Organization
While it is important to be organized physically, to have everything in its place and to have a schedule to follow, it is also important to be organized mentally in our training. 🧠
⭐ Knowing where we are going next in our training and how we plan to get there is one of the most important things we can do. ⭐
It can be fun to go out and see what our horse has in mind, to see what he wants to do and is going to be good at and go from there. Letting our horse lead us can be one of the most rewarding things we can do.
But.
While it is important to keep play as an integral part of training and let the horse shine in the areas he is skilled and willing, without a clear plan in mind even this can become stressful.
If we enter each training session with a clear goal in mind we can help steer our horse, and ourselves, cleanly without clicking behaviors we hadn’t intended. It can be great to be able to capture a behavior when offered unexpectedly, it can also be very confusing to our horse if we start trying to shape more than one behavior at a time.
Before going out to work it can be helpful to have an end goal in mind and a shaping plan to reach that goal. A list of behaviors we need to teach and the order they need to be taught in in order to build the end behavior. We should have an idea of the full training plan even if we only plan to work on the first step so we are prepared for any leaps in learning the horse accomplishes and not left wondering what to do next.
If our training plan isn’t working out the way we had planned it can be more beneficial to stop and take a break to reorganize instead of pushing onward in a haphazard manner trying to force it to work.
For organized training we need:
✅ A clear, well defined end goal
✅ A plan to reach that goal
✅ One step at a time
✅ One behavior at a time
✅ To retreat and rethink is better than clinging to a plan that isn’t working
Being organized in training can be eassy as long as we remember these simple guidelines.
I love this one good job