Well, That Really Didn’t Go Like I Planned

“Well, that really didn’t go like I planned.”

That seems to be a common refrain lately—at least in the circles I’ve been running in. And sometimes that’s exactly what it feels like: a circle. I catch my breath, summon my courage, and off I go again, only to eventually arrive back at some version of the same thought: Well…that really didn’t go like I drew it up in my head. That wasn’t the outcome I had in mind. That wasn’t the progress I pictured. That certainly wasn’t how this was supposed to go.

I remember feeling this vividly last July during our second annual Leadership Through Presence immersive experience, hosted on a beautiful ranch in Cameron, Montana. In the interest of progressing Wishbone, my mustang, I trailered him to the immersion. I figured the road trip and ranch work would be good for him—new country, new experiences, new opportunities to build trust. He’s also my primary coaching partner, and I couldn’t imagine hosting an equine experience without him there. Perhaps that makes what we do a little different from a traditional weekend horse clinic. I don’t have a deep string of seasoned horses selected to perfectly demonstrate that day’s curriculum. I show up with the horses I actually have. More often than not, they are in the various stages of their own growth and development. They have questions. They have trust we are still building. They have things we are working through together. That puts me in a position of vulnerability rather than choreographed outcome. What participants witness is real-time relationship—connection and trust being built one repetition at a time.

By day three, the plan seemed simple enough. Trailer the horses about a mile and a half down the road, unload, and move some cows from one pasture to another…Wishbone had other plans. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely surprising. I’ve noticed three things that tend to activate his fight-or-flight response: crowding or channeling, confined spaces, and separation from the herd he has accepted as his own. I sometimes wonder how much of that reaches back to his capture and containment as a young mustang. I can’t know exactly what story he carries from those experiences. I can only pay attention to what he shows me now. And that morning, in front of our staff and every participant at the retreat, Wishbone brought the full weight of whatever that story was to the trailer.

I felt the vulnerability of it immediately.

And then came my ego.

Why did you bring him?

You’re supposed to be leading this thing.

Everyone is watching.

An hour passed. I circled, asked, offered, released, waited, and supported Wishbone until I was approaching my own mental exhaustion. He was tired too. At that point, I wasn’t looking for the outcome I had imagined anymore. I was simply looking for an honest place where we could get a win. One more time, Wishbone approached the trailer. He stretched his nose through the doorway and smelled the inside. That was enough. That was our win. I turned toward the ranch manager, Luke, and with whatever voice I had left, croaked, “Load them all up and take them down to the pasture to move the cows. I’ll stay here with him.”

Luke understood Wishbone and me and what was happening between us even if no one else fully did. He nodded and turned. One by one, everyone loaded up. Then they drove away.

I sank onto the floor of the empty trailer, Wishbone still standing outside, regarding me from the safety of the distance he had chosen, his nose occasionally reaching toward the doorway. I watched every person and every horse in the retreat disappear down the driveway.

There goes our retreat, Wishbone.

At the end of the drive, red trailer lights glowed through the dust kicked up by the tires.

Red like the Marlboros I would have smoked if I’d had them.

Red like my embarrassment.

Red like my anger.

Red like my blood.

Red like my heart that loved this horse too much to give up on him.

Opinions be damned. Hell, my own opinion of myself be damned.

So what was the point of all that? It’s a fair question. And an uncomfortable one.

The closer I am to the center of my own story, the harder that question becomes to answer clearly. Because when I put myself squarely in the center, I can very easily become the victim of the circumstances surrounding me.  The timing was wrong. There were too many people watching. Wishbone had baggage. I was under pressure. We had somewhere to be. I can stack every uncontrollable circumstance neatly in a row until I’ve built an invisible wall every bit as insurmountable to me as the trailer doorway seemed to be for Wishbone.

Poor me.

This is what I’ve come to think of as the Life Happens To Me position.

Sometimes life happens to me and it feels wonderful. Sometimes it happens to me and it hurts like hell. Either way, my sense of agency becomes dependent upon circumstance. I become someone experiencing the story rather than someone participating in my relationship with it. I know this position well. I still find myself there. And I don’t think it is inherently good or bad. Sometimes we genuinely have little or no control over what happens. The danger comes when To Me becomes the only place from which we know how to experience life. Because beneath it can live a limiting belief:

I cannot find my own agency inside this experience.

But what if there is another way to think?

Another way to feel?

Another way to be?

What if the horses—and the herd itself—can help us experience something beyond Life Happens To Me?

What if To Me can become:

Life Happens For Me.

It is a subtle shift in language, but an enormous shift in possibility. Because if life can happen for me, then perhaps adversity and triumph are not opposites in the way I once believed them to be. Both can contain something worth receiving. Both can bear fruit if I am willing to become curious about what the moment is offering rather than remaining consumed by whether it matched the picture I had drawn beforehand. Maybe Wishbone refusing to load wasn't the interruption to the lesson. Maybe it was the lesson.

Over the next few posts, I want to explore this progression more deeply—the upward spiral from Life Happens To Me toward Life Happens For Me.

And then farther still:

Life Happens With Me.

And eventually:

Life Happens Through Me.

I hope you’ll walk along as we explore what each of those ways of being might reveal.

But for now…

I’ve got a horse to load.

Still Here,
Darin