Ep. 12 In the flow

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis, introducing you now to podcast number 12. Last time round, we talked a whole load about the voice inside your head, which for so many people is full of criticisms and derogatory statements around the woulda, coulda and shouldas of what you ought to be able to do. By now, you probably knew before I ever started talking about this that this was not helpful. But I hope it became really clear that that voice can become your best ally once you began to realise it's not God, it doesn't know everything about riding. It's just a critical voice that you internalized as you were a child that just continues to berate you until you downgrade it and talk it into becoming your best coach, giving you short little reminders of the pertinent points. Because anything that's said in sentences is going to take one way too long. And once you get those reminders and some quiet inside your head to help you check in with your body and notice, you can begin to turn your experience around. But let's suppose that I'm your teacher and I spend my time saying to you, don't pull. You're pulling again. I've told you not to pull. Surely you should know by now that you shouldn't be pulling. I told you last week and the week before and you just keep doing it. Stop pulling. You, of course, will begin to take that on inside your head and you're likely to talk to yourself in that way. But in that situation, the key missing ingredient is you have not been given any information about what you need to do instead. This is a key, key thing and any negative will lead you into trouble. So I could say to you, right, don't think of a pink elephant and you're going to think of a pink elephant to know what it is you're not supposed to be thinking about. And maybe I could say to mustn't scratch your nose in the next five minutes. And the chances are you're going to think about your nose so much that your nose is going to begin to itch and you're going to want to scratch it. So the brain cannot process a negative. Everything that you say to yourself or that I say to you, as your coach, needs to be phrased in the positive. So instead of all that berating you in don't pull, I need to be able to show you what you have to do instead to make the temptation to pull go away. And in this case, the what you have to do instead is not so obvious. Sometimes it is if you Realise you're holding your breath. You need to breathe. If you realise you've curled your toes up, you need to uncurl your toes. If you realize you've hollowed your back and grown too tall, you need to drop your chest, shorten your front. But what you have to do to stop pulling is a bigger deal. It's going to involve how you access your core, pulling your stomach in to make a wall, pushing your guts against your wall, just as you do when you clear your throat and go. It's going to involve stacking your body up in that shoulder, hip, heel line, so your centre of gravity is over your horse's centre of gravity. And so you're matching the forces of this movement in every step. And you don't need reins to support you. Remember the whole idea of the hibbity hop and bouncing along on your hibbity hop so you don't fall off the back of it. Sometimes it takes a lot of information to get really clear on what it is you need to be doing instead. The way we use language is really powerful. And I grew up in my early days in neuro linguistic programming, learning about how eskimos had over 70 words for snow. Now, I was reading up on this recently and it turns out that's not true. They don't have half that many words, but they have many more words for snow than I do. I've never even skied. Skiers would have a better vocabulary about snow than I have. And Eskimos need a vocabulary in snow that enables them to survive in arctic conditions. They need to know so many details about that terrain. Where do you build your igloo? Where do you walk? Where do you not walk? Where can you make a hole in the ice and fish? Where can you not? The more we need to know about something, the more the more precise our language has to be. And there's a lot of interesting differences in different languages on colour. So in English we have 11 words for colours. Quite a few European languages have 12. So in Russian, there are two different words for dark blue and light blue. Apparently, the most recent addition of a colour in English is pink, so we have pink and red, not so dissimilar to the way in Russian. And in Greek, there's light blue and dark blue as two different colours. There's one language that only has two words effectively light and dark. Some languages have only four or five. Some don't really separate green and blue. And they can make those distinctions between green and blue that we would make easily, but it takes Them longer some languages, and those are jungle languages that really need to know about green and what's dangerous and what's safe. They distinguish many more greens than we do. And that to us would tend to look the same. We can tell the difference, but it takes us longer and it doesn't come immediately. The better the language we have to describe a terrain, the more distinctions we make, the more fluidly we can navigate that terrain, the. The better we can teach other people about that terrain. And our lack of language tends to inhibit our perceptions. That is just so true in riding arenas, where we have elite riders with instinctive knowledge or know how that can't put it into words and are likely to just say, effectively, we'll do it more. Like me, making distinctions in language is key. And I guess the truth of the matter is that I have earned my living and made the impact on the horseworld that I have through my ability to put words on feelings. And that was a learned skill. I can remember back through time fairly soon after giving up riding horses, and when things began to go well, that was as right as I knew how to do in those days. And now, of course, I have a lot more writer them right and writer them righter than right. But I'd hit my level of as good as I could do at that point. And I found myself riding along, basically kind of going, wow, man. This was the 1970s, so wow, man was more in vogue than it is nowadays. And I really began to train myself to go, hang on a minute, jump off cloud nine, get back into the here and now. What is really happening here? How could I describe this? What am I doing? How can I make it reproducible? How can I teach it to someone else? And now that kind of process in my brain is almost automatic. The moment I come up with something new, I'm on the track of, how am I doing this? What words say it? How can I teach it? And being able to put words on feelings allows us to build a map and navigate a landscape so much more easily than when there aren't words. So in the study of expertise, what has become really clear is that elite performers in any field will have very good mental representations. That's the term used. So, for instance, research has been done with chess players, and originally it was thought that chess players just had better visual acuity than other people for recognising where all the various chess pieces were on the board and going from there in terms of what that meant. And some experiments showed that elite chess players could recognise the layout of a board and what a next move might be and could recognise that really quickly in a way that more novice players couldn't. But if the pieces were arranged on a chessboard in a way that wouldn't ever happen in a game of chess, elite chess players were no better at memorising where all the pieces were than normal people. So those chess players had developed ways of recognising patterns and chunking what they were seeing, so that half a dozen pieces in a certain position had a certain meaning and maybe implied a next move. So for us as riders, our mental representations are our feelages. As we said before, I as a coach, regard it as my job to help you develop a map of feelages, to know what is a vintage feeling, what is cheap red plonk. That's the notion of me effectively putting labels on the bottles for you, just as you'd need labels on the bottles if you were going to be a wine taster. And as we develop that map of feelages, we get to know what's a blind alley, what's a really useful feelage, how you get from here to there, how to not by your horse and how to create what can really work. Another example of mental maps gained through practice. And I have to say, this blows my mind. Every time I watch elite tennis players, which I love to do, and you get the person who can return a serve coming at them at 100 and goodness knows what miles an hour, and can begin to figure out where that serve is going to land according to how the ball is thrown, and the very early beginnings of racket movement in the service motion. I mean, that just blows my mind. If somebody lobbed a ball to me at 100 and whatever miles an hour, I'd duck and run for it. So it takes all of these hours of repetitions. Remember the idea of 10,000 hours for people to become elite in many skills, and it could be lots more than that. It was 25,000 hours for Elite pianists and goodness knows how many hours for elite tennis players. But all of these hours that are taken for the nervous system to develop the perceptual acuity and the maps, the internal representation to enable elite skills. It's phenomenal the way it can happen. And it is, of course, an investment of a massive amount of brain power. And the practice and the way that practice has to be done for those 10,000 hours to count is highly significant. Let's come at this a bit of another way, by maybe thinking about what it is that gets us into riding or our different hobbies, our different passions and interests in the first place. And the bottom line is, you will be attracted to hobbies and activities in which you find the brain slate known as flow. And what happens in flow is that you begin to be totally absorbed by the task in hand. You forget how much time has gone by. You are so absorbed and it's so demanding on your brain power that you don't have any extraneous thoughts. And in a way, you begin to forget yourself and your problems and your issues as you become immersed in. In the activity. And the research on this began by giving bleepers to lots of different people and suggesting that every time the bleeper went off, they wrote down what it is they were doing and how they were feeling emotionally and how much fun they were having. And it was discovered that lying by the pool with a gin and tonic was actually not half as satisfying as being immersed in an activity. So that might be riders riding rock climbers, rock climbing, surgeons doing surgery, mathematicians doing maths, chess players playing chess. And it required a demanding activity and immediate feedback, whereby you know that you're getting it or losing it, you're getting hotter, getting colder, making progress or not, and you make ongoing adjustments to what you're doing. And according to that feedback. Now, with me talking about this, I'm imagining that you can remember and think of times when you've been in flow, whether that was through riding or some other activity in your life. And then, of course, what might happen is you hit upon flow. It was a wonderfully satisfying ride. You go out the next day, you want to do it again, and you start to find that you're struggling and you can't find that same state. There is likely to be a certain amount of struggle involved in finding flow. And the struggle can get magnified when you're trying to get back there. And I've talked a little before about the idea of trying mode, noticing mode and tune out, and how we have to tune the brain, a bit like tuning a musical instrument or finding just the right level of clear focus on. On a camera lens. And within that tuning, we're learning to tune ourselves to find flow. I can remember talking years ago to one of the coaches in the network, and I talked about those wonderful rides you have that are sent by God. And she said, no, no, no, you've got that wrong. Those wonderful rides are sent by the devil to tempt you to kick and pull the next day when you want to create that same result. And there's truth in that. We come out the next day, somehow expecting it to happen. And over the years, I've learned to say to riders at the end of a really good ride, now that'll be an act to follow. Don't go away saying to yourself, yeah, I can do it, I can do it. Yes, I've got it. Go away saying to yourself, that will be an act to follow. Another way to think about it is that in whatever you did, let's say you did some super trot work with your horse. You baked trot cake and your trot cake rose, and it baked really well and it was just perfect. And then you come out the next day and you say to yourself and your horse, right then, where's my cake? Your horse is not going to hand you cake on a silver platter. It just doesn't work like that. You have to go out the next day and you have to bake that cake all over again. Measuring out the ingredients, mixing them up in just the right way, greasing the tin, heating the oven, putting it in. And if you follow all the steps to the recipe, you'll come up with the same kind of cake. And there will always, every now and again, be what we might call a bad day, or maybe we should call it an extra bad day, where you have to go shopping for the ingredients because you're suddenly going to, where's my bear Down. I can't do it. It's not working. So the notion of having to bake the cake all over again is a really good one. And flow is really interesting. And I recommend reading the book of that name and other books on flow. There's some Superbooks by Stephen Kotler. The Rise of Superman is one of them and Stealing Fire is another. And the original research was done by. I think I have his name right, Mahali Chensaman High. That's rather hard to find. Just look up flow in Google. You'll find it if you do that. Flow is so satisfying. And what essentially we're all craving. Whatever medium we choose to go for it, people will get it in slightly different ways. So when you've got your back up against the wall in a do or die situation, you. You're very likely to find it. Let's say going across country, you can't afford to dither, you can't afford to overthink. You have to be totally focused because your life is on the line. And very often the event riders that find flow really well going cross country dread going up the centre line in the dressage trace, because suddenly they're going, oh my gosh, the dredge is watching me. Everybody's watching me. I hate dressage. I can't do this. This is going to be horrible. So all of these words are going round and round their head again. They've lost the quality of that they had across country and they've indulged themselves in a way in all of that negative self talk which is just leading them up a gum tree. Or you might have the people, I was one of these when I was eventing that knew better than to have any extraneous thoughts in front of a cross country fence, but could really mess myself up in front of a show jump where really and truly you could mess yourself up and live to tell the tale. And that became a coat hanger for other fears that didn't really belong there. I knew better than to drop my eyes in front of a cross country fence, but I might just crumple a little in front of a show jump. So we all find different ways of finding flow and ultimately that's what we crave. And ultimately this can become the biggest obstacle where having done it well one time, you just think you can do it again. And there is so much self knowledge and learning to tune your system that goes into finding flow. You may find it on the cross country, you may be somebody actually who finds it best just in meditation. There are many ways you may find it. As somebody once told Ram Dass during a lecture, he was talking about this kind of thing and realized there was this old lady in the audience nodding and smiling and really acting like she knew what he meant. And it was early in his speaking career. And afterwards he went up to her, she came up to him and she said, I so understood your talk. I know exactly what you mean. You see, I crochet. Crochet, for those of you who don't know, is a little bit like knitting. It only uses one needle and it's not exactly a dangerous activity and not what many people would think of as a flow inducing activity, but for this older lady it obviously was so. All of us that ride love horses. All of us that ride, love the dance that riding our horse can become. We love that feeling of oneness with him. We love where it's harmony and lightness and ease and we struggle perhaps and become our own worst enemies. When it isn't finding flow, finding the way of tuning the camera lens of your brain, finding how to breathe and center yourself, getting that ongoing feedback of got it, lost it, got it, lost it, got it, lost it. That tunes you into that noticing mode and the flow process that is the name of the game. And there is unfortunately so much that can get in the way and so much skill and practice required to get this really good. The payoff though is so great when you forget those petty concerns that most of us live our lives by, or the imagination. That luxury is what makes us really happy. And to realise that nothing ever beats being in the moment in noticing mode with your horse. I hope you have some opportunities to do that in the next days and I look forward to speaking to you again. 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 to building your skills. We'd also love you to take a look@justgiving.com and then to search Overdale to find the Justgiving 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.