10 Years? Or One Year 10 Times?

Do we have ten years of experience, or one year of experience ten times?

Does our horse have ten years of experience, or one year of experience ten times?

Or perhaps it’s easier to think about it this way. Have we gained twelve months of experience, or did we gain the same month of experience twelve times?

I think about this a lot, maybe because I work mostly on my own, developing our own young horses and helping people interested in horsemanship with their horses.

Young horses are a balancing act. There are months when they get the same month of experience over again, because they only grow so fast. We just don’t want that to get away from us, or pretty soon we’ve got a seven year old unstarted horse out in the pasture who has done the same year of experience seven times.

I think that we can make the mistake of assuming that, say, a 9-year-old horse has nine years of experience. But that might not be true. He might really be a 9-year-old horse with only two or three years of experience, at the end of the day. And then we’d wonder why he was struggling.

And people are no different. When I met my husband, Glenn, I asked him what his typical ride looked like. He said he usually saddled up and walked out in the cows. Every ride. So he was doing the same ride over and over again, and he’d ceased to improve. He had mastered “walking in the cows”, so I gave him some new projects to work on, like learning diagonals at the posting trot and cantering.

So I think about this a lot in my own work too. Have I just repeated the same month or the same year of experience again? What did I do that made this month/year different than the ones before? What has stayed the same, and how could I improve the things I already know how to do, so there’s still movement there? I think especially if we work by ourselves a lot, it can be hard to FEEL the progression of our skills. Videos, clinics and shows can help kind of show us our progress (or lack thereof).

Several years ago, I had a student who became very discouraged about her lack of progress in her horse work. We explored this together, and what became clear was that she felt like she had been riding “all her life” and she should be more advanced than she was.

I talked to her about Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule” (that it takes a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice at something to become “expert” at it). I suggested that she go home that night and sit down, and make a good-faith effort to figure out how many hours of practice at “horsing” she had collected at this point in her life.

She did do this, and her answer was… 2500 hours. Now, this woman rode as a child, then went to college, then graduate school, then got a job, got married and had two children. She was doing a lot of things other than riding horses! But in her mind, because she’d been “riding since she was a kid,” she became frustrated with her lack of progress. A lot of those years, she was, by necessity, doing the same month or year of experience over again. So maybe she’d been riding for 20 years, but that only amounted to a total of 2500 hours of practice/experience. Doing the math on this helped this student a lot, and she actually decided to get a different horse who would fit better with all the other demands on her time. By doing the math, she was able to give herself some grace.

Now, it’s not a terrible thing to do the same month or year of experience again. Depending on the weather where we live, we probably have to do this to some extent in our horse work simply because of the weather. And that’s okay, as long as we embrace the truth that coming out of that phase, we’re going to be in a similar place we were going into it.

I guess because of the kind of person I am, I don’t sit still much, physically or mentally. So when the weather’s bad and I’m not able to get much movement in my horse work, I tend to do things like study anatomy, or listen to podcasts that introduce me to different ideas about horses. So perhaps my horse is getting the same month of experience, but I’m actually not. And I’ll bring my growth back to him when the weather improves and we can work together more again.

What are your strategies to ensure that you’re not repeating the same month/year of horse practice/experience over again?