02/01/2026
What Actually Motivates Horse People🤔
(A completely unscientific investigation with alarmingly consistent results)
A month ago I asked my membership Society a deceptively simple question: what motivates you to work with your horse?
Now, this was not a wide-eyed fishing expedition. I spend a lot of time thinking about motivation, how it works, how it fails, and how often it gets oversold. I was not expecting clichés or inspirational fluff, and I was not particularly interested in them either.
What came back, though, genuinely surprised me. Not because it was dramatic or profound in the usual motivational sense, but because it was so consistent, so grounded, and so quietly revealing. The answers were thoughtful, deeply human, and occasionally funny in the way real insight often is.
Because almost nobody actually talked about motivation at all.
What people talked about was what happens to their brain when they are with their horses. Again and again, members said some version of the same thing: this is the only time my mind goes quiet. Poo picking. Filling hay nets. Cleaning yards. Walking to the paddock. Repetitive, physical, mildly unglamorous tasks that somehow succeed where mindfulness apps, breathwork podcasts, and expensive planners have failed spectacularly. Several people admitted they now enjoy horse chores more than domestic ones, which feels like a devastating but accurate commentary on modern life.
Another theme emerged just as clearly. People who had a plan did not describe themselves as motivated.😳
They described themselves as scheduled. Riding on certain days. Having a loose structure. Tracking sessions. One member said, almost casually, “Since I created the schedule, I don’t need to motivate myself.”
Someone really needs to put that quote on a cushion because it dismantles what most people believe about motivation.😆
It turns out motivation is what you reach for when there is no structure. Structure, on the other hand, just gets on with it.💪
A few people admitted something we all recognise. The hardest part is rarely the riding or the training. It is the getting started. The tack. The prep. The moment where you have to move from thinking about horses to actually doing something. One member shared that when she does not feel like riding, she tells herself she can tack up and untack if she wants to quit. She has only ever done that once. This is not a lack of motivation. This is excellent self-management.❤️
Many answers circled another quiet truth. Horses create protected time. Time that belongs to you. Away from work, housework, kids, phones, responsibilities, and the constant background noise of life. Whether it was Canberra winters, Wisconsin snow, Perth heat, or grey rainy mornings, the pattern was the same. Once people were out there, they were glad they went. The reward was never productivity. It was presence.🧘♀️
Progress came up too, but not in the dramatic, cinematic way people like to sell. Small improvements mattered. A new exercise. A lightbulb moment from a podcast. A horse being a little clearer, a little calmer, a little more with you than yesterday. Plans mattered more than goals. Methods mattered more than vibes.
One member described each day with her horses as sewing another stitch into a delicate partnership, which feels about as accurate as it gets.
So when you look across all of these answers, the original question starts to feel slightly off. People are not being motivated in the inspirational sense. They are not waiting to feel ready or summoning willpower from the couch. They are going out because the horses are there, because a plan exists, because their mind settles once they start moving, and because once they are at the paddock, things feel clearer.
One member captured it beautifully when she said she had "spent years blowing out birthday candles wishing for the life she now has", and she is not prepared to let her emotions waste a single day of it. That is not motivation in the Instagram sense. It is perspective, responsibility, and a quiet commitment to showing up.🙌
In the end, motivation does not seem to be the thing that gets people to their horses at all. It appears somewhere along the way, between the walk to the paddock and the moment the brain finally goes quiet.
Feel free to add your thoughts to this.
Love and respect to my beautiful community for sharing their insights 😘
Only 7 more days till Bootcamp Reboot starts where I guide you through my flagship program.✊
