your relationship with what you already have.
Pressure isn’t the Problem, it’s the Amplifier
My wonderful friend Shannon Pigott just wrote an article on Pressure isn’t
the Problem, it’s the Amplifier. I liked it so much I asked her for permission to
reprint it for all of you. Here it is!
Left to right: Sandy Collier, Barbra Schulte, Kathy Daughn, and Shannon Pigott
“Dear pressure, I’m learning to love you!
There was a time when I thought pressure was the problem.
I’d show up prepared. I had done the work. My horse was ready. But when the
stakes got high and the judge was watching or people were lined up at the rail, I
would freeze. My body hesitated to respond the way it had in practice. I felt
disconnected from my horse, from my plan, and honestly, from myself.
That kind of pressure used to leave me frustrated and discouraged. I thought
something was wrong with me. I thought I lacked grit or mental toughness or
whatever it was that other riders seemed to have when they walked in with
confidence.
But I’ve learned something that changed everything. Pressure isn’t the problem,
it’s the amplifier.
It turns up whatever doubt is already inside of you. If you bring fear into the pen,
pressure makes it louder. If you bring doubt, pressure turns it into hesitation. But
if you walk in with focus and a clear plan, pressure will sharpen your performance.
Now I treat pressure like a tool. It is something I am learning how to use, not
something to avoid.
Here’s one of the biggest mindset shifts that helped me.
I’ve done harder things than this.
I’ve walked through real challenges. Physical ones. Emotional ones. Life has
thrown tougher things at me than a reining pattern or a fence run. Reminding
myself of that gives me something to anchor to when the pressure hits. It helps
me stay calm. It helps me breathe. And most importantly, it helps me execute.
I’m not perfect at it. Pressure still shows up. But now, instead of fearing it, I’m
learning to ride with it. I’m learning to let it sharpen my senses instead of cloud
them. I’m learning to trust myself more than I doubt.
And maybe, just maybe, I’m learning to love it!
Rejuvenation – The Power of Recovering Energy (Easy to Skip Over) – A Re-energizing Walk
I did this video one day this past week. It was a beautiful Texas Spring day.
I took a nice and easy ride with my boy, Nick. I’d been home for a couple of days after quite a stint away.
Like everyone, when I expend a lot of emotional and physical energy, I need to step back and restore a bit.
The concept of being self-aware of how much expending energy affects us and then recovering energy is a favorite idea I learned and practice in my performance training.
Research shows the habit of retrieving spent energy is a powerful game changer. It is a strategy that transformed my horse training as I strategically practiced it and one that continues to help me in life challenges.
It applies to literally all expenditures of energy, whether it’s in a sequence of moments when you’re riding (during pauses when you give yourself and your horse whatever time is needed to take a deep breath, lower your heart rate, and release excess muscle tension)—or in the bigger picture of restful and adequate sleep—or in the context of traveling – after putting extra energy out and then coming home and allowing the mind, body, and emotions time to recharge.
That’s what this video is all about.
I have a little challenge with that because I tend to go, go, go.
This morning, I was thinking about the topic of this video. I realized I needed to get grounded and rested, so I decided to ride through the canopy of trees on our driveway.
We’ve been working on our beautiful trees, cleaning and trimming them a bit. I’ve wanted to be under the trees, walking with Nick, or taking a little walk on the ground. It feels energizing. So I wanted you to have a little ride with me this morning.
We have to train recovery—our ability to re-energize. By that, I mean we have to make a conscious effort to do so. Restoring our energy is the number one thing that allows us to sustain energy.
We expend energy and then get it back. The latter must be done deliberately, or else we deplete our energy reserves.
I’m doing that this morning, and I’m sharing it with you. I hope you have a wonderful week.
Getting Your Horse Soft
In my last article on May 13, I talked about what softness was and wasn’t, the
benefits of your horse being soft, and how I go about it. If this topic interests you,
you might want to go back and read it before you read this one. In this article, I’ll
give you a few suggestions on simple ways to increase softness and
responsiveness in your horse.
One thing that makes a horse softer and more responsive is being more
ambidextrous. Your horse will be better able to respond to your aides and will be
more supple doesn’t have one side stiffer or more hollow than the other. Imagine
how much more fluid and coordinated we’d be if we didn’t favor one side more
than the other. I’ve written several articles on this in the past, because I think it’s
so important for everything we do with our horses to be equally flexible and
balanced on both sides.
First, it’s important to understand that about 80% of horses are stiff to their left
and hollow to their right side. It’s easy to feel because when executing a
symmetric circle to their stiff side, they don’t want to tip their nose to the inside
as easily and they tend to collapse that circle by trying to lead with their shoulder.
The opposite is true to their hollow side. They’re too bendable bendable and tend
to drift to the outside of that circle. Also, it’s harder to move their shoulder in to
keep them on it. So, first try to walk a perfect circle both ways making it very
round and see if you can tell. Once you’ve figured that out, the next thing is to
make the stiff side more supple and the hollow side a bit stiffer until they’re as
balanced one way as they are the other.
Another way to tell is when you’re walking a circle to the right (if they’re more
hollow that way), you’ll feel their hip cocked to the inside. In other words, their
hind feet don’t follow in the tracks of their front feet.
Once you’ve determined which side is which, I’ll give you some ideas on how to
even them up. I’d love some guidance from all of you regarding what problems
you encounter and areas that you could use some suggestions for also.
Am I Good Enough?
A woman I know often feels like she comes up short in her horse program.
She loves her horses, but thinks her horses are just ok, and that her riding isn’t good enough (and likely never will be), and that she doesn’t have enough time, money, or friends in the horse world.
While that sounds a bit dire, she’s certainly not alone. Dare I say, many of us feel some version of the same, to some degree.
It’s called scarcity. It’s characterized by the belief that who we are and what we have are never enough, and that we need something more from the outside world to come to us or to happen to be fulfilled.
The biggest challenge is that a scarcity mindset causes us to compare ourselves to others and overlook our unique qualities. If that ‘more’ does come to us in some form from the outside, it’s likely still not enough.
Scarcity is insatiable and toxic.
In the horse world, we may think we need to be a better rider because so-and-so person is at a higher level. Or, if we compete and win a big championship, in our minds, we think it was a fluke, so we need to win more classes to prove we’re the real deal.
When it comes to learning new skills with our horses, one way scarcity might manifest is in the desire to be ‘fixed’ by someone or something else.
If we go to a clinic and hear something we’ve understood before, we might think we already know how to do that, but what we know is the what, not the how. We confuse knowledge with learning.
In a scarcity mindset, we want to explore NEW ideas to develop our skills, rather than delve deeper into the nuances, sequences, and rhythms of fundamentals we’re familiar with.
New strategies and concepts are good, but in their own time. There’s an order and a process to learning. First comes getting solid with what comes first.
There’s a concept that’s the opposite of scarcity. It’s called ‘sufficiency’. The idea is that when we want to expand anything, an excellent strategy is to go deeper with what we already have.
In the currently available “You Hold the Reins” mini-podcast series, Dr. Stephanie Burns, an expert in adult learning, offers a glimpse into how the adult human brain works, including learning new skills and getting unstuck with skills you struggle with.
She helps us understand that there’s so much we can do to learn more effectively. Plus, it’s essential for efficient and effective learning.
Learning requires taking knowledge (information/understanding) and practicing it in specific ways. This is work typically done between lessons and without the presence of instructors, for example.
We do ‘hold the reins’ to advancing our skills in the most efficient and effective ways possible – and it does require knowing how to study skills on our own – and then doing it!.
Stephanie’s teaching on ‘deep learning’ has brought to light a multitude of multidimensional concepts about adult learning and what’s possible for us.
In podcast two, for example, she explains the necessity for clarity, breaking things down, and repetition in more detail.
I was coaching someone recently, and I just kept hearing Stephanie’s words about deep learning in my mind.
I was thinking about how I could break down the ideas I was sharing even more, and also how I could make it meaningful to my student and help her do the same when she wasn’t with me.
It was as if a brick hit me, highlighting the importance of these deep learning concepts and how they need to be applied. As I thought about ‘how’ to use them, a new whole world of clarity, creativity, and design opened up.
Because of what Stephanie teaches and how she’s teaching it, she’s helped me ‘go deeper’ – and boy, there’s a lot of room there to expand. 😊
Dr. Burns calls learning our superpower. It’s not a talent given to some and not others. We just need to know how to do our part. That’s up to us.
The three You Hold the Reins mini-podcasts will be available for another week.
If you haven’t signed up to hear them (they’re free), I recommend doing so soon! You won’t regret it! There’s so much you can do to help yourself. You just need to know how and then follow through.
I’m thrilled to be learning this information for myself. To me, it’s life-changing.
It opens doors to learning whatever you want to learn by doing what you do for yourself.
Softening Your Horse
I was ruminating the other day about what it is about a really broke horse that makes everything about them look so good, so comfortable and so effortless.
We all know what it’s not. It’s the absence of stiffness, nervousness and fear.
Ok, but what is it? For me, it’s a beautiful blend of a horse who knows his job and is confident in his rider. One that is physically and mentally capable, plus enjoys what he’s doing.
This kind of horse isn’t a 90 day wonder who’s been forced into compliance without time being taken to condition his body and mind, but rather the product of great genes for the event that he’s to be trained for, a compliant, forgiving mind, a big heart, the physical capacity to do the job, plus his rider has explained things in bite sized pieces until he offers them at the slightest suggestion.
If we’re lucky enough to have the kind of horse, who is that trainable, they almost train themselves…but what about the horse who barely checks those boxes? Is he still worth the effort? For most of us mere mortals, that’s the only kind we’re ever going to have! I believe that most horses can develop into better moving animals and we can help build desire in them to do what we need them to by knowing what we want and breaking it down into small “chunks”, being consistent and fair, and as Greg Ward used to say, “improving them 1% a day and in 100 days, they’ll be 100% better!”
That may not be enough for today’s competitive world, but it surely a start that will help ensure them a better life if you have to move on from them.
The single most important ingredient is to help your horse be soft and responsive. When I first get on a horse, I don’t have an “agenda” for that ride, but rather I try to feel for stiff spots. When I find one, I rub on it like water on a stone, until the sharp edges of fear and resistance get smooth. It’s often a long process and patience is a prerequisite. It’s like massaging a sore muscle, you start off finding the area, then working on it a little deeper each time, until it bends and shapes like you want. I work on their face as well as their ribs and shoulders until they’re capable of moving the way I need them to. It will go like that all through their training process, because each time you introduce a new thing or add speed, resistance occurs. No horse can learn when speed increases or lack of understanding their adrenaline anymore than we can learn something when we are in the throes of an adrenaline rush.
In my next few articles, I’d like to go into this more and give you some ideas how to get your horse softer and keep their adrenaline in check.
Please let me know if you have any things that work well for you!
“An Exercise to Develop Feel”
There’s that word again … “feel.”
It can be so elusive. What does that mean? And most importantly, how can you develop it?
To me “riding with feel” means being so connected to your horse that you can sense how to communicate seamlessly with him moment to moment (like a dance partner leading the dance.)
For example, you show him what to do next with just the right amount of cuing. Or you detect what he is going to do next before he actually does it. You sense his muscles tighten or his body parts barely move before he actually changes direction. Because you sense these subtle shifts, you are right there with just the right amount of seat, feet or leg support to guide him moment to moment.
So how do you acquire this elusive quality of “feel” in an efficient way?
Well nothing replaces hours in the saddle, but there is an exercise you can do to help your quest.
First, riding a horse with “feel” is a “soft” skill.
In any endeavor (not just horses) a “soft” skill means being responsive to a constantly changing situation. What’s going on is never exactly the same … similar to a quarter back making moment to moment decisions play by play.
“Hard” skills, by comparison are the things you do over and over in the same way (for the most part) … like how you position yourself in the saddle, or how you hold the reins.
It’s important to understand that soft skills take longer to develop because it takes multiple exposures to multiple changing scenarios to develop accurate responsiveness.
It’s also important to know that it’s common to get frustrated as you learn soft skills because there’s no short cut to the time and experience necessary to learn them.
However, I do have an exercise for you that I know will help you develop “feel” by helping you become more mindful of your horse’s movements.
Step one is to walk your horse with your chin up, shoulders back and eyes up.
Breathe as you walk.
Simple.
Now, connect to your core. By this I mean tighten your abs a bit. Push you belly button back and down towards your spine.
Keep walking with great posture, eyes up, an awareness of your core … and breathing. Take your time. Get comfortable, yet alert.
Now, stay in that same posture and core awareness as you connect to your legs. Feel your legs moving with your horse’s ribs and legs. You don’t need to analyze what leg is doing what. Just “feel” the movement.
Keep breathing. Keep you eyes up. Stay soft in your body. Make your elbows heavy. Breathe into any body part that feels tight. Don’t rush. Get loose and stay loose. Be aware. Tune into the movement.
Now, go deeper. Drop your awareness further down and into your horse’s feet. You don’t have to know exactly which foot is where. Just gently take your mind through your core, through your legs, and then through his legs and into his feet.
Stay mentally connected to the rhythm of his feet. As you turn a corner imagine his feet positions. Perhaps in a curve to the left, you notice that his right front foot reaches a bit over the left front foot. Again, there’s no need to be super analytical. Just feel it.
And as you do other things … stopping, backing, trotting, loping … do this same exercise. Connect to his feet. Imagine what they are doing.
If you want to extend a horse’s gait, before you ask your horse with your feet, imagine his feet moving faster. If you want to slow down, imagine his feet slowing down.
Remember, do this exercise slowly at first.
The keys are to keep looking up. Keep breathing, Keep connecting to your core. Then become mindful of his feet.
Enjoy more “feel”.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Feast on it or Forget About it!
I was recently playing pickleball with a friend who is far better than I am at the game and when
I’d hit a really good shot she’d holler, “feast on that one Sandy!” What she meant was not to
pat myself on the back, but rather to savor the feel of the shot, replay the way it felt when the
ball left my paddle, the sound it made, the effortlessness of it. So, I actually started to take a
moment when I hit an exemplary shot (though they were rare) and recreate it in my head, my
body, in my self-talk. I’d even start telling myself “Hey, if you got that almost impossible ball
and returned a great shot once, you can do it again! And guess what? I did. I started hitting
more and more good shots!
Taking that to our riding lives, when you execute a great stop or turn on the fence or have a
higher scoring run than usual, take the moment to “feast” on it. It’s been proven that it takes
30-60 seconds of savoring a moment to create a pathway that can be followed internally to
duplicate that more and more often, in other words to make it “stick”.
Likewise, if we mess something up, “Forget about it”. We don’t want to deepen that moment
into a rut in our subconscious by ruminating on it and having that be what “sticks”. It’s fine to
be honest with ourselves though, if we understand what didn’t go well and replace it with what
we’ll do better next time. That’s what the great tennis players do when they miss a shot. You’ll
see them swing their racket a time or two like they should have to “replace” the error with the
correct stroke. If we dwell on the error, we just make it stronger in our subconscious rather
than making the desired motion get more firmly entrenched. So, forget about those errors or
better yet replace them and feast on those good ones for a minute to make them stick!
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Come Back to Center with Four Questions
I want to share something that happened recently.
Have you had the experience of learning an idea and using it successfully to help you stay focused or get back on the right track, but it just fades away over time? Then, all of a sudden, it pops up again, and you realize how valuable it is.
That’s because if we don’t use something consistently, we get further away from it, making it less memorable. However, it’s still there somewhere in our minds, and it becomes more prominent every time we review and return to it.
This happened to me with Byron Katie’s four questions.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
She created four questions that, when taken together, are an excellent tool for letting go of fear or worry.
The questions can be used when you notice you don’t feel great.
You can use them when you’re not feeling comfortable inside (maybe something just happened), or you saw someone you had a judgment about, or you saw someone you were concerned had a judgment about you, or you think about what your horse may or may not be able to do – those kinds of things.
In many situations, asking yourself these questions gets you centered again.
Their use is connected to the idea that we tell ourselves something about something and become self-aware that the outcome of that thought doesn’t feel good or move us forward.
Here are the four questions:
Number one, “Is it true?
Number two, “Can I absolutely know that it’s true?”
Number three: “How do I react? What happens to me inside when I believe that thought?
Number four: “Who would I be without that thought?
My response to question four is typically, “I feel free,” and that’s a great feeling.
I hope you enjoy trying out the questions. They are incredibly valuable, mainly when you have thoughts and judgments that are uncomfortable or limiting.
I always appreciate you being here. Please leave a comment. Bye bye.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!