Coaches: How Do You Get A Rider's Horse to Trust You?
As a coach or instructor, how do you gain the trust of a horse you don't personally ride or handle? This article explores the profound responsibility of a teacher to connect not just with the student, but with their equine partner. Discover why getting the horse to trust you is a critical, and often overlooked, aspect of effective teaching and how this trust is built by demonstrating knowledge that improves the horse's experience via the rider.
Article Summary
This article tackles a crucial question for all equine professionals: should you get on a client's horse, and how do you earn its trust from the ground? We challenge the idea that an instructor must ride the horse to fix it, exploring the risks and the disrespect inherent in that approach. Discover why the horse, an intelligent being that values knowledgeable leadership, is always paying attention to the person in the middle of the arena.
Learn how to build trust indirectly but powerfully by teaching the rider to be better—to move in a way that frees the horse and makes their job easier. The full text explains how, by helping the rider, the horse begins to see the instructor as a trusted leader, creating a true three-way partnership.
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Few talk about trust between a coach/instructor and the horse that belongs to the rider taking lessons with them.
Few seem to even think about it?
You might want to take that as a warning sign.
A sign that your current coach still has a way to go in understanding the relationship that is possible with the horse in front of them.
Yet to learn how we should be able to work together with the horse, both of us trying to help the rider. But that is a conversation for another day.
But one question that comes up again and again by many riders is that they want their instructor to get up on their horses.
Should we get up on our clients horses?
Is it necessary?
Is it safe?
And if you think we should, when should we?
Under what circumstances?
If you have been teaching for a few years, especially on your own school horses, it doesn’t take you long to realize that you can train your horses through the riders who you are teaching. Which is sweet. Helps when you are so busy training and teaching that you don’t have the time time to put into your school horses that you wish you could.
But is it safe?
No.
Heartbreaking when we lost a teacher well respected just a few years ago. But he made a habit of working with his clients horses by getting on top of them. Which, especially in clinics, is when you really don’t know the horses, is especially risky. As sadly this accident proved the truth of that. And we lost someone special. Someone that should have been here for years yet learning and sharing with all of us.
But it isn’t only risky...
It is also disrespectful.
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