Mrs Brown – Jacqueline Vincent Author
I keep my horses at a farm with nineteen other horses, sixteen cows and a bull, three dogs, four cats and several chickens. They all live in semi-liberty, out for most of the time but with access to shelter, if needed. The owner of this almost paradise is Candy, a hardworking, valiant, wonderful human being. She believes in training or influencing animal (and human) behaviour by feel and had increased her client numbers so much that we never had a minute to chat.
Because of Covid, her classes have all but disappeared, but which has given us the opportunity to work with my youngster, Okupa, in the school.
Okupa came as a pair with Golosina, who I’ve backed and ridden with success. I only wanted one horse, but he had such a poor start to life I took him on as well. It hasn’t been easy.
The lessons with Okupa go as follows, calm, ask, pressure, and then release for him to think about how he handled my ask. It is an entire hour of tiny, quiet steps forward, under Candy’s instruction. He has difficulties, because of his past, of accepting pressure to do as I ask him without it descending into a boxing match, which he will win. Candy’s way of teaching allows us both to reflect on our decisions and how they made us feel. The higher the pressure, emotion levels, the worse he becomes. When I ask for a maneuver, with calm and without emotion, we succeed. But the window of opportunity to achieve is narrow, a nano-second too early or too late, and I experience failure. I work with calm to ask, low pressure levels and timing. However, each failure or success bring with it its own reward, an understanding I am moving forward with our training and my understanding of how Okupa works.
However, my dilemma is, in the writing side of my life I push, put on the pressure, keep up the pressure, write, edit, re-edit, publish, market …… I’ve been in groups where they expect this way of working, using mantras, a plethora of self-help books, do it quicker, faster, more efficient… You get the gist. I enter my author world and it’s like swimming with the tide, fast, furious and frantic. Afterwards, I feel a failure, unfulfilled and no closer to my goal of earning a living from writing. Overpowered by the next objectives, in my author journey, my small steps of success are squashed under the weight of expectations.
Conclusion
Do I use the ideas from my emotional intelligence work with the horses and apply to my writing? The journey will be slower, but I can give myself time for each step to be safely tucked into my store of knowledge before tackling the next one and learn to get the timing right. I’ll be so much happier in myself.
February’s Newsletter
This month, due to a second error on my part (not having a piece of learning secure in my knowledge store), nobody got to read my story about Bruno, our nearly adopted dog. It is a story of an opportunity that didn’t work out. I’ve posted it again this month, in the hope you will enjoy a short story about a wonderful, independent dog who decided we weren’t a good enough home for him.
Jacqueline P Vincent 
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