Ep 94: Reframing Your Mindset About Reactive Responses
Challenges are inevitable. In both your horsemanship journey and your life, there will be times where you feel insecure and unsure about your next steps.
The same is true for your horses. There will be times when your horses feel insecure and unsure about their next steps, too. When horses experience insecurity, they display some kind of reactive response (i.e. bucking, kicking, rearing up, shying away, freezing up).
I believe that there are varying degrees of reactive responses. And, I truly don’t think that horses display undesirable responses just to spite us. These reactive responses are simply a horse’s method of communicating that they are scared or insecure with the situation that they are in.
If you have ever taken a young horse to a new arena, you’re probably very familiar with the types of responses I’m talking about. When you unload a horse at a new place, it should come as no surprise that the horse will be somewhat reactive.
To help your horse overcome these reactive tendencies, you must provide a trigger that signals that horse to come back to the ‘thinking’ side of its brain. If you can do something to stimulate the thinking side of the horse’s brain, that animal becomes much more secure and confident with the situation that they are in.
The thing to realize about reactive responses is that the goal is not to train the reactive responses out of a horse. Those reactive responses are necessary to solicit speed and effort in times of competition. Instead, the goal is to be able to control that horse’s mentality and establish cues that help that horse seamlessly transition from ‘reacting’ mode to ‘thinking’ mode.
Need help with your horse’s reactive responses? Schedule a 1:1 coaching session with Phil.
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