Ep. 10 On the thrills and spills of putting words on feelings.

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast 10. In the previous podcast, I introduced you to the idea of an elite rider has a great ride and a new feeling that they want to teach their favourite student. And we're going from their right brain experience to them needing to put this into language, which is their left brain. The student hears the language again, that's left brain, and, and has to interpret that language somehow into a feeling. And we ask the question how much slippage occurs in this process? And I think came out with the idea that quite a lot of slippage can occur, especially in that original translation of the feeling into words, where the do X, which presupposes A, B, C, D and all down the Alphabet, which the student might not have, or, or the do nothing going. It's just a case of sitting there, just sit there, which really means I don't smell it anymore, I don't feel it anymore. To me, it's a nothing. There's massive slippage in that part of the procedure and a fair amount of slippage too, between what somebody says as they say the words and what the receiver hears and what they do with that language. The receiver then attempts to make a feeling out of the words. And I reckon the success rate on this is rarely any more than 20%, and that would be on a good day with everything working well. But my story about the rider who felt like a meringue really hinted at the answer to this, because if we can somehow lead and manoeuvre the student into the new right feeling, we deal with her reservations about feeling weird. We find ways to say it, we go hang hands on, we lead her out of her old way, feed some new information into her nervous system to begin to find a new way. And then we start to refine the language for that. And the real key comes when she comes up with her own language. Just like the rider who told me, I feel like a meringue. We then have a word or a phrase which is like a trigger word, which, which is the marker for a particular feeling in her body, which will not get confused with any other feeling. When it's the coach's word, it can get confused in many, many ways. But when the students come up with the word, we have a real right brain to left brain link up, which will anchor and establish just the right pattern we want. So during this stage of the rider beginning her 10,000 repetitions, being consciously competent, the coach is there in the arena supervising her as she get it, lose it, get it, lose it, get it, lose it. It's kind of like playing a game of hunt the thimble, which was a game from childhood parties in my generation where some adults in the room would tell you you were getting hotter or colder or hotter or colder or hotter or colder, as you honed in on where that thimble was would be hidden. Using the student's word, we reckon we can get ourselves to an 80% success rate, even in situations like me and meringue, where I didn't totally get that word. Not at least until my student told me she used to feel like suet pudding. And I could tell you many stories of times when I've been in a riding arena with a trainee coach and I have set the rider up to find this new weird feeling and find the word which really describes this new weird feeling, and then maybe said to my student teacher, okay, so can you supervise this learning now and supervise the hotter, colder, hotter, colder, hotter, colder. The student has done that. And at the end of the lesson, quite often the student comes up to me and says, that was a fantastic lesson. I really appreciate that lesson. I'd love to work with sue again tomorrow. She was brilliant. And later in the day, when my trainees and I are talking through our lessons, maybe sue says to me, so what was I really teaching there? What was that word and phrase? I don't totally understand what it meant, but that didn't matter. She still did brilliant coaching by supervising. Got it, lost it, got it, lost it. Even if she's just going, have you got it? Have you still got it? Be careful on the corner. Oh, be careful. You're going to change rein. You need to really keep it. I think you're losing it. Can you find that feeling again? Good job. And so it goes on as the student is just developing her skills. Now, some students are absolutely thrilled about being allowed to have their own words connected to their own feelings. And some are very good at it. Some people struggle with it more. And whilst this is a generalization, it is a generalization which is true in my experience. On the whole, women connect words to feelings more easily than men. Men tend to struggle. And it is true that within the female brain, the two hemispheres have more linkage. The corpus callosum that links them is thicker than it is in guys who have more separation between the functions of the two hemispheres and the whole words and feelings thing. Anyone that's been in a relationship may have experienced this. It is true, though, that some women will struggle and some men will be unusually good at it. Kids and teenagers often need a lot of convincing that I, as the teacher, am not trying to catch them out. They're used to school teachers maybe asking them trick questions or trying to catch them out. And sometimes I have been known to almost say, please, please help me here. If you can give me some words, it will really help me teach you better. I promise I'm not trying to catch you out. And nothing you can say is wrong. Sometimes, too, people who are specialists in a certain field come up with words that relate to that field. Like, I've had geologists tell me they feel like a trilobite, or they feel like some form of Tyrannosaurus something or other. And of course, that's not going to work for anybody who isn't a geologist. And over the years, if somebody's struggling, I'm likely to know what words could work, because so many people have told me, let's say, if somebody had to get shorter in their front and drop their chest in order to get the hollow out of their back, so many folks have said, I feel scrunched, I feel hunched, I feel like Quasimodo, I feel really compressed down. And then you'll find somebody who says, I feel like a little worm trying to crawl out of a hole in a nut, or somebody who says, I feel like a frog, or somebody who says, I feel like a little garden gnome by a pond who's about to fall into the pond. Everybody will have their own way of describing a feeling. And whilst we need to have some standard languages so we as coaches can work, work with certain students and certain students understand those baselines, for instance, like bearing down, I think it's really important that everybody can have their own individual words as the triggers to their own individual feelings. And that will reduce the slippage, speed up the learning process and be very educational for the coaches as well as the riders themselves. Let's come back to the idea of the elite rider who has this really good feeling, has to put that feeling into words in order to teach it. The student hears the words and from those words has to create a feeling. Some of these words were handed down many generations ago by elite riders. And what we really have is a multi generational game of what I'm going to call Chinese whispers in and what in America would be called telephone. So a group of kids sit in a circle and one of them chooses a phrase or word and whispers it to the next kid, and it gets whispered all the way around the circle until the last child gets to say out loud what she heard. And that gets compared to the phrase originally said by the first child. And often the differences have everybody rolling around laughing. This has happened in this multi generational way through teacher to student, teacher to student, teacher to student, in the way these sayings of writings were handed down. And what tends to happen in human communication like this are the factors of deletion, distortion and generalization. I can tell you a rather fun story of one thing that happened to me with generalisation. A student appeared in front of me one day and her horse was maybe rather lazy. And I said to her, do you normally ride without a stick? She didn't have a stick. And she looked at me straight in the eye and she said, but Mary Wanllas doesn't allow students to ride without sticks. And I looked at her straight in the eye and I said, well, I'm Mary Wanllis and that's news to me. And it turned out that a friend of hers had been on a course with me some time before and had told her that I didn't allow riders to ride with a stage stick. And maybe I'd taken this person's stick away because I thought she was using it inappropriately or her horse was really nervous or something, which was specific to that situation. That rider, that horse became the fact that Mary Wanless doesn't allow riders to use a stick. So there we have generalisation in process. So we have deletion, distortion and generalization and a game, an intergenerational game of Chinese whispers. Now, I'm the kind of person that if you say to me the rider is supposed to push, I would ask, well, what do you push? How do you push with it? What am I supposed to push with? What does this push mean? Normally people don't ask those questions, they just accept these terms at face value. The term push though, is not what I would call sensory specific. It's open to a multitude of interpretations. Whereas things like sit on your hands, point your seat bone straight down, we can agree where straight down is, we can agree if the length of your front matches the length of your back. But these terms like push or use your back or sit deep, as we said in one of the early podcasts, are likely to end up with with many riders in multi finality, many end points. Whereas we're actually trying to lead each individual rider to pretty much the same end point. So we are cloning riders with really good skill sets. So we have these words handed down to us, which people rarely question. It's highly likely whoever said the word push, first of all, in the English language, meant you pull your tummy in to make a wall and you push your guts against the wall. But we'll never know. Another word that's been intriguing me recently is the notion of sit deep. Now, you can think of this in two ways. When you measure a piece of furniture, we measure the three dimensions of its height, its width and its depth. Depth being between the front and the back. That word deep is the same as the word for deep ocean. So the word deep has two completely different meanings in terms of deep ocean and how you might measure a piece of furniture. And recently at a teacher training course where we had teachers there, I believe we had German, French, Dutch, Finnish. We've also had Polish, Norwegian and all these coaches, I. Is it the same in your language that deep, the third dimension of a piece of furniture is the same as deep, deep ocean? And in all those languages it is. And I keep finding myself talking about the distance between the rider's back and the rider's front and using the word deep. And I can't find a different word. We call it horizontal depth, just to be clear. But if you heard the word deep and sit deep, I'm sure you'd go, yeah, deep down, strong, heavier. And that would be most people's interpretation. Now, realise that these words and phrases did originally come out of the mouths of elite riders, and I would say that's pretty much a certainty. So I myself have not won any medals. I am trying to encourage the world to rethink how we talk about riding, the effective map that we have for teaching people about riding. And in my situation, as not having won anything, not a revered rider of my generation, it's hard to get taken seriously. So these sayings came out of the mouths of elite riders. So let me ask you if we go back to our drawing, we had a couple of podcasts ago, that triangle like an iceberg, with the ABCs and the DEFs of riding under the waterline, which for us is consciousness, and the xyzs above consciousness. If these phrases came out of the mouths of elite riders, were they representing the ABC end of the Alphabet or the XYZ end of the Alphabet? I hope it's pretty clear to you that those sayings would be XYZs, they would be the discoveries of time and talent, but they are presented to riders as if they were ABCs. Now, I believe that X's presented as if they're A's get us into an awful lot of trouble. It leads to confusion, misunderstanding, frustration, people giving up in Despair, thinking they're stupid, when really they're not stupid at all. We need to be really clear that an X presented as an A cannot work. And there's no way anybody can jump from A to X. It cannot be done. The stages in between have to be gone through. So here's an example from my own riding. I'd spent maybe 25 years thinking about growing short, having the foot light in the stirrup, the arrowhead, the thigh in the calf, the torso like a box. It was very clear that I could make this work in rider after rider after rider, and that we were beginning to clone riders with good skills, actually, in 25 years, more than beginning. Then I'm riding along one day and I suddenly found myself thinking, hmm, I could describe what I'm feeling with the words grow tall. And I could also describe what I'm feeling with the words stretch your leg down. Now, that's rather interesting. I wonder what's going on here. And as I thought more about it, it began to occur to me that Maybe in my 25 years, I'd worked my way sufficiently down the Alphabet from redefining its ABCs to have reinvented the word wheel and discovered what was really meant with the words grow tall and stretch your leg down. And I promise you, it's not what any normal, sane, intelligent person would do when told those words. You would have to have the ABCs and the various levels of the Alphabet so you could go PQR and home in on this. It could not just be done as a naive response to those words. The naive response would lift your ribs, you lift your chest, you make yourself taller, you hollow your back, you restrict your breathing in the way that we've done a few times just to give you that experience. Sometimes I think that people view these traditional sayings of riding a bit like the tablets that were handed down to Moses and consider that they're sacred, they're not redefinable or thinkable about in any different way. But when X's are presented as A's, and those X's have been through deletion, distortion and generalization, you're going to end up. We have ended up with a culture in trouble, with so many people feeling frustrated, feeling incapable, giving up on themselves. And it's true that we often hear the phrase back to basics said in riding arenas. And when I hear that, I always think to myself, okay, for the coach who's saying this, what are the basics? Is it what I would define as the ABCs of rider biomechanics that the rider needs to learn. Is it what I would define as the ABCs of the horse needing to have a conscious understanding of the reins as woe, the legs as go, an opening rein to step right, to step left, the leg coming a little behind the girth to move, the hindquarters in a hind leg yield to me, those are the rider's ABCs and the horses ABCs. And I hardly ever meet a rider or a horse outside of the framework. And the learning that I am attempting to perpetuate and offer to the culture who have those baselines of understandings, exes presented as A's is a recipe for disaster. Maybe that is really my biggest message and it's obvious when you think about it, and it leads to so much wastage within our industry. Having said that, as a coach who really wants to sell the ABCs to people as I understand them, it's not an easy job because most people don't want to take that much responsibility, don't want to really appreciate the fullness of the fact that they cannot not influence. They'd rather ride along on some vague version of skill or not skill, and not take that responsibility. Going back to the drawing board. Doing the ABCs is not easy, but it is the springboard to developing skills. And I know that these skills enable us to clone skilled riders. Yes, all of us have our tricky things about our bodies, the aspects of riding we struggle with. But it is possible through this method to clone riders in a way I don't think mainstream thinking has ever been able to do. The deletions, the distortions, the misunderstandings, the miscommunications, the lack of questioning just makes it too hard. But I hope I'm piquing your interest in ABCs, how learning happens and. And how much change each of us can really make. These podcasts are linked to two other Internet sites. One is dressagetraining tv, which hosts a whole variety of webinars taught by myself, Mary Wanlis and my colleague Ali Wakelin, where we're working live with a variety of horses and riders, showing them the basics of biomechanics and helping them build their skill and and train their horses and explaining to the audience as we do this. There's also a groundwork certification course on that site based on the work of Dr. Andrew MacLean and Equine Learning Theory. And this too gives you a step by step guide to building your skills. We'd also love you to take a look@justgiving.com and then to search Overdale to find the Just Giving page for Overdale Equestrian Centre, which is my UK home base here in this time of lockdown in 2020, we have 10 school horses eating, of course, and pooping and doing all the things that horses do, and no income to support those horses. And whilst they're having a wonderful time for us, this is something of a stress. And if you've enjoyed these webinars or enjoyed these podcasts and benefited from them, and you're willing to give any small, large amount to our Just Giving page, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.