Ep. 26 On ‘the map is not the territory’

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 26, where we're going to change tack a bit and talk about what I call the three toolkits. And this, I think, is an answer to why it is that the horse world is so divided into different factions which actually can't talk to each other because they can't agree on what the skills of riding and training are. Now, when I was in my late 20s and I gave up writing in despair and went to live in London and sold fire extinguishers for a while and got involved in the world of psychotherapy and also neuro linguistic programming. And the teaching in neuro linguistic programming was very life affirming for me. And it has a number of basic tenets which you get to be very familiar with during an NLP practitioner training. And one of them is the map is not the territory. Another one is there is no failure, only feedback. In the early days when I heard that, I'd had a life that felt to me as if it had a lot of failures in it, especially the failure of giving up riding in despair. And I would find myself saying that to myself over and over in my head and realizing that it would come out as there's no feedback, only failure. There's no feedback, only failure. So I hope any of you who've been listening to these podcasts have got yourself through that stage, if that too would have been your baseline. And understand now that there is no failure, only feedback, as we get ourselves progressively to home in on patterns that work in both riding and life. So the map is not the territory. Let's think of literal maps. You could have a road map, a population map, a rainfall map, a topography map that shows the hills and valleys and rivers, a map that shows geology. All of those maps are related if they're of the same territory, but they're different. One of those maps doesn't make the others wrong. None of the maps negates any of the other maps. But you have more ways to describe the territory. And of course they're related because there'll be more roads in an area with more population. And maybe if the ground is flatter, there'll be more population, and if there are hills, there'll be fewer people and more rainfall. And maybe the geology will be more rocky and volcanic so you can understand how those various maps fit together. And having more ways to describe a territory always makes your experience and your descriptions richer. So within a lesson you could have the example of I'm there with a student and I've tried explanation A for a certain thing and it's obviously not resonated with them. And then I go to explanation B and they still look at me blankly and I go to explanation C. And then it's becoming clear that I've got to dig a bit deeper here and somehow I come up with a new idea as explanation D. Some of my best insights came when someone didn't get it on the first attempt, or the second, or the third. And what eventually surfaced from the depths of my brain became the best explanation ever. That's an example of creating another map, because each of those explanations is a map. But this is also true if we take the big picture of the entire horse world. Keep remembering the map is not the territory. And ultimately none of us can really know what the territory is. We make map territory violations very often in our speech, in our thinking. One time where we never do it is in a restaurant. Because if you did it in a restaurant, you'd eat the menu. That would be the equivalent in a restaurant of mistaking the map for the territory, but you'd never eat the menu and be happy eating the menu. But people do this all the time, metaphorically speaking. So if you think of back through with some of the podcasts, we talked about skill development as developing more and more sophisticated internal representations. Those are internal maps. And if you do this as a good learner, noticing, getting it, losing it, getting it, losing it, noticing more sophisticated things, you will have 5, 10, 20, or 30 years of experience. It's quite possible that the person beside you has one year of experience repeated 5, 10, 10, 20, or 30 times. There's a massive difference in every field between those two people. Whether you want a plumber, an electrician, or a riding coach. You want the person who genuinely has 30 years of experience. And we see through the maps that we know, and we see what we're looking for through those maps. So let's imagine a situation where we've got some tricky horse issue and the horse owner or rider has gathered the vet, the physiotherapist or body worker, the farrier, the saddlery, the biomechanics coach, and everybody's gathered together watching this horse work. Each of them will see a problem in their area of expertise. And of course they're likely to think it's the problem and they're seeing the problem. They have the tools to influence or solve, and maybe not seeing the problem that they don't have the tools to solve. They don't have the internal representations for that they each see the problem that they have the tools to influence, but hopefully their tools are so sophisticated that this isn't just a case of when all you have is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. It's interesting now that we live in an era or a world where specialisation is encouraged. There's a very good book called Range by David Epstein, written rather in the ethos of Malcolm Gladwell, who's well known for his book Outliers, but disproving actually some of Malcolm's findings. And in Range, David Epstein really argues that new insights happen when two or more fields are combined. And he makes a compelling argument in the book for the value of a wandering career trajectory. Now, if I think of my work, it's a combination of physics, the training I did in how people tick through psychotherapy and NLP bodywork, which I've done a lot of, and a lot of initial training in anatomy, all, of course, seen through the lens of my own personal struggle. And there is a sort of joke within the psychology world that virtually all the research that's done is actually not research, but me search people trying to solve their own problems. But that melding of physics, bodywork, anatomy, psychology has yielded a different take on riding skills and how they're underpinned by physics and the anatomy of two creatures. Going back to our horse and all these practitioners seeing the problem that they can fix within their skill set. Maybe what they're seeing are just facets or components of the overarching problem. And maybe there's more than one problem where we just like to think of one problem and one fix. Sometimes I wonder, as a physicist who grew up debating the waves and the particles, if the fact that the vet sees a veterinary problem and the farrier sees a foot problem and the saddler sees a saddlery problem. I, as a biomechanics coach, see a riding problem. Maybe this is no different to the waves and the particles. Perhaps the mysteries of the universe are just as simple as what you find depends on what you look for and how you look for it. So my working life has basically been dedicated to clarifying, working out how the rider horse interaction works and becoming able to do it well and teach it well. And somewhere back through time, I read about how American trainer Charles Dcomfy had talked about the first and second toolkits. The first toolkit he talked about as the rider's position. The second toolkit he talked about as the school movements. This seemed like a really appropriate designation. So I consider myself as a rider, biomechanics person, a teacher of the first toolkit. Mostly people pay lip service to that and maybe do a few minutes at the beginning of the lesson on get your leg here or get your body there, and then they give up. And then. And basically use the school movements as the training medium, regardless of how the rider rides. And if you don't have a good map to focus in on how the rider organises their body and what they need to change, and you have good ways to help them change it, I'm not surprised that you give up. But the other side of the coin, of course, is that the rider cannot not influence the horse is always responding to the position of your center of gravity, your ability to match the forces of his movement or not, your asymmetry, the way you support your body weight, the way you wiggle, shove or sit still. How is your dancing partner hold and how is it influencing him? It cannot not influence yet. Maybe after a little bit of talk about position, which doesn't do that interaction any justice, but there you go. A typical training session would kind of continue with the trainer thinking, now what would I do if I were riding this horse? And the answer might be, well, shoulder in would really increase the engagement of the inside hind leg and increase the bend to the inside. So the trainer says, let's ride shoulder in. And essentially she's teaching the person in front of her as if she were teaching herself, because shoulder room would work for her, so surely it must work for this person, but it may not, because the person probably pulls on the inside rein and the horse jackknifes with his shoulders still on the track and his nose to the inside. And perhaps the trainer says, come again and pay more attention to the bend. Come again, pay more attention to the angle. And all the time the trainer's thinking, if I did it another time, I get it right next time, surely she'll get it right next time. But actually the reality is that fatigue is creeping in and maybe despair is creeping in and the pull on the inside rein and the contortions are probably getting worse. And in the worst case scenario, and I think I've said this before, is that the lesson becomes, do it, do it again, do it more, do it now, do it better. And I've told you the story before about how international team training back through time in the US would degenerate into the big international trainer, big name trainer of the day, yelling at all of the riders, ride better. So on that basis, the trainer has not managed to cross the skill gap between herself and her student and has assumed good biomechanics and good influence over the horse in. In her prescription of shoulder in. And undoubtedly there are people that use the second toolkit well, that choose school movements well, that stay close enough to the student's area of skill and just stretch it a little bit without putting her too far out of what she can do and it can be made to work. Whether it's repeatable is another question. But undoubtedly some people do second toolkit lessons very well. Now, I can't quite date this, but it's somewhere between 10 and 20 years ago that I came across what I Now call the Zero Toolkit, which underlies toolkits 1, Rider Biomechanics and Toolkit 2. The School Movement. Most people, of course, virtually start at 2, virtually ignoring 0 and 1. And the zero toolkit is the work of Dr. Andrew Maclean, who's Australian. He was a zoologist. He was an Australian team event rider and a rider of wayward horses who I think traveled around Australia seeking out the most difficult horses to work with. And it became clear to him one day, given that he was a zoologist, that what he did as a horse trainer bore no relation to what he knew about animal training in. In general. And he set out to do a PhD, which was the development of what he called equine learning theory. And that is, how do we give the horse a conscious understanding of the aids? The legs go, the reins are stop. And building on from there, Andrew is giving his blessing to my name of the zero toolkit. And really he's doing ground zero. And his work starts on the ground. It's a little different to other philosophies of natural horsemanship in that it's specifically intended to prepare the horse for riding. And giving the horse a conscious understanding of the AIDS makes a lot of difference. So when you're on the ground, the aids are you have a bridle, you have the reins, you stand in front of the horse. There's a specific way to hold the reins. You have a dressage stick, which substitutes for your short arm, as it were, and you're going to tap the horse where your leg would give a leg aid. And when he walks on, you stop tapping. So you're kind of getting him to understand the response that gets you to go away. Most horses, in my experience, are totally clueless that the legs mean go and the reins mean stop. Every time I go to buy a horse or try a horse out, I will do a little groundwork before I get on. So nowadays I don't get on a horse, or very rarely get on a horse without doing a little test here of maybe just even go and stop, you learn a huge amount about the horse. Whether he understands this or not, whether he has a light go or a heftier go, whether he has a light stop or you go to do a stop aid with the rain, he just goes. So without risking your neck, you get to know what the baselines are in a very clean way where it's easy to observe. This is a far cry, isn't it, from my story of the film Empire of the sun and the sort of hustle, drink your sake, salute the general and run to the plane before you do your kamikaze fly off. Run to the horse before you get on this crazy one that you hope to God you can stay on. So nowadays I don't do that, but I will always do this little test before I get on. And I recommend to you the groundwork certification course that we have on dressagetraining tv, which is based on Andrew's work breaking it down into even smaller steps than he would normally do. So if your horse had this conscious understanding of the aids, he would be a little different to the dancing partner that doesn't. So remember the last podcast where we talked about, you buy a new horse, the horse has been danced by a really good rider. He doesn't need to know the steps, he's just danced, he's sold. You buy him, you think he's trained, you think he can just do those steps, but he can only do those steps in the way he's danced. If he'd had this basic training in the zero toolkit, he would know the steps in a different way, and he'd do at least a vague approximation for longer before it all fell to bits. Now, knowing the steps like this cannot override the rider. Biomechanics. If you get crooked and distorted, your horse is going to get crooked and distorted. If you just pull on the rein, you're going to tend to make him jackknife at the withers. But you could make an analogy, perhaps when he is danced. It's a bit like we all learn to speak our native language, so English, in my case, intuitively. We learn from listening, we learn from being around people. And at some point we go to school and learn how the grammar works. We learn that it has underlying rules. We learn that sentences have a structure, that they have parts with nouns and verbs and adverbs. Now, I think this conscious understanding of the aids can be a lot more pleasant Learning for the horse than English language and English grammar was for me. But you could say there are two different ways of knowing that territory intuitively and actually with an overt understanding of the rules. Now, knowing the steps like this cannot override the rider's biomechanics. If you get crooked and distorted, your horse will become crooked and distorted. If you pull on the inside rein, it's only a matter of time before he jackknifes. But it is really helpful to the horse to have this conscious understanding of the legs as go, the reins as stop, an opening inside rein, meaning step the front leg on the same side in that direction, and so the language builds from there. You might think of it that all of us are native speakers of our language, intuitive in my case, and we learn this language with no formal training intuitively. At some point we go to school and we learn about the structure of sentences and nouns and verbs and adverbs, and we. We learn English grammar, which I have to say was not a wonderful experience for me at school. And learning the grammar of go stop opening inside rein does not have to be a tortuous experience for the horse at all in the way it was for me and maybe you at school. With these two understandings, the horse is a very different creature. Otherwise he's left maybe befuddled to just not knowing what the heck humans are about trying to stay out of trouble. Presumably most of the time some horses temperaments aren't made that way, but most are. He will respond according to his body type and whether he has naturally more woe than go or more go than woe, and he kind of gets by. And it is shocking to say it again, how few horses really have this conscious understanding of the rider's aids. In our next podcast, we'll flesh this out some more and talk about how the three toolkits can work together so well. And reiterate, I'm sure, how it is that knowing about only one of them and thinking that this is the map of the territory and that there are no other maps makes the horse world a disjointed, disparate culture of people who can neither talk nor learn from each other. Meanwhile, have fun with your riding, enjoy your horses, and I'll be back again soon.