The Nuance of Pressure, Feel & Choice - Lockie Phillips

I typically kick the episodes off by having the guest tell us who they are and what it is they do. Happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. And I’m giggling a little bit because the first question I typically ask my guests also is who are you? What do you do and how do you do it?

That’s funny. Yeah. Who are you and what is it that you do? OK, this is it. My name is Lachie Phillips.

Lachie is the shortened nickname version of Lachlan. I was born in Australia, but my entire adult life I have lived in Europe. I’m 35 years old. I am a retired professional classical and modern ballet dancer. I worked for the Polish National Ballet in the Warsaw Opera House and the Turing and Schatz ballet.

I have a degree of stage dance from the Zurich University of the Arts, from the 10th Dance Academy of Zurich, and I have a license in writing instruction, horse training, rehabilitation from what is now a closed institute in Poland. So let people take that what it is. But I’m not that invested in credentialism. I’ve been working much longer and more deeply with horses than I worked in the dance field by now. Did my first lesson in 2012 and today I live in Spain in a 19th century farmhouse with a fully surfaced track system with my herd of four horses, my 2 employees and I have a thriving business that’s hybrid online and in person.

I travel the world doing clinics. I have several online courses, mentorships. I also have associates who work in my company with my student body. I don’t certify people, but they are associated with me, carefully vetted people that I collaborate with to serve clients that I don’t have the time to serve and to serve clients that like my message but maybe would prefer someone else’s way. Yeah, emotional horsemanship is the is what I give the name of the way I train horses.

Now I know that the industry is a little bit method shy. You know how horses get ears shy, head shy, rope shy, whip shy. The industry tends to be a little bit method shy because in the last 30 years we’ve seen a lot of predatorial marketing around methodology. A lot of trainers have become the anti Methodists. So they’ll say I’m not a method, I don’t have a method.

That’s why you can trust me because I have no method. And I understand that point of view, but I believe there’s nothing wrong with having a method, especially if your method factors in flexibility. So I have no problem breaking rules, adapting rules, using a different discipline, using a different concept, horse to horse and person to person. So emotional horsemanship is the lens that I teach and train by. Emotional horsemanship prioritizes how the horse feels in the training.

That’s really it in a nutshell. How does the horse feel about the training, in the training, during the training, after the training, before the training? How does it feel to be under the effect of a trainer and a rider? And all of it is our best guesswork, of course, and best guesswork. Another word for that is empathy.

And we use a lot of science, so we’re reading up on a lot of different papers and looking at a lot of different modern researches, not because we’re scientists, but because we are nerds and we are hungry for information. And then we use a lot of feel also. So FEEL steps out into potential scientific unknowns, but also respects and nods towards 5000 years of the horse human relationship and all of the traditional practices that work. That’s what Feel is all about. We ride horses, which a lot of people don’t think we do.

We ride horses, we train horses, we keep horses. We also don’t ride and train all horses. But I love my work. I wake up every day. My entire life is completely dedicated to this work.

It’s been my full time job for several years now and I couldn’t be happier doing it. That’s who I am. Awesome. You write a lot on your Facebook about empathy when dealing with forces, and I think that’s becoming one of those words that’s turning into a buzzword a bit. How would you define empathy in your training?

Yeah, part of me wants to ignore when empathy becomes a buzzword, because I think when something becomes a buzzword, it’s become mutated into a fashion rather than adhered to through a sense of professional and personal integrity. So the fashionable aspects of empathy I have no interest in whatsoever. I’m a nerd, so that doesn’t interest me at all. I believe that there are people who are experimenting with empathy now the same way they might go to Zara and try on this season’s new whatever, and they’re experimenting with it, and that is their right, and they can certainly learn something from it. But next year they’ll be something else to focus on, and they’ll move on to that.

Like a bird flying from to a branch in a forest. For me, I’ve made my nest around empathy. For me, empathy is classical, not fashionable. For me, empathy is as old as the hills are around my farm. It is not something new and exciting and fresh.

For me, empathy in horsemanship is the oldest, most classical, probably first thing that made people successful with horses at all. Because if you have totally wild horses with fully formed fence mechanisms that have not been bred out of them, and you have a human being and upper primate walking out onto the plane somewhere where those horses not only can defend themselves if cornered, but can flee if necessary and are infinitely more powerful and intelligent than the upper primates are. Well, the only thing you’ve got going for you there is respecting the horses point of view. The only thing. And so for me, at a higher level, that’s how I would frame empathy.

There are some people out in the industry now attempting to paint myself and people like me as opportunists who are weaponizing empathy in the fashionable sense to exert power and control over their communities. And to them, I would say that is a projection of themselves that has nothing to do with me and my work. They are usually always peripheral and outside looking in on my work, and that’s me being a little bit defensive. I am being defensive and I’m owning that I’m allowed to defend my work. So empathy is about feeling what the horse feels.

What could be more powerful, important and valuable to a horse person than that? Have you ever sat on a horse and you could feel that they were going to transition into trot before you asked, and they weren’t transitioning out of anxiety or rushing or anticipating? You could feel that the horse waited for you, was ready for you, and knew what you were going to ask before you asked it. And so when you asked it, you weren’t asking for it. You were just nodding to what you had both already decided to.

And then there was the trot. If that’s happening to horse people all the world over, why aren’t we talking about that? Why aren’t we forming our methodology with that at the centre? Why are we talking about spurs? Why are we talking about mechanical aids?

Why are we talking in Latin about muscles constantly? And we’re not talking about that, as if that is real. As real as a muscle, as real as a behavioural outcome, as real as the match, he said. You put on your horse before a competition. Why aren’t we talking about that like it’s real?

Why are we all experiencing these things and everyone’s treating it like the big pink elephant in the room? I’ve just walked into the equestrian industry, essentially an outsider. I was around horses as a child, of course, but I’ve walked into the industry and decided to call bull on everyone, ignoring this great big important element that we all seem to live by and that a lot of professionals seem to gatekeepers. Mysterious mysticism. It’s not.

There’s nothing mysterious about it. Everyone can do this, whether you’re talented or not. Everyone has felt this. Even complete beginners feel this because they have not been manipulated out of it by unscrupulous people with terrier motives. So that’s what empathy is.

It’s being able to feel the horses experience so that the training amplifies and centres the horses experience. Not only can this make training safer, but more concerned, but hopefully more enjoyable for everybody, especially for the horse, and hopefully help people make more discerning decisions about what to do with this horse right now, how much pressure to use right now, what to do next. Yeah, I know. It’s such an important point because there are so many times where people will know what’s going on and then they almost talk themselves out of listening to that. And then it creates this whole nother issue of now your horse almost doesn’t trust to even express these things to you anymore because every time they do, they’re getting shut down.

And so I think giving them space and space in terms of allowing yourself to feel these things is such a good point. So when you’re talking about feeling these things, how are you feeling it? What is? Because I assume you do stuff on the ground, you do stuff under saddle. Those feeling mechanisms I’d assume are different.

No, they’re exactly the same, Samantha. That’s all it is. If you want to train with feel, you have to in fact, allow yourself to feel things, which is what a lot of people are running from. And that’s why horses are the gateway drug to personal development. That’s why a lot of people say, yeah, I’ll get a horse.

I’ll go for rides in the forest. I’ll go to competitions on the weekend. Two years later, they’re deep in therapy with some expert. And. And so it’s this whole thing because horses cause us to stop running from ourselves.

Yeah. And that’s one of the reasons why I love them is because they cause me to stop running from my cell and to get real. So it’s all about emotion. For example, you don’t have to answer. This can be purely rhetorical, but also anyone listening, just take a moment and take a breath and let go of whatever you’re holding on to and ask yourself, what do you feel right now?

Because emotion is not constant. Emotion is the last final development in a cascade of physiological developments throughout the body, and emotion is the most sophisticated, penultimate, highest, most crystalline summary of an entire cascade of features that occur in our Physiology. The emotion is the last thing to come to the table. So before you have a defined emotion that you can actually label, describe, understand, and utilize, you’ll have a series of other sensations in the body. Everything from feeling agitated, generally in a foggy and vague way, to feeling generally relaxed in a foggy and vague way, to feeling excited, to feeling angry or tense.

All of these things start off as very broad definitions in the body because our brain is constantly editing and summarizing what’s happening to our body in real time. And presenting summaries to the brain to the brain can make efficient decisions going forward. For example, Samantha, if right now your brain was actively present with what was happening in your kidneys right now, and your liver and your spleen and your stomach and your bile ducts and your veins and your neurology and your olfactory system and your auditory digital system. If you were actually present with all of those systems and felt them acutely, your pupils would dilate. You would stand there having a nervous breakdown because of the expansive detail of the experience of being alive.

So what the brain is doing is taking all of these details and summarizing it, chunking it down into simple form, simple feelings. Emotion is when you do something, the brain in retrospect, understands what it meant it. That meant this for me. Next time you’re presented with a similar situation, your brain predicts and goes, ah, last time that meant X. That meant good.

That meant bad. That meant lovely. That meant exciting. That meant happy. That meant sadness.

That meant there’s grass over there. The brain will present it when you’re presented with a similar situation. And then based upon what happened last time and what the brain felt about it, the body will then make the decision right now about what to do, using that information, using that meaning. And when the brain makes a decision and the meaning of it didn’t match with what happened last time, the brain feels very uncomfortable. Suddenly the brain has to spend a lot of energy, a lot of metabolism.

It’s very uncomfortable sensation and there’s a very specific scientific word for it. It’s called learning. That’s what learning is. Last time this meant I would go into trot and this time it means half halt. What?

What’s going on? That makes me uncomfortable because it’s not matching what happened last time. Now, the more you present learning to a horse or to us, the more resilient a brain gets and the more plastic it gets. Neural plasticity When a brain is neurally plastic, it means it can choose to expose itself to different choices over and over again. And like taking a muscle to a gym, their resilience at the discomfort of true learning gets better and better until it becomes a benign sensation or even something you would choose.

Like some people choose to go lift up weights even though it does not feel as comfortable to lift a weight as it does to eat popcorn on the sofa watching Netflix season 6 of The Crown. Even though it doesn’t feel as good to do that. There is this whole other category opened up in our Physiology that would choose that sensation because the brain knows the benefit of all of that. The brain has felt the physiological summary of the anti-inflammatory response of the serotonin of the endorphins that come through exerting strain on the body in a non damaging way etcetera. So if you can apply this not just to exercise Physiology, but you can apply this to emotional maturity and emotional balance also.

Everyone here knows what it feels like to ask a horse to do something. And that horse has a tantrum. For example. Everyone is a good horse person until we’re standing at a trailer. Everyone is a good horse person until the spring grass comes through.

Right? Yeah. And now. And now your most beloved friend, who’s been so good and so amenable and so lovely to you, says to you, I love you, but there are $100 bills going out of the ground. I love you, but you are not teleporting me to Mars on that spaceship.

I love you, but no. And when a horse really says no and they discover that they’ve got thousands of pounds on you. And if you are not someone with a predication towards physical violence, catch 22. Check, mate. So you ask a horse, Nope, I need you to not eat the grass.

The decision is made. We are getting on the trailer now. What does your horse do? Do they have a meltdown? Do they go all right?

That doesn’t add up in my mind to what I had predicted should or could happen because a grass sees a horse sees grass, grass sees the horse, and they’re like, we belong together, Mariah Carey, we belong together. Yeah, a trailer sees a horse sees a trailer and they say oil and water. We do not belong together. This is craziness. And so when these things don’t match up, you would hope you have enough of a resiliency built into a horse, that they have a strong emotional muscle the same way they might have a strong top line.

And that does not mean in the training, what you’re supposed to do is go in there rope swinging, whip cracking, and say, I’m teaching them resilience because I’m frightening them. And then nothing bad happens. Like they don’t actually die. Now I get them to the point where they feel like they might die and then they don’t. And I’m going to call that resiliency.

That’s not what I’m talking about at all. Usually it’s sufficient to expose a horse to something that wouldn’t be their first preference, that’s all. And ask them to try your preference instead. That is absolutely sufficient to build true emotional balance, balance and resiliency in a horse. So when we’re with a horse and we’re making decisions based on feel and empathy, you’ve got to start with what do you feel?

Now, if we personally, as individuals have toward ourselves to be numb or some cultural machination around us has trained us to numb out, then, and that’s very understandable. In fact, if you’re alive in the world today and you’re not numbed out, you’re unusual at least part of the time. But when you numb out and you feel nothing, no physiological sensations because the human brain unfortunately has a glitch in its machine where it’s heavy prefrontal cortex has the capability to dissociate from the rest of its Physiology. Some of us don’t have that, but most human beings do. And if I did have that potential, my training as a dancer divorced me from it.

So my brain body connection highway is wide open and extremely strong and cannot. Dissociate or close down. That’s made being in the world a little difficult sometimes, but I digress. So if you’re numbed out around a horse, which is understandable, you’re left with an extremely limited playbook with a horse. Usually that playbook leans in towards mechanical training, Meaning do this action like this right now, the way I sit, and that’s a short hop, skip and a jump away from overbalancing on the dominant side of things or overbalancing on the force side of things.

And if you go to a tack shop, tack shops tell that story of that being extremely common. So not judging that. I’m just trying to tell the truth about what we’re dealing with and working my little tuchus off to give as many people who want it alternatives if my alternatives resonate with them. Yeah, no, I think back to my career with horses and I grew up in a very competitive show barn where we had a team and you had to be good enough to ride on the team, even though we’re all in the same barn. And I grew up just watching a lot of horses.

And before I became a professional, my top horse had ended up having uveitis and went completely blind. I cried. Of course, I’ve lost this partnership and. So did he. Exactly.

And what happened was I ended up buying another horse and I still have that one. She’s retired out in my field. I was having a really hard time with this horse to the point where I sought out a sports psychologist because I was like, this horse is making me lose my mind. After three months of working with a sports psychologist, he goes, I don’t know that you like feel emotions. And I was like, what do you mean?

Of course I feel emotions like when I do this, I get really happy or when I do this like I get sad or whatever. And I realized there are more emotions than just being like happy or sad have like frustration, like I would quickly get frustrated. And luckily for me, I learned to just walk away from situations when I hit that point. But like I, I ended up really needing to figure out how to become emotional. And I, once I did that, I really started connecting with my sis on this way deeper, different level.

And through that, I actually really don’t even compete that much anymore because it’s, I’m hoping to find my way back to it. But as of right now, you can’t really go to these things and see everything that’s going on and feel everything that’s going on and like still put in a good effort because you’re surrounded by another buzzword dysfunction. It really is too much to feel and unfortunately the only way to fix it is to get all these other people to feel. But you don’t even. Know out exactly.

But there’s a third option. You go into those environments being extremely honest about what those environments are and you go in with a tool kit that feels a little bit like wearing a chainmail armour. Well, you don’t numb out, you do feel, and you are well resourced in regards to not taking it on, observing it, not engaging with it, witnessing it, not trying to change it, knowing that you can’t right now, and staying open and available to anyone who’s peripheral, anyone who’s also looking for the exit. It’s like the industry sometimes to me when I observe, looks a little bit like the Titanic. Hubris and arrogance were unsinkable.

Meanwhile, there’s ice on the deck, water on their feet. The band’s still playing and some people are looking for a lifeboat and there’s not many. So there are options. You can go into those environments and steal yourself, literally, which is where that term comes from. Steal yourself is like to put armour on to put steel on.

No, I definitely. I think that in itself is even a skill to be able to put up armour but still feel within the partnership. But yeah, I’m in the process of developing my own tools in order to hopefully reapproach being able to go back into these settings. And I do feel like a venting, out of all the horse sports, is the most horsemanship centric only because galloping at solid obstacles with your partner, really, you’re overcoming a lot of adversity together. And when you approach that in a way that isn’t forceful, I don’t use whips, I don’t use spurs unless I have a horse with a biomechanical issue and they genuinely need the support, not from the whip, but more so from the spurs.

But yeah, I find all of these things you’re talking about trailer. Everyone’s a good horseman until they’re at the trailer. And I had a horse only a few months ago. I’ve been, she’s a six year old finally ready to like go out to some schooling competitions and did some trailer practice with her, brought her to a local farm. She was pretty good and bring her to this competition.

I’m in Aiken, SC, so we don’t really have like indoor arenas because it’s pretty warm relatively all year round. We go to this huge venue, there’s a covered arena, there’s multiple rings, there’s all of this stuff. I finish everything. She was pretty good and I get her back to the trailer and for 2 1/2 hours could not get this horse on the trailer. At 2 1/2 hours I go, OK, at this point we just need to get her on the trailer and we ended up there was a vet there so we ended up getting some sedation.

It just got her on that way. But like it her not getting on the trailer had nothing to do with the trailer. Her not getting on the trailer had to do with the first time she entered that covered arena and she became up regulated. And I didn’t even know that’s what that looked like in the horse because she was never like that at home or even at these small farms. And that’s why I think competition does have a good place in relationship building because all of these things strengthen a relationship when you see the holes because of the pressure of the environment.

But I was like, the horse isn’t afraid of the trailer. The force isn’t even rejecting the trailer. The force is rejecting life at this point. And we just didn’t prepare or whatever enough to make her feel stable in that environment. And you get her back home two days later, she takes 5 minutes, loads right up on the trailer.

You go, oh, OK. This genuinely was not a trailer issue. And I think so many people then working with her owner and this has really started driving me up a wall is when people use terms like stubborn or they just she’s just stubborn. She’s just this and it’s no, she’s discerning these environments that we’re putting her in and in times it has not felt good. And that’s all she’s saying is that she’s not being stubborn.

She’s not even really being disobedient. Like she’s just expressing how this has made her feel and we need to rewire that a bit. That’s the issue. The issue isn’t that she isn’t getting on the trailer. The issue was that there’s been some connections that were made that weren’t positive or whatever, and but that doesn’t make her a bad horse or a disobedient horse.

And I this even brings me to you writing about respect versus regard and just the verbiage we use around forces and with horses, I think influences the training in a positive or negative light. That’s beautiful. Beautiful. But yeah. I think there are so many directions we could go in.

I’ve seen you talk about use of whips and that you don’t necessarily believe in use of whips and that you talk to any normal person and they’re like, yeah, that makes total sense. Why would you even use a lip? And then to talk to horse people? It’s, that’s my glorious piece of me. It’s.

Yeah, but you don’t even use it as an extension of yourself. You use it as this way to pick your horse to do something. There’s a difference. And in eventing, there’s a lot of talks on banning whips. And that in itself has been a super polarizing thing.

There’s never a reason to put up a wall or whatever in the technicality aspect of the jumping, but that doesn’t mean that you need to use that thing to make them go over something. But how do you educate people to say, Oh no, you use that to help your horse versus you use that to make your horse do something? Would you like me to speak on that? Yeah, yeah. So I have no problem in principle or practice with ARM extenders of all varieties.

That might include a whip, that might include a flag, that might include a pool noodle. It might include a feather duster. It might include a target like an extendable target. Have nothing against a handheld rigid implement that extends the arm. I do not believe that most people need them in all instances and I have a handful of clients at the moment that I am training them with arm extenders after about one of them.

I’ve been working with her for a couple of years and she’s also done clinics and she’s been intensively working with me for about 8-9 months now. And only after 8-9 months of intensive work did I agree with her that one of the specific courses she was working with could really benefit from work in an arm extender. So I try to bring a lot of rigor, a lot of study, and a lot of discernment to any situation where I would gear up or any situation where I would advocate for the amplification of someone’s body and someone’s aids. Now that’s a nuanced point of view, and a nuanced point of view translates very poorly on Facebook. And so the Facebook goblins ran away with my discussion on whips.

And now I have a reputation in the industry that Lucky Phillips doesn’t believe in training aids, which is just not true. And that’s fine. I don’t need the Facebook goblins to like me. That’s fine. They’re going to do that to anyone.

It’s like a drive by shooting. It’s an indiscriminate thing. So I’ve nothing against arm extent extension, nothing at all. I have a real problem with whipping. But my biggest issue and the issue I have no problem squaring up to anyone about is people who say it’s an arm extender but are in fact simply whipping that I have a big problem with.

I think we need to start telling the truth. I think professionals need to stop manipulating their clientele. If a riding instructor or a trainer has attached their professional and personal self worth to the mechanical or competitive outcomes of their riders and their horses, and that horse is struggling for insert reason here, that rider is struggling for insert reason here. Instead of taking an extra 20 seconds to work through something, instead of taking an extra 2 weeks to develop that horse’s fitness, instead of taking an extra two months to make sure a horse is really ready and understand something, they just give them a whip and say, oh, it’s an extension of the arm. I say I agree with you, but the extension of ARM is slapping the horse at some level and making it happen now because the instructor is actually deeply insecure about not getting immediate outcomes or is afraid of their financial professional health.

It’s the late stage capitalist hellscape playing over and over again. And usually it’s the instructors and the riders that get the bad end of the stick. Literally. Really, it’s the horses that get the worst end of the stick, but it’s often the professionals who asked the horses to sign a silent contract to agree to a certain level of mediocre handling and mediocre horsemanship in order to give professional outcomes that bring in more money and bring in more clients and keep the whole egregious ball rolling. Now, that’s not painting everyone but the same brush, because there are definitely people out there using arm extenders for competitive games, for mechanical outcomes, and they’re doing it ethically.

They’re doing it beautifully. I’m not speaking about them. Any listener who is listening, if this that I am saying does not apply to you, don’t wear it. But if my words are making anybody insecure or ruffling any feathers right now, it’s probably ruffling them because they apply to them. What we’re supposed to do is not necessarily kill the messenger and say he’s an asshole.

Sorry for swearing he’s a bad. He’s a bad guy for speaking to the elephant in the room, which is what people are doing. They say he’s the bad guy for speaking to it rather than self analysing. OK, why is this bringing something up for me? Am I really telling the truth about my work?

What would happen if I actually was to tell the truth about my work? What would happen if they would walk into the arena in a group jumping lesson and said, guys, for the last six years I’ve been telling you that these things are extensions of your arm and telling you that your arm is allowed to exert a level of violence on an animal. I have decided overnight that is wrong and so with everyone’s permission, we’re all going to take a deep breath, realise that other people are watching and that what we do now matters. Let’s take our hands out of the cookie jar. Let’s stop this corruption of our integrity.

What if we stood in our integrity right now and just for today we’re just going to hold the sticks, but the horses aren’t going to be touched by the sticks because we can’t go cold Turkey. We’re going to weed. So I’ve got a 2 month process where we’re going to wean all these school horses off these sticks. As soon as they’re forward and they’re happy and they’re light, we’re all just going to start dropping the sticks one by one. I’m going to leave them in the stable.

And while we’re at it, why don’t we look at excessive headgear? Why don’t we look at over facing horses? While we’re at it, why don’t we just do a stop take of the whole thing and then really see exactly how generous these animals are and let’s really see how much we’ve been relying on tool use at the expense of our skill. And I happen to believe that everybody I’ve ever met is big enough. Why do they need to make their body bigger with an arm extender?

Everybody is big enough. And so why do people feel so small around horses? Why? They’re a big animal. I get that.

But like, sorry, not sorry. Get over it. They’re a big animal. Get over it. Yeah, they are.

Hello. This is elementary. It’s like day one, step one. This is a horse. Got it.

They’re a big animal. Yes. OK. Moving forward. Why?

After 20 years, after 20 lessons, up to 20 weeks, up to 20 months, do people still sit with this? They’re so big. I need to, I need to feel like I have a weapon to defend myself. If that’s where someone is with their horsemanship. We need to step out of the arena and we need to analyse our relationship to fear.

And we need to understand why we don’t have a good relationship to our fear, but we don’t have a relationship to being intimidated. And why are we consistently putting ourselves in situations where we require weapons to feel safe? At the same time, I refuse to be the pariah or to be the persona non grader in the equestrian field because I’m like, yeah guys, stop whipping. Stop whipping. If we look at what has happened to circuses, if we look at what has happened to the captivity of marine mammals, all it took was several decades of concentrated advocacy from animal rights groups, plus a high profile accident or incident, plus well timed documentaries for the existence of animals in those spaces to be legislated out of existence.

Now, during COVID in Spain where I live, horse riding was ruled as an illegal activity over night during the worst of the quarantine because it’s considered an extreme sport. And horse riding specifically was earmarked as a forbidden activity to not overburden healthcare. And so unless you were Federated with the Spanish Equestrian Federation, which requires a payment into the government and to actually be competing and you actually require it for your living, but there are very few people in Spain who actually do that. We’re talking way over 99% of the animals in Spain and not registered with the Spanish Equestrian Federation. So all of these basically hobbyists or low level competition folk were unable to ride their horses and were get getting €600 on the spot fines if they were spotted on a horse without the right paperwork.

So in living history we have historical precedence where we know at least the Spanish government I know has the strings to draw upon and the buttons to push where we that can be made illegal for the right reasons or for the right motivation. The captivity marine of killer whales walkers in America is now on its way out because of a high profile death of one of the best trainers at Sea World and then a really well timed Netflix documentary called Blackfish which brought the entire thing to its knees in the United States. So we need to start behaving ourselves with our horses. All that’s done in the dark will come to light. I love this industry so much.

I love horses so much. My whole life is dedicated to serving equestrians. It really is. And many of us are like children with no parents at home and our hand in the cookie jar can’t behave ourselves. And so me saying stop the whip, I’m now that authoritarian parent figure to a lot of people.

And then there’s tantrums. But I don’t think I’m a bad person for advocating for less violence. And I also don’t think I’m an impractical person for advocating for less violence. Monty Roberts isn’t almost at the end of his life after 90 years of dedication to violent. Less violence in training for us to go back to where we came from.

When his legacy expires, him and others like him, Is any of that landing with you? Because I could keep rambling. Yeah, no. And I think, I think in the United States, I always find COVID a very interesting time because for a lot of people, especially in the United States, like I find over seas in any direction really, you have a lot more people that do things with horses outside of sport where in the United States, almost every facet of horses, of course, there are outliers, but there are so many people, English, Western, whatever, who are involved in competition and that sort of thing. And COVID put a halt on that, right?

All of a sudden we’re not competing and we don’t know how long we’re not competing for. And so a lot of people had to look at themselves and what they do and say, am I only doing this for competition? Do I do this because I actually like spending time with horses? Because now I’m forced to lay off the conditioning and lay off the rigid structure that I have my program set around. And all of a sudden I just have to like spend time with horses.

And for me, I’ve always loved competing, but that I just have always loved horses. And I realized, oh, OK, I could do this without competing. Like I just love what I do it for a living. I don’t know, I don’t really make a living off of competing anyways. But maybe I would have like actually got to school for something or something.

But yeah, I just think the whip thing is so interesting because my mom is a horse person and she was a horse person from her childhood, grew up doing Western sports. And I, the talk about whips and eventing is very new. Like it’s only a few months people have been talking about this. And I brought it up to her and I was like, the issue if we take everything, the emotion, everything out of the issue is you have people that are not horsey that can now tune into horse sport at any time via Instagram, via live stream, via Facebook or whatever. People can now have a snapshot into our sport.

If every time people get a snapshot, they are watching people use whips on animals, it doesn’t matter how nuanced we at the equestrians can have conversations about it. If it looks bad optically, it is bad and it doesn’t matter how we feel about it. And my mom and I also when I first heard it, like people talking about whips immediately get defensive and you go, I really don’t even use whips. Like why am I getting defensive about this thing? And it’s because we are conditioned from such a young age to just accept that this is a part of the sport or the lifestyle or whatever.

If you’re feeling like you need to fall back onto the use of whoops, it does stem from a fear or insecurity or something either being inflicted upon you or from you yourself. And I just think so many people lack the curiosity to understand why am I reacting that way to this sentiment? Why do I do this to my horse? And once you start asking why, you actually then start the actual process of working with horses. I think so many people are good enough that they can manufacture outcomes and things without necessarily needing to do the internal work.

Horses really are the key to personal development. And it starts with what happens when you strip everything there? What’s left? Does your horse even want to spend time with you? Does your horse come up to you in the paddock?

Or do they just ignore you and take a breath and slowly turn away and walk away? Or do they run away? Or do they come trotting up? There are so many things even without riding that allow us to gauge the relationship that we have with our horses and get people I feel just don’t even acknowledge. And I guess when we’re talking about whips, and I want to be conscientious of your time, but to me, Whip?

I have time for you. Thank you I. Have time for you? Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of time. Cool.

To me, things like whips or even tack to a certain extent is what I would consider pressure. You’re putting this thing on this horse. Emotion can be pressure, feeling can be pressure. When you’re talking about working with horses and training forces, how are you going about like when you get a force into your program or even when you’re working with your own forces and either they’re not doing something that you want or whatever? How do you approach that situation where most people would get frustrated and turn to this external thing?

Firstly, if I’m getting frustrated, I’ve already lost the horse and my horsemanship’s already in the toilet. It’s not that frustration is bad, and it’s perfectly fine to say to a horse you’re annoying me right now, stop it. That’s fine, especially if those horses have no problem saying that to you. I have that kind of relationship to my horses where if I’m frustrating them, they’ll tell me, and if they’re frustrating me, I’ll tell them. So much of this industry is alexithymic.

Alexithymia is a phenomenon where often, not only, but often neurodiverse people will use mechanical means to describe something that’s inherently emotional. So instead of saying, well, I feel happy, that will say my face is smiling. So anyway, I think what you were really asking me about was pressure. Yeah, how you utilize pressure in in just regular work with the horses doesn’t necessarily have to be a behavioral thing, just. Yeah, I use pressure in training.

It’s my primary language with the horses. I use all kinds of pressure. I use soft pressure, I use firm pressure. I use flapping pressure. I use splashing pressure.

I use sliding pressure. I use halting pressure. I use bouncing pressure, I use quiet pressure, I use feather pressure, I use no touch pressure, I use a motivational pressure. I have 130 sign up, so 130 people on a three month journey to actually look at pressure properly. What I avoid in as many instances as possible is escalating pressure.

That’s what I avoid. Now if we think about the history of pressure in training, think of it like an alphabet A through to ZF for example, it’s just one letter in the alphabet that appears in some sentences, some words. Now what happened 20-30 years ago is that the equestrian industry started to change. This change started towards the end of the First World War and the invention of the internal combustion engine. When cars started to replace horses in human civilization, horses got pushed the outside of society.

We lost a couple of generation of horse sense. It just skipped a few generations. It’s still in our blood. And then we had the expanding western middle class, with enough expendable income and some free time on their hands, started to buy horses in the 80’s, the 90s, et cetera. And so suddenly we had what was in previous years only professional people, lifelong horse people, animal people, owning horses, agriculturalists, ranches, vets, jockeys, etcetera, competitive people only they were riding horses and using them and having them.

Now we have this expanding recreational market. And I can think of nothing more wonderful to spend your life than in recreation. I don’t see recreation. I don’t call them amateurs. I call them recreational.

I say that with the utmost respect because I think there’s no higher purpose for a horse than to be in a place of recreation, because that’s what it’s all about when we create horsemanship. The problem was no time in history before had so many horses been owned by so many people who had so little experience. That’s remains a problem to this day. So then they started finding these Cowboys and these horse people and these instructors and saying, hell, I’ve got problems. I’ve got some money and I’ve got a horse and I’ve got some time and I’ve got some problems.

And so the industry started realizing, Oh my God, I used to be dealing with people like me with other professionals. Now the bread and butter of my industry, 90% of my income is coming from the recreational market who are really good people, really great people. And there’s some talent there. But boy, there’s a lot of training that needs to happen for this folk. And when the industry was in breakdown and we’ve got people who are close to the cliff’s edge with their horses on a regular basis, escalating pressure felt like a saving grace.

It felt like a home run. It felt, Oh my God, if I come in there and go ask, demand, promise, I can get that horse from disaster to safety now, which is probably the only situation where I would still use escalating pressure is if I had to get a horse from disaster to safety now. In fact, if we look at the letter F, F is often employed in four letter words for emergency purposes. Escalating pressure existed as a color on our palette, as a letter in our alphabet for that specific purpose, but it was lassoed into the center spotlight. And then we had the systems of training, methods of training and professionals and horse people who decided to form their entire personality around it because it was really effective.

And they stopped using it just for emergencies. They started using it for the imaginary emergency that’s actually not happening right now. And then give it a couple of years. Now it’s being used for everyday procedures. Now it’s being used to catch a horse.

Now it’s being used to lead a horse. Now it’s being used to stand next to a horse. Now it’s being used to win gold medals. And so it suddenly it became everything. And then these trainers were like, wow, you use it, you get what you want catching.

It’s like going to a slot machine, but every coin you put in gives you a jackpot. Every coin you put in gives you a jackpot. And then in the shadow of that blazing furnace of the highlight of escalating pressure, in the shadow of that, we had the wastage and the fallout in the industry of all these chewed up and spat out horses that got sold down the river to even more humble people who are my clientele primarily. Who now for the last 20 years have been picking up the pieces and paying the debt that all these other horses have been asked to pay for years. By getting burned out by systems that over prioritize one way of using pressure as a primary factor in the horsemanship.

And so then these systems, generally speaking, began to even forget that there were other types of pressure. And if they were demonstrating other types of pressure, they weren’t successful at saying to their clientele, this is on off pressure right now. This is soft pressure right now. This is soft feel. You had a few people talking about soft feel, but really it was like soft feel or ass tell demand that those were the only storyline.

And I’ve watched clips and clips. I’ve spent time researching this and looking at trainers actually putting work into horses, and I see that even the people who promote escalating pressure only use it sometimes. That they’re not successful at teaching and they’re not successful at illuminating the structure of it, the mechanics of it, the application of it, the outcomes of it. Because the industry is still expecting them to give them this, ask, tell, demand. You get to get what you want.

You pay me money, I give you what you want from your horse. So that’s where we’re at with escalating pressure. I need everyone to remember that it’s not the whole universe. It’s actually extremely narrow and specific point of view on pressure. A lot of people believe that non escalating pressure is this ubiquitous, samey, monotonous, abstract softness for every question always that we’ve all decided is ethical and fair.

And that’s not true at all. That’s just another type of pressure that might be appropriate now and then the next moment the horse might need you to use something else. And so I’m trying to bring as much rigor, discipline, study, humor, fun and openness to this subject as possible. And yeah, from September 15th, so in 10 days time, I’m starting a three month group coaching program with 130 people where we’re looking in live delivery. I say we’re looking at this subject across a 13 week period and there’ll be demonstrations with my horses, but not only this year, I’ve pulled in a library of raw materials from clinics all over the world and clients all over the world and my associates as well.

So we’re really going to look at this properly and try to get people liberated off this either or black and white mentality that it’s asked how demand promise or standing there with softness whether the horse gets it or not. Yeah, that’s Then I stumbled upon a Facebook post a few weeks ago and it was someone basically saying how we should use virtually no pressure. Lot of pressure to say that. So then I look at the comments because I was like, I wonder what the people who are seeing this are thinking. And I saw a comment from a girl who was saying that she was trying to do something with her horse and she couldn’t get her horse to do it.

And she was just standing there with her horse. The way I interpreted it was she was willing this horse to do something but not really giving it direction. And then she was like, I know I just need to keep at it and he’ll get it. And in my head, I was like, I understand wanting to be soft, but I also understand that sometimes being too soft confuses the forces. And I don’t mean too soft in the sense of like kindness, but too soft in the sense of not actually, if I don’t point to the right and I’m just thinking, go right, without doing anything in my body to tell them, hey, let’s go over here.

They’re just going to look back at me. I know what you’re saying, and this is a really complex situation that does require a lot of nuance because some people, like this commentator, are dealing with horses that have walked out of a loud room. They’ve been in a loud room all their life and their ears are ringing. I’m speaking metaphorically. So you use soft pressure on horses who’ve been yelled at through pressure their whole life.

These horses won’t understand you. And then those same trainers or similar will come in and say use more. It’s kind. Yeah. But we created the conditions where more was kind.

Yeah. We also have a responsibility to rehabilitate horses that only respond to loud pressure. I’ve seen horses understand softness and just wait for someone to yell at them because they know they always will be yelled at. So why should I respond to softness? I’ve seen that.

I’ve seen horses listen to softness and ruminate on it and meditate on it, and then their eyes open and they’re walking forward and the whole process took about 20 seconds. But if you’re someone who has a bad relationship to patients, that 20 seconds, you feel like the world’s worst horse trainer. I was reviewing video today from someone who’s rehabilitating a little sport pony who has yelled at his whole life, and they’re teaching him that, hey, we can talk softly to each other, it’s fine. And he’s, oh, I don’t know. So it is about learning a whole new language.

And I also don’t believe, and I’m not convinced that confusion is an unkind state for a horse. This whole notion that we should be afraid of confusion is an absolute straw man argument because confusion is cognition. Try learning anything without being confused for a moment. This whole notion that horses should never be confused and that putting them in a confused state is being cruel to them is actually keeping empathic horse people married to heavy pressure. That creates reactive horses rather than responsive horses, because a responsive horse actually has to go into confusion, have a positive relationship to being confused, and go, what do they want?

Maybe I tried this. You’d be amazed how difficult that is for horses that have just had dominant, forceful handling all their life. But they don’t have to think about something. They just have to give their body to someone. They just have to do it.

They don’t have to think or feel about it. They just have to act now. And then we say, see, that’s clear. That’s kind. I call bullshit on that.

It’s OK to confuse a horse if you know that’s what you’re doing. And the confusion is not chronic. It’s like a plane circling the airport. Eventually it has to come down to land. But some horses have to circle the airport because they’ve got fuel to dump.

So let them circle the airport until they’re light enough to land the plane. And so I will go into certain situations. I’ve got an export horse at home, a high profile sport horse too, where I deliberately created a laboratory at home with him where I exposed him to situations that would cause him to think where he didn’t already know the mechanical answer and where whatever mechanical answer he gave was fine by me. So even then when he would try something, he wouldn’t have me go, good boy, that’s what I want. I would just say cool, what a nice idea.

Which was even worse for him because he was used to fawning and pleasing people. But see, he actually had no confidence to him because he was so used to fawning and pleasing people. There we go. Cool. So he did not know how to politely refuse something.

In training he would just go because he was taught not to think, not to field up, just go until he blew out his legs. The best thing I ever did for his soundness was teach him how to be confused, how to think through his body and offer me something that was real for his body and his level right now. And what I discovered that I’ve got a really talented horse that actually, in terms of soundness, was at a mediocre state and needed to move like a mediocre horse for a long time and get strong there before I could put him back into his high level movements. And we did. We got all of his high level movements back, His passage, his PR, cancer departures, they all came, yes.

But they came back after a protracted period. I’m talking 18 months of him looking really on the forehand and really average. And this is a really talented horse with champion bloodlines. I had to say to him, no, I need you not to react to my aid. I need you to think about it and then offer me something that is real for you right now.

But it creates soundness and it creates emotional soundness. Also. I’ll never forget 1 moment in a course I did last year where this horse I’m speaking about I was working on true lining him lunch, lining him on true lines and he had been chased in a previous life chasing circles with his head tied down. So he had a pretty big aversive reaction to anything that sounded, smelled, or felt like I might want to chase him even though I’m not any circle exterior of a person was like 86, he’s 86. It Screw that.

I don’t even want to try it. Don’t even want to try it and he knew how to puff himself up, get a bit stallion Y and try to intimidate me to get me to go off of it and I just wasn’t intimidated. One day I was working on long lining him and I have all of this recorded on a course and even the discussion about it recorded as well. So it wasn’t done in darkness or anything. He turned and faced me and got really big, shook his head at me when I was asking him to just walk on 2 lines.

And I went, good boy, and I walked up and I gave him a carrot and his eyes just about fell out of his head. And then I had some questions from my students, very polite questions. Exactly what the hell is going on? I said, let’s think about it rationally. This horse blew out his suspensories at least five times before the age of 10 because he didn’t know how to say no.

And now he’s advocating for himself in the training. Is he doing it in a pro social way rather than antisocial? No. But I don’t need him to go zero to 60 at his emotional skill set. He’s at least trying to advocate for himself in front of me.

I’ll reward that. I’ll say yeah. Thanks for telling me. You need to go slower. You need to have a break.

You need me to be reasonable. You need me not to exploit you. You need me not to push you too hard today. You got it. Now go out again.

Walk. He went out, he was gripped, he was skeptical, did one beautiful circle and I said great, and let’s finish. So I took his feedback into account. I did let the information control the limits to the training. And since those trainings, he’s gotten easier and easier to work with and safer.

Now he still knows how to try to intimidate, to advocate for himself, but we’re getting better at listening to him. And half the time he’ll intimidate me because I haven’t been working with him. And when I come back from a seven week clinic tour, I got a grovel, grovel. And he makes me suffer for not being there until he’s OK. You’re back goods.

You’ve been consistent. We’re goods B. So what we think is happening, what the stories we’re told. Never reward the horse for bad behaviour. And now the buzzword is emotional regulation.

Oh, that’s dysregulated behaviour. I’m like really? Who dysregulated first, the horse or you calling the horse dysregulated? Because if the horse is having a troubled time and you’re calling that bad behaviour, that means both of you are no longer in the training and then typically one of you’s got to be invested. So if I’ve got a horse who’s having some trouble and I label that bad behaviour, I’ve now dysregulated.

So now what? Accept the horse for who they are. Accept it as information, work with it, not against the horse. It’s like these people don’t even like horses. Do you like horses?

Go get a bike, honestly. But if you like horses, including all aspects of their behaviour and their experience in training. Now that doesn’t mean I really enjoy when horses do dangerous stuff. I don’t enjoy that. I was very aware of the gravity of that moment.

But what I did in that moment counted and matted for my horse. It really mattered to him what I did there, because if he tried to challenge me and I forced him and made him wrong for advocating for himself, what are the options left for him now? Get angrier. Yeah. And so no wonder horses who are forced to become more dangerous, these people who report, never reward horses for bad behaviour because it’s dangerous, they say.

If you look at the statistics, the amount of accidents happening in equestrian sports are happening at the hands of people who train through force. The people who give horses a choice are not experiencing this prevalence of injury. We’re just not. Yeah. And for this, and I am warmly welcomed at some tables and talked off with hostility at others, and that’s absolutely fine by me.

I’m not trying to please everybody, Samantha, and I’m not saying I am for everybody. Even in my own organization, I’ve had to align with associates who have shared values but different delivery because I’m aware that my delivery can be too strong for some people. I’m aware of that, but I think the strongest thing you can be is soft, and it’s about time someone with some backbone came up to really deliver reasonable use of pressure and softness as a legitimate way to work with a horse. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think so many people, I had a podcast a few weeks ago and she is a horse psychic.

And she made a comment about how even in today’s times, the amount of women who don’t allow their forces to say no is crazy because we’re advocating for ourselves for knowing of being something. And I never thought of it like that. To me, it was always a natural. Like I remember I was fringe when I’d have horses that came to me who rushed fences. The first thing I did was teach them to stop before the fence and they go, Oh my God, you’re going to teach them to stop and I go.

Exactly. To like they’re worried that they can’t. That’s exactly where I think the conversation needs to be is that we are all beings. I hate this idea that we as humans are better than horses or dogs or elephants or whatever, like we are all on this earth in this time doing this thing. It doesn’t feel good to get angry at horses.

It doesn’t feel good to have to be surrounded by people who act in poor ways around horses. Like feeling good is enough of a compass to say, OK, yeah, this feels good, this feels right. It doesn’t feel right to put my horse in a big bit. It doesn’t matter that they rush the fences and feel insecure because I carry my whip and I know they won’t stop. That’s not a partnership.

I want my horse to be like, Mom. You rode like crap there. It is a partnership. It is a partnership. Yeah, exactly.

There are many words. We yeah, there are many words we could use, and some of them relate very much to our moment in cultural history. Horses helped us build our civilization, falling food, plowing fields, falling lime and bricks and concrete to build our cities and our roads. And yet their job has continued unabated in building our civilization. But I would now believe that they’re not really building our external civilization, our bricks and our mortar and our roads and our trophies.

They’re building an internal civility, or at least trying to. And if we zoom out and really think about horsemanship as a spiritual pursuit, which some of us do, I could stand with surrendering with humility to the notion that horses are helping to make us all more civilized. I would hope some of us will be faster to arrive at that awareness than others, and some of us will never arrive at it. I see. For example, we’re talking about whips earlier.

And I don’t want whips to be my entire platform because it’s probably the least interesting thing I have to speak and teach on. But whips and the discussion around whips is the same conversation that was had 1520 years ago around bits and everyone’s oh, you can’t ever get on a horse without a bit. Now there are people out there who still adhere to that. There are people who just want a horse in a bit are just they’re born with a bit in their mouth and their minds. So everything is just done with a bit, right?

And even take a photograph of their horse for their mantelpiece without the horse wearing a bridle. They can’t even envision a horse without a bit on every sales picture, the horse is in a bridle, nothing else. But they’re wearing a bridle. Like the horse doesn’t exist without a bridle on. Somehow it’s not.

It’s like you take the bridle off and someone says is that a dog? You put the bridle on. They say, oh, it’s a horse. But then there are people now that legitimately ride normally, which is what I call bitless riding. It’s normal riding.

It’s normal riding or bitted riding. I think a bit is an addition. Riding normally is without a bit 1st and then you would graduate up into a bit for specific purposes. And I still use bits myself. And then there are people who are strictly against all bits in all circumstances and it’s a whole spectrum now.

But at least riding horses normally versus riding with a bit is now considered like it has a seat at the table. Whether people like that seat or not, it’s seen as a legitimate place at the table. I believe the conversation about whips is going to go in the same direction. There are people who use them forever and won’t change off that. They’ll be people who blend.

There are people who are strictly against it in most circumstances, but I believe it’s going to have a place at the table. I used to be in work environments where I was forbidden to ride the horses without a stick in my hand, so I know what that’s all about. We have a lot of work to do in our field, but we’re going to need a community mind on this. I think we’re going to need people’s willingness to put the horses feeling first before they put their feelings first. If we’re too concerned about having our feelings hurt because someone spoke on a podcast about whips in the antithesis of my understanding of them, I think we’re all doomed.

We’re just lemmings and Joppa’s running for a Cliff about to jump off of her. It’s stop. Control your projections. Allow people to speak even if what they have to say is not in alignment with your belief system or your actions. Allow people to speak with being in an equestrian echo chamber for too long.

The world has their eyes on us. We have people looking to eliminate horse riding as an option all together at a legislative level. There are people who have that end goal and they have power, they have money and they have a plan. And so there are people watching us and we need to start being a community, which means listening to people who have a different point of view without projecting our discontent onto them and considering what aspects of their argument might resonate with us and what aspects of their argument do not. And then take it to the horses and start making more discerning decisions that stand true to our integrity.

I think that’s what it’s all about. And we will all get it wrong. It’s not about being perfect, it’s just about trying to do better. Yeah, this has been a great conversation, and I think people are going to walk away with a lot of perspective on the nuance of all of these things. It’s not that there is one right path.

Every course is different. Every human is different. That’s right. And how do people follow along with what you do? How do they find your stuff?

All of that. Great. So if anything I said resonated with anyone, please come and find and follow me. If what I said does not resonate with you, please do not come find and follow me. You can find me at Emotional horsemanship.com.

It’s my website. I also have Emotional horsemanshipsschool.com where I host my school and my online courses and my communities. I’ve got community pages off social media that are free from the algorithms. You can also find me on Instagram at Emotional dot Horsemanship and I have a very limited YouTube page where I try and put stuff out there but I’m usually too busy with my clients to do so. You can find me on YouTube at Emotional Horsemanship also.

Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me, Samantha. Yeah, this is great.