Everything I needed to know about managing people, I learned from horses...

Now I am quite sure that there are no doubt other essays to be found on the 'net with either this exact title or something pretty durn close to it.  I don't care.  It sums up one of the most significant channels through which the Almighty worked in my life for many, many years.  I have blogged before about how much time I spent with my ponies as a kid and how God used a literal stable almost as an archetype of the incarnation for me, since, as a kid growing up in a Jewish home, it wasn't exactly like solid Christian teaching was available on tap for me.

So this one isn't about that. No, what this one is about is how so much of life, so much of ways to deal with human life/conflict/relational issues come right down to some of the same principles that I learned dealing with the equine species so many years ago. 

I'm not saying that one can literally have a verbal conversation with a horse the way you can with a human, but let's think about this one for a bit.  A horse is a big animal. A lot stronger than even the strongest human. If that pony doesn't want to do something, it ain't gonna do it. That simple.  So force is out. Apply this to dealing with those others in one's life that you desire to bring around to your way of doing things. Children. Spouses. Employers. Employees. Etc.  

So what happens with horses is that you recognize the fact that you really HAVE no control. The reality is that you don't. If the horse wants to, really, it can do anything it wants to. Nothing you do with that animal comes about because you really have any control at all. No, you relax. You build a partnership. You learn how to communicate your desires to that horse in a language that the horse can understand. You make the horse want to cooperate.  Does this make some degree of sense to you, even if you are not a horseperson??

It also has to be a two-way street though. Say you are riding along on a trail and there is something there that you do not see, but the horse does or senses some other way. Let's say a rattlesnake. There are also many, many cases of horses refusing to carry their rider across a body of water that the human believes to be perfectly safe for crossing. Later it is found out that the water was only deceptively calm, and was actually quite treacherous. Horses sense things that humans cannot. If the rider was not open to input from the horse, disaster would have followed. 

You also have to have built enough trust with that horse that it believes YOUR input when you tell it that walking past that barking dog or jumping over that fence really won't kill them. It works both ways. Sort of like with people. Including, and maybe most especially, kids.

When dealing with other people, how many times have any of you just tried to bulldoze your way on in there? Even if you were right, you may have won the battle but lost the war (or so the expression goes...).  Worse yet, you may have been so focused on what you were convinced was the right course of action, that you ignored anything valuable that the other person might have had to input into the situation.  I know I have. Particularly painful is when your own offspring rightly point out that you did not listen to their concerns. Ouch. Been there, done that. I know none of you have ever tried to force a teenager to do something that they really were determined not to do.. Even if you do succeed, chances are it very well may come back to bite you in the future. You reap what you sow. 

Forcing other people is almost always a very bad idea. There are, no doubt, devil's advocates out there eager to point out the obvious exceptions: criminals, addicts, wayward spouses and children, etc etc and so on down the line. Even then, while you may force compliance with an outer program, you just can't force a change in someone's inner landscape. You just can't. It won't work. You can't control them and the best you can hope for is to maybe influence them. Or at the very least keep yourself safe from them if they are dangerous.  Sounds exactly like the basics in getting along with horses and keeping yourself sane and in one piece whilst doing so...