For centuries, mankind has found it important to order things – to put first things first, second things second, and last things last, so to speak. Stories have a beginning, middle and end. In school we learn how to organize our thoughts in outline form from the largest, most general ideas to the smallest and most specific. Creatures in our world are organized by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and finally species. In martial arts one starts as a white belt and progresses through the levels of skill in a rational manner, earning each new belt by proving proficiency at one’s present belt level. One learns to play piano in an orderly way, starting with scales, fingering and simple tunes, rather than starting with a masterwork by Handel or Bach.

It’s natural for people to want to put things in order, and this is really pretty rational and logical because oftentimes, it’s essential to put things in their proper order so they work correctly. A house must be built in a particular order – obviously we can’t put the roof on until it’s framed, and we can’t do the finish work if it’s not sheet-rocked. So anyone who builds houses is expert at putting things in a logical order.

There is a logical order to learning to ride and work with horses. There are certain skills and pieces of knowledge that have to be in place before others can be built upon them. And I’m not quite sure how it’s happened, but it seems like many of today’s riders and horsemen have kind of lost sight of this fact. In some cases, we’re trying to kind of start at the end, or at the middle, and we’re getting frustrated and perhaps even injured as a result.

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that most of today’s clinic-goers are middle-aged women who are returning to horses after decades away. Maybe that long break that some of us have taken has kind of interrupted the order in our equestrian education and by the time we get back into it, our dreams have overtaken our grasp of reality.

This wouldn’t be a big deal, but when we try to start at the end, it’s the horse who pays for it. The person becomes frustrated and then the horse has to work with an unstable, emotionally-charged rider who is not making rational decisions.

Trying to start at the end can look lots of different ways. It can look like a beginner or intermediate horseman buying a troubled or remedial horse. It can look like a lower-level rider wondering why they have so few “magic moments” with their horse and thinking that means they’re doing something wrong. It can look like the rider falling off a lot and getting injured riding the horse they “love”. It can look like a rider being frustrated that their horse can’t collect – but the rider is using the horse’s mouth for balance.

So let’s look at this as a matter of order. When one is a beginner in any sport or hobby, we start at a beginner level – we have a bigger tennis racket and the coach lobs those balls pretty slow. Baseball players start with T-ball, then softball, then baseball. So a beginner/intermediate rider needs a beginner/intermediate-appropriate horse so that they can learn all the things beginner/intermediate riders need to learn. If a beginner/intermediate has an advanced-type horse, they haven’t learned the beginner/intermediate things that the advanced things are built on, so they may be unable to learn those advanced things from that horse. It just doesn’t work that way.

Learning to have an independent seat is so important, and this is missing in so many riders today. By “independent seat”, what I mean is that the rider’s seat, legs and body are balanced and independent from the hands and that the rider is not using their hands and the horse’s mouth for balance or to stay on. Many of today’s riders have not had an orderly riding education, so the independent seat has gotten missed. Now, lessons are not the only way to learn an independent seat – many of us learned to have an independent seat by haring around the countryside bareback for years as kids. Using that method, we fell off a lot. But we learned.

It is only when we have an independent seat that we will be able to use our cues or aids (from thoughts, visualizations and breathing to hands, legs and seat) in a subtle and sympathetic way that has feel and timing. As long as we are using our reins for balance, there is little subtlety. So there is an order to things when it comes to learning to ride and work with a horse.
I think that we can get frustrated when we have violated the order of things, when our expectations and wishes are beyond what our knowledge or ability level will support.

My ex-husband was an avid and athletic outdoorsman in the Colorado Rockies. He would get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to “skin” up Aspen’s ski mountains and then ski down before the mountain opened to the public for the day. He could mountain bike amazing terrain and hike 4,000 vertical feet straight up Aspen Mountain. I remember he used to complain of what he called “gear heads”. These were people who had gone out and bought all the gear, good gear, but did not have the skill to use it and ended up being a hazard to the people out there who knew what they were doing. “Having the gear doesn’t give you the skill. Working at it gives you the skill,” he said. He was seeing people who were trying to start at the end, and they were failing and frustrating themselves and others in the process.

I’ve thought about that a lot since then – about if we can become “gear heads” in the horse world. If we buy the horse, and the tack and the trailer and whatnot, we have just begun, not ended. Now we can put in the hours of practice and preparation and if we do things in a rational order, we should get positive results of some sort. If our expectations match our skill and knowledge level, we can be happy where we are – maybe not satisfied, but pretty darn happy.