Ep. 24 Why do some people learn and improve much faster than others?

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis WELcoming you to podcast 24. I want to start by telling you a story I was told in Australia many years ago and it concerns Franz Maringa, who'd been at the Spanish Riding School and left there soon after the war and emigrated to Australia. And he was a phenomenal influence on the generation of riders who were growing up then. He wrote a wonderful book called Horses Are Meant To Be Horses, which is really worth reading, however many years later. And the story goes that it was a barbecue, as it would be in Australia with him and a whole big number of his pupils. And at one point during the evening he said to what's the most important thing about riding? And of course he had this amazing godlike status in this classical background. So everybody's coming up with stuff that sounds really classical, that the horse must be like this and that. And every time he'd go no, and somebody else would come up with something else about how the rider had to be perfectly organized, da, da, da. And he'd go, no. And eventually, after a number of people had done this and everyone was running out of courage, he said, you're all so wrong. The most important thing is that you keep the horse between you and the ground. And of course, ultimately, he's right. My bravest years were when I was head girl in a riding centre, there was no one to defer to. If there was a horse that was going to be a bit iffy to get on, I was the one that had to do it. And I was out inventing three horses and having really good tuition for its day and being out and about taking exams, actually finally passing one of them and. And I can remember actually some of my show jumping zeniths. There was one round in an event, show jumping round that I had a mental rehearsal of for years later, although I've lost it now, and one that I still remember, of riding in a grid with Pat Burgess, of feeling every footfall, being so aware of time slowing down and just having the most amazing experience, which I confess I never had again. I can also remember another job in a well known riding centre with well known people running it and the head honcho looking at me and going, well, AIs, that's assistant instructors. Assistant instructors are expendable. You get on it. And I don't actually remember whether I did get on it, but I kind of sat there thinking, well, yeah, thanks for that. I can remember riding those horses. It was in the era of the film Empire of the sun, which I thought was a lovely film and it was about a young boy who got separated from his parents as Europeans were fleeing Japan during the Second World War. And he ended up in a prisoner of war camp in Japan, which was right next door, separated only by a big fence from an Air Force training base where they were training kamikaze pilots. And this young lad who was mad about airplanes, befriended one of the pilots just in a sort of smile and wave through the fence kind of way. And when it came to that pilot's turn to fly, what they all did was they lined up and they saluted the commander and they walked forward and they shook his hands and they drank a glass of sake or something stronger and they ran to the aeroplane, started up and off they went to basically bomb something and kill themselves in the process. And when this young man went to do it this day, his plane wouldn't start and his life was spared. But I can remember some horses where I felt it was kind of like that. You should kind of go hustle, drink the Starkey and run to the horse and get on before you thought any more about it. There's this famous speech, isn't there? Where was it? Roosevelt. Some American president said, there's nothing to fear but fear itself. And of course this is really true because it's the physiology of fear that's your undoing. Without that physiology, you're present, you're in the moment and you're functional. Of course, the screw tightens one stage more when you become frightened of being frightened. That case, you don't go anywhere near frightening situations. The opposite of that I remember is teaching a young woman one day who is very talented and skilled, and her saying to me, okay, I'm going to keep noticing that I'm noticing. And it took maybe another 15 years for her to be in the US dressage team. So I can teach biomechanics, I can do it in a step by step way. I can make it learnable in bite sized chunks. But I always had a question in the back of my mind that goes, why are some riders so much quicker in learning this? Sometimes you put the duck in water and it swims. Sometimes I just give people the information and off they go. But with other folks, they don't learn and improve in the way we think they should, perhaps. So what's going on? What makes it harder for some people and easier for others? And we're not just asking here what constitutes talent. We're also asking what constitutes roadblocks, difficulty, slowness and struggle. So part of this is the patterns in the body. Everyone's heard of the fetal crouch. This is the body kind of folding into itself. Your middle goes backwards, your shoulders curl forward, your knees come up. And actually not many riders do that. Very nervous novices might foetal crouch. And the time when riders do do it is in front of a fence when they realise that something's going to go badly wrong. And of course, as soon as you foetal crouch, it does go badly wrong. So the foetal crouch is a small part of it. The bigger part of it, which we've talked about before, is the Landau response. And the Landau response is seen in babies at about five months. And if you hold a baby with your hand under its tummy, a younger baby will just curl around your hand. Its back muscles are not strong enough yet for any other response. But between five and seven months, that baby should get where it's supported by your hand and it actually arches its back. And that reflex, the Landau reflex, continues till somewhere around two or three, and then we're supposed to lose it. But talking with Tom Myers about this, he said to me, no, a lot of people really don't. And that's my experience, and it was myself included. So in a moment of, ooh, what's going to happen? The vast majority of riders push down in their stirrups hard, their thigh goes too vertical, their knee and their hips straighten, Their. Their butt comes up. As we said in earlier podcasts, they might pop up tensing their backside muscles. At the same time, they grow tall, they hollow their back, they probably lift their shoulders and their hands and they stop breathing. The Landau response can take a lot of training out of your body. It took me years to first of all understand it and then to train myself out of it. In if you find in any down transition that you tend to push in your feet and get taller, you have a hint of this in your body and you will probably do it too, in a scary moment. So I understand the Landau response now and can help people find their way out of it, but it's going to take a fair amount of time for the people who are most stuck in it. And of course, grow tall and stretch your leg down, as universal advice encourages people to think it's the right thing to do. So these responses limit talent, but you have to add the whole emotional mental state of being fight or flightish or freeze or foldish. So if you're fight or flightish, you're going to tend to be busy. Maybe there's too much going on in your brain and too much going on in your body. I was talking with a client recently, realising that there was something going on in her head that kind of goes, got to do it, got to do it, got to have him forward, got to have him forward, got to have him forward. And anything that I said wasn't really getting through that background in her brain. And to sit still and to sit quiet and essentially to listen to the horse rather than bombard the horse with information, which was a very alien concept. And of course, previous teaching that really gets people into a tears and desperate, doesn't help. Behaviour, identity, mishmashes don't help. And then people have their various things that they do. I remembered while I was thinking about this, doing a teacher training course in Australia, and as all my teacher training courses do, this involved coaches in groups of three, rotating around, giving a lesson, receiving a lesson, observing that lesson. And the person riding in this lesson of three was somebody I knew quite well, who actually was quite an accomplished rider who'd done a lot competitively at the upper levels. And I heard this screech, I've lost my left seat bone in panic and desperation. And inwardly I was somewhere across the arena observing this. I thought, oh, yes, I've been there. When she loses the plot, this can be somewhat tricky. And her coach, who didn't know my work so well, but was an accomplished coach in her own right, I listened to her in her Australian drawl, kind of go, so what are you going to do about it? And I thought, oh, my goodness, how brilliant that was. I need that phrase because it just stopped a rabbit hole that she was about to go down of panic and desperation and just said, so how will you fix it? I remember another pupil of a friend of mine, again, I heard this lesson from a distance and the pupils yesterday going, I don't know how I'm going to get this. It's really, oh, la, la, la, la la. It's all so difficult and there's so much. And my colle, renowned for her rapport skills with people and for being patient, said to her, this is a quote. Well, closing your mouth and opening your ears would be a very good first step. And I can remember a situation once with a pupil chattering away to me as she's working and riding in a circle around me, and me thinking, what's going on here? What's she really saying? There's not much that I can make of this. And I couldn't get a word in edgeways until I eventually did get a word in edgeways and I said to her, what do you do for a living? And she said to me, oh, I'm a hairdresser. And I realized that she was doing her riding lesson, doing hairdresser banter, and somehow we had to find a way out of that to get her into a learning mode. Getting someone into a learning mode is quite a big deal. And the extreme of the fight or flight type fueled rider might see riding as combat. That's more men than women. But getting that rider out of seeing it as combat and getting it into a quiet listening to, learning the horse's language, getting, communicating with the horse, being essentially guided by the horse in what your next step is, is an alien concept to that person. And there will unfortunately be some horses who see riding as combat as well. Perhaps they have that somewhat in their genetic makeup, but they have it in their history. So we can have all the emotional overdoing it things that people bring to lessons, and we have the underdoing it things of the more disengaged dorsal vagal, freeze or fold, rather floppy rider who won't have good authority or good boundaries. If you spent your childhood fading into the wallpaper, you're not going to be very good at going, hello, horse, listen to me. And teaching and learning authority is the hardest thing and really hard when pupils are at a certain level where they just don't kind of get how your dancing partner has to be organised, how you have to lead the dance, not follow, what it means to be causal, not casual, but causal rather than reactive, to believe that you have the right to be up there and to say, hello, horse, I'm being the brains, you're the brawn. More talented riders find it easy to essentially, me, Tarzan, you horse. More people kind of go, come along, horsey, come along, horsey, come along, horsey. And effectively the horse says, yeah, you and who's army? Makes me think of my childhood. I have two older brothers, both quite a lot older than me, and both of them could reach out their arm, put their hand on my forehead while I was punching the air between me and them, and they kind of go, yeah, pipsqueak, you and whose army? And as one of them said a while ago, well, I helped form the woman you are today. Thank you. Thank you, bro. So authority is something that a lot of people struggle to learn. And actually the floppy frozen riders find it hardest, but so do the busy, rather flighty riders. Mita, Zen, you horse, take some doing, but it's kind of what works in a very quiet, very effective way. And you would be amazed how Bearing down, centering yourself, breathing, just makes a world of difference to how seriously the horse takes you. And yet we can also justifiably ask, when you're a rosebud rider in the early stages of learning, how can you have authority? But it will come if your learning should be present and embodied, if you are able to look, listen and feel. One of my colleagues, one of the kids she teaches, is 8 years old and she sits there just so organized and so quiet, yet her little sister, and the sister is fair amount younger, can't begin to sit still. She got on the pony the other week, deliberately facing backwards, and as the lesson went on and my colleague was struggling to get her to do anything other than round the world and scissors and all these kid games, she found herself saying to the kid, you know, Jack is not a climbing frame, Jack is the pony. And the little girl said something like, well, yes, but all the prairie grounds are closed and I desperately need a climbing frame. So Jack is a climbing frame. But her older sister, who's eight, Jack, just sits there. And I told this to another client, just struggling to sit there, and she said to me, ooh, if I'd had a kid like that, I'd have throttled it. Which says something to the jealousy and the despair that people can go through when they don't have that natural tendency. So the ultimate not brave, not good boundaries rider will really nag at the horse and is essentially filling in for the horse's non response. So that person's going, kick, kick, kick, kick, with a rather heavy two down, not hung in a harness body, and a bit of a nudge in the kick rather than a quick in and out kind of leg aid. And then the ultimate of this would say to the coach, but I'm trying and is trying whilst ensuring that she won't succeed enough to rock the boat and risk being scared. That person really needs an injection of bravery authority and go for it. And there's a lot of horses faced with not just that, but the incongruity of riders saying go and stop at the same I want to go, but I'm scared to go. I want to go, but I'm scared to go. The handbrake is permanently on and the horse is faced with such an incongruent rider that, as one of my colleagues said in response to that, warmbloods go autistic and thoroughbreds go ballistic. The horse has to tune out one response and go for the other. But when you leave your horse a blank, he will fill in for your Absence, politely or not. Sweet horses, lovely school horses, lovely horses for novice riders fill in politely. Some horses fill in less politely. I can remember riding Heather Blitz's horse, Otto. This was before he was sold to Todd Fleitrich and ended up in the US Team in the World Games in Kentucky. And I came across a diagonal in canter, came into that diagonal, not clear in my mind what I was going to do, and he filled in with 15 ones, except the diagonal was too short, so we didn't make all 15. But that's a wonderful example of a more advanced horse filling in for the rider. But we want to present our riders with congruity, not incongruity. So part of the issue in struggle and not talent is the spinal sympathetic system of fight or flight. And what does that does to you? And. And the dorsal vagal older system of freeze and fold. And an added complication of that is that in the animal world, after fold, sometimes there's panic. The mouse might manage to fold, play dead, get itself out of danger. The cat kind of moves away and then the mouse runs towards the cat. So at that point in time, that poor panicking mouse doesn't know which way's up. And if you have that in your physiology too, then you have another problem. You might even add dyslexia. And you can't tell right from left. Although a lot of normal people who are normally wired when they're on the ground can't tell right from left when they're on a horse. And sometimes I can't tell right from left when we're on the ground, in which case, God help us all. I meet one or two naturally good learners in each year. That's amongst the new clients I see, which actually is not that many, because I teach many people I've taught over time, and when I meet someone like that, I always ask them what they do for a living. And it's almost certainly true that whatever they do, they're at the top of their profession. They know how to be present, to notice, to be embodied, to breathe. The bottom line in the work I do is not just that people are learning how to ride. The learning how to learn, the learning how to be in the social connection system. And that learning is massive. Learning how to ride is wonderful, but learning how to learn and how to be present is worth even more, because that skill goes into everything you do in life and is so life enriching and probably life lengthening that it's absolutely worthwhile. So on that note, we reached the end of this today. And when I'm back with you next time, we will talk about schoolmasters and buying a new horse and the joys and the struggles that that can throw up. Meanwhile, enjoy your riding. Have fun with your horses.