Listening to the Horse with Warwick Schiller

A few years ago I fully believed I had this whole horse training thing figured out. I had won big reining competitions was traveling internationally to teach clinics and was able to help clients with their training goals. I had no idea that I was missing one major keylistening to the horse.
Then along came a horse named Sherlock. My wife had bought Sherlock to show for the upcoming season he was an amazing athlete but had some odd behaviors that I wanted to unravel.
Changing Techniques
If a horse has an issue I usually go back to the very beginning and retrain them from the start ensuring each step along the way is good before continuing. As I began working through the process I found that Sherlock was more shut down than any other horse I had encountered before. He was quite obedient but I could tell his heart wasnt in it. Hed do the work but would always pretend to be in other places. He was holding backalmost frozen. His tenseness did not result in explosive behavior instead he would retract inside himself. None of the things I tried seemed to relax his tension.

Sherlock is the main reason I began to look outside of my established methods of training to find different ways of working with horses that didnt cause them to shut down. To give him a different perspective on being asked to do things I began using clicker training.
However he still knew it was training and didnt want any part of it. Clicker training was still me asking for something and expecting some sort of outcome. After I had given clicker training a break I read some articles about how small facial expressions and head movements can tell us how our horses are feeling. It turns out the tiniest

movements have a large mental association and to better gauge how your horse is feeling on the inside you must be keenly aware of what they are doing on the outside. This requires listening to the horse.
Listening Breakthrough
Soon after reading about these microexpressions I was doing a clinic in Texas. In the morning group there was a nineyearold mustang who had an issue with bolting under saddle. During the groundwork portion of the clinic he started to block out his owner with his head whenever she walked down beside him trying to get him to step over behind.
Usually I would