ACTHA Monthly | April 2015 | 45
When you learn to listen to yourself, to trust your instincts and then take the right steps, things will change for the better because you’ll learn how to manage your fear and overcome it. Staying safe is your responsibility, no one else’s.
Treat Yourself like a Horse
When we learn how to get horses over their fear, we can use the same strategies to manage ourselves. If you’ve been studying Parelli, you know that the best strategy to use with a fearful horse is retreat. Retreat, retreat, retreat. The greater the fear, the more you need to retreat; when the adrenaline goes down, you can advance again. We call this respecting thresholds, versus crashing over them.
You’ve probably felt a threshold before but not realized what it meant, like when you are taking your horse away from the barn. All of a sudden he stops dead and won’t go further. He starts to fight against you and becomes obsessed about getting back to the barn. People call this “barn sour” and sometimes punish the horse for it, forcing him to move forward, but he’s really “barn sweet.” He’s drawn to the
barn because that’s where
he feels safe. Every time
you crash the horse over
this threshold, his
self-confidence and
trust in you deteriorates,
until one day he goes
literally berserk,
as if to say, “How
much of a fight do
I have to put up
before you
believe me?
I am terrified.”
Instead of forcing your horse over the threshold, retreat. Turn around and walk back to the barn, and when he starts breathing and relaxing again, head out, but this time with more sensitivity. You are feeling for the smallest signs of reluctance, which usually occur well before the big threshold you first noticed. When you feel it, slow down, stop, or turn back again. If you keep doing this, approaching and then retreating from the threshold, all of a sudden your horse volunteers to go over it without any encouragement from you.
To overcome your fear, you have to listen to what your brain is telling you, respond to your instincts and then use the same strategy of retreat and re-approach to regain your self-confidence. It’s amazing what happens when you do this—your adrenaline drops, the tension goes away, and pretty soon you feel self-confidence rising. In Part 2 of this article series, I’ll give you some situational examples.
(continued)
Linda Parelli