If you're working with a horse that's cunning and known to run over people then you rarely want to lose eye contact with this horse. Sometimes when you look away for just a second he knows it's his chance to charge at you. But keeping eye contact helps minimize that possibility.

Although a horse's ears are part of plan. eyes are how horse interprets his world. The horse gladly desires to approach an object or person that has caused him pleasure. Likewise, he runs from objects or persons that cause him pain. (Pain could be a number of things like work, misuse of aids such as spurs, being talked to in an abrasive manner, etc.)

Lots of horse owners get discouraged with their horse because they develop bad habits. One particular habit is kicking. I once read a great book on horses and it said this about kicking:

If a horse kicks at a man and sees he inspired man with fear and makes him draw back, he will remember this and kick any man who goes near him whom he fears or has memory of displeasure with.

Note author said "...and see he inspired man with fear". The point is horse "saw" man was inspired with fear. The horse used one of his greatest tools...his eyes. If a man shows no fear and knows how to handle a kicker, horse will "see" he cannot inspire fear in man and be less apt to kick (although, if confirmed in habit of kicking, it may require several training sessions to eradicate this from horse's memory).

In short, eyes are mirror of horse's mind. Quiet eyes indicate quietness and sincerity. Quick and lively eye indicate vivacity. Restless eyes turning in all directions indicate suspicion and show horse is studying all around him and may perhaps be preparing some freak of self will. Turbid eyes indicate fear or anger.

There's a proverb that tells us not to trust horse that shows white of his eyes. Perhaps it's because white shows when he's looking sideways and he's intent on seizing moment when no attention is being paid for escape or attack.

I could go on about eyes but this hopefully gives you a great idea as to how important horse's eyes are. Make it a habit to continually watch horse's eyes. Learn what he is thinking by learning his eyes.

The first seven times she ran back. Each time we came back to barn we’d run more laps around hay stacks. I could tell she was getting tired. But eighth time I walked her away from hay stacks I noticed she went quite a ways before turning to go back.

When we went back again we ran more figure eights. Only this time I could tell we didn’t have to do too many. I walked her out and away from doing figure eights and I suddenly had a horse who decided that it was sooo much nicer going for a walk away from barn rather than doing a bunch of crummy ol’ figure eights. We had a nice ride that day and she was in no hurry to get home.

The last thing to do is this: Ride. Ride a lot. Don’t wait for weeks or months in between riding. Try to ride at least once per week for three or four hours. Preferably, try to ride at least twice a week for a few hours at a time. (Ideally, you should ride everyday. But that’s hard to do with today’s time constraints) Doing that your horse will get in his brain that you’re going to ride and he’s going to leave barn and there will be no argument. In fact, if you want to have a great horse biggest secret is this: Ride heck out him!

So if your horse is barn spoiled you can try doubling him to show you are in control. The next thing you can try is making wrong thing difficult and right thing easy. Make it dang hard for him to go wrong thing and very pleasant to do right thing. And lastly, ride your horse often. Two to three times a week if possible.