The past year I've started doing a horsemanship and barrel racing clinics. It's been a great experience being able to help people learn how to communicate a clearer picture to their equine partner and to help share the love of horsemanship to my students all the while helping them succeed in barrel racing. It's been rewarding and something that I love to do. Teaching has become a passion. At my clinics, I start out by doing a demonstration on one of my more solid horses so that I can paint a clear picture to my students what my end goal is. My demo horse has gone through these motions every day that I've saddled her up since she was two (she's now seven). It's easy for her and second nature. A foundation build on willing submission, she makes things look simple when they are not. Although it's valuable to visualize that end goal the demonstration doesn't show the rocks we climbed to get to that point. I get a lot of looks like "you make that look easy" when in fact in the beginning it wasn't. It didn't get that way over night and it's not going to stay that way without working at it every-single-day. We live in a world of instant gratification but the real world doesn't work that way.
I was doing a drill yesterday on my demo horse that should have been easy for her. For what she can do, it really should have been a cake walk but I'd never done this particular drill before on her. I thought, if only my students could see me now. It wasn't pretty. However as we chipped away and broke down the barriers of miscommunication, it did become "beautiful". I wished I could have had a video of that process to show my students that we all struggle, and not everything is piece of cake.
As proud of my mare as I am when we do these demonstrations, showing that we are working together as one and with willing submission; I was even more proud of her yesterday as we found holes in our foundation and we fixed them. Life isn't like Facebook and Instagram where all that is shown and thrown at us is rainbows and butterflies. If you look past social media you see the blood, the sweat, the tears, and the endless hours of dedication to hone your craft. You'll see the times that we take two steps back after taking just one step forward. You'll see those that are not willing to give up just because they had a set back or things didn't go their way. You'll see those fighting, working, striving to always get better and not always looking for an opportunity to post to their social media page how great life is. Life is hard, but keep working at it. Keep working towards your goal and know that those of us that are in the real world, we're right beside you - working with you, supporting you and here for you the whole way!
DON'T. GIVE. UP.
