How Long Will it Take to Learn to Clicker Train my Horse?

You want to learn to clicker train your horse? Fantastic!

But exactly how long is that going to take?  You really want to go from feeling lost to feeling proficient in the shortest time possible.

It’s easy to get swept away by the Instagram highlight reel, wishing your horses could do the latest trending trick.  But the truth is, the few seconds of success we see on social media are the results of weeks or months of planning and hard work, and often years of trial and error perfected with a large variety of horses.

In his book “Outliers: The Story of Success”, Malcolm Gladwell insists that the key to achieving true expertise is a matter of practicing, for at least 10,000 hours. And further, the practice itself must be correct.

That’s the bad news.

The good new: in his 2013 TED talk, Josh Kaufman challenged this idea of 10,000 hours. He points out that 10,000 hours is the equivalent of 5 years of work at 40 hours per week (not exactly a timeframe most of us can commit to).  It’s not that we need 10,000 hours to learn something, and be pretty good at it, we need 10,000 hours to achieve expert-level, at the top of an ultra-competitive field.

Kaufman posed the question: How long does it take from the starting something and being grossly incompetent… …to being reasonably good?

His answer, based on a deep dive into cognitive and behavioral research: 20 hours.

That's right...just 20.

That’s about 3-4 hours a week, over 6 weeks; or 45 minutes a day for about a month.

And that, my friends, is achievable.

This is not to say that we need 20 hours to teach our horses a simple behavior.  We’re talking about the acquisition of a complex skills like learning a new language, learning to play the piano, or learning to train a horse in a whole new way.

The catch is that the 20 hours must be “deliberate practice.”  It’s not just fiddling around for 20 hours but practicing intelligently and efficiently.

According to Kaufman, there are four simple steps to rapid skill acquisition.

1. Deconstruct the Skill:  Decide exactly what you want to be able to do and then break it down into smaller and smaller pieces. Most skills are just bundles of other skills.  Focus on the ones that get you to your goal the fastest.
2. Learn to self-correct: Gather resources like books, videos, and courses. But don’t get bogged down with those resources and ultimately avoid practicing.  Learn just enough that you can go out and practice and self-correct as you practice.
3. Remove barriers to practice: Netflix binge anyone? Not having your tools organized, not having an environment set up to learn in, etc.
4. Practice for at least 20 hours: Realize you just need to get past the “frustration barrier”, the part where you suck and you know it.  If you pre-commit to practicing for at least 20 hours, you will be able to overcome this frustration barrier.

Of course, we've got you covered with the Click Chick Mini Course.  The course breaks things down in simple, bite sized chunks so that you can feel pretty darn good about clicker training your horse, to do pretty much anything, by the end of it.

But no matter what, plan on those 20 hours of deliberate practice and I bet you’ll be feeling pretty darn competent by the end of it.