What is Warwick Schiller's background in horsemanship?

Warwick Schiller's horsemanship background spans competitive reining, natural horsemanship instruction, and a more recent focus on the emotional and psychological dimensions of horse training that represents a significant departure from both of his earlier phases. He grew up in Australia where horses were part of everyday rural life, developing his initial horsemanship skills in a practical western context before discovering the natural horsemanship movement and incorporating its principles into his work. His competitive reining career gave him deep experience with the specific demands of developing horses to a high performance standard — the stops, spins, circles, and lead changes of reining require a level of athletic development and training precision that many natural horsemanship practitioners do not develop — and this competitive background distinguishes him from practitioners whose horsemanship has been primarily relational and groundwork-focused without the high-performance demands of competition training. His early instructional career drew on both his competitive reining background and the natural horsemanship principles he had integrated, producing a teaching approach that was both performance-oriented and philosophically grounded in the working-with-the-horse's-nature principles of the natural horsemanship tradition. The evolution in his thinking that began publicly around 2017 drew on a wide range of influences beyond the horsemanship tradition itself — including Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory, trauma-informed therapy concepts, mindfulness practices, and equine behavioral science research — and produced a teaching approach that is significantly less technique-focused and significantly more concerned with the horse's emotional state and the quality of the horse-human relationship than either his reining competition background or his earlier natural horsemanship instruction had been.