Ep. 31 On how to get the best from your teacher, and mental rehearsal

I need to give an extra little bit of introduction to podcasts 31, 32, 33 and 34. Within these podcasts I start to explain mental rehearsal and invite you to do some mental rehearsals, understanding how this skill builds, how it works, and building up to some substantial mental rehearsals of your Riding By Podcast 34. Essentially, I'm inviting you to do some structured daydreams, but realise that daydreaming whilst driving or operating any other machinery is not sensible and is potentially dangerous. These exercises are fascinating and they can be tremendously helpful, but please use you owe it to yourself to do them in a safe, sensible, quiet environment so that you can give 100% of your attention as you're doing them and so you do not expose yourself or anybody else to danger. Please take me seriously on this and please really enjoy learning about the wonderful skill of mental rehearsal. Hello, it's Mary Wandlis here. Following our series of podcasts, which will continue and which I know a lot of people have enjoyed, I'm proposing a series of webinars beginning in late November, four Before Christmas and four After Christmas, happening weekly and giving me the opportunity to show you some of the facets I haven't been able to show you through anything other than my words during the the podcasts. This will enable me both to use PowerPoint and to be on camera explaining things to you, at times using a flip chart and at times using our riding simulator at Oberdale Equestrian Centre and one of my colleagues on that simulator. I think I can add significantly to your understanding and your skills by doing this, and we have demonstrated in many different ways that that people really can improve their riding skills over the Internet. I promise to be interesting and fun and slightly different and to give you very practical viewpoints both on learning and skill development and on showing you the skills that it really is you need to develop. So it may be that we're facing a rather long and dreary and possibly isolated winter, but there might be a little possibility of some wonderland here between you and your horse as you discover skills that really can make a difference to your riding, your relationship with your horse and how the interaction between the pair of you pans out. So please join me on this. You will find joining information on maryonelist Shop webinars and I would love to see you, albeit on the other side of the camera, in a way that enables you to personally ask me questions and personally benefit from seeing as well as hearing. I hope to see you there. Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 31. Over the last few podcasts, we've gone from talking about the three toolkits to leg aids and the technique of how to do them. And also the authority and the boundaries which keep the meaning in your leg and spare both you and your horse from nag, nag, nag. It's the easiest thing in the world to train the horse to be dead to your leg and much more demanding to keep the meaning in your legates. And I've asked you to consider whether you have an internal brick wall or prohibition around being authoritative, making a statement, standing out, maybe even rocking the boat. You might also have the strategy that goes, come along, horsey, come along, horsey, come along horsey. Which again, lacks authority. With riders at a certain stage in learning, working with them to develop authority is much of the grist of the mill of teaching. And it's not easy work. The truth of the matter is that most teachers give up. They go through the motions. So they go what you're doing as rider, if you go through the motions. And the teachers who aren't willing to do that often get really impatient. Being teachable, being fun to teach, is really a good idea. It really does help you get the best out of your teacher. And I have encouraged you to wonder how teachable am I, not just in relation to those leg aids and authority, but into the various numbers that people run. Like the yes buts, the chattering, the being unfocused, the not listening. Well, stepping outside yourself to ask, do I do this? What is the baggage I bring into the riding arena? How much do I listen? Stay focused and give it my best shot. I promise you, when you do, even if you're a fairly novice rider, you will be fun for the coach to work with. And there's a lot to be said for bringing out the best in your coach. Meanwhile, with the folks who are struggling, the coach often really has to maintain for them a behaviour, identity, separation. Do you remember that slippery slope of I rode a bad transition, I'm having a bad day, I can't ride transitions. Actually, I'm a bad rider and I'm a bad person. The coach has to not let you go down that and not go down that herself. She could easily decide, if you can't ride like her or do what she's saying, then you're stupid. But actually, all of us, everybody is so much more than our baggage and our patterns. And I have much respect for coaches, especially elite riders who really understand that. I remember one day talking with Kyra Kirkland, who's retired now from international competition, but in five Olympics was up there in the top few riders, just out of the medals. She said to me once, this person in front of me might not be a good rider, but she might be a brilliant accountant. And that's something I could never, ever be. I hope from our last podcast that you really did do the personality test that tells you your strength that you can find on viacharacter.org it's a lot of fun and it's well worth doing. Talking about fun, we actually have a lot of fun on teacher training. So when I'm teaching coaches, we'll often have a flip chart at the front of the room and we will list basically behaviours that make people difficult to teach and also within that, thinking about how are we ourselves difficult to teach. And then I'll invite one of the coaches to get up on a static saddle on a sturdy saddle horse. And we normally have a big gym ball under the saddle horse, so we have something like the horse's sides under her legs. And we invite that rider to role play her toughest client. And I will work with them and the group will work with them to go, can we get that rider into a learning stage? Can we get them to stop running their numbers and buy into what we're trying to do? And this can often end up with the whole group in a mixture between laughter and tears. It can be the funniest thing ever. But usually we can find a way to get that, that role played rider into a state where they give up on their numbers and they start learning. And I think the coaches who are there in that seminar learn a huge number of tactics for helping people to get there. In an earlier podcast we talked about the idea of the rider having to tune herself every time she gets on a horse, rather like tuning a musical instrument before you play it. And tuning yourself is tuning yourself into losing the other concerns of your day. Getting yourself and your horse in a bubble, being present, being in the moment, noticing, tuning into your own body and your horse. And once you've tuned yourself, then you begin to tune your horse so he forgets that he's lazy or he's whizzy or he's distracted or his friend is over there or whatever it is, and he's. And he too gets in that bubble, focused on the rider. So now we're taking this up a notch, saying the coach needs to tune herself to get rid of all her distractions and other thoughts, to be present in the arena with that rider and horse. And when she's in that state, she becomes a role model for the rider as she too learns to be present and to tune herself into that state of really clear focus. Do you remember our camera lens? An under focused and over focused, the quietness inside your head of noticing. So the coach tunes herself to help to tune the rider, to help to tune the horse. And yet it can work the other way around that the rider and the horse lead the coach astray. I can remember a lesson. I don't remember where it was or who it was, but I remember hearing myself saying don't panic to my rider. And then I realised there were two problems there. The first was the inclusion of a don't. Because don't panic is a bit like don't think of a pink elephant. You have to think of that to know what it is you shouldn't be thinking about. And then I also realized that I was saying this because I was panicking. So a freaked out horse had freaked out the rider and was beginning to freak me out. And I went down the wrong road of getting off my grounding my centre and bringing that horse and rider back into their stretch zone and maybe even back into their comfort zone. A day of teaching people who are up for learning can be a really fun day. You can be working with relatively novice clients, but when they're up for it, the, the work can give you energy and be so much fun. When it's draining, it's draining because of how hard you work to stay centred and organized in the face of people's baggage. I meet a handful of people every year who walk into my arena for the first time and are already good learners. The name of the game really and truly is learning how to learn. And that's a gift that's even bigger than the gift of learning how to ride. Between us. If we keep experimenting, I find different ways to say it, they keep searching for better ways to do it. We can normally find a way to cross the skill gap between us, but of course I'm not a coach or trainer who just wants obedience. I'm coming from a different basis from that. And we have a little saying that kind of goes, don't just say it. V A K it with V standing for visual, auditory standing for the spoken language, K standing for kinesthetic. And putting our hands on people. And through all those input channels, we're dealing much more with how the brain processes information, how the brain thinks, and, and we're streamlining the learning process. Recently during lockdown, when we haven't been able to go hands on. It's a little tougher and it all takes a little longer, but we've managed better than I thought we would. But realising that the brain thinks internally and takes in information externally through vision, hearing and feeling leads us very nicely into the topic of mental rehearsal. It was many years ago in London when I got a phone call from a client of mine who I talk quite a lot, and it went, mary, I really want to thank you. And I'm going, why? What? And she went, I got the job. Thank you, thank you. I'm so grateful I got the job. And I'm there going, I don't get really what I've got to do with her getting the job. And then she explained a little more. She'd been coming to my workshops, which I used to do as a series of evenings when I lived in London, and they were based around skill development and mental rehearsal and focus, being in the moment, being present. And she had, having learned about mental rehearsal, mentally rehearsed her job interview. She mentally rehearsed the questions she wanted to ask. She imagined some of the answers she might get and how she might have to ask for clarification. She mentally rehearsed the questions she thought she would be asked, how she wanted to answer them, how she wanted to present herself. She'd done her mental preparation for that interview supremely well and felt like she got the job on the back of that. Had she not come to my workshop, she might have done the same thing, but maybe not as thoroughly and maybe she would or wouldn't have known that she was doing mental rehearsal. Now, I think the first person to talk about mental rehearsal in the horse world was Lucinda Green or Lucinda Prior Palmer, as she was in the early days, who's an event rider still out there eventing with one horse and a horse trailer in her 60s, but as an Olympic medalist and the winner of baby badminton, I think it was six times she became a legend, especially for her cross country riding. And the story is that when she was a child, her parents would take her to the competition venue and she'd walk the cross country course and probably the show jumping course, and then come back home to plat up her pony for the competition and the dressage test as the beginning of the following day. And while she was plaiting her pony, she would talk her pony through the cross country course and maybe she'd tell it like, we've got to slow down a little bit here. We're going into the woods and I'm going To kick on and line up here and we've got to canter a little slowly through the woods and then we've got the table coming out and then down the hill and I'm going to line up on the tree and I've got to turn here and sit up and be really ready. And she'd talk her pony through it. Many years later, after she was a multiple winner, she wrote about how she had to do her mental rehearsal hidden in the loo because the press were hounding her to such a degree that she couldn't get any peace. I'm virtually certain that her mental rehearsals of the cross country were her most detailed, accurate mental rehearsals. Her show jumping ones probably weren't far behind. But Lucinda was notorious for her inability with the dressage and I rather suspect her dressage mental rehearsals went in the same way that yours might do. Because most people might have the test and a picture of the arena and the letters on their knee and they might take a fingertip and go along that picture of the arena and jump their finger up and down going trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, halt. That's probably at X. Trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, circle, circle, circle, circle, circle, circle, circle, trot, trot, trot, trot, walk and all that kind of thing. Carrying on, going around the arena. Now that is a quick way to check in that you know where you're going. But it certainly doesn't count as a realistic mental rehearsal. Chris Bartle wrote and talked in the days where he had Wiley Trout in the British team and was actually sixth in the Olympics, many years before we actually won an Olympic medal. And I quoted him in my first book, which was published as Ride with youh Mind in the UK and the Natural Rider in the us. And the quote went something like, I go through my test mentally step by step, half halt by half halt, exactly as I'd expect to ride it with, with the problems that might arise with the corrections I'm going to make. Now that's a very far cry from trot, trot, trot, trot, hold, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot. Done really well. That mental rehearsal would take the time of the test itself. If it's a little shorter or longer, that wouldn't worry so much for a rider. But if you were a skier or in any kind of timed event, you really want your mental rehearsal to take your best ever time or maybe even a little less. So you're priming your body to beat your own record. There's an interesting little experiment we can do here. I want you to close your eyes and just imagine signing your name with your dominant hand as you normally do. That's not going to take very long at all and your signature is going to be as readable and legible as it is or isn't in real life. Now, I want you to imagine signing your name with your non dominant hand. Now, that's going to take a bit longer, if not a lot longer. And I just found myself telling the letters to myself inside my head as I imagined holding the pen and moving it very slowly and wobbly. And this shows us in the difference between those two experience, that mental rehearsal can really be a realistic version of the skills your brain knows or doesn't know. So you can do it so easily with your dominant hand. The other one is inevitably slower and painful, as it would be in real life. I learned a lot about mental rehearsal many years ago, where I interviewed quite, quite a number of elite riders. Ideally, a mental rehearsal involves all of your senses, but it became clear in doing this that jumping riders had a bigger sense of rhythm than the dressage riders and were really hearing it in their mind's ear with the PA tum ptum, ptum, ptum, ptum, ptum of their horse's Canterbury. What we're going to do now is another mental rehearsal and we're going to do this about something that isn't to do with riding, just for you to get the idea of a kind of guided imagination in your mind and noticing how your senses are involved and whether some senses are clearer to you than others. So I want you for a moment to just close your eyes and to imagine that you're standing near a bowl of fruit. That bowl of fruit contains some wonderful, perfect examples of your favourite fruits. And you might want to move around the bowl to see it from different angles, or to imagine turning the bowl so that you see those fruits from different angles. See the colours of the skin, whether the skin is smooth, shiny, whether it's pitted, what qualities the skin has. See maybe the play of light and shade as light falls on the skins. See the shapes, how different fruits are rested on each other and the arrangement of the fruits in the bowl. Then think of which fruit it is you'd really like to eat. And in your imagination, take that fruit out of the bowl and hold it in your hand. Feel its weight, feel its shape, feel the texture of its skin. Maybe just move your thumb and run your thumb across the skin, feeling its texture, feel its temperature. Maybe turn it over, look at it from the other side. Is it uniform? Or are there different patterns and different hues and different shades to the skin in your imagination? Bring that fruit up to your nose and smell it. Somewhere nearby, you'll see a knife cut that fruit in half, so you can now hold half of it and see it from the inside. Look at its flesh. What textures do you see there? What kind of structure? How does it contrast with the skin? Is there a stone or a pip? Again, bring that fruit up to your nose and smell it. And now, when you're ready, take a bite. Now, I imagine that at least some of that in some of your senses was very clear to you, and I also imagine that you're salivating at the thought of eating that fruit again. This is another little bit of evidence that the brain cannot tell the difference between real and imagined performance. And that when you imagine doing something, you're priming your brain and sending the same neurological pathways to your muscles as you do in real practice. What this means is that repetitions in mental rehearsal count within your 10,000 repetitions that it takes to get really good at any skill. Most riders only do mental rehearsal before a competition, and of course, that's really important. But if they don't do it to increase and build their skills, they're missing a trick. We'll come back to talk more about mental rehearsal next time and to build your skills. It's a skill so worth happening to help you increase your learning and build on your strengths. All the best to you. Have fun with your horses. I'll be back with you soon.