09/05/2026
Psych Saturday: The One Thing
This past weekend Justin and I offered a collaborative clinic with Dr. Catherine Wycoff of Kinetic Balance. Good riders, good horses, a real appetite to learn and improve. And more than one of them arrived looking for the same thing, though nobody said it in quite these words. They were looking for the key. The one change, the one understanding, the special something that would finally unlock their balance and their partnership with their horse. The secret, if we would just provide it for them.
I understand the hunger behind that search. I have felt it myself for most of my life and career. We want the lever. We want to believe that if we press here, the good stuff comes out there, reliably, every time. It would make the work so much cleaner. Find the one thing, learn the one thing, work the one thing, get the result.
The trouble is that every time I have gone looking for the one thing, it has dissolved in my hands. I would decide it was the seat, and then a rider with a rigid core and unsettled seat would get softness anyway. I would decide it was the hands, and then I would find a horse that strides steadily while his rider grabs with clenched fists and bouncing arms. I would decide it was the breath, and then I would find a horse who settled while her rider held her breath. Maybe because something in her carriage said she meant no harm. Whatever I crowned as the mechanism turned out to be one voice in a much larger chorus, and the chorus sang on without it. The thing I was after never rested on the single piece I had picked. It kept finding another way, because it was never resting on a single thing to begin with.
I think about that a lot. Not because any of those pieces fail to matter, they do, but because of how badly I wanted one of them to be the answer. That wanting is the thing to watch.
Balance and partnership are not produced by a mechanism. They emerge. They rise up out of the interaction of many systems running at once: the nervous system reading the room below awareness, the slower chemistry of stress and settling, the whole history each of us drags into the moment, the footing under our feet and the light in the sky and whether anyone slept. None of these is the cause. What we are chasing lives in the relationship between them, in the way they lean on and answer each other. And underneath all of it is something simpler than any of the parts: whether the rider and the horse feel safe enough to let go. Balance asks them to release, and they cannot release where they do not trust. The horse and rider are doing the same math, in their own bodies, at the same time.
There is a line I keep coming back to, a Sufi teaching that Donella Meadows uses in her book on systems: "You think that because you understand 'one' you must therefore understand 'two,' because one and one make two. But you must also understand 'and.'"
That is the whole thing, really. We keep studying this one and the other one. The nervous system. The seat. The theory of the week. And we keep skipping over the and, which is where the partnership actually happens.
I feel it most clearly on Revel. Revel is efficient to the bone, a horse who has done the math on effort and decided to spend as little of it as the situation truly requires. On a good morning he softens and powers up under me and the whole picture just tips into ease, and if you asked me what did it I could not honestly hand you the one thing. Was it my seat soft and following, or my breath energized, or the fact that the arena was empty, or full, or that we had a good ride yesterday and something is still carrying over, or that the wind picked up, or all of it folding together in a way I will never fully be able to name? I know it when it arrives. I cannot manufacture it by pulling a single lever, because there is no single lever. What I can do is make it safe enough that the energy and liveliness has room to show up.
This is the part athletes hate to hear too. Every performer wants the one tool, the one technique, the one thought that turns the painful pressure off. And there are useful tools, the way there are useful pieces in any settling. But nobody performs well because of one thing. They perform well when a whole set of conditions happens to line up, some of which they built on purpose over years and some of which just showed up that day. The pros are not the ones who found the mechanism. They are the ones who learned to tend the whole field so the odds of things lining up got better and better.
Which brings me back to the clinic. By the end of the weekend, something had shifted for those riders. You could see it, the horses rounder and softer, the riders quieter and more available. They had found what they came looking for. And here is the part I love: when I asked them what changed, most of them could not quite say. They reached for it and it slipped a little. It was the seat, but not only. It was the breath, but not only. It was Catherine's eye and Justin's feel and their own willingness and the horse meeting them halfway, all of it folding together into something none of them could point to and name. What they found was not a technique. It was the confidence to be fully themselves up there and still stay connected to the horse, and once that was in place the balance and the partnership came up on their own. They did not find the one thing. They found the and.
So when I stop chasing the mechanism, the work actually gets more honest. I stop looking for the button and start tending the conditions. I make the ground a little safer in a dozen small ways and I let the emergence do what emergence does. I get out of the fantasy that I control the outcome and into the humbler, truer job of shaping what the outcome grows out of.
There is real relief in that, once you stop grieving the lever you never had.
They came looking for the one thing. What they found was the ground the whole partnership grows out of, and no one can hand you the ground. ~ Paul
