10/01/2025
The hardest truth in this business….and it has nothing to do with horses.
"This summer marks 20 years of being an equine professional. It’s a milestone I’ve thought a lot about in recent years and one that I looked forward to celebrating.
Looking back, I can play my career almost like a slideshow in my mind: Every horse I ever swung a leg over, every ribbon, every late night babysitting a colicky animal. I can see the students who learned to check their diagonals with me, and seasons later, stepped into their first Junior medal final or jumper classic.
There are more happy and sad tears than I can count; the full gamut of emotions, successes, and traumas….
As a young professional, I imagined getting to the point where I’d been running a business for this long, and I thought I’d wear it like a badge of honor. In some ways, I do.
I’m proud of all I’ve done and how hard I’ve fought to carve out a space for myself in the industry. It’s a field that isn’t kind to scrappy, nameless, and stubborn 20-somethings. I made a deal with myself, at a very young age, that I’d train and teach with kindness. To the best of my ability, I’ve stuck to that method.
I’ve never screamed at my students or belittled them. I never felt the need to step into that role after being taught that way so often as a child, myself, and knowing what it did to my confidence. I wanted to do it my way and break the mold—with patience and respect for the horse and my students.
I wanted to focus my program on teaching riders how horses learn, and how we owe it to them to try to communicate effectively. Although no journey is a straight line, I can say with certainty that I’ve been true to myself when it mattered.
So many trainers talk about the ebb and flow of the industry, and I’ve found this to be true, year in and year out. There were times I had more than 20 horses in training, lessons all day long, six days a week, and I was showing multiple times a month.
There were times I had just a handful of horses and was advertising my program like crazy, hoping I’d make enough in a month to break even. Every professional has been on one end of this spectrum or the other; feast or famine.
The biggest mistake I made throughout my career is a hard one to admit, because it’s the most raw part of the human experience. I wanted my clients to be my friends and I truly felt like they were.
There were people in my program over the years that I spent more time with than my own family. We shared the emotional rollercoaster that is the horse world, and that’s something that can really bond you with another person. Mostly, that’s because no one outside of horses really understands it.
A good trainer-friend of mine, who I really look up to, once told me, “You have to make your clients feel like they are your friends, but actually, be friends with none of them.”
I admire her, not only because she is wise beyond her years—and a kind, talented horsewoman who’s been there for me—but also because she’s very good at something I am not. She’s able to compartmentalize. She understands healthy boundaries, and how to work hard, but keep her home life separate. I knew her advice was for my own sanity, and in the back of my mind, I knew she was right. But stubbornly (again, because this is my nature) I chose to believe I was the golden exception to that rule.
I went on inviting my client friends over for dinner. We’d go out for drinks. I was habitually calling them to vent about a bad day, and even sharing really personal details about my own life—as friends do.
Unfortunately for me, 20 years in, I’ve experienced more heartbreak than I could express by blurring the lines of my career with my personal life. I put so much weight on these relationships and felt that these people would never walk away from me, because we were close. We were bonded.
The reality of the situation, though, is that nothing in the horse industry is permanent. Not a job, not a horse, not the highs or the lows of competition… and not friends."
📎 Continue reading the article by Ariel Univer at https://www.theplaidhorse.com/2024/10/22/walking-the-line-as-a-trainer-friend-and-client/
📸 © The Plaid Horse
