Horses do not need your homogeny
The truth about comparison, judgment, and the quiet courage to be yourself in the horse world.
We are told to watch this rider, copy that feel, use this system, adopt this timing, sit this way, hold this belief, ride like that person. Some of that is necessary. Skill is passed down through observation, instruction, and repetition.
But somewhere along the way, many riders stop learning from others and start disappearing into them.
We compare. We perform. We edit ourselves. We start trying to become more acceptable, more legible, more approved of, more like the kind of horse person we imagine other people will respect.
And then we wonder why we feel tense all the time.
Barbra Schulte explained to me the difference between confidence and judgment, and described the way the mind spirals when we feel watched or criticized. But what I heard underneath it was something even bigger: there is a difference between learning from people you admire and abandoning yourself in the process.
That difference matters.
Because the minute we leave ourselves, we become easy prey for the rest of it. For the negative self-talk. For the fear of what the clinician thinks. For the story that the better rider is the one in the next horse over. For the quiet humiliation of trying to progress at the exact pace, style, and expression of somebody else’s journey.
No wonder so many people feel lonely in barns full of horse people.
When Barbra said, “Do Barb, Do you” she didn’t mean reject instruction or refuse correction. She meant something much saner and much braver:
let yourself be yourself.
Let your learning be your learning. Let your path be your path. Stay with your own body, your own timing, your own horse, your own truth.
That is not complacency.
That is integrity.
The horse world has a lot of monkey-see-monkey-do in it. That can create technical sameness. It can even create temporary success.
But horses do not actually ask us to become replicas. They ask us to become honest.
They ask us to feel what is happening.
They ask us to tell the truth about it.
They ask us to respond from somewhere grounded rather than performative.
There is an enormous difference between being coached and being erased.
I think many riders know exactly what that feels like. You begin with love. Then, gradually, you become more concerned with how you are perceived around horses than with what is actually happening between you and the horse. You become hyper-aware of who is watching, who approves, who disapproves, who belongs more naturally, who seems more talented, who the trainer likes best.
The center of gravity moves outside of you.
And once that happens, your spirit gets quieter.
Barb said something else that felt important:
when we feel judged
and don’t know how to stay grounded,
we often rebound by judging other people.
We hand the pain right back. Hurt becomes criticism. Insecurity becomes blame. Vulnerability becomes posturing.
That is how disconnection multiplies in the horse world.
The antidote is not superiority. It is coming home to yourself. Quietly and lovingly.
That may mean breathing before you react. It may mean asking, what is actually my job here? It may mean owning a mistake without collapsing into shame.
It may mean letting someone misunderstand you without rearranging your soul to win them over.
It may simply mean this:
Do you.
Ride topless, ride bareback, ride solo, don’t ride at all. Wear sweatpants to the barn, spend thousands of dollars on a new pair of yellow dressage boots or say out loud an ambitious goal you’ve always had, but were too afraid to share, for fear of mockery.
Do the horse world a favor, and just do you.
Do you with humility.
Do you with rigor.
Do you with a willingness to learn.
But do not spend your one wild life trying to become someone else’s version of a worthy horse person.
The horse world doesn’t need your homogeny, your compliance, your assimilation. We’ve done all that, it didn’t work.
The horse world of today needs you to be an individual not a cog in a wheel.
Challenging the status quo, pushing against conformity, sitting back or speaking up. Asking questions. Saying no. Voting with your feet and standing up for your horse.
Horses don’t care for your conformity.
They are asking for presence.
They are asking for congruence.
They are asking for the version of you that is not split in five directions trying to earn someone else’s permission.
This is the permission slip to not look for the permission slip.
Because maybe confidence is not becoming untouchable. Maybe confidence is becoming un-abandonable.
That feels like a better goal. In riding, in life, and certainly in the horse world.
This piece grew out of my conversation with Barbra Schulte on the Dear Horse World podcast.
Just what I needed to read this morning.
Thank you SO very much 🩷🩷🐴🩷🩷