 And so welcome today. I thought I would share a little gold nugget that has definitely influenced my writing and training ever since I've been young. And it was something that, I don't know if I heard it from Ray Hunt or who was the actual person I heard it from, but it's the idea of making your idea, your horse's idea. And when you can set things up so that you make your idea, your horse's idea, everything becomes much, much easier. And to illustrate this, and the reason I'm doing this today and what brought it up was my son is six years old, we home school, and we went to his music class today. Well, they're six year olds and they're going to their music class and a lot of them have their stuffed animals, which is fine until they need to play instruments. And the teacher had to have them let go of the stuffed animals. So when he presented the idea, he said, hey, look, you know, I don't, we're not going to be able to have you holding the stuffed animals while you're playing instruments. And you instantly saw all the kids kind of draw in and they brought their stuffed animal closer and you could see a lot of them were looking kind of nervous like they didn't want to let go of the stuffed animal. And in relationship to our horses, when we present an idea, we need to see their reaction. How receptive are they to our ideas? Now, these kids in my son's music class, they were not at all receptive to the idea that the teacher had about putting the stuffed animals down. So it was really neat to watch the dynamic because he turned it around. He made his idea, the kids idea, which set the stage for an amazing situation. He basically said, what if we, so you read their response, that's what we have to do with our horse, right? And instead of saying, you have to put your stuffed animals down, he said, what if we made an audience? Let's take all of your stuffed animals. And do you see the table over there? Let's put them on the table and let's line them up and they can all watch us play instruments. Well, there were a couple of kids that you could tell we're not sure about it at all, but the majority of the kids thought it was an amazing idea. And they went over, they put their stuffed animals and toys on the table to watch them play their instruments and then the rest of them followed suit. So the teacher, by setting the situation up where he made his idea, the kids idea, ended up with a bunch of kids that were super excited, more than happy to go put their stuffed animals and their toys down because it was presented in a way that was interesting, that made sense to them, and that made them feel good about their decision. So instead of saying, no, you can't have those, you must put them away, must put them down, he changed the scenario and by doing it made it so much easier on himself, so much easier on the kids, everybody was winning. And that's what we really need to think about when we're working with our horses. When we're working with our horses, instead of thinking about making them do the things that we would like them to do, what we need to try to do is try shifting the focus and find out and each horse is different, just like each child is different, but we need to find out what motivates our horse. And when we can find those things that are meaningful to our horses and that motivate them, we can start to adjust our presentation in a way that we can make our own ideas, our horse's ideas, which is fantastic because it's a win-win again. Now it takes a little bit for us to start to look for those things and look for the things that motivate our horses, but I'll share an example of something I do fairly regularly with people that are having trouble making upward transitions or downward transitions with their horses. So this can go either way, but if we have a horse, let's say, that doesn't like to move forward and maybe go from the trot into the canter and the horses may be a little uncomfortable with cantering. Well, what I'll do is I'll have a student take that horse and start trotting that horse out really fast. So like if we had a scale of one to 10, one being the slowest trot, 10 being the fastest trot, what we would do is we would start riding between an eight to a 10 in our trot. And if you thought about like a car's engine, we'd be redlining it. We'd be way up there, RPMs are pretty high and it only makes sense to change gears. The same thing happens with horses oftentimes. Now we need to figure out the horse and we need to know what motivates him, but this sort of thing works super well for horses that are struggling with the upward transition, be it from walk to trot, trot to canter. And you redline it for a while and when the horse starts coming up with the idea that they'd like to just stop trotting extremely fast and bump up into the canter, you harmonize and you allow them to make the decision. And it becomes something that they then decide to do. They feel good about it because it wasn't you making them. It wasn't you forcing it down their throat. It was something that they came up with. They decided to do and therefore it feels good and it feels good to you too because you presented it in a way where it didn't feel like you were having to force it on your horse and we were all looking for better partnerships. We're all looking for good communication between ourselves and our horses. So if we can start to find ways that we can set situations up where it becomes our horse's idea, whatever it might be. So like sometimes I'll use another example. If you have a horse that's scared of, let's say a bag, instead of taking the bag and trying to desensitize the horse with the bag, what if you encourage some curiosity in the horse? What if you set it up so that you got the horse kind of interested in the bag and anytime the horse looked at the bag, you kind of drug the bag away from them and then if they looked away from the bag, you may be played with the bag yourself and did some things until they got curious and kind of looked at the bag and then you moved it away from them. You're setting it up, you're setting the situation up so you're invoking the horse's own natural curiosity and when they get curious and interested, then we can start to direct that and we can set up a situation where it's the horse's idea to go smell the bag rather than us maybe coming at them with the bag and desensitizing them the whole time and trying to make them be okay with the bag. In the end, so just like in my son's class, the teacher set it up so all the kids put the stuffed animal on the table and the kids were excited, they were ready to play their instruments because it was their idea to let go of their stuffed animals and create an audience of stuffed animals that are watching the kid's class. The same goes for the horse. Every time, so now these kids with this teacher, when he starts thinking of things for them to do, they're going to be much more receptive every time he presents an idea and the same goes with your horses. If you can set things up in a way where you're presenting your ideas in a way that creates excitement and curiosity and makes the horse feel like an active participant, what ends up happening is as you go along in your relationship and you take that down the road, the horse starts to become more and more interested in what you have to offer and they feel so much better about themselves because they're the ones making the decisions to do whatever it might be that you're doing rather than you making them do whatever you'd like them to do. So I would love for you the next time you work with your horse, challenge yourself a little bit and try to figure out if you can set things up so that you're making a situation where the thing that you want your horse to do is the thing that they actually want to do. So you're setting it up so the horse is making the decision to do whatever it is you'd like them to do and that's going to cause you to have to change your mindset, adjust your approach, take some time, slow down, be aware of the things that motivate your horse and I think you're going to find if you can start building on that idea of setting things up to make your idea the horse's idea rather than making the horse do whatever you'd like them to do you're going to see huge changes in your relationship with your horse. So anyway, that's why I hopped on live today because I saw it happen at my son's music class and I thought, boy, what a perfect example of making that situation one where the kids were just happy to do it, it was fun, it was exciting and I just thought, wow, it's the beginning of their music class this year how that is setting the tone for the way the rest of the classes are going to go and it's great. If you had made the kids, boy, the next class there had been some resistance, there's some friction singles with your horse. If you make your horse do things too many times there's some tension and there's some friction in the relationship and your horse is not going to be looking forward to the interactions nearly as much and so I just thought that was pretty cool today. So my challenge to you again is go try to make your idea, your horse's idea instead of making your horse do what you'd like them to do. All right, thanks for joining in. I appreciate you all and until next time, happy horsing around. I'm always so slow at getting these off.