Kerang Pony Club

04/09/2026

03/09/2026

'On the bit' is about much more than your horse's head position. It refers to your horse's whole body and way of going.

03/09/2026

𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐑𝐢𝐬𝐤 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 – 𝐕𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧

Good coaching isn’t about removing every challenge, it’s about choosing the right challenge, at the right time, for the rider and horse in front of you.

Join us for Applying Risk Decisions, an interactive coach development session designed to put your risk assessment skills into practice.

Through realistic coaching scenarios, polls and discussion, we’ll explore how to:
-recognise when risk is changing
-decide when to Watch, Modify, Pause or Stop
-make proportionate coaching decisions
-respond when rider, horse, environment or activity factors change
-explain and recheck your decisions with confidence

This is about practice, not repetition. Applying the tools you already know when decisions need to be made in the moment.

📅 Monday 7 September
⏰7:30pm - 9:00pm
📍 Online
🎤 Facilitated by Rachael Edwards

Registrations via JustGo: https://pca.justgo.com/Workbench/i/r/EventsAndBookings/booking-details/E8D7FDCF2A762F4F5EC35CE111EA437D5B2285C5/

Good risk decisions are timely, calm and defensible. Come along and strengthen your decision-making as a coach.

01/09/2026

Earned Leadership - Becoming someone worth following😎

There is a quality that develops between a horse and human that I don't think we talk about enough.

Traditionally, we have called it *leadership*. And actually, leadership is a pretty good word for it. Unfortunately, it has accumulated so much baggage in the horse world that mentioning it can immediately summon arguments about dominance, being The Boss, and who, exactly, should be demanding respect from who...

So after considerable intellectual effort, I have solved this problem by putting another word in front of it.😆

*Earned leadership.*

Groundbreaking, I know.🙄

But the word *earned* matters because it reminds us that leadership isn't something you automatically possess because you own the horse or moved their feet first. It is a quality you have to consciously nurture, both in the horse's willingness to focus and follow you and in your own ability to be someone worth following.🤓

Imagine walking down a dark alley at midnight in the worst part of an unfamiliar city with someone calm, capable and streetwise whose judgement you trust.

You would probably stay close. You would let them make the decisions. If they said, "We're going this way", you'd go that way. Not because they had established dominance over you, but because you trusted their judgement.

And importantly, their confidence would make you feel more confident.

This is known as "trickle down confidence".🫶💪

Now walk down the same alley with someone who was hesitant and whispering, "Did you hear that? Should we run? OH GOD, WHAT WAS THAT?"😱

Same alley. Very different experience.

This is what I mean by earned leadership with a horse.

It develops when your horse learns, through experience, to focus on you, trust your judgement and defer to your decisions when they are uncertain. Instead of immediately feeling they have to take care of everything themselves, they increasingly look to you.

*Are we okay?*

And if you are genuinely okay, that can help them become okay too.

This is different from simply teaching a horse to understand your aids. A horse can know perfectly well what your leg and reins mean in the arena and still decide that your contribution is entirely irrelevant when the wind gets up, their friend disappears or the neighbour starts the lawn mower.😬

➡Understanding you is one thing. Looking to you when they aren't sure what to do is another.

And this quality has to be consciously nurtured.

Annoyingly, quite a lot of that work is on us.😬

We have to become better communicators and decision-makers. We need enough awareness to recognise when the horse is struggling, enough judgement to know when to persist or change the plan, and enough confidence to remain useful when things become difficult.

Because we cannot expect our horse to draw confidence from us if we have none to offer.

Fortunately, confidence is something we can build. It grows from competence. We learn, practise, improve our communication, make good decisions and appropriately challenge ourselves. We discover that we can handle situations that once felt difficult.

And the horse is doing much the same thing.

So you build earned leadership together. You start with clear communication and focus, then gradually stretch it into obstacles, distractions, new environments, wind, other horses leaving and all the perfectly ordinary events horses occasionally interpret as the opening scenes of the apocalypse.😏

But leadership can also be undermined. Become frightened and indecisive and the horse may decide it needs to take care of things itself. Become frustrated, aggressive or relentlessly perfectionistic and *you* become another source of tension.💥

So give yourselves successful experiences.

The horse becomes uncertain. They look to you. You remain calm enough to think. You communicate clearly. You make a good decision. They follow your guidance.

Everything turns out okay.

Then do it again.

You don't become your horse's leader because you own them, control them or declare yourself to be one.

➡You earn it by becoming someone worth following.

Collectable Advice 281/365. Please SHARE as it is this quality that many people are overlooking or self sabotaging themselves by not nurturing it. More details 💬⬇️

31/08/2026

The Great Obedience Scandal 🔥

I read and listen to plenty of questionable ideas about horses on social media. The interesting thing about my work is that I also get to see what happens when those ideas leave Instagram or Facebook, travel through a human being and eventually manifest in an actual horse.

There are plenty of ideas I can disagree with and move on from. This one I can't, because I am seeing what happens when caring people become frightened of teaching their horses clearly and consistently. I see the confusion, deteriorating behaviour and frightened humans trying desperately to be kinder while their horses unravel and become increasingly difficult to navigate.

So I am going to counter this one. Again.😎

First, a little background.

Apparently, teaching a horse to reliably respond to us has become morally suspicious. Reliable responding is now framed as obedience. But it gets worse, so bear with me. Obedience might diminish "agency". A horse responding correctly might merely be producing a "conditioned response", while resistance gets a philosophical promotion. The horse has said "No". Celebrate the No. Proof that the authentic horse remains gloriously intact.😎

This is where I ask people who come to work with me a rather ridiculous question.

➡How did you feel driving here today?

Did stopping at the red light make you feel oppressed? 🤨Did driving on the left fill you with simmering injustice? 🧐When you saw a GIVE WAY sign, did you think, I could comply, but how will anyone know I still have agency? 😳Did you occasionally cross onto the wrong side of the road just to reassure yourself that society hadn't conditioned away your authentic driving self?🤯

Oddly, nobody has.🤷‍♀️

Yet you were spectacularly *obedient*, if that's how we want to frame it, all the way here. You stopped, gave way, stayed in your lane and responded to arbitrary symbols exactly as you had been taught.😱

Good grief. *You've been conditioned.*😱

Except you don't experience it as oppression. You experience it as knowing how to drive. The rules are so well learned that you barely think about them. You understand how to navigate the system, and that competence gives you enormous freedom within it.🤔

That's the point.

Of course horses aren't humans, and I can't tell you exactly what a horse subjectively experiences when it responds to a learned signal. But neither can the person telling you that reliable responding represents some terrible erosion of the horse's agency.🙄

➡That's a human story being placed upon the horse.

What we do know is that horses are extraordinary learners and adapters. When we train them, we are teaching them how to navigate us. Halter pressure means something. Rein and leg signals mean something. Stop, go, wait, follow and load mean something. Teach those things well and the horse no longer has to keep guessing what the bloody road signs mean.

Now imagine the Australian government changing the road rules every few days. Monday, red means stop. Tuesday, stopping represents excessive compliance. Wednesday, you're encouraged to honour your authentic relationship with the intersection. Thursday, the old rules return because someone has just been cleaned up by a B-double.🫣

That isn't freedom. It's an unpredictable world, and it would be bloody stressful.

This is why I object so strongly to narratives that make caring people frightened of clarity and consistency. I have seen where this can end up. Compassionate language doesn't automatically produce compassionate or good consequences. An inconsistent human creates an incredibly confusing world for a horse.😕

And this is where I want to put a spotlight on the narrative itself.🔦

What happens when a training philosophy doesn't reliably produce the responses people need from their horses? You can examine the training, or you can construct a story that makes the unreliable response evidence of something more enlightened.🙄

Cue the semantic smoke machine.

Reliable responding becomes "obedience". Resistance becomes "agency". Refusal becomes a "No". An unintended behaviour becomes an "idea". Training that isn't producing reliable communication can suddenly be given a much more flattering interpretation.

Perhaps we've simply transcended obedience. 🎭

Maybe.

Or perhaps the training isn't very good when it meets reality.😎

That possibility matters, because if every poor outcome can be renamed enlightenment, we have created a philosophy remarkably good at protecting itself and remarkably poor at helping us recognise when horses and humans are struggling.

And no, I don't think that's automatically kinder, gentler or more thoughtful.

When an idea makes caring people feel guilty about providing clarity, while leaving horses trying to navigate an inconsistent human world, it can become cruel despite all the beautiful language surrounding it.

Teach your horse how to navigate you. ❤

Be clear, predictable and consistent. When your horse's response changes, investigate it. Consider pain, fear, confusion, physical difficulty and your own training, and change what you're doing when the evidence tells you to.

But don't let somebody else's narrative convince you that understanding is oppression or resistance is freedom.😎

Horses don't live inside our philosophical stories.

➡They live with the consequences of them.

And this is exactly what my upcoming *Project Reboot Challenge* is about: robust, thoughtful, systematic training that helps horses confidently navigate us, with no semantic smoke machine required. Details in 💬

Collectable Advice 280/365.
Please SHARE this. The best way to dismantle a narrative smokescreen is to help people see how it works. 🎭