05/08/2025
Wow...just wow Mustang Maddy just nailed it in the post. I talk about this a lot with horses and people alike. So it is so refreshing to hear others talk about it like this as well. She describes way more eloquently than I probably ever have...but I'm so grateful I have the same mindset and that she could convey it so well. This article may seem like a long read...but it is completely worth it.
Recently, I’ve been working with women who have told me that they’ve lost their confidence around horses.
In their past, these women may have galloped fearlessly through fields, competed or traveled with their horses, or even used to train horses themselves. But now, they may be nervous about even leading their horse out of the barn.
A certain bitter tasting flavor of shame soaked grief and self-loathing can take hold of us in when we find ourselves in this place, as we long and ache for what used to come so freely to us while believing that are are the only one’s responsible for not having it, believing that we ourselves are the only ones to blame, that we are the ones standing in our own way.
And so much of the time, we believe that in order to feel more confident, we just need to push through the discomfort and do the hard things before we feel ready. After all, this is the message our culture tells us and that others around us have likely been telling us, too.
“You just need to push through. You just need to get over it.”
But what if, when we lose our confidence, what we actually need is the opposite?
What if, instead, we focused on restoring the relationship we have with our bodies and tune into our little “no’s” that have gone previously unheard and unacknowledged?
(What if sometimes it takes more courage to let ourselves say “no” than it does to push through?)
What if we what we really need to feel more confident is to surround ourselves with a group of people who really “get” us, who help us feel more seen, understood, validated, and less alone than the majority of us have ever felt in our lives? Who help us to feel safe in our own selves?
I believe that when we feel heard we find our herd. When we feel heard and seen, we feel safe. And when we feel safe, our ability to tune into ourselves & feel more confident can come about as a natural side effect.
I believe this because I’ve seen it play out in my own life, the journeys of women I’ve worked with, and with horses often deemed “untrainable.” Looking to horses...
To help a horse feel more confident, I would never say to the horse “Well, I see you’re scared about this but this isn’t going to kill you, you just need to get over it. You just need to push through it.”
99.9% of the time this method of repeated exposure does not work for the horses I work with OR, it “works,” meaning I can get the horse to perform the behaviors I want, but it comes at the expense of the relationship — the horse is shut down, the horse is looking to avoid engagement, the horse holds onto tension they just don’t seem to release, etc.
(And I’m guessing if you’re reading this you wouldn’t take this approach either — or it at least doesn’t feel right to you when you do or see others doing it. So why would we do that to ourselves?)
With these horses, my approach is not to push them through their discomfort. My first step is helping these horses feel safe. How do I do that?
I facilitate ways for them to express themselves and find their “no” (restoring their voice) and I then respond accordingly by listening and responding to their no (restoring their choice/sense of control).
So, in summary my first job is to help the horse feel heard, to restore their voice, to respond to their “no”, and by doing so, they begin to feel safe enough to accept the invitation of coming back into their bodies.
Once this foundation is established, meaning (1) the horse is able to communicate their “no” in a way that is reliable and desirable & (2) begins to feel safe, and safe enough to release tension vs storing it (which is observable through blinking rates, licking & chewing, yawning, etc as the horse’s nervous system returns to a baseline state of relaxation)…
THEN I may begin to touch on the scary thing or a specific trigger, such as the halter, the saddle, the tarp, the place away from their buddies, etc. During this process, at times, I may dance the edge of their threshold and what they can handle before spilling over into fight, flight, and freeze if I trust they have the tools in place to be able to navigate it and they are showing me signs that doing so will lead to resolution and renegotiation of the trauma response.
But if I do this too soon, before the foundation of safety is established, then the scary thing is just re-traumatizing.
So, it’s essential that communication is firmly rooted and reliable. Their nervous systems need to be showing signs of being able to move tension through their bodies again vs it getting “stuck in the up.” I need to know the horse isn’t going to leave their body and just go along with what they’re told so it will be over sooner (aka freeze/immobility) if I want specific training results AND am prioritizing the horse’s emotional and nervous system state.
*Note: This isn’t just because this type of approach feels good to me, it’s because I’ve found this to be highly effective in rehabbing “untrainable” horses and because I have seen, time after time, that horses who feel safe are safe to be around.
*Note: This is a different approach than specifically R+ in which we want to stay well under threshold throughout the training process.
I believe it’s a similar process with us humans.
What if confidence isn’t just about pushing through discomfort? What if the first essential phase is actually acknowledging our discomfort and listening to/honoring it and allowing ourselves to say “no”?
What if, when we come home to our own bodies, feeling safe in our bodies - sometimes for the first time in our lives - is when we begin to feel more confident?
What if confidence comes when we surround ourselves with a home-base of people who don’t make us feel confused, who don’t make us feel shame about just not being tough enough, good enough, capable enough… but who make us feel validated, empowered, and clear?
What if confidence comes from finding safety in a community in which we feel heard and understood?
What if this is all the foundation of restoring our confidence, long before we dance at the edges of what feels safe and try to do uncomfortable things?
These ways of being with our horses, and with ourselves, are counter-cultural. It’s rare to come across them, to find pockets of belonging in this way.
Which is why I believe its so important to offer spaces for us to come together in these containers, both because I am learning that this is a gift I can bring for folks and horses alike and because I want this too, because I am learning that if we are the ones to realize there are not enough spaces like this, oftentimes we are the ones who need to be the ones to create them.
If this resonates and you are in the position to attend an in-person container, you may consider attending a 5 Day Mentoring Intensive with me and like-minded folks in so-called Ridgway, CO this summer.
The intensive consists of a group of 4 folks who bring their horse or use a horse from my herd to dive deep together into all things horse-human connection, working on their personal goals and journeys with curriculum we create together, tailored specifically to the individual, and held within a caring & witnessing community of others who are on a similar but unique journey as well. Sliding scale options of $1,800 / $2,500 / $3,200. Link in comments for application + more info.
And a few words of disclaimers/acknowledgement...
We can't "buy" community.
I believe this is our birthright as human beings, to have access to these kinds of spaces and communities. It makes me angry and fills me with grief that I am “charging” people for this or “selling” this kind of experience. I firmly believe that “community” that can be “sold” is not true community. True community is not something you can buy your way into. I am holding this belief with the tension of needing to “earn a living,” also an abominable statement to me, but the context of the systems we find ourselves in. I hope the experience for folks attending is that their money is going towards learning tangible training methodologies, and the community and sense of support comes freely, nourishing all of us. I’m still trying to navigate this and acknowledge the complexities that comes with holding the tension of these opposites and living in systems that deny our natural needs and facilitate exploitation, individualism, and self-gain.
We can't "buy" confidence.
Please understand that I am *not* attempting to “sell confidence”, emotional states, and quick fixes here. Obviously, that cannot be plucked off the shelf and “bought.” If you struggle with confidence specifically, I am not trying to claim that you’ll magically emerge feeling confident to take on the world by the end of our time together, and believe that making such a claim is false advertising, manipulative & exploitative; So what I do believe that there is a possibility you’ll have the chance to immerse yourself in an approach you may not have tried yet and be deeply and profoundly moved by it in perhaps unexpected ways, with the seed of something awakening inside of you that you may have thought was long lost. This is my wish and intention.
PC
