Balancing the Exciting Breakthrough with the Boring Truth

Hello Hello. Welcome to The Balance Point, where I ponder life, horses, leadership, dogs and anything else that captures my attention. I’m Tessa, and I am glad you are here.

Today I want to talk about something when done well is… quite boring!  (did you know we are supposed to start these things with a hook… and apparently that’s not my strong point… boring does not equal hook… but stick with me here)

Because - Good horsemanship is boring.

Or ….  that is what it might look like from the outside.

There are no dramatic moments. No crowds holding their breath. No sudden explosive energy that somehow magically gets resolved in a flurry of movement and sweat. If you were watching from the fence, you might actually wonder if anything was happening at all. A hand lifts slightly. A horse shifts its jaw. A rider walks a quiet circle. Nothing to post about. Nothing that would stop anyone mid-scroll.

And yet, from the inside, it is the most extraordinary and exciting thing to feel and experience.

I want to sit with that paradox for a while today. Because I think it matters. Not just for how we train our horses and mules, but for how we understand what mastery actually looks like in any area of our lives. And what we might be missing when we go looking for the dramatic version of it.

AND…  I DO think we do go looking for the dramatic version. All of us. In the arena and far outside of it. And I think we have been doing it for a very long time.

I want to start with a little thought experiment. 

Imagine you are looking for a horse trainer. You have two options in front of you.

Trainer A fills stadiums. The clinics are electric. The crowd is cheering. There is a lot of dust and a lot of drama and it is genuinely impressive to watch. The horsemanship in the moment is skilled and fast and bold. And - just in case, there are ambulances parked outside. Not as a joke -- as a precaution. In fact, if you want to bring your horse to a month-long teacher certification with this trainer, you are advised to bring two horses. Because one might not make it through the first week sound. The waiting list to get into a clinic or a horse in training is long and the fees high.  

The horses that come out the other side? In my experience, and I have worked with more than a few of them, they are reactive. They are unpredictable. And they are lame.

Trainer B has a smaller following. A deeply dedicated one, but not a stadium. The sessions are quiet. Calm. Soft. There is no dust, no drama, nothing that would stop anyone mid-scroll. The horses are confident and willing and light. And the quality of horsemanship that comes from this work is, to anyone paying close attention, absolutely remarkable.  But to those not paying attention it looks boring like nothing is happening. 

Who do you choose?

If you are listening to me…I am guessing you said Trainer B, quiet, calm, and boring. And you would be right.

But here’s what we see... In the wider equestrian world, in the clinics that sell out and the social media followings that fill up and the names that become household words, we have overwhelmingly chosen Trainer A. We are Looking for the awesome excitement of ‘breakthroughs”

In different contexts in our lives we see this maybe subconscious choice in everything!  …. I came across a TED talk by management and leadership historian Martin Gutmann that had me sigh in relief. Because he is describing the exact same pattern -- not in the horse world, but in the world of human leadership. And his framing gave me language for something I have been observing my entire career.  I highly recommend you look up his TED talk - here's the link: https://youtu.be/DU06c7f9fzc?si=3uuhjpVIBdRM0bh-

Gutmann tells the story of two real polar explorers from the heroic age of polar exploration. Candidate A successfully achieved all four of the major polar goals -- the North Pole, the South Pole, the Northeast Passage, and the Northwest Passage -- and was the first person in history to accomplish three of those four. Every expedition he led was completed. Every team member came home. 

Candidate B led four expeditions to the Antarctic. Every single one resulted in failure, catastrophe, or death.

So… who do we hire?  Should be a no brainer… BUT…

Candidate A is the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. (never heard of him, you?)

Candidate B is Ernest Shackleton. (oh yeah.. Heard that name) And history has given Shackleton no fewer than twenty-six books celebrating his leadership qualities, while Amundsen has been largely forgotten.

Gutmann in his TED talk points out that the expeditions of Amundsen make for boring reading. Not because he was lucky. But because based on his deep knowledge of the environment, his careful and deliberate planning, and his thoughtful leadership in the field, he managed to reduce the problems his team encountered to an absolute minimum. Things went smoothly. People were prepared. Crises were avoided before they had a chance to develop. And there is simply not much of a story in that.

Shackleton, on the other hand, makes for extraordinary reading. The drama. The near-death. The heroic rescues. The man who kept his crew alive against impossible odds. That is a story. That is a legend. That is twenty-six books and an endless stream of documentary films.

Gutmann calls what we are doing the action fallacy. We confuse a good story with genuine excellence. We celebrate the person who manages the crisis brilliantly and overlook entirely the person who made sure there was no crisis to manage in the first place.

Trainer A is Shackleton. Trainer B is Amundsen.

Preparation before action. Not crisis management after the fact.

And once I had that framing I could not unsee it anywhere.

In the classical tradition, the French master Baucher gave us a phrase that I return to constantly. Preparation before action. Three words that carry an entire philosophy inside them. You do not ask for the thing until everything necessary to answer the thing is already in place. You do not set sail into the ice without knowing the ice. You do not ask for bend before the jaw can soften. You do not ask for collection before the horse understands each individual piece that collection requires.

Preparation before action.

Boring from the outside. Extraordinary from the inside.

This brings me to something that has been quietly working on me for a long time. Something that has nothing to do with horses and everything to do with them at the same time.

When I was a teenager, a little wild and full of wanting everything to be big and exciting and full of adventure, my best friend's father said something that landed on me like a thud.

“Simplify your life”

Three words. And I remember thinking... that sounds absolutely terrible. I did not want a simple life. I wanted a big life. A complicated, adventurous, full-to-the-brim life. Simple sounded like giving up. It sounded like shrinking. It sounded absolutely boring.

I have been thinking about those three words for decades now. Not constantly, but they surface. They come back to me at odd moments and I turn them over and look at them from a different angle. And what I have slowly, incrementally, not-in-one-dramatic-moment come to understand is that he was not talking about what I thought he was talking about at all.

Simple is not the opposite of exciting.

Simple is the opposite of foggy.

What he was pointing toward, I think, was clarity. Knowing what you are actually doing and why. Moving with intention rather than just motion. Stripping away the noise so that you can actually be present for what is happening, rather than just reacting to the volume of it.

Amundsen was simple. His expeditions were not small or timid or without adventure. They were extraordinarily demanding. But they were clear. Every piece was known. Every contingency was prepared for. Every team member understood their role. There was no fog. And because there was no fog, there was no crisis. And because there was no crisis, there was no legend.

And I am still arriving at what that friend's father meant. There was no single moment where it all clicked into place for me. There has been a quiet string of small realizations accumulating over years, each one adding a little more texture to those three words. I do not think I am finished arriving at them yet.

Which, I realize, is rather the point.

The understanding itself came in small steps - which brings me to Martha Beck…

Martha Beck is a Harvard-trained sociologist, life coach, and author whose work I have returned to again and again. In her book Finding Your Own North Star, she writes about two parts of ourselves that are constantly in conversation, and sometimes in conflict.

She calls them the essential self and the social self.

The essential self is the part of you that is most fundamentally you. It knows what brings you joy. It knows when something feels right and when something feels wrong. It does not care what things look like from the outside. It is the part of you that would stay in the barn all afternoon doing quiet, incremental work with a horse because something about it feels deeply alive, even if no one is watching and nothing looks impressive.

The social self is the part of you that has learned to navigate the world. It has absorbed the rules, the expectations, the cultural messages about what success is supposed to look like and how it is supposed to be achieved. It is the part of you that looks over at the crowd gathered around the round pen and thinks... I wonder if I should be doing something more like that. Something that looks like something.

Beck writes that most of us spend a significant portion of our lives letting the social self run the show, even when the essential self is quietly trying to get our attention.

The social self loves Shackleton. It loves the dramatic rescue, the visible transformation, the before and after that everyone can see. It wants evidence of progress that is undeniable, shareable, and fast.

The essential self, if you listen to it carefully, is far more comfortable in the quiet. It is the part of you that feels something profound happen when a horse offers its jaw just a little, and you sense the beginning of trust forming in real time. It is not looking for applause. It is looking for truth. It is the part of you that would have hired Amundsen.

Beck also writes about what she calls turtle steps. The idea that meaningful, lasting change does not happen in grand gestures or weekend breakthroughs. It happens in the smallest possible movements toward something real. One tiny step. And then another. So small that someone watching might not even register that anything is happening.

Preparation before action. Turtle steps. Simplify your life. Three different voices pointing at the same quiet truth.

I want to tell you about a student who came to me with a horse that was very, very braced through the neck and the jaw. Bending was simply not available to this horse. If you asked for a bend, you got resistance. A neck like a two-by-four. A jaw clamped shut. The whole front end of the horse locked against the ask.

Now, there are ways to try to address that which involve more pressure, more insistence, more drama. And sometimes people go down that road because, maybe that’s all they know or have seen, or they want results and they want them to look like something. They’ve been told and shown the Shackleton story. The heroic push through impossible resistance.

We did not go down that road.

We started by simply asking the jaw to move a little bit. Just a small release in the jaw when a hand was lifted. We did it from the ground first. Just that. Nothing else. When that was quiet and easy and understood, we moved to doing it at the halt, mounted. When that was quiet and easy and understood, we asked for it at the walk.

That was it. That is what the sessions looked like.

A hand. A jaw. A halt. A walk.

Boring.

Amundsen boring.

And then 10 minutes later, very slowly, we had softness through the neck. We had bend. Something that had been locked for who knows how long simply... opened.

My student called it a lightbulb moment. A breakthrough.

And they were right. It was a breakthrough. But here is what I want you to hear. There was nothing huge about how it happened. No dramatic confrontation. No moment the crowd would have cheered for. It was the quiet, inevitable result of every small piece being in place. The horse finally had all the parts of the answer. And when we asked, the answer was just... there.

That is preparation before action. That is what it looks and feels like in real time. Not heroic. Not dramatic. Just a jaw that softens because everything necessary for it to open had been quietly put in place.

Personally… That is what I live for.

Nuno Oliveira, one of the great masters of French Classical dressage, wrote something in Reflections on Equestrian Art that has stayed with me for years.

He observed that so many times riders attribute bad character to horses, when what is actually happening is that a certain work was started without sufficient preparation.

He went on to say that the good rider is not the one who, seeing resistance and serious difficulties appear in a new exercise, tries to conquer them at any price, sometimes using violence and brutality. 

I’ll Read that again slowly. And this time I want you to think about it in your life, not just horses.

The good rider, is the one who, on seeing resistance rise up, knows how to return to the beginning, to the preparatory exercises, until the flexibility and relaxation necessary to teach that exercise have been obtained.

Oliveira is talking about horses. But this is also the action fallacy that Gutmann is describing in his TED talk. The rider who pushes through resistance at any price is choosing the Shackleton path. The dramatic confrontation. The heroic conquest. And sometimes they get through it. But the ship is still lost somewhere underneath.

The good rider goes back. The good rider is Amundsen. The good rider returns to the preparatory exercises and builds what was missing before asking again. The Good rider is prepared.

How many times have you encountered resistance in yourself and tried to conquer it at any price? Pushed through the discomfort, forced the result, overrode the signal that something was not yet ready?

I have done it. I have pushed through my own resistance in ways I later recognized as a kind of self-directed force. Deciding I should be further along than I was. Deciding the foundation was solid enough when it was not. Deciding that what I needed was more willpower rather than more preparation.

And what I find, every time I am honest about it, is that the resistance was not the enemy. The resistance was information. There was a piece missing. And the answer was never to demand more. The answer was to go back and find what had been skipped.

That is not weakness. That is not timidity.

That is sophisticated horsemanship. And it is sophisticated living. And it looks, from the outside, absolutely boring.

Now I want to pause here and add something important. Because I do not want you to hear everything I have said so far and walk away thinking that struggle is always wrong. That any friction means go back. That the answer is always to make things easier.

That is not what I am saying. And if you listened to Episode 3 of The Balance Point, where we talked about balancing productive struggle and learning, you already know that I believe deeply in the value of struggle. That some struggle is not only inevitable but necessary. That working through something genuinely difficult is how real growth happens, for horses and for people.

So let me draw the distinction that matters most.

There is a productive struggle and there is an unproductive one. And the difference between them is not how hard things look from the outside. The difference is whether the pieces are there.  The planning and the preparation.

When the foundation is solid, when every individual piece has been taught and understood, and you begin to recombine those pieces into something more whole, there may be a moment of effort. A moment of reaching. The horse searches a little. There is something just at the edge of their current ability and they are working to find it. That is a productive struggle. You can feel it. There is searching in it but not confusion. There is effort but not panic. The horse is not lost. The horse is reaching. And that reaching, when the pieces are genuinely in place, is how the next level of understanding arrives.

That kind of struggle I welcome. That kind of struggle I will sit with and allow and sometimes even ask for. Because I know the foundation underneath it is real.

The unproductive struggle is something entirely different. It is what happens when you ask for the whole thing before the pieces exist. The horse is not reaching for something just beyond its grasp. The horse is completely lost. There is no foundation to reach from. And no amount of pushing through that confusion will produce genuine understanding. It will only produce a horse that has learned to endure.

Amundsen did not avoid all difficulty. His expeditions were extraordinarily demanding. But every difficulty his team encountered, they had the pieces to meet. The struggle was productive because the preparation was real. There was a foundation to work from even for challenges that were not fully anticipated. 

Shackleton's crew encountered difficulties for which they were not prepared. And no amount of heroism could fully make up for what had not been built in advance.

The art, and it is an art, is in reading the difference. A horse that is searching feels different from a horse that is lost. When I sense searching, I stay with it. When I sense confusion, I go back.

The struggle is only productive when the pieces are already there. That is the whole distinction. That is everything.

I want to bring this back to something I think is the real measure. The proof of whether the work was genuine.

Good training sticks.

What I mean is this. If your horse has time off, for whatever reason, and you come back to them weeks or months later, the training is still there. Maybe a little dusty. Maybe needing a gentle reminder. But the understanding is still there, because it was real. It lived in the horse. It was not dependent on the perfect conditions or your particular energy on a particular day. It was not a performance put on for the moment. It was genuine knowing, built piece by piece into the horse's own experience.

Amundsen's work stuck. The Northwest Passage was navigated. The South Pole was reached. The knowledge was real, built into the expedition so thoroughly that when the challenges came, as they always do, the team had what they needed to meet them.

That is what preparation before action actually produces. Not just a smooth day. A durable foundation. Something that is still there when conditions change.

And I think the same is true for us as human beings.

The growth that sticks is not the growth that happened in a weekend workshop when the energy was high and the facilitator was inspiring and you felt like a completely new person by Sunday afternoon. The growth that sticks is the growth that built itself into you slowly. The habit practiced until it was no longer a habit but simply who you are and what you do. The belief that shifted not in a dramatic moment but in a quiet accumulation of small choices made differently over a long stretch of time.

That is not exciting. It does not make for a good story at a dinner party. But it is real. And when conditions change, when life gets hard, when the inspired feeling has faded, it is still there.

Because it belongs to you now. Built in. Durable. Yours.

Martha Beck writes about this too. The essential self, she says, does not need perfect conditions to know what it knows. Its knowing is internal and durable. And the work of coming home to that essential self is quiet, incremental, and profoundly unglamorous.

Turtle steps. Preparation before action. Simplify your life.

All the way home.

So here is what I have come to believe, after many years of working with horses and mules and human beings, including myself - mostly myself.

We have been celebrating the wrong thing.

We celebrate the dramatic rescue and overlook the careful preparation that made rescue unnecessary. We celebrate the crisis managed brilliantly and forget entirely the quiet leader who made sure there was no crisis to manage. We celebrate the three-day transformation and scroll past the patient, incremental work that produces understanding so deep it never needs to be managed again.

Gutmann says we need to learn to celebrate those who mitigate rather than promote drama. And he is right. But I want to add something to that. I think we also need to learn to recognize and deeply value the profound internal experience of doing that quiet work. Because the person who will never make twenty-six leadership books, the person who avoids the crisis, who prepares before acting, who decomposes before recombining, who takes the turtle step when every cultural instinct says to make something happen...

That person is experiencing something extraordinary. Even if no one can see it.

A jaw softening. A neck releasing. An animal offering the next thing because every piece of the answer was already in place. No drama. No audience. No applause.

Just that quiet, profound feeling of genuine understanding between two beings. Of preparation meeting its moment. Of the boring truth arriving, right on time, exactly as intended.

The real breakthrough never looks like a breakthrough. It looks like nothing. And that nothing is everything.

Good horsemanship is boring. And if you are lucky enough to experience it from the inside, you will know that that kind of boring is the most exciting thing in the world.

Thank you for Reading!  I’m Tessa of Cohesive Horsemanship…  until next time, go be playful, and be curious. If this resonated with you SHARE IT… and leave me a review or send me a note!