Ep. 11 On the voice inside your head!

Hello everyone, this is Mary Wanlis with podcast number 11. Last time round we talked about whether the phrases we're all so familiar with, which get said again and again in riding arenas, things like grow tall, stretch your leg down, stick your chest out, relax, use your back, sit deep. Whether those phrases are actually, if we use an Alphabet analogy, more ABCs or XYZs. And my argument is that those phrases have been handed down to us in a multi generational game of Chinese whispers or Euro American telephone. Handed down from elite riders, from teacher to pupil, teacher to pupil, teacher to pupil, in a way that their meaning can change and become obscured. And that fundamentally they are the discoveries of time and talent and they are X's presented to us as if they're as. Now, my hope for you when you're in an arena is that your coach works with you to give you really good how to information which is based on a coherent map of riding and how the riderhorse interface works. My hope is that she gives you that information in what we call bite sized chunks, which, which are actionable, doable, digestible, that they're good. Next step, fixes for you based on where you need to be in the Alphabet, whether you need your ABCs or your HIJS or your PQRs. And we hope that that input has differentiated causes from symptoms. So we're not trying to, as it were, undo a knot by pulling on the nearest free end and thinking that's going to change it, but digging into that knot to really know what has to where to unravel the issues between you and your horse. So there is the issue of the input you get on the outside, the relevance and the quality of that input, but there's also the issue of what you do with that input inside your head. And this is the focus of today. So the brain, to put it very simply, we could think of like a radio. It's in that a radio can tune into only one station at a time. And for us, the stations our brain tunes into are our senses. So you can think of our visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses. And in visually we're including both what you see on the outside and the pictures you might make in your mind's eye. In auditory, which is hearing, we're thinking of both what you might hear from an outside person and, and what you might say to yourself inside your head. Your kinesthetics are the feelings internally in your body, not just skin sensations. You then of course have taste and smell, but they're not so relevant in riding, although it Always amuses me when I have a student in front of me whose imagery is really based around food. And you might remember my story of the woman who felt like a meringue. And some people will tell you their horse is like a sausage cooking in the pan, just with this bend that's come into the sausage, or like a really light and fluffy crumble. So some people really use food for their imagery and many people have many other topics, like we said the other day, of geologists talking, like being like a trilobite or some other kind of fossil. But anyway, you have these senses. So what this means is if you're really busy talking to yourself inside your head, you're not tuning into feelings. If you're really busy externally looking at the outside world, you're not tuned in to the internal environment of your body. All of this makes a massive difference. Now, ultimately, you have to be able to access your feel sense and most people will get there either via a visual image or via language. But how you do that is. Is a really key thing. So let's imagine you talk to yourself a lot inside your head and I'm going to tell you a story of the day. This became so clear to me. It was relatively soon after I had given up riding and then begun again. And I was riding somebody's horse one day and this voice yatted on to me kind of in the back of my head, with re really not taking a lot of notice. And then I heard that voice and I heard myself inside my head go, and this is a quote. I'm going to get this horse going if it kills me. And I really heard this and I stopped for a minute and I walked on a long rein and I. If it kills me, is it really that important? Do I really mean that? What's going on here? And I would have had all sorts of derogatory woulda, couldas and shouldas going on in the back of my head. You've been writing all these years and you still can't do this. And da, da, da, da, da. And that'd become a lot less after giving up and starting again with no expectations and no desire to be a really brilliant rider, but just to figure out what was happening in each successive moment. So from what I was learning in psychology, I soon began to realise the negative effects of most people's internal dialogue. And this is part of what I talked about the other day as the loser's manual for the brain, which most of us end up with rather than the user's manual. So Experiments have been done that have attached tape recorders to young children, so maybe by the time they're toddling they're three or four. And it turns out that a massive amount of the communication they receive is negative. Don't do this, don't do that. I've told you already, you shouldn't do this. And we take that on and that voice becomes the internal voice that we use to berate and judge ourselves. Now, even if it really worked to talk to yourself inside your head, and even if it was really helpful to go around a corner and say to yourself, inside leg, Elmer girth, outside leg, behind the girth, remember to keep the outside rein, I must give the inside hand. Da da da da da da da da. By the time you've said that to yourself, you've gone round the first corner of the short side, gone round the short side, gone round the second corner and you're partway down the long side. You. It takes too long to talk to yourself in sentences. If you're going to use words inside your head, you have to do those words in shorthand and they need to be positive reminders of the pertinent points. So possibilities might be bear down, foot, light, vison, keep kneeling, big thrust, breathe, chest down, no sentences, just those short little reminders of points stated in the positive. If something goes wrong, you're not allowed. Oh my goodness, here I go again. It just happened, I ought to know by now. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All you're allowed is one four letter word. Oops. Now I'm going to confess here, my favourite four letter word begins with S. But once that four letter word is said, it's over done with and you're onto the next moment noticing you're not allowed to ruminate about the past and basically ruminating about the past or pontificating about the future, especially when that becomes what if this, what if that, what if the other does not help you. We're really trying to keep you noticing in the present moment. So you're checking in with yourself now, now, now, now, and when you need to, just giving yourself those little reminders. So given that most people's brain doesn't work like this and most people have a tyrant inside their head full of the woulda, coulda and shoulders, here are some strategies to help you change this. First of all, I want you to just close your eyes and can you reproduce inside your head the kind of things that you say to yourself as you ride? The first thing to notice is whose voice is it? Is it yours? Is it your mother's? Is it a coach you had at some point in your life? And I want you to close your eyes again and as you listen to that voice, notice if the voice has a location in your head. Now, it normally does, it could be more right, more left, more forward, more back. But whereabouts inside your head does that voice seem to come from? Most people find it's somewhere on the left, but wherever it is, I want you to try moving that voice to be on the midline. So we're then talking as the midline, as dividing your head into a right and a left. So can you move that voice to the midline and just notice? Does it change? Sometimes for people it becomes softer and kinder and more encouraging. Sometimes it just goes quiet. But it's not going to be as full on and tyrannical almost certainly as it is in the location that it tends to come from. So here's your first strategy. You is moving that voice inside your head. Here's another one. If you had a remote control and you imagine that voice like a sort of a radio or a TV voice, could you take the remote control and just zap it? So with you, switch it off. So the idea of a remote control can be a really good one. Another possibility would be to have the voice sing to you or talk to you in a funny accent. Now, it's kind of hard to do an accent. I'm not very good at Mickey Mouse here, but you want some kind of weird, kind of, oh, you really are very stupid. How come you're still doing this after all these years? Surely you should know better than that. Or maybe it would like to speak to you in opera. Surely after all this time, all these lessons, all this money, money you should know by now, if you do that, does it become any less credible? You see, for many people it's as if that voice is God. They just imagine it knows everything, it's a tyrant and they just obey it and shrink from it and are terrorised by it. But let's suppose you might think of interviewing that voice for the job of your coach. So then you'd be asking it, what are its credentials? What qualifications does it have in coaching? What's its experience? What have other pupils got to say about it? What kind of references has it got? I think you'll soon realise that actually it isn't qualified for the job. So all of these strategies help reduce the tyranny of that voice. And if all of those fail, we have one more, which is, whenever you find yourself talking to yourself in a sentence of almost any kind, say to next and make the next thought something useful, like bear down, foot light, breathe. And you're only allowed these little short phrases because everything else takes too long and because you want to have some quiet inside your head between those phrases. So this starts to deal with too much internal dialogue. And you do want some of these short phrases. And every time you say one of them, there needs to be enough quiet time afterwards for you to really check in with your body and really check. When you say breathe to yourself, do you really breathe? When you say bear down, are you bearing down? Can you reform your bear down? If you say to yourself, foot light, can you lighten some of the weight out of your feet? Put it instead into your thighs so you have to check in with your body. Just saying the words otherwise will do nothing for you whatsoever. In the early days of developing this way of coaching, I got really shocked quite a few times when students in arenas said to me, this is kind of a quote. You paint such wonderful pictures for me in the way you describe things. And I stood in the middle thinking, I do. Because to me, all the things I was describing are what I would call feelages. Now, that's the feeling equivalent of images. But these people had transferred my words into a picture to then begin to find the feeling. I am one of the few people, and I believe it's about 2% of the population who cannot close my eyes and make a picture. Now, I definitely dream in pictures, but consciously I don't make visual images in pictures. But it doesn't matter. And if you're like that too, it doesn't matter. It's no big deal. In fact, I've heard, I read one article about people making movies. Some of the team working on Frozen, I believe it was, one of them, was able to picture the whole storyboard inside his head from beginning to end. Another person, equally senior who worked with him every day, did not make visual images in consciousness. And neither of them knew that the brain state of the other was humanly possible. So we can function well regardless. But if you're somebody who works well on visual images, that's absolutely fine. And the more graphic your images are, probably the better they work. But it's really important in doing this that your external vision goes, as it were, on the back burner. So I hope in the past, back on the early webinars, you did our balloon breathing exercise. At the end of that, we often talk about vision and ideally you'd redo that balloon breathing exercise. Now, because having blown up the balloon, I will normally draw people's attention to their vision. And what will happen is that they're using their peripheral vision, almost like gazing maybe somewhere across the room. And this is a state where you're seeing everything but looking as nothing. It's what Sally Swift called soft eyes. We often talk about it as if your eyes were in the back of your head. So for a moment, close your eyes. And when you open your eyes, can you imagine that your eyes are in the back of your head and. And let the world come into your eyes and you might feel and see that you can actually see a lot of the room that you're in, almost 180 degrees to your right and your left. You're looking at nothing, but you're perceiving everything. And now, in a moment, you're going to pick a point across the room and stare at it. Now, this is a different way of looking. You have less peripheral vision. And in your focused vision, notice, are your eyes still in the back of your head or did they jump to the front of your head? I think you'll find you're looking now from the front of your head and that looking out can often be the beginning of just tipping a little bit forward and almost getting ahead of yourself. Come back to closing your eyes, thinking of your eyes in the back of your head. Just breathe a few breaths before you open your eyes again. So with your eyes in the back of your head, open your eyes, Notice the world coming into your eyes, your peripheral vision, how much you can see without looking. And not yet, but in a moment you're going to pick a point across the room and stare at it again. So do that now. Now, when I do that, I can really feel the difference in my eyes. I can feel them go boing to the front of my head. And we recognise this colloquially because we talk about eyes out on stalks. Her eyes popped out of her head. This is what absolutely must not happen. Just in the last moments before a jump. A lot of people who really lose it in front of a fence, the first thing that goes wrong is vision. And you need your external vision on that back burner to be able to operate internally in the way you need to. It's a bit the same with the horse. When the horse pricks his ears, he's on an external visual focus. He needs that going into a jump. When his ears go sideways, he's much more internally focused on his own body. And the rider, he's much more attentive in that state. And that's really where you want him as a dressage rider. And very often when the horse pricks his ears, you lose access to his brain. It's almost like he can't walk and chew gum. And in a top level test, you might see an elite horse with its ears pricked but still kind of staying with the rider. But that's not going to happen so easily with a more green horse. I've also seen eyes in the front of your head kind of deals really being a factor in riders anxiety, like they're looking out, where's the next spook? Where's the next spook? Where's the next problem? Just like the horses and with your eyes to the back of your head, you'll find you can keep yourself emotionally more stable and process those feelages and those images more easily. So this is a great start off here, which I hope gives you lots of food for thought as to how you can get yourself in a situation where you can become your own best coach and do the best possible job with the input you're receiving. It's all based on that. Quiet noticing any words inside your head, just little reminders stated in the positive of useful points that are doable. Next step fixes, you check in with your body. There's a bit of quiet between each one. Your vision with your eyes in the back of your head so you're not externally focused. Looking out for danger, getting yourself where you can't have the right kind of internal experience. I really hope this might help you break the tyranny of the voice inside your head, which for so many people is a really big deal and a real limiting factor in performance. Elite riders don't do that to themselves. Their focus in each moment is a really different deal. And like all other skills, this is a skill you get to learn and practice. All the best to you. I'll be speaking to you again soon. 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 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 at Just Giving 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 or large amount to our Just Giving page, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.