Neil Dudley: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Straight from the Horse’s Mouth. And as in typical fashion, we’re going to get right into it. This episode is called Signals…Pullin’ on the Reins. So, I had a conversation with Ty and Butch Murray in one of the episodes a while back on the Cowboy Perspective. And one of the things that really stuck out to me – that was episode 20, by the way, if you want to go back, after you hear this, if you want to go back and listen to it, check out episode 20. Anyways, Ty just started talking about signals that you give a horse when you’re riding. Hey, what do you do when you want a horse stop? You pull back. What do you when-? Pull back on the reins. What do you do when you want a horse to slow down? Pull back on the reins. It turns out almost everything you do when communicating with a horse turns into pulling back on the reins. That is so similar to life. And I want you all to think about that. Like we’re going to play that little excerpt from the podcast here in a minute for you to listen to it in Ty and Butch’s words. I just challenge you to think about how many times in life are you pulling back on the reins with your kids, with your peers in the industry, with your employees, and they’re having to or they are being required to guess what you mean. All the time. I know I do it. So, how about let’s all consider and find the value in coming up with clear communication, not only with our horse, through our seat and our legs and good horsemanship, but also within our families, within our communities, within our businesses, within our peer group. People, everybody is so comfortable, so much more comfortable with each other when they understand what you’re looking for, what you’re expecting, what you would like to have from them, what you are going to consistently deliver to them, that leadership, that direction. I love you guys and gals out there listening. Thank you so much for paying attention to the Cowboy Perspective, this podcast, and take that thought, listen to what Ty and Butch had to say, just roll it around a little bit. Is there a place in your life where it would help you to think about pulling back on the reins a little less and communicating in a clear way. Here’s the excerpt from that conversation with Ty and Butch. Hope you enjoy it. Here we go.
Butch Murray: Of course, you know both our horses and we ride them with no bridals, and it’s a new technique.
Neil Dudley: What do you say to those people? I know they’re out there that say, well, they’re just trying to show off. They just want to ride them bridle-less so they can say they can do it.
Butch Murray: We just made a better deal for the horse. We don’t have a piece of iron in their mouth and we’re not on their face all the time. We don’t use tie-downs.
Ty Murray: Showing off is the last thing that I’m trying to do. And when you don’t have a bridal, you have to ride. You’ve got to give your horse a steady stream of information, and 90 some odd percent of the people you know, if you say, well, what do you do when you want your horse to stop? Well, I pull back. Okay. What do you do when you want him to back up? I pull back. Okay. Well, what do you do when you want him to slow down? I pull back. Well, what do you do when you want him to wait? I’ll pull back. What do you do when a cow’s about to get behind you? You pull back. I mean, it’s like take that away and you’ve got to figure out a different line of communication that the horse understands. And for me, my mentor Dennis Reese took me and took the bridle off and gave me a stick in each hand and he said, “Now go ride.” Well, you learn pretty quick how much you rely on pulling on your reins. You realize how little of information you’re giving your horse. And so, to me, I still like to ride bridle-less because every day that I do it, it makes me ride better, and I can operate every part of my horse through a subtle, steady stream of information that he’s not guessing wrong. He’s not filling in the blanks wrong. He knows what I want, and he’s able to willingly give it to me the way that he naturally has known how to do since he was a day old. We’re not asking them to do back flips. Everything we’re asking them to do they’ve known how to do their whole life.
Neil Dudley: Well, that’s good. I think it’s good insight. And it’s a good thing to think about. It’s not about anybody else really. It’s about what level do you want to be at?
Ty Murray: There’s not too many people that see us out here. We’re not doing it to show off. Ain’t nobody out here.
Neil Dudley: Sure. A hundred percent.
Butch Murray: But I do believe that when that bridal comes off, the truth begins.
Neil Dudley: Yeah. I guarantee you right now, if you told me to do it, I’d be nervous. And I mean, I’ve done- I had that one horse I used in the Cowboy Extreme Race. I could ride him bridle-less. He had the trust in me that was necessary. And we had that communication. So, I’ve experienced it. But I think you got to, it’s like Ty was just saying, I want to be better, but I’ve not been getting better for a while.
Butch Murray: You remember his name? And you remember why we named it?
Neil Dudley: Yeah. And that’s what- that one day is something I’ll never forget. Prior to then, it would have been whoops, bank, make him jump off into the water and hey, we did it. Now we’re going to have to do that same thing next time we come to the water.
Ty Murray: Or worse. Cause next time he goes I thought it was scary and he proved me right.
Neil Dudley: That’s right. Well, and what I learned that day was with a small amount of patience, five minutes in my life, I built trust a trust and a relationship with that horse. Well, and even y’all, I mean, that was five minutes that I value of our time together. And we hadn’t even mentioned Joy, but she’s about the same thing. I mean, Joy, I can teach you a lot about riding.
Ty Murray: She’s who we learned from.
Neil Dudley: If you don’t know who Joy is, that’s Butch’s wife and Ty’s mom, and she’s a cowgirl mentor of mine. We just don’t happen to have her in here telling us about it.
It occurs to me that I enjoy some real actionable things that can be done in order to improve my communication. So, I thought I’d give you guys and gals a few of those things that I use that I’ve found valuable to me. One of them is I’ve built a system or just a thought process in which when I’m in a group of people and I’m not getting the feedback or response or action that I feel like is blatantly obvious that I’m asking for, I immediately start thinking, okay, what am I doing here? How am I pulling back on the reins in a way that is confusing? There’s no way for somebody to interpret and know out of thin air what seems blatantly obvious to me. So, I immediately go audit those things. Am I being very clear to everyone what my expectations are or what my goals are in this scenario? I would say that helps me so much. If you find yourself kind of like, man, I am totally bumfuzzled by the fact that we keep getting this wrong in this team, I guarantee, if you’ll audit it for a minute, there is some you’re not giving- the team does not have clear direction, clear communication. So, there’s one thing that I use all the time. Another thing that is just working consistently with a group and finding out what their communication style is, what it is that they understand. Just like with a horse and pulling back on the reins, he’s having to guess a lot of things. Well, so here’s an example, like if you put your right leg on the horse, the first thing a horse’s innate instinct is to move into pressure. So, they’re first immediately moving into pressure. You could train a horse to, if you touch him with your right leg, to always move towards that, although that’s counterintuitive to my thought. So, in my mind, I want to touch him with my leg and have him move away. So, it’s a system of rewards. So, I touch him with my leg, he moves into me. I keep touching him. I touch him a little harder until he takes one move away, then I completely release. Pretty quick, he starts understanding, oh, when that leg touches me here, he’s wanting me to move away instead of into it, which is against my instinct. The same thing is so very true with people you’re working with, introverts, extroverts, all those different personality types that are within our organizations, pay close attention to those things. You will find that with just small recognitions in how people communicate and what they understand and how it kind of comes into their consciousness, you can make so much change and better, what I just call better life – everybody’s actually operating in a happy scenario, in a scenario in which they understand. So, take into consideration all those things. How do people communicate? How do they react to pressure? And realizing and recognizing when you’re not getting the results you want, that it could be quite possible that it’s only an issue with communication, unclear understanding. So, go, use those things, put them into, I guess, action within the things that you do in life. And I hope it certainly helps you.
I hope you guys found some value in this quick conversation. I’m going to be doing these Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, trying to nail down some specific things on topics for everyone so you get a little quicker listen, and if you want to get deeper, you can listen to these full episodes. Thanks everybody for listening.
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Now for your listening pleasure, a little Traversing the Trail from Mr. Byron Hill.