Wedges of Wisdom: Emotional Control

It happens, every once in a while - a frustrating ride where despite your best efforts, you just can't seem to get anything working for you. 

I had one the other day. I'm certainly not immune to them, but I've learned that it's what you do with those feelings when you sense them begin to build that matters, not that you had them to begin with. Some days I'm more successful than others. There are still those rare occasions where I can't get it figured for the horse and have to eat my pride, hang up my chaps and turn the horse back out in the hopes that tomorrow might come together a bit better.

Harry Whitney let me in on a secret the first time I met him. We were standing outside the cookshack waiting for our host to ring the lunch bell when he turned to me and asked me how I was feeling about everything. "Good," I said, "but I can sense I'm going to struggle with letting go of some guilt I am feeling." 

"Oh?" he smiled. I explained how I had always sensed Soni held a lot of worry but that I had never been able to figure out how to help him through it. I knew my desire to help him sometimes was the very thing that got in the way and that there were times he probably felt that pressure I put on myself. "I feel guilty," I told him, "that for as long as he's been with me he still feels so much concern."

Harry no doubt knew all of this without me having to tell him: he has a way of reading people like that, but he listened to me anyway. As he pondered my admission, the lunch bell rang and the other clinic attendants started filing in to grab their trays. Harry and I stood outside for a moment and let everyone pass before he looked over at me. "You know, I feel all kinds of things when I'm with a horse, I just don't let him know about them. I might be utterly terrified, but that's not useful to him so I don't tell him. I only give him the information he needs in that moment and let him figure things out in his own time." Harry smiled knowingly and ushered me into the cookshack.

I think about that conversation every time I get frustrated, which will often prompt me to grab my phone and scroll through my photos to find this gem:

It's easy to gloss over all these little moments of connection when we're so focused on all the other "noise" (see my two-part post on goals). But these are the moments that matter: it's these moments, strung together, that help the horse feel confident enough to express a willingness to let go and trust in us.

I could fall headfirst into Soni's soft, quiet eye. His expression is one of quiet contentment, but he's not tuned out. If, in those inevitable "moments", I can filter my response enough so as to provide him only what's useful to him, the reason for my guilt will vanish. I will have moved from trying to do something TO the horse into trying to do something FOR him. And trust me, he knows the difference.