Ep. 20 On the ‘wordscape’, the ‘brainscape’, and the ‘culturescape'

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast number 20. In the last one, we talked about the brainscape and the wordscape. So these represent two different layers of the brain. The wordscape will be a more superficial layer, if you like, which has heard all the words and could recite all the words. So the rider knows that she should be growing tall and stretching her legs down and getting the horse on the bit and relaxing and all these different things. The wordscape would be a deeper layer of the brain that deals with neurological patterns, with networks of neurons firing together, wiring together, creating patterns that result in how we use and move our muscles. You could have the average rider with lots of these sayings in the wordscape, who's had the lessons, been to the demonstrations, watched the webinars, read the books, and could recite all these things of what should be happening. So a massively developed wordscape, but potentially a very undeveloped brainscape. And the patterns she does have in the brainscape may be really rather ineffective ones. They could come down to kick and pull and not really show any real skill. The opposite would be the elite rider with really sophisticated patterns in the brainscape, who can do wonderfully, seemingly magical things with horses, but in the wordscape, may have very little language or at least strategies to deal with the difference between the brainscape and the wordscape. So one of the strategies we discussed this time was the rider, the dressage rider, when asked, how do you get a horse on the bit? Said, well, I don't blooming well know, do I? In other words, I know I know in instinctive knowledge, in know how, but I know I don't know in language. Then there was the show jumper, asked what he was going to say to people in this clinic abroad that he was about to teach, and he said, and this is literally a quote, as little as possible. I'll put up the jumps, I'll make exercises for them, but don't expect me to say anything that might be helpful. Then you have the person who would claim that riding is really simple and why do you make it so complicated? It's just so simple. You kick to go, you pull the reins to stop, you pull the right rein to go right and the left rein to go left. What is your problem? And that person will have pretty, certainly phenomenally good patterns in the brainscape, but really does not know what he knows and does not know how different he is to the people he's talking to and doesn't even imagine the different ways it could go wrong. These other people there could Be a total disconnect between people who are doing wonderful things with the brainscape, but saying what everybody says in the wordscape, the traditional language. They might be saying to people, grow tall. Well, they themselves are a really good box. They might be saying, stick your chest out, but they are not sticking their chest out. And these people never think hard enough to realise that there's a disconnect. And there's a disconnect to a greater or lesser degree in many elite riders. Others, and sadly, this is a lot of coaches at the lower levels will recite the catechism, what they were taught to say in riding arenas. And actually they really don't have any kind of out of the box useful knowledge in the wordscape, and they also don't have a lot of skill in the brainscape. And as a young coach, I was one of those people, I can remember really not exactly struggling, but not finding it brilliantly easy to make walk, trot, canter and trotting poles last an hour. Well, life has changed since then, let me tell you. That total disconnect is likely to be the case with young coaches. And you have to begin somewhere, don't you? And it is true that elite coaches tend to be older by the rule of thumb that it takes people on average 10,000 hours to become elite at any skill, and that is four hours a day, five days a week, that's 20 hours a week for a year, a thousand hours for 10 years. And this is an average realize musicians can take 25,000 hours to become an elite concert pianist. And nobody's done the research on riding, so we don't really know, but I bet it's not less than this. So you've got 10,000 hours to become an elite rider and another 10,000 hours to become an elite coach. And realise in that 10,000 hours, as in the riding one, you've got to be working deliberately on learning from feedback and improving, rather than just doing the same old things over and over again. So with 20,000 hours of really dedicated practice under their belt, elite coaches are going to be older. And that's just how it is. Going back to my childhood, I have vivid memories of my father kind of rolling his eyes and going, oh, finally the pen is dropped. And I always think of this as an old fashioned phrase, but actually when I talk to people about it, many people do know that phrase. And when the penny drops, it drops from the wordscape to the brainscape. And I think it's probably true as a kid that I'd rather happily let the words go past me, so I didn't have to take responsibility and act on whatever he was saying. But when the penny dropped, then I got it and then acted on it and made my father very happy. So the brainscape and the wordscape for all of us exist within the culturescape. And every field has its culturescape. And the horse world has one heck of a big culturescape, a big powerful culturescape. And one way to understand this is to call on the work of Professor Carol Dweck. She's now at Stanford. For many years she was at Columbia University. She's a researcher within education and she has done lots of works with kids in school. She wrote a popular book called Mindset, a more academic book called Self Theories. And when you read her work, if you do, every time she talks about intelligent, we as riders should substitute the word talent. And she talks about the difference between a classroom and how the kids are. If the working ethos is you've either got it or you haven't. So in her work, you, you're smart or you're not. In our case, you're talented or you're not, or a classroom where the working ethos is the harder I work, the smarter I get. Now, she termed these a fixed mindset, you've got it or you haven't, or a growth mindset, the harder I work, the smarter I get. Now, generally speaking, I think riding operates under a fixed mindset and this creates a lot of its atmosphere, especially, let's say in livery yards or what you Americans will call boarding barns. There's a lot of boarding barns where if the working ethos is you've got it or you haven't, the people who feel like they've got it really want to stay being the ones who've got it and are one up. And you can only be one up by keeping everything else and everyone else one down. So there can be a lot of backbiting, a lot of my horse is better than your horse, a lot of I won last week and a lot of putting people down and a lot of misery for the people who feel that they are being kind of labelled and put in a one down situation. And this is what happens with a fixed mindset, creating the culturescape. One of the things I've done that I'm most proud of in my life actually is to have spawned quite a lot of talent hotbeds. Now that's borrowing a phrase from Daniel Coyle and his book the Talent Code. Maybe these aren't talent hotbeds so much in that the places he's talking about, which are music schools or tennis academies, they would bring in people who were already thought to be pretty good and in need of special coaching to reach the elite levels. Whereas in our talent hotbeds, the people that show up are the people in the local area who show up. And increasingly they're people who show up because they've heard about my work. But within those talent hotbeds, where the ethos is the harder I work, the smarter I get, the working atmosphere is very, very different and so much more supportive. And when I'm doing a clinic, my baseline attitude to this is that everyone in the clinic is equal. Everyone is from where they are right now taking the next steps in their learning. And that changes how people feel and how they approach learning and how they learn from everybody else in the clinic and how supportive they are for each other. So going back to Carol Dweck's research in the classroom of you've either got it or you haven't. And there's the need for kids to keep looking smart. If you give the kids the choice of an easy assignment or a harder assignment or maybe an easier test or a harder test, those kids will choose the easier assignment or test because they have to get a good grade to be seen to be still smart. Whereas if you give the same choice to kids in a classroom where the ethos is the harder I work, the smarter I get, a lot of kids will choose the harder assignment or the harder test because they know they're going to learn more in the long run and they're not worried about being shown up or anything like that. Recent research has also shown that self esteem is built on our recent behaviors and recent successes. It's not built as people thought back through time, especially in the us, through being given a trophy, whether or not, and even being given a trophy for just showing up. So our recent successes, our application have a big bearing on how we do. And when we give feedback in writing lessons, we really try and give feedback to the person's effort and their behaviour. And to not say you're brilliant, that tends to undermine things. And we're really trying to create a model that where it is seen and understood and known that hard work and application pays off and we're teaching people to do that hard work in the right kind of way. Do you remember noticing mode versus trying mode or tune out? And over time we're giving people a finer microscope lens through which to perceive the territory of riding. And we're making the impossible possible the Possible easy. And the easy, elegant. And I recommend, if you have kids, when you give feedback to your kids or you talk to them about their homework assignments, you might say things like, oh, I love how you thought up that story, what a wonderful character she was, what beautiful colours you chose for that. Rather than, it's brilliant and you're so smart. There's another factor here too, and this became really clear to me in the 1980s when I lived in London and I started doing dismounted workshop courses as a series of evenings where we could come and do exercises and talk theory. And when people introduced themselves on the first evening, it became so clear that everybody thought that their own personal struggles with riding, with their body, with learning, were personal to them and that they were the only person that couldn't do it, and that everybody else did fine with the way they were taught and the way they were learning. And whilst that stays as everybody's fantasy, that they're the only idiot, as it were, who can't get this thing and everybody else can do it, there is very little power from the group as a whole. Everybody's there in their own individual whole, berating themselves and their stupidity and their lack of talent and how awful it is. Yet the reality is that this is the experience of a very large percentage of the population. Some struggle on spending time, energy and money, some devolve themselves into being happy hackers, some give up. But realising that so many people are having their own variation on the theme of this same experience changes the game. And I was listening recently to a podcast talking about how change only ever really happens when group of people arrive in the town square and protest or whatever, because when that happens and this person knows there's a problem and the other person knows there's a problem, and this person knows that that person knows and that person knows that this person knows and everybody else knows that everybody else knows. Whereas when it's perceived as an individual problem that I'm the only person that has this problem, there is no possibility of significant change. There has to be this communal knowledge that, yes, I see this and yes, you see that and I see that you see it, and we both see that this person sees it and we all see that there's a group of us seeing it. And within the horse world, whilst since those early realizations of myself that it wasn't just me who was struggling, and that just about everybody who set foot in my door was really struggling, since then, maybe time has moved on a bit and people are more aware of culture as a whole, but yet I think there's still a lot of people struggling away in their own individual worlds going, I have no talent, I was born without it. Rather than the harder I work, the smarter I get. This is a learnable skill. It can be broken down into bite sized chunks. Talent has a structure, and yet the culture as a whole, the culturescape within each individual's wordscape and brainscape are embedded does not help us to realize this. The culturescape keeps each individual struggling away in their own little world, probably believing that they're one of the unlucky ones. So in a way, me doing these podcasts is somewhat subversive because I'm really putting out there that the model of learning and skill development that we have in the horse world and what those skills are, does not serve many people well. And if you happen to have naturally high tone, naturally good focus, naturally good ways of supporting your body weight, natural bravery with a good bear down and a good breathing pattern, you have some of the very beginnings of talent. And you have a chance that you will discover more factors of what make it work in your learning. But if you don't start with those beginnings, then you're kind of on the riding scrap heap. But it doesn't have to be that way. And yet it's also true that in my early days of this, and in my enthusiasm for this, which is just as big 40 years later, I made the assumption that an awful lot of people were more like me than they are. Because I had dedication, determination and discipline. I was going to get to the bottom of this thing. I, I was going to use my scientific physicist brain to help me get to the bottom of this thing. I was going to read and learn and explore whatever it needed to get me to the bottom of this thing. And George Morris, who's very famous as a show jump trainer in the us, he once said, riders with talent are to a penny. Now, personally, I don't agree with that, but he felt that was the case. Riders with talent are to a penny. But give me a rider with dedication, determination and discipline. Those riders are as rare as hen's teeth, and actually those riders are rarer than I thought they were. And it does take a fair bit of hanging in there. I'm not promising you a straight line of progress, just a graph that kind of goes upwards and just keeps improving. There will be ups and downs and pitfalls and snakes and ladders and all sorts of things that happen, but the plateau that most people find themselves on after making early progress does not have to be there and it may not just go away and never come back. You may find yourself on plateaus that gradually get less long, less frequent, because you and your coach know how to ignite the learning process and you have the faith that the harder you work, the smarter you get. To really change the riding culture is going to take more than my lifetime. This is not any longer a solo endeavour. There are probably about 50 good coaches of this world. Around the world, there are other people who in their own right, have a harder I work, the smarter I get kind of ethos and have enough knowledge to really make differences to people. And a lot of riders dig their own graves by being determined that they should work with an elite rider. This is especially true in America, I think, and that some of the magic of that elite rider up on the pedestal, some of their gold dust will rub off. Whereas the reality is that the gap that trainer would have to cross to coach that person and the gap that person would have to cross to get close enough to the XYZ of information that that trainer can offer them is just so large that it's not as profound and useful a coaching situation as it could be. Yet people are so seduced by the elite rider on a pedestal and sitting at that rider's feet and waiting for the gold dust to rub off on them that it's what they want more than anything else. And the cudas are going, oh, I ride with so and so maybe puts them one up in their eye to the person who rides with somebody more lowly, who may actually have more relevant information to give to that person. That's about ego, isn't it, really? And becoming a good learner means you're less pandering to your own ego and more digging in, sweating, doing your 10,000 repetitions, working on each piece as it comes along, doing your best to be consciously competent. Although we know the reality of the human experience is probably that you will be semi consciously, semi competent, but that is good enough to keep the learning process rolling. So I encourage you to realise that whatever struggles you've had with your riding are not just you. We don't enough share our struggles with people just because of the culture of, of you've got it or you haven't, rather than the harder I work, the smarter I get, the more that becomes your ethos. The more you surround yourself with people who have that ethos, the more you work with a coach who has that ethos and has a good model of how skills development and how the rider horse interaction works, the more you do that, the more productive your learning becomes. And meanwhile, folks like myself dig away at the prevailing culture, like digging at a mountain with a teaspoon, in the hope that both from the top down with the elite riders I work with and from the bottom up with the everyday riders I work with, we can in time impact on the culture and make this easier for the generations that follow us. Meanwhile, have fun with your riding. Have fun with your horses. I'll be back 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 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 od large amount to our Just Giving.

Page, we would be so grateful.

Many thanks to you.