(Focus + Opportunity) - Distraction = MOTIVATION.

28/08/2011 by admin.

A winning formula.

Without a shadow of a doubt my biggest hold up to advancing towards my goals has been a lack of motivation. I read a great saying the other day ” If it’s important to you you’ll find a way, if not you’ll find an excuse” and now I am having a very real look at what makes me make excuses.

Excuses are like outfits we wear and put on. Some of them fit for a while, some of them wear out, and some of them become like best friends that give us confidence or comfort and we wear them continually to every event in life - even once they are full of holes, and no longer fit.

Excuses are different from reasons. Reasons are things that are blocks or obstacles, but like that saying says “you’ll find a way” to get round them, under them or over them if its something that matters. Surely, though, every goal matters doesn’t it? So why would we hold ourselves back if we could move away from these blocks? I think the answer to that is that sometimes it matters so much that we allow a reason to become an excuse deliberately. The root of that problem probably lies in our life experience and conditioning as a young person. For instance, I know that as a child I was mainly motivated by guilt. If I didn’t want to do something that was suggested to me, then it was easy to get me to change my mind if I had it explained to me how my non compliance would affect others badly. That may sound like a reasonable way of making someone do something, but do you see the word “Guilt” anywhere in the formula above? It means now, that if it is a situation to which guilt can not apply (i.e. I am the only one to suffer as a result of not doing it) then I won’t be motivated to do it at all. No one ever dealt with my excuses or reasons - I wasn’t taught that skill of organising them and quashing them.

Similarly, if your life has made you feel that you are not an achiever, not a winner, or that the stakes are so high in achieving your goal that it seems risky, you may make reasons into excuses because you are scared to try. The results of trying and failing would only further compound your disbelief in yourself and your abilities, and it would make a statement about you to the rest of the world - it’s not that you are not a winner, but now you are a LOSER! Right?

No - LOSERS are people who try, fail, and walk away. People who try, fail and try again are TRIERS and everyone loves a trier! Eventually a try will become a success and then you will be a WINNER, it’s just a game of numbers.

Now lets look at the formula more closely. Focus (which is the trying, and is something you give yourself. You don’t need motivation to try, you just need a good attitude about it) is only going to work if you have opportunity. Without opportunity your goal is a dream - no less aspiring, but just a little further out of reach. You should NOT however wait for opportunity to come knocking. It’s great if it just turns up, knocks and puts an idea in your head, but if you have already had the idea you need to go find the opportunity.  It’s another block, another reason, and if you want it you will go look for it in any amount wherever possible.

So now you have those two things you are set to reach your goal right? Wrong - distractions are commonplace in life. Their purpose? I’m not sure they have one, they just exist like the sky is blue and grass is green, but even then that can be down to perception. It is how you perceive these distractions that counts - you need to eradicate them and decide if the distraction that keeps you from your goal is an excuse or a reason, but in either case you now know what to do with them.

And the end result = MOTIVATION. That means you now have it, you no longer need to keep getting it, you no longer will want to procrastinate or block yourself you will just want to move towards your goal and do it, get it, have it. Now doesn’t that sound like a nice feeling? No more talking yourself into it, no more carrying the weight of the put off inevitable. You now just go and do it and it’s done and you can enjoy the benefits. Really, when you think of it like that, why on earth are we making excuses?! What’s fun about that?!

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Focus - where are you putting yours?

27/08/2011 by admin.

On your future?

On you present?

On you past?

Focus is one of those things that only half of us are aware of, and even then, only half that are aware of it are half as aware as they should be - let me explain……

I have spent two and a half years training in the Parelli program with my horses. There are lots of things that we are taught to understand through Pat’s perfect little sayings, and one of them is the power of Focus. Entire training manuals and DVD’s have been devoted to it - it’s obviously a really important thing to understand for so many materials to have been brought out about it, but like so much of this program, I just didn’t get it properly until it slapped me in the face - a BFO ( Blinding Flash of the Obvious) was had in the paddock the other day.

It was a while ago that I understood how my focus on my horse could affect him.  I was trying so terribly hard to get Brodie to stand still while I played extreme friendly with him. It wasn’t working, as my frustration and my anger that he wouldn’t accept it was building my focus. I was really thinking about it and concentrating on it. Even with my back turned to him, a relaxed position in my body, and slow rhythmic slapping of the ground with my carrot stick and savvy string he was  like a cat on a hot tin roof. I was pretty perplexed about how I was going to improve this as we’d been trying to get it sorted for a very long time, and I was so unaware of where I was pointing my focus, and was under the impression that body position and rhythm were all I had to help me. It wasn’t until I had my focus distracted that I understood it was the problem.

It was whilst sharing the arena with our Parelli Partners Sandy the haflinger and Sarah his human, who were working round some barrels at the other end of the school. Sandy got his line caught round the barrel, and my attention (focus) was taken away from concentrating on the sound of Brodie tap dancing behind me, and was directed towards Sandy who was possibly going to take exception to being wrapped round a barrel. Instantly the noise behind me ceased and he stood still.

Lesson learned - I don’t have to be looking at him to have my focus on him. He could feel how heavily concentrated on  him I was. Since then I have taught myself to be genuinely focused on other things during friendly game (faking it doesn’t work!! You have to really be watching a bird in the sky/man in the garden next door/ sheep on a far off hill,  and thinking about them or your horse knows you are just viewing the object and you are still focused on them). You have to stop thinking about what reaction you want or what it might be. Now that’s easier said than done I know; when putting the Big Green Ball on his back for the first time you are very aware you may be about to get squished and you may find running through the contents of your fridge in your mind and deciding upon dinner not easy to do. But from my experience you are far less likely to get squished if you can. However, that’s still only half of the lesson.

For about the past year I have been practising this online and getting results……..online. Now I have started doing Liberty, I have had another BFO about focus when my horses kept getting worried and leaving me. One thing I had never taken into consideration was the horses focus on me. I suddenly became very aware that even when they are almost catatonic from a new learning experience, that those moments when they go all thoughtful before they lick and chew and you can hear the cogs turning, they are still utterly focused on you. They are still a prey animal, they are still ready to flee and preserve their life, and any change in your energy is going to affect them.

I finally got the concept of my phase 1 being raising my energy. I had always practised this, I had always heard how you raise your life up and ask your horse to move, I knew it, I did………or did I? I had heard it, I had watched it, I had done simulations with it, I had even spent a couple of years running through the motions of it, thinking I was doing it, but I did not know it.  This happens to me all the time - a Patism I have heard for years suddenly comes into context and has a whole new meaning “Oh that’s what that means!!” I’ll say to myself mid BFO and feel silly it took so long to be revealed to me. My only solace is that I am told the same thing happens again and again with exactly the same Patism as you go through the levels. During one of my BFO’s in Alison Jones’ presence I remember her saying to me “now you wait until you get a level 4 understanding of what that means!”

The reason the horses were leaving me was because I wasn’t recognising how focused they were on me. I had spent so much time teaching myself to turn mine off and then amplify it to get results on longer ropes that I hadn’t noticed that in close quarters, when they can leave, they are focused just as heavily on me as I am on them and my phases need to be so much lighter. In fact, all of a sudden my focus required little or no amplification at all without a rope keeping us together. For so long I had been overloading my sensitive extroverts with energy online. The importance of focus being a two way thing was lost on me until this point. I am now really looking forward to finding out how focus affects contact and ridden work in ways I think I know, but really I know I don’t  - yet!

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Wow! Has it really been two years??!!!

26/08/2011 by admin.

We are still here, still dedicated to our horsemanship and dogmanship journeys. Lots has happened since we closed the activity centre, we have lost some of the herd and we have got some new members in the pack.

As I write this it feels like another ending - the end of our 2011 Summer. We have had much better weather than forecast and each sunny day feels like we’re cheating mother nature - stealing from next years supply of good days maybe?

Even so there is a definite edge to it that tells me it could go at any second. The golden-green hues of the foliage will overnight become burnt oranges and browns as heavy morning dews are swapped for sharp frosts, and the horses will lumber up the hills to winter grazing, turning their butts to the wind and hunker down for whatever the weather.  The dogs will rise from their benches noses to the North trying to scent out signs of an approaching chill; signalling an end to mind numbing sunbathing and a start to “their time” when their spirits rise in correlation with the falling temperature.

All endings are signals of new beginnings, and for me, that’s a signal of ADVENTURE!!!

We have had lots of adventures in the last two years. Lots of starts, lots of ends and lots of adventures. I doubt I can even remember them all, sadly - I wish I had continually blogged because I will already have forgotten golden moments ( I can thank Brodie for the brain damage and amnesia again).

Where we have been may be interesting to those of you who have visited us over the years and know our place and our herd and pack, but the thing that is really worth hearing about is where we are going - more on that in a minute, first a quick catch up!

After we closed the riding school we put horses back to owners who had loaned them to us or sold them on, keeping 20 or so who were our personal projects or just too settled after traumatic lives to be bothered with settling in somewhere else at that time.

Breeze was sold to our most dedicated student Elizabeth Munro and had a wonderful foal by Gus whom she called Brooke because we thought it was a filly. Ten days later it produced the unmistakable appendages of a colt. I can’t describe the hilarity that caused, not to mention the red faces of the vets. The “e” was dropped and the colt remained Brook although we were tempted to persuade her to change it to Bloke, and really he should have been Broke because in the last year that’s exactly what he has done to every fence in the place.

Foxy is on the West Coast with one of our regular riders who just adored her, her companion Surprise went to terrify small children on a farm in Dornoch. Murphy had a series of loans and ended up back here after doing his “littlest hobo” bit and helping several riders with confidence issues preventing them from enjoying or progressing with their own horses.

Both May and Sugar had dreadful experiences at being loaned - May at the hands of an SSPCA auxilliary and his wife who abandoned her with 4 dead rats in her water, no food, two lame feet, and a headcollar that had eaten into her face. Sugar was taken for 6 months with a view to buy, but after ten months with no real cash turning up I went to recover her, finding to my horror, that she had been utterly neglected with the worst overgrown feet the vet had ever seen, and a fear of being caught. Both those cases had the SSPCA involved to a lesser degree - not enough suffering had actually taken place for it to be worth taking to court apparently. Poor May was put right by us, but in a decision I will regret forever she was put on loan a second time when we were utterly crippled by a dreadful winter that meant we had to get horses moved out of our ice rink of a croft to lower ground. May got laminitis, followed by colic, and was put to sleep the day after Joe and I got engaged. I will never stop missing her.

Our other earth shattering loss happened just after Christmas past when, for the first time ever we had the unpleasant experience of finding a herd member dead in the field. It was Byron, and it must’ve been sudden (less than 12hrs from fighting fit to dead on his side in the middle of a bush). We are not certain, but suspect Atypical Myopathy was the culprit as the pasture ticks all of the boxes and so did he. The last time I saw him he was so full of life, making snow angels and playing porcupine and circling with Bailey in an exceedingly high energy way - but what more do you expect from two left brain extroverts at play? Did he literally play to death? We had got him hacking out on trail rides the summer before he left us and I will be eternally grateful to Catherine Mair for helping me to get him ready for it and riding him or a companion. If I had never had the experience of taking my first ever baby horse round the woods after all those years of raising him then it would have been a much sourer pill to swallow.

Sandy was returned to his owner Sarah Watt who has taken him through the Parelli levels program and is working well at Level 3 currently. To be honest he is unrecognisable as the bampot who needed re-started every spring in his 3 seasons work with us. They recently moved East, and we miss them a great deal too. We had made a lovely little group here of PNH students that got together for regular play and courses, but unfortunately that has fragmented somewhat over time and the younger girls have all grown up, got jobs and boyfriends and horses have sunk onto the back burner for a lot of them. An exception to that is Ella Wingent who has the lovely Shadow on permanent loan, they are in Level 2 of the program and she has recently taken on a new young Welsh D we bought from Gillian Turner as a possible event/pony club prospect. She’ll take him through the levels and compete him for us over the next few years.

Daisy has been sold to Free Spirit Trekking Centre to carry on her good work educating the next generation  of horsey folk. Her son Marley ( who has inherited her floppy lip!) was gelded this year and has been offered to a young Parelli student who is about to go into the wonderful world of horse owning!

The dogs have done well - Trance one of our 2009  litter was most impressive last season, but his sister Pop had most runs and is going to be a great little leader. His sister Ishtar who was sold to one of our volunteers didn’t fair so well after she left here and ended up in a foster home who immediately adopted her and came 12th in their class at Aviemore - not bad after only running for a couple of months. Tal who was also out of that litter and sold was returned a week later. After that Joe and I decided we wouldn’t breed again in the near future and we weren’t going to sell the remaining three pups. Tal never fitted back into the pack so we rehomed him and his 5yr old brother Mambo to mushers Barry and Kelly Wemyss who have given them a superb new start in a racing home where they won’t be so utterly dominated all of the time.

Deet got much worse with his dry eye so we had operations done to attach salivary glands to his eyes to keep them wet. It was pretty successful except it has made him unbelievable ugly and so far has really been affecting his running performance leaving him partially retired.

Ludo’s allergies got worse. 2 endoscopes, 3 more cultures, x-rays, and countless medicines, natural remedies, and diet changes and we aren’t really on top of it leaving him in retirement - although that’s fine by him as he has winters in the house and lives out in the big pen all day.

Bru Bear has been a daddy to two litters now (eight pups in total) and a lot of them are living with friends who are Bear admirers. We have one of his first daughters, Juno, she’s a lot of work yet filled with potential. Ideally she should have been a Police dog I think, and I desperately wish we were closer to a Schutzhund club than 200 miles as she’d have excelled at that. Instead she just spends her day policing the rest of our pack. Bru and his wife are due to have a dirty weekend again in the next couple of months.

Right now we are on the brink of one of our biggest adventures yet. I am pregnant, due Jan 2012, and so fat it’s almost unbearable! I have had to think carefully about how I am going to manage the projects on the croft and the care of the animals, and we are making some fairly huge changes accordingly. Although things are about to get tougher than ever before I have never  felt more determined or closer to getting what I want.

Our Parelli group has seeds of hope with a few older ladies joining in.  It has changed the dynamic of the group quite a bit as most of them have their own set up and horses, but issues with transport. We are seeing a trend towards playing and lessons away from Highland Wildrides and shared at individuals homes which may mean more people becoming interested in starting. Hopefully they will still enjoy the idea of courses in the future but all plans for those are off for the next year.

We are not going to downsize much on the dog front, but we are going to try very hard to continue with the past two years of work, and match our horses up with their perfect partners. So far it is looking more promising right now than at any point previously as I have networked over the year with lots of other lovely natural homes who may have openings in their herds. We have also decided that, as the winters in the past two years have prevented livery owners getting to us, that it will be easier this winter when I am heavily pregnant, to put all the liveries off for the time being. It will be so sad to see Liz and Breeze and Gill and Magnum less but we know they are all moving onto a new beginning and adventure too.

So stay tuned for more updates and info, stories and course notes as time progresses. Remember that we will be more than happy to have our followers join us on adventures when you can.

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We will shortly be updating the website …..

26/08/2011 by admin.

Now that we are no longer running the riding centre we are working hard at getting a community group together for those with an interest in the outdoors and animal based activities. We will shortly update the website to reflect this and we will continue to post events onto the main calendar as well as give them a write up on here.We are also thinking of profiling club members and their animal partners monthly.

Please comment and let us know if there is anything you would specifically like to hear more about.

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Alison Jones Level 2 Course Rocked!

26/08/2011 by admin.

A POST FOUND LOST IN ARCHIVES - THIS MUST HAVE BEEN OCTOBER 2009.

So we just had Alison Jones up for our L2 course and it was AMAZING! The weather was just perfect and warm and sunny, Alison really worked us and we packed masses in whilst having a good giggle!

The first morning we had a chat about leadership and horse psychology, followed by some simulations that helped us feel how training through pressure and release feels to the horse. Although I had done this before it was great to recap and go over it again as some of it I had forgotten and some of it I had never learnt in the first place! It has made me think that I will probably go and spectate at courses of a lower level just to keep re-affirming the program and its teachings.

In the afternoon we did a lot of the obstacles and tasks that Sarah and I had done when we did L2 with Alison at Easterton in June. Although some students had never done a course before they were all very capable horsewomen and picked it up easily and I was using a different horse this time having finally settled on using Hannah as my levels horse. These exercises helped us diagnose whether or not we were ready to progress our play sessions to be more precise (principle before purpose) and we learnt how to adapt the length of the phases, and the relationship of phases to blocks in order to achieve this.

Saturday saw a few more familiar faces come along to spectate and to partake and again the weather was just amazing. We had a quick cuppa and a chat about what each of us wanted to achieve during the day before going straight into the school for a full day of L2 online and freestyle. It was so much fun, and I can’t even begin to list how much we learnt. Several of us had our confidence improved by trying new things and several finally made some head way on tasks that had previously appeared impossible to do.

 

I would like to thank Alison for such a great couple of days – she really is fantastic and has the answer to EVRYTHING! I would also like to thank all of the students and spectators who came from far and wide to join in – not least Shelly from Savvy Scotland who took lots of pictures that I can’t wait to see once they are up on the Savvy Scotland website (I’ll post a link to it here once they are up), and Rachel who had quite lot to tackle with Big Ron, but did an admirable job. It was great to see how much Elaine and Felix and Sarah and Sandy have come on since March, and Ella finally got some lateral flexion out Shadow (Yay!) whilst Claire and Breeze looked beautiful together in the Freestyle riding. I was also delighted that this course put us in touch with Tamara Innes and her lovely horse Clive who has done exceedingly well teaching herself and her horse from the Success Series, and we look forward to some play days with her up North next year.

 

We have already booked dates for late April next year with Alison. We will do a Level 1 -2 day again on the Friday 23rd, but this will most likely be the only one that we organise next year so if you are keen to give it a go then please let me know as soon as possible and send a £60 deposit. There are only six places available on this day. You do not have to be a savvy club member, but it is highly recommended as Savvy Club gives you the DVD’s to help you get started as well as 25% off the equipment. At less than £15 a month for the family it is the best investment you will ever make in your horse.

The other two days are going to be Level 2 Freestyle riding patterns on the Saturday and then Level 3 Online and Liberty on the Sunday – can’t wait!!

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