What you will discover this week:

• How wild horses demonstrate personal responsibility
• What to focus on when you feel stuck
• How to find and use your own Personal Horsepower

‍Transcript for this weeks message:

Welcome to You Are Destined For Greatness. I'm Shane Jacob, founder of The Horsemanship Journey, and the creator of the Stable Living coaching program for teens and parents. In Stable Living, we use principles that can be seen in horses. And today I want to talk about the third principle, which is personal responsibility and to look at one way that horses demonstrate responsibility.

So, it goes like this. In the wild, horses live in groups or herds, okay. And since horses are preyed upon by a number of other species, being in a group offers the most protection and safety since the group will protect each other. They'll help to ward off or even fight off predators.

Now so in the group, from time-to-time members of the group, they'll break the rules of the community. So, what I mean by this is it's usually the younger horses, okay? They might get too rowdy or too rambunctious with the other horses. They might make too much noise. They might bring too much attention to the herd. They might be just running around disrupting the others, climbing on them, you know, just playing too much or whatever the thing is. You know, so on, okay?

So, when members of the group break the rules, the leaders, which are usually older mares, they'll run off the rule breakers. Okay, so they’ll chase them away, and they'll seclude them from the rest. They'll threaten them by baring their teeth, by biting them, by wheeling around and threatening to kick, or actually kicking them. They literally chase them away from the rest of the herd, and they won't let them be near the group or near or near the rest.

So, when the offenders, they find themselves alone, you know what they do? Okay so, let's just think about this for a minute. They can't go near the group without risking getting physically hurt. And so now they're at a high risk of being attacked by a predator. So, you know what they do? Here's what they don't do. They don't make a bunch of excuses. They don't complain that nobody ever told them the rules. They don't say the rules weren't fair. They don't sit and wish that some of the other horses would have stood up for them and been on their side, and they don't minimize their behavior They don't try to justify it. They don't do any of that.

Now, whether or not they have the capacity to think this way is beside the point. The point is that they don't do any of that powerless kind of thinking. What they do is they agree to the rules, right now. And as soon as they recognize that the danger they're in, their first reaction is to figure out what they can do. So what they do is, they go back to the edge of he herd. Now, they don't try to rejoin it just yet. They stay at a safe distance from the leaders, and they communicate that, “Hey, guys, I'm back in. I'm with you. I'm going to follow the rules.” They've humbled themselves .They're willing to abide by the rules and act like an upstanding member of the community.

And so how they communicate this is, they lower their heads just a few inches from the ground and they walk back and forth in a line, okay ,at a distance away. Okay, they just pace back and forth in a line with their head down, and then they also do this chewing and licking motion with their mouth even though they're not eating anything. And so what this does is, this communicates that they're apologetic and their willingness, that they have a willing attitude. This communicates that to the leaders and the rest of the group. And you know what the leaders and the rest of the group do? What they do is they let them right back in. And they forget it. They totally forget that it ever happened. They forgive and forget. And that's another story for another day.

So why am I telling you all this and what is it mean to you? Here's why. Okay. As soon as the horse that gets exiled finds that he or she has a problem. As soon as they realize that they're in danger, they act to remedy the situation. That's where their power is.

So, now here's a question for you. What if we, you and I, could train ourselves to react to every situation that we wanted to change with the same response as the horse in this scenario? What if, when we wanted a different outcome, our first reaction was to say or think, what can I do? Instead of, fixating on the myriad of excuses, other people, all the other circumstances, and all, you know, what can we blame for our current state, and so on? What if we looked right here and said, what can I do?

Time, all the time, energy and effort looking elsewhere, it just totally stops our progress and it leaves us feeling stuck and powerless. We call this habit our personal horsepower because this is where the power is, the power to progress. It's not from looking externally or anywhere else out there. I encourage you to find more of your personal horsepower by forming the habit of immediately focusing on what can you do when you want change.

Okay. You got this. Remember, You Are Destined For Greatness.

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