Ep. 15 Action Goal Thinking

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 15. I hope you've had some time to think about your seat bone movement and notice what happens, whether one seat bone is less easily controlled than the other. And if you're on a motorboat type horse, I hope you've had some at least beginning little successes in beginning to slow his legs. This way of noticing, of course, is very internal. And your friends, if you have friends you hack out with, might suddenly think you've gone nuts, that you're not just riding along, talking with them about the scenery and this, that and the other in life, but are maybe engaged in your own little world of noticing. In fact, this little world of noticing can really become an all consuming kind of experience. And perhaps you've even managed to get yourself into a flow state just noticing the movement of each seat bone in each of your horse's steps, how well you can stay plugged in, or if you get those extraneous little wiggles and jiggles and the white noise of a disconnect. If you've done this, you're beginning to mirror the fascination of a young child in play, totally absorbed in the moment. And of course, it is a really good trick of evolution that kids learn to walk before they learn to talk. So as they're getting it, losing it, getting it, lose it, which means standing up, toddling, falling over, picking themselves up again, having another go, they never say to themselves, God, I'm a stupid kid, why can't I do this? By now Harry is so much better at this than me and he's younger than I am. I really must be terrible. They just keep getting it, losing it, getting it, losing it in that state of utter fascination that governs childhood learning and play, and which so easily eludes us as adults until we find ways into the fascination of flow on the basis that everybody thinks everybody else is either bad, mad or sad, you're going to possibly be considered, as we said, sad or, or maybe mad. And of course, the opposite side of the coin is the person who can only get into that state of absorption and fascination when their chips are down and their life is on the line and maybe they're coming up to a cross country fence. It's very much a case of temperament. We could almost say introvert or extrovert, which is your kind of way of doing things. Back in the 1970s, a psychologist called Robert Nidefer came up with a great little idea of classifying your experience and your focus of attention as either narrow or broad or on the other axis, internal or external. So this gives us a narrow internal focus of attention. A broader internal focus of attention. A broader external focus of attention or a narrower internal external focus of attention. Now, this model does mesh rather well with the various riding disciplines. So a narrow external focus of attention would be cross country or show jumping. You have to ride more instinctively, we hope, with some good right patterns wired into your body so they function on autopilot, so your attention can be on pace, steering the jump. I can remember how cross country maestro Lucinda Green wrote once about taking part in a point to point race, which somebody talked her into doing and how much she hated it. Because now that external focus of attention, which included a whole range of other horses, she thought was just too much and too scary. Yet in the book that David Hemery wrote about sports performance, he, he wrote about jockey Lester Piggott. Now, Lester Piggott died a few years ago, and you would have to be an older person to know his name, but he was a legend in his own lifetime. And he told David Hemery about how during a race, his focus was entirely on tactics, where a space was going to open up when he should accelerate, how he was riding his horse relative to the field in general. Everything that happened in his body was on autopilot. And he was a phenomenally brilliant rider. I remember a photograph of him cantering a racehorse at probably about the age of 12. And this horse was basically in the most wonderful carriage on the bit in a racing kind of a way. A narrow internal focus of attention would be the kind of focus of attention you might have in plugging in and finding that really good connection with the horse's back that you want your seat bones to make. A broader internal focus of attention might encompass more of your body as you become more skillful, or might actually be you thinking about tactics or planning what you have to pack in the lorry for your expedition the next day. That schema is really helpful in terms of just thinking, what discipline am I drawn to? What am I actually good at? Am I an external, broad focus person? Do I want to play polo? Do I want to do polo cross? Do I want to be racing and team chasing and hunting? Or am I an internal, narrow focus of attention person? Or do I as an event rider have to show a versatility which actually most event riders struggle with? Later researchers changed the schema a bit, still using the dimension of an internal focus or an external focus, but rather than broad or narrow, thinking of that focus as either task relevant or or task irrelevant. If you're thinking about your body sensations, monitoring your internal sensation, regulating what's happening with your breathing, then you're paying attention internally to relevant things. You could be doing daydreaming, you could be tuned out, as we said in some of the earlier podcasts, or trying too hard, in which case your internal focus of attention is going to involve a lot of talking to yourself and a lot of not being in that state of flight flow, losing sight of the wood for the trees. On a relevant external focus, that might be you and the jump, you don't suddenly move your eyes at the last minute. You really keep your focus on where you're going, what you're doing. An irrelevant external focus might be where the crowd distracts you and also might distract your horse from his narrower external, relevant focus. In the world of motor learning, researchers have found that learning and performance work best when the performer's attention is directed towards an external focus. Now, in writing, I think we have to take this with a little bit of a pinch of salt, because there are a lot of lessons that go right from this marker to that marker, right from here to there, that focus on geometry and actually don't really lead to any skill improvement. It's also possible that people's focus is just put on their horse. Make him more round, make him more forward, make him more this, make him more that, with no how to information. So those external focuses are very commonly used in the horse world. And it's unfortunate that most elite riders will tell you, well, I just made the horse more blah without saying what they did in their body to have that happen. And the truth of the matter is that their internal change was probably done unconsciously. It's part of the cognitively impenetrable area of their skill that will be below the iceberg in that diagram. So they don't tell you about it and kind of imply it doesn't even happen. Some of the researchers believe that analogies can have the same kind of effect as an external focus. So if I suggest to you that you think of the chain of muscles in your horse from his hind legs, up the back of the hind leg, over his croup, under the panels of the saddle, up each side of his crest to his ears, like two big hoses, maybe fireman's hoses, and you really imagine, can you get water to flow through those hoses, and if there's a kind of blockage in your horse's system, where would be the blockage? Does he do backflow? Does the hose have leaks? Is the right Hose the same as the left hose. Can you even them out and make really good flow? We're using an analogy and you're finding ways within your body to, to get that to become a reality. Now, that on the whole is more effective than focusing on body parts. And as some of the researchers have suggested, if you were a mountain goat about to jump across a chasm to the opposite rock, you'd be focused on the opposite rock. You wouldn't be thinking, I must think about my feet, I must just pay attention to my feet, or even I must just pay attention to my seat bones. But we have to start somewhere. And in the start off, people's attention often has to be just on their body. And we start doing body parts 101. I often find myself making an analogy to people about how they learnt to drive a car. Now, this does work better here in England, where almost everybody learns to drive what Americans would call a stick shift. And if you only ever learn to drive an automatic, you have not bitten the bullet of really driving a car. So in the early days with a stick shift, you have to figure out how you get your foot off the accelerator onto the clutch, move the gear lever, still have hold of the steering wheel, still know where you're going and you're looking at the road ahead. Meanwhile, you have to get your foot off the clutch and back onto the revs again in the appropriate way. And for me, as a learner driver, this was utterly overwhelming. And even if it was overwhelming for you too, I imagine now, if it was legal, you could change gear, eat a sandwich and talk on your mobile phone. And that is how skills build up in the brain. So in our starting somewhere, we might start focusing on your shoulder, hip, heel alignment, how you support your body weight, finding just right in your underneath and finding the quality of plugged in, which loses all that white noise. As soon as I possibly can, within somebody's learning, I want to get that rider to be riding what I call on Interface. So if you've been able to get your seat bones more plugged in and you felt changes in your horse as a result, you've had an interface experience and you've learned that when you do A, your horse does B, and that that is a cause effect rule. And you will continue to learn that when you do C, your horse does D, and when you lighten the feet in your stirrups, it changes the shape of his back. And when you bear down and all of these things, you begin to make a difference. So riding on Interface is the Name of the game and is really how I interpret the external focus that people talk about in that research. If you just thought about your big toe on your left foot without an interface kind of value, then you'd be wasting your time. So what happens when people begin to have these interface experiences is that they get to reinvent the wheel, discovering for themselves how the cause effect rules of the ride a horse interaction work. Just being told about those rules won't do anything for you. It's just intellectual left brain knowledge that bypasses the parts of the brain that do physical skills. You need to experience this in the doing. And then we hope, you're beginning to build your mental representations and your internal map of how the rider horse interaction works. And that is building your skills. It's also as a learner, valuing your autonomy and your ability to put two and two together and work it out and begin to build your own coherent map. So research as well in learning shows that learners who are not given autonomy and are just supposed to do what they're told are much less good learners. Well, I have certainly seen that in riding arenas, having tried to do what I was told for the first 14 years of my learning and not doing very well, and seen how people begin to blossom when they start to figure out how to I do A, the horse does B and to really begin to understand how the rider horse interaction works. The use of language can be really precise and little differences make a big difference. So for instance, there's been some research with swimmers that if they're told to push the water back with their hands rather than pull their hands back, they become faster and more organized. So just a little change in wording that links the action with the effect the action needs to have versus just the action itself changes learning and mirrors that mountain goat who has the idea of his actions taking him to jump across the chasm and land in a particular spot. So the more we can have you do A in order to create B and we link the action with the goal, the more streamlined and effective your actions become. And in fact, it has been proven that talking in that way increases balance, increases force production and increases speed. Moreover, all of those factors are achieved with less effort. And that's being measured through heart rate monitors and breathing rates and all sorts of other biochemical markers. So goal action coupling is critical to building skill and having a less effortful success. Yet there will be that beginning point of body parts 101, when the rider is trying to deal with how their stirrups are a different length, how their front has to be probably shorter than normal, how their feet rest lightly in the stirrups, how the sitting surface extends down through their thigh. And sometimes people have an interface experience within their first lesson. And at that point in time, I, as the teacher, think I have probably sold this approach to them. That's not always true, but I like to wish it would be. Sometimes it takes more lessons because we're having to untangle a kind of knot in the rider's body before we can really get ourselves to where they're focused is on interface. And if you think of the person who starts trying too hard and getting involved in all that conversation inside their head, they are too self absorbed. They're not thinking about doing A to create B. They're just having this conversation of, oh, my goodness, I should be able to do that and I must try harder and what's wrong with me? And that is one of the most diversionary and really unpleasant tactics to involve yourself in. Having said all of this, I think it's really true that the biggest stumbling blocks for people are their expectations of how learning works, which I would say is through the loser's manual of the brain and how learning doesn't work. And also their willingness to feel weird in ways that give the brain contrast, find biomechanical patterns that work and really make difference. The reluctance that people have to feel weird is massive. It's there in everybody. And it's an absolute stumbling block for some riders who are sure that anything that feels familiar must be right and anything that feels unfamiliar must be wrong. And then, of course, people start thinking, surely it can't require all this focus and attention. Surely it can't be this hard. And the reality is, yes, it does require that focus. And when you're changing patterns, yes, it is that hard. Although over time, we expect these things to become easier. But as you know, we'll present you with a more refined microscope lens and you will discover a new landscape in which you get it, lose it, get it, lose it, get it, lose it as you ingrain another aspect of skill. And so it is that the learning process goes on. So what I want you to go away from this realizing is that the analogies. Can you think of pushing down the plunger in your insides? Could you imagine being hung in a harness? Can you imagine energy transmitted through those hoses, those imaginary hoses from your horse's hind leg, over his back to his ears? Those kind of ways of thinking are so productive. And if we just say, make the horse more this make the horse more that without any how to information or we just go think about your seat bones as this. That was the end rather than the means whereby we create a different interaction with your horse, a different way to connect with him, a different shape to his back. If we don't think of those things as a mean to an end or with this action and goal coupling, then we can just go up a dead end. Please keep noticing what's going on in your seat bones. Can that become fascinating? Can you become like a child, absorbed in the moment, absorbed in play, as you notice how this and other changes to your own body Change your horse as soon as you do this and you start noticing when I do A, he does B, when I do C, he does D, you are reinventing the wheel in the way that every rider has to. And you know, sometimes, especially I think of this as on the continent you have teachers saying, ah, talking about it doesn't work, you just have to ride, ride more and you'll work it out. Well, if you ride more under these conditions, you will work it out if you ride more. But you always do what you always did. But maybe you do it harder, you'll always get what you always got and maybe you'll beat your head against the brick wall harder. Learning can be elusive, but when you begin to unlock the keys to learning, you unlock the keys to skill. Hang in there. Keep noticing. Whether you notice more small internal things or you're a jumping rider who really likes to focus on the external things, either way, how you focus is the key. Have fun. I'll be back 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 how 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.