“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”

I find it helpful to relate horse training to life.  One thing I have learned while training horses is that they can only learn through failure.  If they never do the wrong thing, there is no way for them to differentiate between the right thing and the wrong thing.  Let’s say you were trying to train your horse to stand in one spot without moving a leg.  He might stand there for an hour without moving, but he’d never understand that’s what you wanted him to do until he moved a leg out of place and you corrected him.  He would never associate a word you said with staying in place, unless he heard you say that word after he failed to stay in place and you moved him back there.

In a similar way, the saying “learn from your mistakes” is not entirely helpful.  Instead, the saying should be “make mistakes so you can learn from them.”

This is one reason why working with and riding many different horses is a catalyst for becoming a better horse person.  If you always work with one horse, that horse might forgive your mistakes or overlook them.  But even if one or two horses accept your mistakes, ten horses will not.  So you are bound to learn a better way of doing things.

Failure is a very good friend.  I have learned to stay on horses by failing to stay on horses.  I have learned how much pressure is too much for horses by applying too much pressure.  Likewise, I have learned how much pressure is too little when horses failed to respond to it.  I have learned that certain training methods will not work for every horse by trying out those methods.  In the process I have learned much more than I would have if I’d never failed.

It is natural to feel discouraged when you fail, and I’d like to instead feel that now I have a new opportunity to learn.  Today I failed to get my horse to trot in a perfect circle, so now I have a chance to learn how to teach a crooked horse how to use her body differently.  I’ve succeeded in getting many horses to make a beautiful circle, so this failure is a good opportunity for me.  Should I start on a smaller circle or a larger one?  Should I work her first in long lines?  Should I start with four steps of a circle and then go back to a straight line?  The learning opportunities are endless.

Here’s wishing you also will have many failures in your future with horses.