Monty Roberts - Horse Sense for People

HORSE SENSE

FOR PEOPLE

MONTY ROBERTS

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollins Publishers as Join-Up: Horse Sense for People in 2000

Copyright © Monty Roberts 2000, 2001

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780006531616

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007381869

Version: 2016-02-26

To those thousands of people who have come to me and said “You must give us the human version of the concept of Join-Up. ”

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Forewords

One JOIN-UP: THE JOURNEY

A STORY: The Mustang Mare

How to Achieve Join-Up

Join-Up: The Journey

Join-Up in the Workplace

A CORPORATE EXPERIENCE: Paradyne

A CORPORATE EXPERIENCE: Transit Mix

Two COMMUNICATION

Father and Son

Discovering the Language of Equus

Body Language

A STORY: Cadillac

A STORY: Reading Each Other

The Round Pen

Why We Need Join-Up

Imprinting Our Young

A STORY: Barlet

Three AGAINST VIOLENCE

The Road to Columbine

Violence Through the Generations

A STORY: PB

Four TRUST

What We Achieve Through Join-Up

A STORY: Blushing ET

A STORY: Tina

A CORPORATE EXPERIENCE: CSX and Tropicana

A STORY: Betrayal

Five RESPECT

A STORY: Brownie

Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Learning

The Blackboard System

A STORY: The Trouble with Harry

A STORY: Where Do I Sign?

Six THE GOOD PARENT

Infants

Spare the Rod

A STORY: The Water Glass

A STORY: There Are No Back Doors in Life

A STORY: Margaret’s Chore Chart

A STORY: The Boy with Baggage

Seven CHOICE

Greg Ward

A STORY: Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover

Crawford Hall

The Muckers’ Story

Eight CHANGE

The Art of Listening

Slow Is Fast

A CORPORATE EXPERIENCE: Change and the Nature of Leadership

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Monty Roberts’s Ideas to Live By

From Horses to Humans

CONCLUSION

Simplicity

The Power of Gentleness

Appendices

Corporations That Have Visited Flag Is Up Farms

Blackboards

For Further Information

About the Publisher

It took almost my business lifetime to begin to understand the tremendous power that can be leveraged when people’s individualism, creativity and wisdom are unleashed.

In recent years there has been a growing appreciation of enlightened forms of leadership that seek to engage, involve and inspire, as opposed to the long-standing practices of “direct and control.”

Meeting Monty Roberts and absorbing his philosophy was a really magical moment for me—I am inspired by his beliefs and impressed by his actions. He clearly demonstrates that kindness and respect for the horse are superior to the traditional breaking of the animal’s spirit. Monty’s notion that the teacher (or leader) must create an environment in which the student can learn and grow is simple, direct and honest—it fit perfectly with a style of leadership that I have been experimenting with since the early eighties.

Monty Roberts certainly listens to horses but, in my humble opinion, he delivers a powerful message to people and, in particular, people at all levels of leadership. What he achieves with a horse is a metaphor for a style of management—employees will produce exceptional results if they are treated with dignity, respect and honesty.

In the world of organizations and business we make the mistake of putting people in boxes and limiting their abilities and creativity—we need to find a means of changing the way people think about themselves, their jobs and how they work as individuals and in teams. I suggest you couldn’t start anywhere better than this book.

CLIVE WARRILOW

Volkswagen North America

CEO and President

I am not usually to be found kicking up the sawdust of a riding ring, especially if it means taking a long drive to get there. My encounters with horses have been limited to having them step on my feet on hot summer camp mornings nearly forty years ago. As an adult, I look at them as not much more than a one-horse power motorcycle with a mind for unpredictability. I once spent a ludicrous amount of money to ride a horse named “Cheesehead” while I looked, dry-mouthed, down a thousand-foot drop in Yosemite National Park convinced that my mount was more interested in biting the rear end of the horse in front of me than concentrating on his footing. I have never grasped why so many people, including gaggles of little girls, have such a big thing for these creatures of tonnage that can decide to run like a demented rabbit just because a piece of paper blows across the trail.

So again, I wonder why I am standing in sawdust while people with big shiny belt buckles, jeans and pointy boots mill around me. The loudspeakers are playing full orchestral renditions of “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Tumbling Tumble Weeds.” With my nondescript beige pants (khakis?) and T-shirt I must look out of place. I am also too fat to ride horses. I’m surrounded by opposites, hundreds of gangly men and tiny women. Like the horse they appear to love so deeply, they are a different species.

Oddly enough we are all here to see the only other person in the place who doesn’t look like he ever rides a horse, Monty Roberts. I’m here to see a man who deciphered the horse’s natural language, Equus. By demonstrating its application he is spreading the word about how to rid the world of outmoded concepts about the violent domination of horses. I rather suspect he has simply invented a way to convince a horse that it is in its best interest to allow itself to be ridden. Sure, he is kind of a Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey of the horse world, but I would just as soon watch that kind of thing on PBS.

Why am I here? Why has his best-selling book The Man Who Listens to Horses been read by millions of people like me who would just as soon never deal with a horse? The music stops and Monty walks into a circular metal fenced ring. He looks like a London cabby. This is the man who was a child prodigy, a wonder rider. Arguably he knows more about horses than any other person on this earth. His eyes are pale and full of life; yet ironically he is completely color-blind. At sixty-one he has the clarity and cadence of voice of a thirty-year-old. He’s not wearing a cowboy hat. There’s no denim, just a nondescript jacket.

This is the man who listens to horses. For his first act, he takes a horse that has never been ridden. He communicates with it by using a fascinating body language, all the while talking on a wireless to a hushed crowd. The horse moves nervously around the ring while he allows it, he tells us, to go the usual distance it would if a predator were trying to chase it down. Monty freely admits that he is the predator and gently induces a little anxiety that puts the horse into a trotting flight around the ring. Then Monty does his magic.