10/03/2026
Success exists on a scale of our own measurement.
No one but you and your horse can truly define what it looks like, how it should feel, or the path it takes to get there. Those answers don’t live on a scoreboard or in a judge’s comment sheet. I think they reside in the quiet, evolving conversation between rider, horse, and partnership.
When we step outside the narrow frame of competition and begin to look at success more holistically, our understanding of it begins to shift. It becomes less rigid, less performative, and far more meaningful!
Success, and the way we measure it, evolves as we do.
It’s easy, dangerously so to reduce success to numbers like percentages, placings, ribbons, rankings. While those things certainly have their place (I’m not above enjoying a shiny ribbon like the next rider), they are only one small piece of a much larger picture.
For me, the most honest measure of success exists within the container of these things.
How close am I to feeling harmony within myself?
Is my mind working with my body rather than arguing with it?
How close is my horse to feeling harmony, not just in training, but in the quiet hours of their everyday life?
When we come together, does a sense of harmony exist between us?
Or are we merely negotiating a polite disagreement?
The real question becomes, can I synthesize all of these things, the mental, the physical, the relational, into the way I define and pursue success?
Because when harmony exists within the rider, within the horse, and within the partnership something remarkable happens. The work begins to feel less like control and more like conversation.
The accolades of a winning or well-scoring test is wonderful, they’re the cherry on top.
But they’re not the whole damn cake!
And frankly, if the cake itself isn’t good, the cherry isn’t saving it in my humble opinion.
Pictured - (4yo Almazaan DaVinci taking each day as it comes )
