Patience is Not a Superpower

It might feel sometimes like patience IS a superpower, especially if it’s a quality we just don’t have in the moment. But the fact of the matter is that patience is a quality that is available to anyone who wants it, and furthermore, like any physical or mental skill, the more we exercise it, the stronger it gets.

I didn’t used to be a very patient person around horses. I wasn’t patient with people or horses (or myself, truth be known), and I came from a culture that did not necessarily teach or value patience in our horse work. It wasn’t something that came up, and thinking about it, I probably saw a lack of patience modeled in those around me more often than not.

As usually happens with these things, I met a horse who changed that. Ashcroft was a young unraced Thoroughbred gelding, who, knowing what I know now, was simply fairly unbroke. So inadvertently, simply from my own ignorance, I asked him to do a lot of things he didn’t know how to do, and that troubled him to varying degrees. See, most of my horse experience to that point was in the form of riding already trained show horses. I hadn’t really ridden green horses before. So oftentimes, Ashcroft and I were at cross purposes.

Because Ashcroft had so little knowledge, fighting with him about things (canter leads, for example) yielded little progress. Basically, we were pretty good at making each other miserable.

Things changed for us one night when we were working together in the indoor arena. I had put a standing martingale on Ashcroft to help him keep his head down (this was a traditional thing to do where I came from), and when Ashcroft felt that martingale holding his head down, he gave it one colossal head flip and broke it. That night, I think I heard for the first time what Ashcroft was trying to say, “TEACH me, don’t MAKE me!”

It doesn’t really take any patience to start a fight. It takes patience to teach. When I realized that, that’s when I started practicing my patience muscle. The first step was recognizing that I was headed toward impatience, in the moment. The next step was learning some things I could do INSTEAD of fighting and losing my patience. There’s a lot that’s gone into that, from ground work, to learning to work with a horse loose in a space, to riding work, to learning anatomy and biomechanics, to learning about the horse’s brain and neurochemistry. Learning more ways to work with a horse has given me more things to try when things weren’t working out. I think a lot of us are like me way back when, where when the one and only thing we know how to do doesn’t work, we just lose our sh*t. Having a more extensive tool box has helped me so very much on this front.

Working on patience will give us a whole new understanding of repetition. We can work with a horse in a way that punishment is unnecessary, because he learns that repetition in and of itself means, “Try again, that’s not it.” Learning to repeat things over and over, unemotionally, is probably the single most important thing I’ve learned as an adult. We are in charge of our patience. Impatience is not some force of nature or act of God that we have no control over. Like therapists tell their clients every day, “You control how others make you feel.” We do not have to feel impatient when a horse does ______________. We can choose to feel differently. Learning about repetition also helped me see and feel the difference between repetition to facilitate learning, and drilling. It becomes pretty obvious.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to spectate an international-level show jumping competition at the historic venue Hickstead in the UK. I hadn’t been to that level of competition in quite a while, having become interested in other things with horses besides jumping. I was pretty shocked by all the riders on cell phones IN THE WARM UP RING (which, when I was a kid, was already the most dangerous place to be at a horse show), but what was really interesting was to watch again, with “new eyes”, things I used to see every day.

During the most important class of the day, an American rider had a “stop”, where her horse refused a jump. She immediately “spanked” him twice with her stick, and he reared, then jumped forward, obviously very worried. What I saw, in those quick moments, was that the horse had done something he KNEW he was going to get in trouble for, so it’s likely he didn’t feel like he had a choice. Maybe the distance he had to leave from felt dangerous to him, or he was anticipating some other problem, so he stopped. Once he had stopped, he became more worried about the rider on his back than he was about the jump, and he was genuinely fearful in that moment.

A horse who has been trained to jump knows he’s supposed to jump. It’s what he does for a living. If we would take a little time, and study why horses stop, we’d see that they stop for perfectly good reasons (to them). Oftentimes, horses crash at jumps because they didn’t stop. Stopping is sometimes the only way a horse has to say, “This is impossible from here,” or “This is really hurting me,” or “This is not saveable.”

I think that day at Hickstead, for me, the “penny finally dropped” (as they say in the UK) and I understood inside of me, for the first time, that how we react toward the horse in a situation can become a scarier thing to him than the situation was in the first place. This is how we become part of the problem for the horse, rather than part of the solution for him. It’s not hard for the horse to become more scared of us than he is of the puddle, or the tarp, or the trailer, or the jump. Now the problem is not “out there”, it’s on his BACK.

Patience doesn’t cost anything. Anyone can get it, regardless of our experience level, where we come from, our income bracket, what kind of riding we do, what color or gender we are, or what we do for a living. It’s there for the taking. And here’s a hint: if you have a history of impatience in your horse work like I did, you might practice patience in other parts of your life first, then bring that practice to your horse work. That helped me a lot, and still does. In anyone’s life, there are a multitude of opportunities every day to work our “patience muscle.”