Skittles teaches me to lower phases

I spent an hour or so with Skittles on Monday. The last time I worked with her (sadly, over 2 weeks ago), I started wondering if it was always going to take so long for her to settle down and move from right-brained to left-brained. I've been doing tons of retreat retreat retreat, assuming that if she's afraid, I need to retreat. Anyway, long story short, instead of retreating last time, I upped my energy to match hers and started getting more firm with asking her to yield. And if she wanted to back up, then OK, let's back up a LOT and QUICKLY. Or if she wanted to go sideways, then let's go sideways LOTS and QUICKLY. And guess what? She calmed down almost instantly. Lowered head, lots of licking and chewing.

On Monday, I started with that again if she felt like being her usual freaky self. And she was, so we repeated what we did last time and it worked again. This isn't to say she still didn't go right-brained here and there after that, but it was less frequent and for less time. Amy suggested this might be "left-brained fear".... I wonder if there is such a thing, because it makes sense... since as long as she acted like that I wasn't asking anything of her until she settled (which she never seemed to want to do) .... hmmmm.....

Anyway, becoming more assertive and firm right at the start seems to really establish me as the leader in her eyes and she gets left-brained MUCH faster.

After I had her attention we worked on refining the 7 games, and added in obstacles. One thing I often forget with Skittles is that it takes WAY less ask for her than for any of my other horses. She's SO sensitive that when I start waiving my stick around I might as well be shouting through a bullhorn; too much noise. I finger-waggle is all she needs. So once I have her jumping out of her skin from shouting at her with the stick, I remember, "Right, this is Skittles, LOWER THE PHASES!" I still held the stick in my hand, but mostly kept it lowered unless she ignored my phase 1 cues (for the quick 2-3-4, right?)

The attached video clip (I just figured out how to do this!!) shows me working on the driving game through pylons with her. This is just after I realized I was shouting, but just before we had it perfected with just lifting my finger. After about the 4th time through, all I had to do was point my finger at her head to drive her away, and just take one step back to draw her toward me. Very nice! And lots of licking and chewing. My son took the video, so it's not a complete circuit of the pylons, but right at the very end you can see me pointing my finger at her head to go on the far side of the next pylon.