How My First Horsemanship Clinic Changed My Life

26 years ago, we were living on 10 acres with a 14x80’ trailer house. When we moved in, it was a fixer upper. We added a few pens and barns to make it functional. I fixed up one of our neighbor’s arenas and rented it out to train my horses. I remember one particular day where I told myself I wasn’t good enough. My training was rough that day, and I finally decided that if I was going to do this for a living, I had to get better. I saw an ad for an Advanced Horsemanship Clinic in the Western Horseman magazine, and I told my wife, Bridget, that I wanted to go. The tuition for this clinic was around a $1,000, and at the time, we were living off of what we made day to day. It was a huge expense for me, a huge sacrifice for my wife, and a big commitment on my part. But, I had enough confidence in myself to learn and earn the money back. So, I took a leap of faith and invested in myself. Although the clinician was about 15 years older than me, our journeys were very parallel to one another. At one point during the clinic, I remember asking him when he started doing clinics. He told me that he was about my age. The biggest thing I took away from this clinic was that I was on the right track. As I look back on my training business, that clinic was one of the major turning points in my career. When I was starting out in my training business, it was hard to envision the possibility of having a 6-figure training business. Fast-forward 30 years, and that’s exactly where we are today. I often wondered why it took so long to get to the point where I felt like I was “making it.” But, I finally realized that I just had to put my time in. I had to go through enough life experience so that I would have something valuable to share. Something I’ve realized about self-development is that it never ends. No matter if you have been in business for 30+ years, you still have to work at it every day to make it the best it can be. If I get to a stage where I feel like I’ve reached my maximum potential, that’s when I start going backwards. Every day, I have the opportunity to learn something new. Every day, I have the opportunity to get 1% better. The biggest factor in horsemanship is continuing to make yourself better. As your feel, timing and balance improves, your horse’s performance will continue get better. Over the years, I’ve ran into a few serial clinic-goers—those people who go to numerous clinics a year and gain all the knowledge, but when it comes to the application of that knowledge, they fall short. Now, I’m not discrediting the ambition to gather knowledge. I think it is extremely valuable to soak up as much information as you can. But, you are not going to optimize the value of that knowledge if you don’t apply it. You always hear the saying, “knowledge is power;” but knowledge is only powerful if you apply that knowledge and apply it correctly. Through application, you gain experience. You do not gain experience from simply gathering the knowledge. The value is in the experience.