I call horses "driving mirrors" - they reflect back the emotions you put in. 

 If you put in love, respect, kindness and curiosity; the horse will return these gifts to you.

 

Originally, we started to use horses as a worker to help us on the farm. Today horses are used in many ways. A lot of times, people don’t know their horses very well. Is he introvert or extravert? What is his background, character,…? When we work with our horses, we are often stressed; from work, we don’t have a lot of time or we think about other things like « what will the dinner be for tonight ». This is when we get problems with our horses, because we often forget that horses don’t speak our language. They react on our body and are able to read us that way; mirroring our behavior. So, we miss the proper communication and relationship with them. 

 

Horses are non-verbal animals. They won’t respond if you ask them «  How are you doing today? or How was your day? » 

They have a different language and it’s called « body language ». It’s a way to communicate and we're all familiar with it. As a baby we were not able to speak, so we worked with our body to explain things to other people. A lot of times we will use our body to communicate but we won’t realize it. As we grow up and we become more verbal, we sometimes forget about our wonderful body that helps us to communicate as well. Working with horses is not something crazy. It’s another way and another language you have to learn. Everyone is able to do it! 

 

Horsemanship teaches us that before a horse can learn anything new, he has three primary needs that must be satisfied: safety, comfort and leadership. First, he must feel 100% safe. In his world this means: he’s not going to be eaten or left alone. His second need is to feel comfortable: mentally, emotionally and physically. If he is with you and something happens around him and he feels scared, he still needs to trust you and feel comfortable enough to not run away. The third one would be leadership. Horses are herd animals. If you take your horse out, to work with, you need to show him you can be a leader for him. If there is something happening around him and you, he won’t feel like he needs to run away if he knows you’re a good leader for him. He will trust you and follow your energy and actions because he knows you’re a good leader. 

 

With the natural non-verbal communication of groundwork, you will have gotten your horse to respond in a positive manner, gained his respect and begun to establish yourself as his leader. You will have done this with honesty, fairness, assertiveness and leadership by communicating in his natural body language. To ride my horse with

Horses help reconnect children and teach them leadership, communication skills, relationship, keeping calm and being patient by receiving love, understanding, accepting and thinking positive. If there is a problem in the work they do, they will learn to look at themselves before telling someone else (their horse) that they did something wrong. Think about it, if your horse doesn’t give you the right answer to your question maybe he didn’t understand the question or you must have asked the question incorrectly. People have to learn to listen and to find out what the problem is and to think about it how they can fix it. They will use all those skills in their life of today and it will help parents to offer their children what they deserve.