“Sometimes the decisions we make (with) our heart and not our heads… are the ones that change the course of our lives in the way that they’re meant to. In a way that we never could have imagined for ourselves.”
This moment from my conversation with Noelle Floyd is the one that hit me the hardest.
It was near the end of our podcast recording and was honestly kind of a sleeper of a moment, but for some reason I was left turning her words over in my head for days after.
I think it’s because it fights against my quite logical nature. I know many horse people who are practical, logical, no-nonsense folks like myself, where something as silly as ‘listening to your heart’ feels like it belongs on a painted wooden sign in someone’s living room.
But when I look at the decisions I’ve made in the past few years, I think my heart (or instinct, or gut) has had a louder voice in my decision-making than it did in my younger years. At some indeterminable moment in the midst of moving my horses to my own farm, having little kids, and stepping away from my full-time career in equestrian media, the advice of simply ‘writing out a pro/con list’ for every decision no longer felt sufficient. If I felt a tug in one direction or another, I started to make note of it.
This shift in heart/head balance is also probably the reason why I’ve had a massive hurricane of inner turmoil accompanying every life decision I’ve made since age 30. If I couldn’t rationalize my decision to a stranger on the street, with them nodding along and saying, ‘That makes sense!’, it felt like an invalid or simply stupid way to initiate changes in my life.
Listen to the Horse Person x Dear Horse World collab episode, Live & Unscripted, here.
“Just because you make a decision with your heart doesn’t mean it feels good,” I replied to Noelle.
Because truly, the big life decisions that we discussed in this episode together did not feel good. They felt contradictory and uncertain.
It reminds me of the decisions we make for our horses all the time, the ones that we just know are what our horse needs: scratching from a class when you just have a sinking feeling it isn’t going to go well, moving to a barn that is more expensive and a further drive because you get a better feeling around that trainer, or simply deciding to hack that day instead of flat or jump because your heart—or your horse’s—needs it.
That’s because listening to input besides just our logical brain (like what our horse’s body is telling us about how they’re feeling or how we’re riding them) has a great deal of value when it comes to making choices that take into account all the un-writeable, un-listable factors.
In so many ways, my job in media is to be a professional listener. And yet, I’m just learning to listen to myself.
This episode is proudly supported by WeRideTogether, a nonprofit organization created to cast light upon the endemic issue of sexual abuse in youth and amateur sports. Their mission is to make the youth and amateur sport environment safer for all athletes. To access the blog post mentioned in this episode, click here.
This episode is also supported by Nikovian—equestrian riding apparel for home or for shows that feels and performs like luxury, but without the luxury price tag. Use code horseperson15 at checkout for 15% off your purchase.