How to Build Confidence in Your Horse

This is a great exercise to build balance because it gets you leaning out of position toward the barrel. It also makes you really focus on riding an exact path that will get you close enough to the barrel to drop off the cone without running into it. The horse learns to really pay attention to you and this builds his confidence in you and objects moving around on his back.
I took Jack one of my ranch horses through these exercises. Seeing all the objects in the gate was a really big deal for him. But what surprised me the most was that after making it through the gate Jack was even more nervous about the two tiny spinning fans on the ground it never even occurred to me that the fans would be an issue. It took me approximately 30 minutes to get Jack to walk through the two fans calmly and quietly without any tension. The method I used was approach and retreat asking Jack to move a bit closer each time then backing away and then moving closer again. Each time we would back up he would be a bit more confident to take a step forward the next time.
When I present my horse with challenges and obstacles like these I make sure Im in the mindset to build confidence in my horse as we complete them. That is why I came back to the fans many times over the half hour with Jack. For me it was not about the fans but about building his confidence so
that he could trust me when he might be leery of something. Our mindset is key. Go into challenges like these with a mindset that recognizes that it is not about the obstacle itself. There will be plenty of situations where the purpose will be real and there wont be extra time and that is why it is important to set up these situations when there is time. Creating artificial situations is a special time I dedicate to each horse to build him up so that when it is for real he will be ready to say Yes sir! How fast?