Episode 154: Sarah Memmi Pt 1: A Good Guest

Sarah Memmi is a behavioral scientist. She teaches at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where she’s an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the College of Business. Her main area of research is how people pursue goals; how they handle conflicts between multiple goals, and how they manage their personal resources (time, money). She also teaches in the University of Louisville’s unique equine business program.

There are so many rabbit holes we could go down relating to Sarah’s professional work, but I am beginning with Sarah’s lifelong love of horses. I met Sarah twenty years ago when she was feeling in over her head with her young trakehner/TB homebred. We began there. Sarah’s situation at that time was one many people share. She kept her horses at home. She didn’t have a trailer so she couldn’t take her horse to a trainer for help. She had to figure out how to work with him on her own. We began with that part of her horse journey because it’s a situation many people find themselves in.

Her young horse became a super riding partner, but sadly Sarah lost him to colic when he was just eleven. So this opened another chapter in her life. She was in graduate school. She didn’t have the time or the resources to take on a new horse, but she wanted to stay connected to the horse world. I know from clinics that many people struggle to find situations where they feel that they fit in. Sarah has been wonderfully successful finding trainers she enjoys learning from. And she has had lots of opportunities not just to ride other people’s horses, but also to clicker train them. So clearly she’s doing a lot right and this is what I wanted to explore.

So many people get the door slammed in their faces when they try to talk about clicker training. Instead Sarah has been in invited to clicker train the horses she’s riding. Before we dive into questions centered around her research on goals, I wanted to begin here: what is she doing right that has brought her so many riding and training opportunities? This question is a great way to introduce you to Sarah and her work.