Along for the ride: Actively DO

by Robyn Schiller

Robyn is the wife of horse (and people) trainer Warwick Schiller. She invites you to join her as she journeys through her life as trainer’s wife, mother, businesswoman and Internationally competitive rider.

Warwick got a PM the other day from a friend.  This friend was concerned about another friend that was having trouble with her horse.  The horse was becoming “dangerous” – biting people, kicking, you know, things that aren’t cool!

She complained that she had sought advice from Warwick and he had only told her to “watch the videos”.  Which isn’t exactly what we would have said, but sometimes people don’t want to hear that the answer is going through the steps on the videos that reside in the online video library and would be too hard to answer in an email.

The online video library started as Warwick trying to help as many people as possible.  There are only so many horses you can ride and lessons you can give in a day – limitations if you will as to how many people you can physically help with their horses.  However, virtually, those limits don’t exist.  A person can video how to train a horse from the ground up and make it available to literally millions of people!  A person can show in a video what is possible with horses by capturing the process and the results they get with the horses they’ve owned, trained and helped.  Then they can give you a step by step process to get there – a roadmap!  This is exactly what Warwick has done.

The results that you see are the culmination of a successful process.  They don’t just Happen.  Unfortunately, there isn’t magic fairy dust that we sprinkle over them and POOF – the problem is gone, the horse is trained. The results come about when you “Actively Do” the things you need to do!  I love the explanation of “Actively Doing” that Jane Pike shared with us at the Cultivating Confidence Workshop.  Jane explained what Actively Doing was when she recounted her hypnotherapy training.  She was partnered up with someone and they were practicing processes.  Jane was feeling like it wasn’t quite working and so she took her instructor aside and apologized.  She said, “I don’t feel it’s working.”   The instructor told her that it wasn’t working because she was not Actively DOING the things she was supposed to be.  Perhaps, like a lot of us, she was waiting for the thing to be done to her.  Once she started Actively Doing what she was supposed to (the process), she was successful.

Proven processes work but you have to Actively Do them – pretty much the same whether it’s training your horse, learning a new skill yourself, cooking dinner or tying your shoe. This was a big lightbulb for me when Jane talked about it.  Your success will be dependent on your participation in the process.  If you half ass it, you’ll probably get half assed results.  If you ACTIVELY DO it, then you can achieve anything!

As a tangent to this, a word of caution:  Make sure that any process you follow or advice that you take is coming from a credible source.  When I say credible, I mean make sure you know what the results of their process look like before you jump in and that in your eyes the process is something you want to achieve as well.  You wouldn’t have someone build you a house if you hadn’t seen examples of the houses they’d built before.