10/16/2025
YES!!!
🐴 Touch as Many Horses as You Can
This is solid advice...
If you want to get good with horses, work with as many as you can.
Different sizes, shapes, temperaments - the whole lot. Every horse you handle adds to your internal database of feel, understanding, and the ability to make good decisions fast.
When I’d only ridden a handful of horses, every new one felt alien. Their movement threw me off; their energy unsettled me. I’d climb on and think, gosh this feels awkward!
Nothing was wrong - I just didn’t have enough data.
Now, when I handle a new horse, it takes about two seconds to read the room. Because experience builds calibration. You stop reacting to every emotional flicker as danger and start recognising it as information.
You can feel the horse telling you what’s easy, what’s hard, or what’s concerning through how fluent your touch moves through them. I hear the horse respond physically, mentally and emotionally just as clearly as they learn to read my touch.
That’s why I tell people to do my backward-forward-yield groundwork exercise with as many horses as possible. If you don’t know what that is, then do something you do know - something simple you can teach a horse. It’s not about fixing them; it’s about refining you. Every repetition tunes your database of awareness, your ability to feel them, read them, and ultimately your ability to influence them.
Because confidence isn’t built by one example; it’s built by learning to manage it, navigate it, and witness the results of your actions many times over.
So go out there, work with different horses, and stack experiences.
The more horses you understand, the less any one horse can shake you - and the more predictable they all become.
This is Collectable Advice 52/365 of my notebook challenge, please SAVE it, SHARE it but it is not cool to copy and paste it ❤
