The elephant in the room
While teaching a demonstration, I commented that we are happy to treat physical wounds on our horses for months, yet we may baulk at spending months mending and attending to emotional wounds.
My comment was that "it is a bit like mental health in humans." And that made me think.
It seems okay if someone's physically sick or injured that they need our help and support. However, if we've got emotional problems, they are stressed, lacking confidence or anxious, it seems to be something that we don't address directly or that we hide and feel ashamed. That made me consider the fact that we are our number one asset in our relationship with our horses, yet how often we don't treat ourselves as a priority.
Everybody wants to put their horses first, and that's great.
But without our health and well-being, we will struggle to create the relationships we want with our equines. Consequently, we don't pay enough attention to working with the challenges we face in terms of our mental strength and putting our needs as humans first to further help our horses, donkeys and mules.
It is pretty clear that if you are a professional athlete, you would pay a lot of attention to your mental well-being, you would work on overcoming obstacles in your thinking and you would create new ways to see the world, visualize your success, create a patterns of thought that allowed you to become a really serious competitor and to reach to your potential.
So, we need to adopt this attitude in the horse world by treating ourselves as the key to our relationship with our equines.
If we're prepared to acknowledge our frailties, our failings, our weaknesses, our lack of confidence, our anxieties or our fears instead of being afraid of them, then we can use them as an opportunity for us to grow, to learn, to make new connections and to become a newer better version of ourselves than we've ever been before.
We need to work on our behaviour at least as much, if not more than we work with our horses' behaviour.
If we genuinely want to succeed in helping our horses, donkeys, and mules, we need to remove any criticism of people who lack confidence or are fearful of horses.
We're all making a different journey. I meet many people who feel judged, especially if they lack conference or are trying to listen to their horse. I met so many people at the demonstration who clearly were confused because of the information overload they were getting from so many people. We must encourage people to explore their principles and give them the courage to follow their unique path.
Improving our mental strengths is so important that we should accept and make normal the desire to improve ourselves, become more confident to, become less anxious, and get rid of that fear once and for all.
The acceptance of our own importance in the relationship will take us on a new journey to a greater and better place both ourselves and our equines.
Don't fear fear, fear doing nothing.
The challenge IN HELPING OURSELVES IS THE COURAGE TO BELIEVE WE DESERVE IT.
The challenge of helping ourselves is the courage to believe we deserve it. We are our number one asset in our relationship with our horses. Yet, how often do we treat ourselves as a priority?
When we're prepared to acknowledge our frailties, we can seize an opportunity to grow, learn, make new connections, and become a better version of ourselves than we've ever been before.
You're not alone; embrace courage and believe in yourself.
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