Just 3 simple steps to a happy horse and happy rider?

Riding horses  in a way that they like can seem so difficult  sometimes. Because it is!

Sometimes trying to pretend things aren’t so difficult just gets us into more and more trouble.

I mean, take gadgets, for example.

All the gadgets you can imagine like side reins, draw reins, de Gogues and all the others things you can buy were invented in good faith (well, maybe not absolutely all of them…).

They were created by someone who was trying to make life simpler; either for themselves, for their horse or for those people they were teaching who didn’t have quite the same level of skills and experience as the master.

Even if we accept they were never intended as a way to force or constrain horses – just look at how they’re often used nowadays…!

As the French master horseman, General Decarpentry, wrote in his book, ‘Academic Equitation’:

“In equitation, as in politics, we should beware of over-simplification; this nearly always leads to more trouble in the end”.

So, can you really take a subject as complex as riding and training horses in a heart-centred way and distill it down to just 3 simple steps so it becomes easy enough to understand? That’s a puzzle that we’ve been working on for many years and we think we’re getting pretty close with what we teach inside our online coaching programme, Schooling Made Simple.

To break that down a bit:

Firstly, we start off by thinking about where we want to end up – the schooled horse. What do those words really mean? Do they mean the same to every rider, trainer or judge (spoiler alert: no, they don’t!) After all, if you don’t know exactly where you want to get to on your travels, then any road will do!

Next, we take a close look at the nature of horses. For some, the gap between where they start out in life physically and mentally and where we want to take them can be huge. So why exactly is that? What are the root causes of the difficulties? Why is it that many riders seem to have much more trouble navigating the journey with some horses (often the one they’ve got) than with others (the ones they wish they’d got!).

Thirdly, we explain a way of gently closing that gap that’s been tried and tested over many centuries. It’s a way of being with horses that understands and appreciates the nature of each individual and provides methods and techniques that work with nature rather than against it to bring out the best in any horse.

Starting on Friday April 9th, we’ll be teaching a FREE 3-part masterclass that explores these 3 steps in more depth.

If you’d like to, you can join us and discover how you too can achieve whatever you want with your horse WITHOUT having to resort to force or gadgets.

(And that’s enough to put a smile on everyone’s face… 😉 )

If you haven’t signed up yet, you can reserve your spot here: https://www.derekandjo.com/free-masterclass

Derek

PS: if you’d like to get our help in a deeper way, we’ll also soon be offering the opportunity to join our (paid) online coaching programme, Schooling Made Simple.

but this weekends’ 3-part masterclass is absolutely FREE.