Pat and Linda

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while and it is dedicated to Pat and Linda Parelli, who have inspired me and guided me on a day to day basis in the last 12 months.
First of all, I want to say that at the age of 46, I have never before been inclined to follow someone else program. When I home-schooled my 3 children, I wrote my own curriculum and now that I have become a high school teacher, I still write a lot of my own material. In brief, I am not a follower and Parelli is not my latest fad.
As I said in a previous blog I discovered Parelli by chance and got to play with some Parelli horses last year in the UK. It is a day I will never forget and from then on I wanted the horses in my life to have that look in their face.
Back in Australia, I started buying the home study program and studying in earnest.
By day, I play with my horse and by night I watch Parelli DVDs. Obsessed? yes, absolutely! I have a lot of things on my side, but time is not one of them and I want to become a Parelli professional before I come of retirement age!

Education has been my passion for nearly two decades and never before I have come across teaching material of such high standard. I have acquired quite an extensive collection of Parelli videos, from the old VHS and to the latest pattern series with everything in between. It gets better and better, thanks to the relentless efforts of Linda, my favorite teacher!
Not only the teaching material is brilliant but the customer service through the Savvy Club and now through Parelli Connect is unequal.
So, I spend a couple of hours with Pat and Linda on a daily basis and they have become part of my life. They have given me so much that I don't even know where to start.

Pat has given me the courage to live my dreams and to believe in myself. He gives me my daily dose of Pat wisdom. When I face a problem with a horse, I can play in my head a number of scenario from the demos horses that Pat has shared with us over the years and think, OK what would Pat do now? I don't say I always get it right but now I can forgive myself my mistakes and learn from them rather than beating myself up.
Linda is a gifted teacher. I can watch a DVD one day with one of her task and if my horse is ready we can be doing it the next day. I love the way she gets all teary at times because I am like that. I love her enthusiasm when her students succeed. I love how when things don't quite work out she can laugh. I can deny that she has become a role model.

What is so special about Pat and Linda is that they can share with us their humanity. Even now that they have become stars, it is not all glamor and Hollywood. Pat can talk about Caton, his son, and share his grand daughter's first canter or the loss of a special horse. Linda blogs about her successes and set back. This has given me so much faith and courage in what could be achieved by "normal' people.
So I wanted to say thank you to those two beautiful people for the huge amount of work they put into helping us becoming better human for our horses. Thank you for never loosing hope that we can make the world a better place. I truly believe we are! The only place to start changing the world is in our everyday life and this is what we, students of Parelli are doing, thanks to Pat and Linda and their fantastic team.