Clear Communication

Often times, it does not occur to me that people want to have a conversation with me. If someone approaches me and says "Hi", I will smile back at them, respond with a quick "Hello" and be on my way. It is not that I intend to be rude or that I do not wish to speak to them, but simply that it passes straight over my head that they might want to speak to me.

Often introverts such as myself lack in their communication department, both speaking and with body language. I am often told that my face looks "strangely blank". What they mean by this is that my face is somehow not smiling and shouldn't be showing emotion (as there is no frown or smile indicator), but that my face is in fact full of emotion- I almost always have a very contented, sometimes so far as amused, look on my face. My horse Cherish is often misunderstood, as I am, for her lack of expression (both in facial and body language). This is not only a fault of the communicator, but also of the perceiver. Interestingly enough, extroverts tend to find it harder to find subtleties in body language (or so I have found) and introverts find it easier. Extroverts also rely more on facial and body expression, while introverts save the like for more extreme expression. Just today, I was in my "Computer Architecture" class, and we were taking apart the insides of computers and putting them back together. I knew that I had all the cables in the right place, but my computer was still not turning on. I got one of the upperclassmen (an extrovert) to help me. When we finally figured out what was wrong (the power button and USB drive cable was loose) he said, "Yes! Finally, we got it to work." I responded with a quiet "Yay, I'm so glad." He thought that my tone of voice meant that it was dry sarcasm, but I was actually beaming with excitement that I in fact had done it right, but that a cable was only loose. This extrovert had a much harder time seeing my excitement than my introverted teacher did, who chuckled at my face expression as he walked by.

If you are an extrovert, do you think you are misreading what your horses are trying to say to you? Do you think your horse is misreading what you are trying to say to them? This could be the very source of your problems, and actually often is- people so often have the communication off with their horse, and don't even realize that it is one of the most important aspects of horsemanship!