“How you do one thing is how you do anything.”

As my car crests over the hill, about two hundred horse trailers — some with a camper and some that are just 10 horse slants — glisten in the morning light. I’ve taken time off to be here, and my brain is buzzing with all the things I should be completing at work. It’s a flurry of to dos, problems to solve, recapping conversations. The speed in which these things are flicking around my head seems to be almost lightspeed. It’s safe to say that I am preoccupied. As someone who flourishes in the face of a challenge or a good problem to solve, it’s easy for those things to dominate my main train of thought.

All that disappears, not when I step out of my vehicle, not when I’m walking into the hollowed aisles of Watt Arena, not when I’m helping my friends, and trying to coordinate behind the scenes to help, but I raise my hand to pet a horse. It’s always a careful thing, that. I raise my hand, slowly, and give them the option to say hello. Horses, like people, aren’t always morning people and aren’t always excited about people. And today is their day, after all. They’re the star of the show, they’re nervous too. These animals, they’re on the same level as a professional athlete, and this could be considered their Olympics.?

I’m lucky enough to be friends with some of the top two year old trainers in this business. They have taken me in, allowed me to learn from them, trusted me to help on the days where the pressure is on. The opportunity is one that I don’t take lightly. It’s easy to think that these aisles are filled with the coarser, uneducated folk. They talk slow, some of them even have a beer in their hand at 10am, and they occasionally make jokes that so-called refined people wouldn’t. However, there’s an unmistakable smile on a trainer’s face as he moves to pet the animal he worked, taught, and slaved over for a year. For the trainer that I work with, these animals are the lifeblood of his family. Their devotion, work ethic, helps feed their family, pays the bills, ensures their survival. This day is a collection of a year of work and preparation, months of late nights of manual labor.

Dustin Gay and his family woke up at 5am to get to the Watt, and that was after going to bed at 1am, to haul all the horses here. The night before, they bathed, clipped, groomed, and worked all of their horses to get ready for this moment. I hold one of their horses so that Lesli, his wife, can pull the blankets off them. Heads turn. There’s suddenly a mob of buyers around us. The horse I’m holding, a sweet sorrel stud colt, rests his chin on my shoulder as I gently run a brush down his coat. He glistens like a copper penny while he presses his nose into my ear, hot breath down my neck. “He’s clearly personable,” Lesli says to the buyers. She’s done this before, she knows how to move, how to talk to people, how make the horses stand so that the buyers can get a good look at them. I’m moving in the background. I learned a long time ago to watch and duplicate. No one wants to tell someone what to do, so I watch and then try to move as she would to make her life easier.

Meanwhile, just down the lane, there is a commotion around another horse that’s balking in the hands of the groom. Horses of all types come here, the one they have in common is they’re the very best of the business. Here, you get to see what trainers have done the work. This boils up into a handful of things: how manageable are the horses, how slick and glossy are their coats, and most importantly: how well they can work a cow in that sale pen. I consider the horses that my friends brought here: they’re easy to handle. Maybe they’re a little quirky at times, but more so than not, they’ve got the temperment of someone who’s been there and done that. It’s a testament to their work. They’ve been hands on these animals, clearly not the “crash” work as I call it. You know the kind: the last minute, let’s do as much as I can last minute.?

That work translates into the warm up pen. I tend to step back, Dustin and Lesli are a well oiled team. My place is to be an extra set of hands. I watch Dustin warm up the horses. Easy circles, walk, trot, and lope. The arena is packed with horses getting warmed up. I see other people, their eyes drawn to the horse that Dustin is on. Other trainers are jerking on their horses around him, trying to have a mini-training session with them. Dustin, who’s been working steadily with them for the year, he’s just allowing them to be and warm up. The horses are better for it too.?

Horses are a lot like humans. I believe they were created to be our perfect complement. Unlike the dog that we mutated from wolves, bred to be subservient to us, horses are untouched. Each one requires work to gentle and trust us. They’re bred for traits they have that complement the work they do. Each one has a different personality, each one can feel everything we do. They’re capable of anger, frustration, hatred — but they’re also capable of trust, whole-heartedness, grit, selflessness, and love. They teach us lessons that what you put into a relationship is exactly what you get out. They teach us that boundaries and careful communication is the difference between a cast or a check. They teach us that forgiveness is possible, as well as a grudge.?

Great horsemen understand that. They default to the thinking that it’s not the horse's fault. They’re mastercraftsmen of “perfect conditions”. Inputs, like feed and the environment, can be the solution to some of the issues that arise with a horse. I was fortunate to be in the company of a great horseman most of my life, and raised by great horsemen, as I strived to be one as a teen. It’s a subconscious thought process that I go through when I am looking at why something happened the way it did. What incentivized it? What contributed to this outcome??

We, as humans, rarely take enough time to see the situation as the whole. We distill everything down to “this person didn’t do their job”. As a new executive that comes in as a change of leadership, they’re quick to see what person is “acting wrong” without examining the culture and environment. They’re quick to demand building trust with them instead of understanding that trust is best earned. As if the people you’re moving to step in to lead aren’t already weary of you. In the world I came from, coming in like that often earned you a cast. There’s no way to bully a 1200 pound animal like that.?

Yet, I find that in business, the same isn’t thought of. There are striking differences between my personal life and professional life. However, one leads into another. I’ve always been someone who lived by the mantra “how you do one thing is how you do anything”. It tends to boil down to the same principles as being a good horseman, because at the end of the day people and horses really aren’t that different. The understanding that each breed of horse requires a different touch, that even horses of different lineages require something different to encourage them to be peak performers. Imagine if we took that mindset into our relationships with people, if we spent the time a great horseman takes to understand their partners.?

There is so much to learn from the world and the people and problems they have around us. Sometimes to get our business goals achieved it requires us to step back and see the whole picture of the conditions we’ve created for the product and team members around us. As a Product Manager, it’s my job to analyze the results and try to solve the problems of people who use the product. I find that the lessons I’ve learned from trying to be a great horseman are the same as in Product.