Ep. 21 On struggle, behaviour, identity, and nerves.

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast number 21. In podcast 20, we talked about a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The research on this was done in education, and the fixed mindset basically meant you're smart or you're not, you've got brains or you haven't. We as riders, in reading this and hearing about this, substitute the idea of you've got talent or you haven't, there's nothing you can do to change that. It's fixed in that fixed mindset. A growth mindset is based on the harder I work, the smarter I get. For us as riders, it's really the harder I work, the more I build skills, the more talented I appear. And if you are living in a community of people with a fixed mindset, there will be people in that community who think they're really good and, and want to keep themselves one up and will tend to want to keep you one down. And I think this lies behind a lot of the backbiting that does undoubtedly happen in the horse world. A growth mindset gives us many more possibilities and much more optimism in learning. But many people, I think, do feel that they're battling away with a rather fixed mindset, of their lack of talent, and in a world which can easily keep them in that place and not realizing that they are one of many, many, many riders who are not served well by the prevailing ethos and the prevailing models of skill development. And once this becomes mutual knowledge that, you know that's the case for you and you know it's the case for somebody else, and she knows it's the case for you and the case for her, and. And then you have a group of people really realizing that this is the prevailing culture, then everything changes. But somehow in the horse world, this hasn't changed to the extent it really needs to to drive change in the overall culture, both from the bottom up and from the top down. I'm going to tell you a story here. This is a true story. It happened maybe 15 years ago. I was at a big lecture demonstration in the audience and there were a number of presenters. This was a fundraiser for top class competition. There were a number of presenters, coaches and riders showing different facets of training. And we saw riders riding in very different styles. And just before the break, there was the opportunity for the audience to ask questions. And I put my hand up in the air very quickly and got selected to ask a question. That's the only time in my life that's happened. And my question was, we have seen riders, some of whom are vertical and some of whom are leaning back. We have seen some riders with very long stirrups and very short stirrups. None of the presenters or coaches has made any reference to this. Does that imply that they don't think it's important? Now, the person who was the master of ceremonies said to me, well, you need to direct your questions to one of the particular coaches. So I directed my question to a coach who demonstrated a session with a pupil of his where as far as I could see, the rider was leaning back in a very water ski situation. The horse was motorboating off with her and he was trying to use exercises to stop this motorboat happening. He said that he really thought it wasn't relevant that the rider was leaning back and the rider could sit how the rider wanted to sit. And one of the other presenters said, well, my rider was vertical and she always rides vertical at home. And there was a sort of in the audience, but not overall a satisfactory answer to my thinking. But unbeknownst to me, there was a prize for the best question, which was being judged by somebody who was a prominent rider and dressage judge. And this person judged my question as the best question. And I won some vouchers for horse feedback. And during the break I happened to run into the person who was the compeer for the evening and he said, I walked up to him actually, and I said, oh, hello, I'm Mary Wandlis. And he said, ah, yes, you asked that question. No wonder it was such an intelligent question. And I said, yes, I specialise in them. And he said to me, and this is a quote, well, you've asked your question and you've won your prize, so don't ask any more. Now that was 15 years ago. And I've kept asking questions, asking the questions that nobody else thinks to ask because the questions you ask determine where you go from there and working on answering those questions. And actually, when I look back on the last 15 years, I think I've answered a phenomenal number of questions. I. I look at my progress in that time and I'm quite mind blown by it, actually. So he put me in my place, supposedly, but certainly didn't stop my private endeavours and I think hasn't made much difference to my public endeavors. And he was probably one who thought writing was relatively easy, you know, had great patterns in his brainscape and did whatever he could to teach them in his wordscape, but wouldn't have been a good coach for riders who were struggling because he Wouldn't have had enough. How to information. So what tends to happen? First of all, let's take the dressage world. The dressage world tends to attract, if we're honest, the more neurotic riders, the ones in pursuit of perfection. One of my favourite definitions of dressage is the passionate pursuit of perfection by the obsessively imperfect. And if you weren't so obsessive, you'd probably be out galloping and jumping and having more what the world would generally consider fun. And undoubtedly, dressage can become, as you'll see on some T shirts and caps, stressage. And people set high goals for themselves and want perfection and can't achieve them. What will often happen, and perhaps you can recognise this in yourself, is you're riding your horse and you ride a not very good transition and you think to yourself, that was a bad transition. And then you, I can't ride transitions. And you ride a few more and they don't go very well. And you I'm having a bad day and this keeps going and pretty soon you're, I'm a bad rider. And the implication of that is I'm a bad person. Now, you've gone down a slippery slope here, and the problem really is that you have confused your behaviour with your identity. The fact that you rode a bad transition has demonstrated that you're a bad person. What this means is that every step your horse takes is loaded with meaning because it has the potential to prove you good or bad. Now, I can remember when I was more caught up in a behaviour identity mishmash, that I'd have days of thinking, I can do this, I've got it, I've got it, I've got it. And I'd be really excited and I'd go out the next day. We've talked before, haven't we, about the next day? And it wouldn't work. And I think, oh, no, I was wrong. I haven't got this. I'm awful. I'll never get this. I'm such a bad rider. It's a kind of roller coaster that you really don't want to live on. And I realized that when I was getting into the big excitement, I've got it, I can do this. Yes. I invented for myself this construct of Mary's column that was rather like Nelsa's column, which any of you who are British will know is a statue in Trafalgar Square. And it's a very high one. And I realised that Nelson's Column needed to be taken down gradually. So it wasn't a column. And Nelson stood on the ground like Mary had to stand on the ground so I didn't sink or swim in my own eyes according to how well or badly I rode. Now, it would be different if I rode a bad transition, just meant, well. I'm a good person and I'm a learning rider and I haven't yet figured out how to do transitions. And it wasn't a statement about identity, it was only a statement about behaviour and what layer of the onion you're currently on in terms of your riding. But of course, if you've grown up in a fixed mindset kind of culture, it's very hard to keep that identity, behaviour, separation. And there are instructors out there and if you're as old as I am, you will have grown up with some who were really good at going, you are really stupid, you idiot. You should know better than this. Why can't you do that? And that might have become the voice in your head. And again, back through time, I've given you some suggestions about how to calm and quell that voice in your head and turn it into your own best coach. I like the story that somebody told me once about Iris Kellett. She was an Irish show jumper and trainer who became very well known in her day. And somebody told me about being at a clinic that she was teaching and somebody wrote a show jumping round. And at the end of that, Iris said in her beautiful lilting Irish accent, now that was one of the most diabolical show jumping rounds I've ever seen in my life. You need to go out and do that again. And this time what you need to do is. So her comment was just about, that was a diabolical round of show jumping. It wasn't. You are a diabolical rider. And keeping this separation between behavior and identity in how you talk to yourself, how you think about yourself, how you talk to your kids is really important. The notion that every step your horse takes is loaded with meaning and able to prove you are good or bad person is shocking. No horse should ever have to carry that burden. It's too much to ask. Every step he takes is loaded with meaning. He's going to have to keep his head down at all costs in order to help his rider keep believing she's good enough. It's going to be stressage for him. Even if it isn't stressage for her. It can go wider than that, too. I want to tell you the story of coaching in Australia many years ago and going back for a second or third clinic somewhere and talking to somebody's husband. And he came up to me and said, thank you so much, I really want to thank you. And I said, oh, what's going on? And he said, well, well. I used to come home from work in the evenings, put my head around the door and ask my wife, how did the horse go today, dear? And depending on how she replied, I'd take my cue about how best to enter. And now I don't have to do that anymore. So his wife had made that behaviour identity separation and was living on a much more even keel. And it probably was that, like me, she had had to lose the euphoria of, I can do it, I am a good rider, I am a good person, in order to lose the grumpiness or the despair of, I can't do it, I'm no good, it's hopeless. And his life, hopefully her life and her horse's life, became much easier as a result. So as well as this kind of angst, there's also often fear and anxiety. The fear of being judged, being watched, not being good enough, as well of the horse. Fear of the horse as he might spook or look at something, or fear that he's going to whiz off or buck. And it's true that dressage riders tend to be the most neurotic riders, the ones who are more easy going or off by their seat of their pants, galloping and jumping. And it's the intense dressage riders who are there in the arena. And I do love that definition of dressage as the passionate pursuit of perfection by the obsessively imperfect. When I was young, there were lots of teachers who used to make you more scared of them than you were of doing whatever it was they wanted you to do. Usually it was a jump. That tactic doesn't work so much these days now that there's litigation. I can remember as well being in Germany riding, and in our morning lesson there were 11 horses in a 20x40 arena. And I remember the instructor shouting. And when people shout in a foreign language, I get much less upset than when they shout in English. And I was pretty sure he wasn't shouting at me. And there was one girl that he'd been a bit tough on, and I suspected he was shouting at her, which indeed he was. And she came round a corner and he was standing in the corner, and as he did, he picked up a shovel, whacked the horse on the side of its butt with the shovel, whereupon it set off bucking across the arena. And there was another tirade of shouting, which I expect was, stay on, you stupid girl. Except she didn't. He did buck her off and she landed in the dirt and everybody picked themselves up and on they go. But that kind of behaviour isn't on nowadays. It would, in England at least, definitely lead to a lawsuit if there was injury to that rider. Instructors back through time did an awful lot that would make you more scared of them than you were of whatever they wanted you to do. And instructors had a very little understanding, very little empathy. And I remember the story of one. I'm not sure if this is a real story or made up, some pony club Harrigan and a child who's sitting there in tears. The saying to the girl, well, if you must cry, you could at least sit up straight while you're doing it. Which shows how little she understood about the nature of that kind of collapse. Nowadays, as that doesn't happen, people are maybe more likely to get, as it were, agoraphobic. Perhaps they won't go out hacking with some particular friend because something happened, or they won't go on a particular ride, or they won't canter in a certain place, or they don't like to go out here or there, so they're curtailing their riding out. And then maybe they're curtailing in the riding in the arena because there's a spooky end or a funny corner and that person is living on her nerves in a big way. Now, all of us will have nerves some of the time and we need them because nerves fuel good performance in the start of the cross country box. You need to have butterflies. And there's a beautiful book called the Pressure Principle, which I really recommend to anyone learning anything and especially to coaches. It's by Dave Ulredred and it talks a lot about his work with the English rugby team, especially Johnny Wilkinson. And Johnny would throw up before every match, literally on the pitch. He was a dangerous man. He was a force to be reckoned with. He was one of the best. But he always threw up. And it wasn't a case of how to get him to not throw up. It was a case of how to get him to eat the right food at the right time. And for him and everybody else to do damage limitation and to live with throwing up. It was what his body did. People often say with having butterflies, the question is, can you get them to fly in formation? Not can you get them to go away? And if they do go away, you could be in real trouble. British athlete David Hemery won a gold medal in the Mexico Olympics. It was in the hurdles, I believe, 400 meters. And when it came to, I believe, the next Olympics, he was kind of older for his peer group in that race. He knew he was unlikely to get gold in his training. He did an awful lot of what he thought was being very mature and telling himself, well, maybe he could meddle, but he wasn't going to be the best of the bunch. And he was kind of priming himself a failure in a way. And in the competition on the day, warming up, he suddenly realized he was kind of having an out of body experience and not feeling anything. And he ended up biting his fingernails down to the quick in the attempt to get himself to really be in his body and feel something. As it turned out, he won the bronze, but he thought if he'd have been really with it, he could have won silver. So that case of not having nerves would be a big deal. I get a little bit nervous before I speak in public, but I know I can make the butterflies fly in formation. And a lot of people suggest that you decide, whoever you are, whether the physiology you're experiencing should be interpreted as fear or excitement. Well, I can certainly do excitement in front of an audience. I was more prone to feeling it as fear in the cross country box, but without it, and that happened to me once in a drama production. I was on stage. Without nerves, you're really not good. You need those nerves. And of course, for a lot of event riders, cantering down the center line where they're being watched and they're about to be judged is a more nerve wracking experience than being in the start box where it's only their life that's on the line and that's all. We'll talk more about fear in the next podcast. But those of you who live with your nerves on an ongoing basis, I really recommend you take yourself to the website equestrianconfidence.com which is run by my friend Joe Cooper, who's worked with a lot of riders I know and made a massive difference, especially if you've had a fall and you've got some residue from that that kind of nibbles at you and nags at you through the edges. She can make a big difference and on the site she does a good line in flying phobias and spider phobias and other things like that. So we're going to finish at this point with you feeling, I hope not too fearful, able to make the butterflies fly in formation to have fun with your horses. To have fun with your riding and I'll be back with you 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 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.