Inside Out Horse Training

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Is the horse really spooky and unfocused… or are we lacking the ability to guide?

This is a hard pill to swallow, but an important one. Stay with me before you get upset, because this isn’t personal—and it isn’t just you. It’s part of being human.

We are very quick to label the horse.

He’s bird-brained. She’s spooky. He’s unfocused. She’s ADHD.

Whatever words we choose, the conclusion is the same: the horse is the problem.

But if horses were truly designed to be that scattered and incapable of focus, nature would have eliminated them long ago. They wouldn’t have survived.

The truth is this:

The horse isn’t unfocused.

The horse is simply not focused with us.

There is a profound difference.

Focus is not something we demand—it is something we cultivate. We create it by offering clear, calming parameters. By asking for awareness, consistency, and—most importantly—by bringing those qualities ourselves.

When we fail to provide that guidance, the horse doesn’t become “bad.” He becomes responsible for his own safety. He grows more vigilant, more reactive, and more likely to seek security everywhere except with us.

Some horses are incredibly sensitive and need us to be mentally present every single second. Others are more forgiving and can tolerate moments where our attention drifts.

But no horse can truly stay connected to a person who isn’t mentally there.

They can go through the motions. They can perform the exercises. They can appear obedient enough that we believe they’re with us.

Sometimes that says less about the horse… and more about how little connection we’ve learned to recognize.

When I teach, I spend just as much energy keeping the rider focused as I do the horse.

I work to quiet the constant chatter. To keep the “But what about…” monster from taking over. To stop the mind from jumping five steps ahead instead of staying with the one we’re actually on.

Teaching a person to remain fully present—to follow each moment without their thoughts scattering in every direction—is incredibly difficult.

I’m not saying that from a place of judgment.

My teachers had to do the same thing with me.

Presence is a skill.

And here’s what changed my own horsemanship:

The horses I had spent years describing as spooky suddenly became remarkably calm… when I became more focused.

That realization was both humbling and freeing.

It forced me to accept an uncomfortable truth:

We often don’t know the horse nearly as well as we think we do.

What we’re seeing isn’t always their personality. Often it’s their response to us.

We project our own lack of clarity onto the horse, then label that response as who they are.

And that is deeply unfair to the horse.

Perhaps before asking, “Why is my horse so distracted?” we should first ask,

“How present am I?” And then, “how helpful am I to a horse?”

Love this!

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We often mistake a temporary state of being for who someone is.

We like to make quick work of categorizing ourselves and everyone around us. We walk through life with labels ready to fire off, hoping they’ll explain us to others. There are the obvious ones—religion, politics, nationality. Then there are the personality labels: introvert or extrovert, empath, Gemini, Type A, highly sensitive, and on and on.

Some of these tell us something meaningful. They can offer insight into a person’s values, culture, or tendencies. But too often we leave no room for change. We forget to account for circumstance, environment, and company.

Someone may be quiet and withdrawn in one setting, then animated and endlessly talkative in another. One group of people might bring out caution; another might bring out confidence. The same person can seem entirely different depending on who they’re with, what they’ve experienced that day, or what season of life they’re in. Human beings are often far more flexible than our labels allow.

What does this have to do with horses?

Everything.

We buy a yearling or raise a foal, and before long we’ve decided exactly who that horse is. He’s lazy. She’s spooky. He’s dominant. She’s sensitive. We collect our observations, assign our labels, and stop looking.

But the horse standing in front of us today isn’t the horse that existed six months ago, or even yesterday.

If we believe we already know him, we stop listening.

Instead of responding to what’s actually happening, we’re responding to our story about him. We see everything through the lens of what we think we know.

The danger of living inside labels is that reality can be standing right in front of us and we’ll reject it because it doesn’t fit the category we’ve created.

It’s easy to learn a handful of systems and memorize the boxes. It’s comforting to believe every behavior has a predetermined explanation and every problem has a prescribed solution. Labels create the illusion of certainty. They make us feel as though we have control.

It’s much harder to meet the world with fresh eyes.

To approach each horse, each person, and even ourselves with the question: Who are you today?

That requires tolerating uncertainty. It requires admitting, “I don’t know yet.”

That uncomfortable space is where feel begins.

Feel isn’t built by collecting more labels. It’s built through observation, experimentation, curiosity, and the humility to let go of what you thought you knew when reality tells you otherwise.

The people who become exceptional communicators—whether with horses or with humans—aren’t the ones with the most categories. They’re the ones most willing to remain present, to notice what has changed, and to adapt.

Our world grows less tolerant every year of not knowing. We’re expected to have immediate opinions, immediate diagnoses, immediate answers.

But wisdom often begins with resisting that impulse.

Sometimes the most truthful thing we can say is, “I’m not sure. Let me look again.”

Once again, Amy Skinner nails it!

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An entire industry has been created selling you the idea that there is a method to fix every problem.

What is extremely popular is a video for every problem, and for every fix there are three more problems created, for which there’s a method to fix too. It leads to a form of restlessness wherein people are rarely satisfied with improvements, in their own bodies and in the horses, because there are always more problems not yet fixed.

I get asked nearly daily to create a video about specific problems (I saw your video on trailer loading, but what about loading a chestnut mare into an Adam trailer?). These can be helpful to see, but the mentality over time has shifted into specifics instead of looking at the big picture.

Good, all encompassing horsemanship creates a foundation wherein problems melt away holistically. If you understand how all things connect, you stop seeing things individually, but as a whole. You have to fix the whole and stop looking for quick solutions.

Teaching people to be actual horsemen, to stop looking for quick tips and tricks, to start seeing the whole and the connection of all things, means rewiring our minds from conditioning and marketing over the past decades.

So if you have a problem, it isn’t living in isolation. It’s part of a whole picture. And you have to look at, and feed the whole, for the symptoms to melt away. Husbandry is in hand work is trailer loading is riding and so on - they all roll into each other

This Friday! We still have some room, if you're interested in trying this excellent class.

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There’s a quiet grief many animal people carry when they begin seeing things differently.

Because once you realize how much of traditional animal handling was built around suppression instead of understanding…
you can’t fully unsee it.

You notice how often animals are praised for tolerating discomfort.
How often fear gets labeled as “respect.”
How often shutdown gets mistaken for calmness.

And for a while, it can feel heartbreaking.

But then something beautiful starts happening too.

You begin noticing the tiny signs of aliveness returning.

The horse who starts expressing opinions again.
The dog who becomes playful after years of hypervigilance.
The animal who finally realizes:
“I don’t have to disappear to be safe here.”

That moment changes both lives.

Because animals were never meant to be emotional machines built for human convenience.

They are nations unto themselves.
Full beings.
With inner worlds as rich and meaningful as our own.

And when we stop trying to dominate those worlds…
we get invited into them.

O

If today’s post resonated with you, you’ll find much more in my book, Chosen, Not Obeyed. It’s an invitation to see horses—and perhaps yourself—through a different lens.

📖 Get your copy here: ⁠ https://a.co/d/0dPCSVyv

Some food for thought...

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Some of the most influential moments in my horsemanship haven’t come from other humans, but the horses themselves.

25 years ago, at the the very beginning of my journey into studying horses and horsemanship, I remember being particularly stricken by this scene in the Cloud mustang documentary…

A young filly has strayed from her family herd to mingle with local band stallions, and in spite of her attempts to return to her herd, she’s ultimately rounded up and kept by one of them.

And as her and a family member call to each other, we see one of the grazing senior horses pop their head up and pin their ears… “Stop that.”

In an attempt to understand and be more ethical with our domesticated horses, we often forget who they are, as nature made them.

We often worry about birth trauma, or weaning trauma, or the trauma of being separated from their family or horses they’ve established a bond with, or the trauma of changing facilities or ownership.

And yet when we observe them in nature, this ebb and flow of social connections is natural, and not without stress.

And in spite of it all, they just… get back to grazing.

In many ways, our fixation on horses being emotionally fragile is a mirror of our tendency to fixate on our own human fragility, rather than how incredibly resilient and adaptable we are.

Resilient has almost become a four letter word nowadays, with both horses and humans.

Now, I’m not saying we should allow an unnecessary amount of stress our horses lives because it’s ‘natural’ and they can ‘just deal with it,’ but I do think we should give pause and rethink this idea that they are so emotionally fragile.

And yet, we know most domesticated horses AREN’T adaptable, they DON’T ‘get back to grazing.’

Why is that? What are we doing wrong?

Modern humans, too, are increasingly more dysregated.

I think, just like the horse, this has a lot to do with living in a way that’s disconnected from our true needs and nature.

I’m not trying to tell anyone how to think.
But I do want you to think.

We’ve made up a lot of stories about who we think the horse is.

Going back to that documentary, something else I notice now, is that senior horse is clearly communicating to the calling youngster…

“Stop that. That’s enough. It’s time to get back to grazing.”

Behavior interruption and behavior extinction appear to be absolutely natural, and probably absolutely necessary, in a healthy, regulated herd.

Modern pundits might reject such an intervention as punitive.

We can study that filly and the behavior extinction she had when she stopped trying to return to her herd…

Modern pundits might label that learned helplessness, and yet that is not what that filly experienced in that life-changing moment, any more than a horse who’s learned to turn their back to the rain to withstand nature.

There are so many voices out there, telling us what to think, what to do.

And there’s a lot of discrepancy between what they’re describing, and what the horse is actually experiencing, and who the horse actually is.

We can’t get so caught up in being educated, that we stop seeing the horse as they are.

Sometimes we have to stop listening or reading, and start watching…

We're excited to share Julie Lesnik has announced her new endeavor, The Sanctuary School! Julie has so much to offer these hard working horses and their people!
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The Sanctuary School The Sanctuary School is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to supporting the emotional wellness and dignity of lesson horses through immersive care, relational horsemanship, and public education.