Graduation

We all graduated from this course and got our diplomas. Everyone had their private talk with Rob and then we had cake. It has been an outstanding three weeks and my horsemanship has grown by heaps. I have met amazing people that I look forward to seeing down the road. It has given me a great insight to what the Parelli program is all about. It all makes so much sense now. I recommend this course to anyone who really wants to be great with horses. It takes some stamina but what it gives you in return is priceless. The Parelli program was born from the colt start process. Another layer has been pealed off and there will be many more to come. However, I'm leaning back to enjoy my own personal journey on this ship we so dearly call Horse-Man-Ship.  

Never ending self improvement

Hand over day

And it's pouring down rain!! The only day of rain since I got here and it had to be during this day?
Berin had put out a speaker and wrapped around a plastic bag for the rain. And just to spice it up they had put another big trailer and car on the playground. The horses were more then excited and the humans were nervous! The owners showed up and all of them were wearing big rain clothes and umbrellas. Talk about a real test of the friendly game!! We started on the ground and Berin guided us through every exercise we had been working on. The rain never stopped during the all day. We were all soaked to the teeth. Despite the circumstances everybody did a great job!

Prepare for the possible, the probable and the inevitable. 

Day 13

One more day before the hand over day. Rob took us out on the playground and we trotted and cantered around the place. Preparation is everything. Getting a little bit nervous about tomorrow. I keep on thinking I have forgot something. Going through the checklist and everything seems to be there. I'm talking behavior wise! However my horse is a real star and I will be sad putting her on the trailer tomorrow. Like Rob says, the hardest part about working with horses is to give them back to the owner. I will have to try to get used to that feeling.

Slow and right beats fast and wrong

Day 12

Continuing with mounting. Follow the rail and indirect and direct rein. It's beautiful weather every day and we need to put sunscreen all the time to not get burned up by the sun. If this is the Australian winter they don't have a lot to complain about! :)

Expect a lot accept a little

Day 11

Monday morning and we are in the week of reinforcement. We repeated the same patterns that we learned last week. My horse is a star and I really start to like her. She reminds me a lot about my own horse back home.

Trust that they respond but be ready to correct, not one more than the other

Sunday

Started with the squeeze game to come up next to me to help me mount her. She got the concept with me on the left side but had problem understanding the game on the other side. I made sure it wasn't me who solved the puzzle for her and just set it up and waited. Finally she got it on both sides. She wasn't at all grumpy today, maybe because I didn't have my saddle. I will find that out tomorrow.

Set it up for success

Saturday

This weekend I have two goals. To get her deeper in the pond and to have her accepting me mounting her. Today she offered to go in the pond on the 45" line. After that big effort I took her to the shower and we played friendly game with the hose. She starts to get the hang of it and is no longer afraid.

Isolate, Separate and Recombine

Day 10

Last day of week two. My horse had bad mounting today and pinned her ears and tried to bite and kick me. I thought it was me being less smooth than what she needed but I spoke to Rob about it and he thought it was her attitude about the whole thing that needed changing. Again, we are not preparing the colt for us but for the customer. So the horses has to learn to have some tolerance. As long as the horse is not scared he should consider it as extreme friendly game. By the end of the day we mounted again and started to do some guiding with the indirect and direct rein.

Attitude of justice is effective

Day 9

Rob showed us in a demo how you can spice up the squeeze game and to set it up for the horse to solve the puzzle instead of us. He demonstrated how to be particular without being critical. In the afternoon we repeated the pattern and mounted up in the round pen again. Huge difference in the horses (and humans)! Rob had us moving along as a unit and the horses were in much more harmony. Great day!

The process never looks like the product

Day 8

My horse greeted me this morning. We are starting to get a strong relationship and she looks for me to go do something. We played in the playground with the saddles on and kept checking our pre flight checks really thoroughly to make sure we had not overlooked anything. In the afternoon, we went in the round pen and mounted our horses. This was it. You can never be to sure about how they will react. Will the preparation be enough that you have put in them or not? Rob moved the herd around and we all got a closer look at how the horses were feeling, being in the middle of everything! All the humans were pretty much on their toes and we tried our best singing a song or whistle to make our muscles relax. All we were supposed to do was just being a passenger. This exercise was an emotional roller coaster. One second being terrified to the next singing along and laughing with the others. The horses calmed down and so did the humans and we all ended the ride on a happy note.

Pressure motivates and the release teaches

Day 7

Continued with our progression. We are now able to direct our horses in the rodeer without upsetting them. Going from walk to a trot to a canter. Great progress with my horse. Played in the playground with the saddle on. She wasn't bothered by it at all. Jumping up and down, climbing, squeezing through etc. It seems like she has solved her issues with having something tied to her back. I try to keep up with her tempo in the playground and make each task more and more interesting for her. She is doing lot's of progression with it. By the end of the day some of us mounted up on the horses inside the round corral.

Be the minister of YES, not the ambassador of NO!

Day 6

Great demo's from Berin on hoof prep and how to use trees to your benefit. We moved further on the skeleton from accept the human to accept the saddle. We continued where we ended last friday with acceptance of the saddle. In order to establish a good pattern we again turned the horses loose with the saddles in the end. To my big surprise my horse didn't buck! Maybe the tarp exercise was exactly what that colt needed to solve the puzzle.

Time  Quality  Price

- pick any two

Sunday

Took it very easy to make sure to not bore my horse. Repeated the same patterns as before again with lot's of friendly game. It's good this game because it's the only one you can't over do and yet it's the one we don't do enough of. So lot's and lot's of friendly. Everytime I present an obstacle I challenge her with something new. This is appreciated by her busy mind and she's such a clever horse and can solve the puzzle very quickly. We had a big breakthrough with the tarp. She licked and chewed and finally turned loose. We'll see tomorrow if this helped her with the acceptance of the saddle or not.

Horses often forgives but never forgets.

Saturday

Day off but with horse time. Continued building with what we had played with last week. Pond, trailer, carwash, tarp etc. Everything starts to fall in place. I found my horse has problems with the tarp in zone 3 (how interesting!) so I tried to help her get her confidence back. Lot's of approach and retreat. It was better by the end of the session but she hasn't turned completely loose yet. I wonder if this can be the key to why she was bucking with the bareback pad.

You are preparing the horse for the customer, not for yourself

Day 5

Last day of the week. Friendly game is really paying off. My horse greats me at the gate and wants to go do something interesting. Slowly we can start to be more of a partner with leadership. We took out the saddles and just had them on and took them off again. Approach and retreat. We also jumped up and hanged on our horses. Everybody was doing very well. The colts will have a positive feeling of how the week ended and that's what they will remember on Monday morning when we go back to the saddles.

It's not what the horse does in his body, it's how he feels doing it that is important!

Day 4

Repeating the same pattern as before. Still emphasizing on Friendly game. Continued to explore the playground and help the colt wherever it had difficulties. We tried all kinds of obstacles such as the pond. It's amazing how much they are offering us if we just give them a little bit of time. And when they offer it, we need to take it right away otherwise they loose interest in us. We turned our horses loose in the round pen with bareback pads on and my horse bucked a lot! Gave me lots to think about how I can better prepare her for the saddle. This is going to be my horse for the rest of the course so if I don't want to be bucked off I better find a way for her to solve that puzzle. As seen on the photo below this horse has got more than one card to play up her sleeve. ;)

The better you are at the finish the better you are at the start.

Day 3

Another day of great learning. Continued playing with the herd and the colts are working as a unit more and more. They experiment to find their places to see what's working for them as a group. In the afternoon we headed out to the playground. From the rodeer it's the horse who did catch us so I got a colt I had never played with. We got more into the subject of playing the seven games without playing the seven games and had a strong focus on Friendly game. Rob had us put our bareback pads everywhere on the playground so we could stroll around and suddenly turn up by a pad and check it out. When playing with colts the window of opportunities can be very small in the beginning. We need to keep in mind that we need to get a start that we can build on and not try to perfect something right away.

The colt should not even know it has been started, it should just have happened to him.

Day 2

More playing with rodeer and catching game. The horses were much calmer today. We learnt the importance of being ready and go ahead directly when the colt gives a green signal. A colt can loose interest quickly so easily. We are starting to see all the fine signals the horses gives us. In the afternoon we got to play with the colt who had chose to be caught by us and progress the Friendly game with them. My colt was unsettled because she was looking for her buddy and felt lost in the big playground. After a while she started to connect with me and lower her head much more. Rob had us go through some checkpoints by the end of the session to see what we had got. We all had fine results!

Some horses need to find relaxation in motion before they can find relaxation in standstill.

Day 1

Was great! We had a lot of learning and got to handle the colts for the first time. We made a circle around all the colts (which is called Rodeer) and played the catching game with the colts. Our main instructor is Rob McAuliffe and assisting him is Berin McFarlain. They are doing a great job so far. We learnt the importance of looking at what the colt needs to build a strong relationship before asking him to learn stuff.

We are 15 students and there are 16 colts. 

During these three weeks we will go through Pat's colt start skeleton which is:

Accept the human

Accept the saddle

Accept the rider

Accept the bit

Check in Parelli Colt Start Course Australia

Getting excited, today is my first day of the Colt start course!
Everything is packed and I'm ready to go in my new sports car ;)
My saddle and other horse stuff got stuck in customs, hopefully I will get it delivered by next week.

Many new faces to get to know in a short time. We are 15 people in this course.

The surrounding is very beautiful.

Retour en France

Depuis qu'on est rentré j'ai l'impression d'avoir acquis beaucoup de savoirs. Juliette est devenue super sensible (ou c'est moi qui fait plus attention à mon énergie?) et elle a commencé à offrir le changement de pied plusieurs fois. Vraiment top! Je vais préparer pour filmer le prochain niveau (4).

Savvy Summit

Quelle expérience !

Pendant trois jours on a vu des performances énormes. Pleins d'informations et on a encore appris des choses très importantes. J'ai hâte de rentrer pour jouer avec Juliette !