A Riding Program Of Your Own: Drifting Into Poor Management

There is more to be learned from my mistakes than from my successes. It is highly likely that anyone starting a program of riding and natural horsemanship will start small scale--likely with only one person doing all, or nearly all of the work.

That is how I operated for many years. The cost savings made the operation possible. It also caused me to make some poor decisions without even realizing that I was deciding anything.

The key to getting anything of a large scale done is to prioritize needs. There is nothing wrong with setting certain tasks well ahead of other tasks on a to do list. The problem comes in how one views that to do list.

One must look at preservation before growth. However, a program needs to be preserved while growing. The more the program grows the more there is to preserve. However, the number of hours in each day remains twenty four.

I began to see my most important tasks as pasture development to hold down costs, fence maintains to keep horses safe, and maintenance of riders in the program by keeping them interested.

Thee is nothing wrong with those priorities, per se. The problem is that there are many other things that needed attention, horse training, special program development, advertising, safety development, general up keep, publicity outside of advertising and paperwork.

One cannot give all of these tasks the attention they need. The result is that only the most important tasks receive sufficient attention.

That is not the problem. That is inevitable. Every single organization that has any innovation in it at all will have more tasks to do than resources to get them done. It is also inevitable that I would feel pressured to get more of these tasks done.

Again, that pressure was not the problem. The problem was more subtle and sinister. It was my subconscious reaction to that pressure. Without realizing it I came to believe that the top priorities must be done and that the others were not important.

There was never a time that I sat down and decided that developing a detailed safety program was not important. I never made that decision. But my defense mechanism was to come to only recognize the importance of the priorities that I could physically accomplish and to convince myself, without realizing that I was doing so, that the other things that I did not have time to do were not important.

That defense mechanism was the problem. It caused me to fail to accurately evaluate what needed to be done. There is a world of difference between "I cannot accomplish that right now" and "That is not important."

As we are converting to a non profit and the eyes, hands, and talents of others are coming into play I am finally in a position to evaluate priorities better. What I consider my top priorities have not changed. What I consider to be important priorities have radically changed.

As you develop your program don't slip slowly into the trap that I made for myself.

(These are two wonderful Corolla geldings that are eligible for adoption. Creed, the larger of the two has been ridden in the woods on many occasions. Rico is being trained by Abigail and is her first training effort. She is doing great and so is he. He recently had his first ride in the woods. For information about adopting these horses contact the Corolla Wild Horse Fund.)