Waiting for Something to Go Wrong

Progress with your horse improves.
Then it slips.
Then it improves again.

And no matter how careful or committed you are, it never quite settles.

This book explores a pattern many people live inside without realising it — a way of relating shaped by what has already happened and what might happen next.

Often, there was a reason.

A fall.
A scare.
A moment where everything changed.

After that, staying alert feels responsible. Thinking things through feels sensible. Replaying sessions, conversations, and small moments feels like learning. Preparing for what might go wrong feels like care.

But over time, something else begins to happen.

Attention drifts away from the present. The mind circles the past or scans the future. Even when things are going well, part of you is braced. Relief never fully lands.

And your horse feels it.

Waiting for Something to Go Wrong looks at why progress with some horses never stabilises — not as a training issue or a lack of effort, but as the result of a relationship organised around unresolved experience rather than what is happening now.

From the horse’s perspective, this creates a world that never quite settles. Learning happens through repetition, but it doesn’t integrate. Improvement appears, then fades. Confidence wavers. Vigilance becomes the baseline.

From the human perspective, the cycle is exhausting.

This book takes you inside that shared experience. It shows how living partly in the past or the future shapes timing, attention, and interaction — and why neither horse nor human can truly rest while this pattern remains unseen.

It also looks beyond the paddock, revealing how the same pattern often plays out in everyday life: conversations replayed over and over, moments analysed long after they’ve passed, a constant sense of needing to stay on top of things just in case.

Waiting for Something to Go Wrong is written for people who care deeply about their horses, who have done what they were taught, and who still sense that something in the relationship never fully arrives.

It doesn’t offer techniques or quick fixes. It offers recognition — of what has been shaping the relationship beneath the surface, why insight alone hasn’t been enough, and why real change requires support rather than more self-management.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in a cycle of improvement and regression —
If you’re tired of feeling alert even when nothing is wrong —
If you sense that both you and your horse are living with more tension than either of you deserves —

this book will help you see why.

And once you see it, the relationship can finally begin to settle.