You know that question that keeps coming up in conversations? What do you do when your horse continually says no?
I don’t mean the big no, not rearing or bolting or shutting down. I mean the quiet one. Your horse doesn’t quite move forward, the expression gets a little tight, or she offers something else instead of what you asked for. You’ve trained yourself to notice these things because that’s what we do, right? We learned to listen.
So you stop, back off, do something else. Because that’s what a good trainer does.
And then the next time you get to that same place, the same thing happens, so you stop again. And the time after that. Every time you try to move past that point, there it is, and every time you accept it.
And at some point you realize you’ve been stopping at the same spot for a really long time and you’re stuck.
You know where you want to go, but you’ve stopped so many times that you don’t even know anymore how to get past it. You want to respect the no, but you also want to move forward. And asking the same question the same way keeps giving you the same answer. So maybe the way forward isn’t to override the no. Maybe it’s to ask a different question.
This happened with Blondie recently. I’m working on transitions from walk to trot in shoulder-in under saddle. The shoulder-in asks Blondie to carry herself in a better balance, a little rounder, with more weight on her hind legs instead of pulling herself forward. It requires her to coordinate her legs differently, and that’s not something that happens in one session. It needs to be practiced. And it’s a key exercise because once this opens up, a lot of other things become possible.
After a few attempts, something came back that I hadn’t seen in a long time. She did her front leg lift and a little hop — things she used to do when she didn’t know what was expected of her or when she thought she couldn’t do it.
I don’t have that occurrence on video but here’s an example of this behaviour from when we started riding. In that case all I had asked her to do was to go forward. Easy thing now.
Earlier in our training, stopping or moving to another lesson was the right call. We didn’t have the foundation to tackle the difficult issues. But we’re not there anymore. We have years of work behind us. I knew the exercise would benefit her and I knew she had the preparation. So instead of quitting, I acknowledged the difficulty but I didn’t abandon the lesson. I didn’t push harder. I varied how I asked, adjusted where I set my criteria. It was an exploration, not an insistence.
I lowered criteria and made the next attempt something she could meet, clicked that, then asked for a little more. Not to stay at the easier level but to get her moving again, to get the momentum going so she could carry it into the harder thing. I didn’t know if it would work. I was feeling my way through, adjusting as I went.
A couple of clicks and that was enough. She was back in it, moving forward, giving it her best effort. It wasn’t the transition I was looking for, not yet, but the difference between that and what came before was unmistakable. The next day we had the same pattern, and by the third day the old behaviors were gone. Something opened up. You know when you find the right thread on a feed bag and it opens cleanly with one pull? It felt like that.
She still needs practice organizing her body and I need to get better at how I ask for it. But even on the days when she could do it, there was a point where I felt her getting tired and I stopped. Not because she said no, but because continuing past that point would have cost more than it gained.
📽 This is our last transition from that ride. It’s far from where I want it to be, but it’s an approximation. And it was a good place to stop.
I keep thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t stayed with it. We’d still be circling around that same spot and I’d still be telling myself that Blondie wasn’t ready, when really I was the one who wasn’t sure.