Ep. 32 On mental rehearsal experiments, and how MR is best led by passion, but can become torture.

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 32. In number 31 we started talking about mental rehearsals and you did those couple of mental rehearsals of signing your name with your dominant and your non dominant hand and also the mental rehearsal of seeing a bowl of fruit, picking up a fruit, holding that fruit, smelling that fruit and ultimately biting into that fruit. Mental rehearsal primes your nervous system, as the saliva of the fruit experiment tells you. That can mean that it's a good thing to do when you can't get enough access to your horse, maybe even when you and or your horse are laid up. In fact, there's research that shows that injured footballers recover faster when they do mental rehearsal. And if I was involved in that, I would be encouraging them to do both. Mental rehearsal of healing, maybe of tissues knitting together or even bones knitting together with smooth organized edges, and also mental rehearsal of their skill. So if you're a riding school rider, if you can't get to ride often enough, if you share a horse, but you can't get out there every day, and if you're just a working person or a mum and, and your riding time is limited by life in the way life does get in the way between us and horses, mental rehearsal doesn't substitute for a real horse, but for your brain it actually does. Mental rehearsal is a skill like any other skill and it takes practice. It works well to be in a good state when you do it, where you're feeling comfortable and happy with yourself and life. If you make it a chore, mental rehearsal will be contaminated with chore like feelings and you won't want to do it. And if you do do it, it won't work so well. In the early days of doing this, people often find themselves getting distracted and and find it not so easy to get themselves staying with the game. But if you do get distracted, just bring yourself back gently. Remember our tactic when you're riding of when you have an extraneous thought saying to yourself next and having the next thought be a useful one. Maybe like bear down here though, in your mental rehearsal you're not wanting there to be many words. There might be some of the words you'd say to yourself inside your head when you're riding, but we want you more than anything else to stay with your sensory experience. But if you find yourself getting distracted and not able to focus, remember the mind is like a horse. If you force it, you, it will fight you. Come back gently. Keep having little short goes at it, keep just bringing yourself back without getting into an internal battle about it. The balloon breathing exercise, which I directed you to back through time, which is on the Internet. If in YouTube you put merry wandlas and balloon breathing, you'll find it that balloon breathing exercise is a huge benefit in getting you to get the focus that works really well in mental rehearsal. So right now we're going to do another mental rehearsal which isn't horsey. So starting with not horsey ones really helps to build some of your skills and show you the structure of how this works. And this is something I think virtually everybody will have the experience of back in your past. I want you to close your eyes and I want you to imagine that you're riding a bicycle. Now, there's a number of ways in which your brain could interpret that and keep doing your imagination while I ask you a couple of questions. As you're riding that bicycle in your imagination, are you experiencing it from the state of being in your own body? And if you are, is it more that you're feeling your legs going around, pushing the pedals round, you're feeling the wind in your hair? Or is it more that you're seeing your hands on the handlebars and seeing the road ahead of you? Or is it both? Or are you having an experience from the outside as if someone had taken a video of you and you're watching yourself in that video riding the bicycle? So bring your attention back into the room again and just think about this for a minute. You may have had that external visual perspective of the videographer taking a video of someone who looks like you on that bicycle. Or you may have had an internal perspective which could have been more kinesthetic, with the feeling of your legs pushing the pedals and the wind in your hair, your hand on the handlebars. Or it could have been more visually based. This is telling us more about what your normal way of processing things is and whether your brain more easily does a visual way of processing or. Or a kinesthetic way of processing from the inside of your way of processing or from an outside of your way of processing. A few people, but not very many, managed to combine the video from the external perspective with the feelings they'd have inside your body. I commend people who can do that. I think that's really quite a feat, and we all need to be more versatile in our ways of doing this. We tend to imagine that everybody does inside their heads the same things that we do inside our heads. This, for coaches, is a real trap and so often leads to the coach coaching the rider in front of her as if she was coaching her it's important to realise that everybody will do something different inside their head when given the same external input. So I'm going to do with you an exercise that I really enjoy doing with groups of people. And I'm going to say the same word over and over again, and you're going to notice what happens inside your head. And then I'll talk about how this pans out when we do it with a group of people. So close your eyes again and I'm going to say the word strawberries. Strawberries. Strawberries. Strawberries. Strawberries. Strawberries. Okay, I think that's long enough. So you will have had your own experience. And I've done this with groups of people many times. And some people will maybe go back in time to their memories of picking strawberries as a child. Maybe a family member grew them, or they used to go to a farm and pick them. And people will have mental rehearsals of bowls of strawberries, of maybe washing the strawberries and preparing the strawberries before they grow in the bowl. Some people just see strawberries, single strawberries floating in front of their mind's eye. Some people go, why the hell is she saying that? God, this is getting boring. And everybody has their own unique experience, including the people who are salivating going, oh, I love strawberries. And really imagining piles and piles and piles of strawberries with cream and sugar. We all tend to imagine. Everybody would imagine the same as we do, but everybody has their own unique experience. And actually, I can remember a conversation with a woman who, when I was young, was one of the fellows of the British Horse Society. And I thought the best, most insightful coach I met in that generation. And I remember having a conversation with her and she looked at me and going, oh, I thought everybody thought the same as me. And despite that, she managed to be a remarkably good coach. But everybody will do something different in their mind given the same external input. I'm now going to do another mental rehearsal with you, which, again, is not horsey. And we're going to do this kind of similar, but different, two different ways. For some of you. It will need an apology when we get to the end, so I'll kind of offer the apology in advance, but I hope you'll bear with me through this because it's going to illustrate something really important. So I want you to close your eyes again and I want you to imagine that you're sat with your friend on a bench in a fairground, and you and your friend are sitting watching the roller coaster, but you're sitting on this bench. And you're watching from a distance. And you watch the people who've been queuing up to pay their money to go through the turnstile to get put on the roller coaster, into each of the little carts and. And the bar closed in front of them. And you can hear the sounds of this happening. And maybe the clunk of the bar. And a little movement of the roller coaster as each next little cab gets into the right place for people to get on it. But you're sitting there watching this. And you watch as the cue diminishes. And the people find their places on the roller coaster. And the roller coaster begins moving. But you're sitting on your bench as you watch this. And you watch it begin to gain speed. And you watch people. And you start to hear the woos and the whee's and the wahs from the people there. And to see their hair blowing in the breeze. And to see this whole thing as it gets into motion. And the ride gets going and begins to speed up. But you're sitting on your bench watching this. And it gets to the end of the ride. And all of those people get out of the roller coaster. And a new line of people is developed. And you and your friend go and join it. And you stand there in the line for a while. And you get to the point where you pay your money and you go through the gate. And you, too, are put in one of these little cabs on the roller coaster. And the attendant closes the bar in front of you, and there's a clunk. And you sit there as very slowly, it just moves. And each car in turn, gets filled up with its people. And then when the roller coaster is full, it gradually begins to move. And it starts slowly at first, and it goes slowly up a little hill and gets to the top of that hill. And gains a bit of speed on the way down. And you're there with your friend, and you're chatting with each other, and it's getting a little faster. And maybe you have your hands on the bar in front of you. And you go up the next hill, which is a little bit steeper. And as it gets to the top, it gets a little bit slower. And then it goes over the top and gets some more speed on the downhill. And now you're getting to the really big hill. And it goes up and up and up and up. And it does get slower as it goes. And you get to the top, and there's this woo as you go down the other side. Okay, you can come out of that one now. But I hope that really showed you, with my apologies to those of you who can't abide roller coasters, the difference between an external visual perspective and the internal having the experience perspective. Because in the having the experience perspective, maybe you got butterflies and maybe your stomach felt a bit unsettled and maybe you felt some fear if you don't like roller coaster, some real excitement if you do. But much, much more of your nervous system was involved. And that makes the mental rehearsal much more meaningful than if it just is a video of seeing yourself as it were, from the outside. So back in the days when I did this series of interviews, I remember interviewing a well known dressage rider and asking him about his mental rehearsals. And mostly his mental rehearsals were as if he was watching a video of him. And this was actually in the days when we did have video. And he said, but then I start to see it going wrong and I have to jump into the video rewind, go back to the place where it was okay, and then I ride it within the video and if it's still not good enough, I'll rewind and ride it again within the video. And then when I get to the next easy bit, I'll go back to that external visual perspective. But there'll normally come a moment when I have to get in and rewind it. And you know, there are days when I spend most of my time in rewind. Another skill might be very different. I remember talking about this in a seminar and there was a guy there who used to play rugby for Ireland in his youth. He was now, I think, a doctor. And in his rugby playing international days he had the reputation for knowing in advance where the war was going to go, where the opposition players were, where the space was going to go, open up, where he needed to move to. And he was really incredibly good at predicting the game. And he told me that while that game was going on in his mind's eye, he had this picture of the pitch as if it was taken from a camera in the sky, looking down on the pitch, showing him where all the players were. Well, you can imagine in that context that that was a fantastically useful skill to have. But it wouldn't work well for riders. You can imagine it maybe on a cross country course, because you've probably seen cross country on TV where sometimes they do use the camera showing the rider from above. But that rider needs to be in her body having her own internal experience. But I really get how in rugby or soccer or I guess American football, you would have a lot of value from that in the sky external perspective. It's interesting too going back to the more of your neurology is involved, the more effective your mental rehearsal will be to realize, and this is research based and sadly, I'm sure it's true and you can probably bear this out in your own experience that mental rehearsals with a lot of emotional strength, which could be the mental rehearsals of I hope we don't stop at the ditch or maybe the mental rehearsal of how you did stop at the ditch or maybe how you got catapulted over or into the ditch. Those mental rehearsals have a lot of emotional charge and they tend to be very long lived and powerful. And actually with those ones you're wanting to take away the emotional charge, maybe you could imagine seeing it from external rather than internal. Maybe you could make it fuzzy or black and white as you watched it as a video and maybe you could take some of the charge out of it that way. You really want to add to the power of your mental rehearsal of doing it right. There might be a lot of rewinding and taking the charge out of the old one in that as you get to learn how to do a really powerful, useful new mental rehearsal of everything working right. This is one of the skills that Jo really has on equestrian confidence dot com. This is a great story that isn't quite that dramatic, but came from someone else that I interviewed at that time. And she's a rider who jumped Grade A's, been round badminton and at that stage wanted to ride Grand Prix in dress arch. Now you can imagine how rare that is. Hardly anybody makes it to the top in two disciplines. And I think she actually did make it up there in all three. And I'd asked her the question, tell me about a bad day and tell me about a good day and about the bad day. She'd said, yeah, I do have a bad day every now and again where I just can't get it together. And I go, so what do you do about it? And she said, well, if I have one of those days, I come in the house at the end of the day, I and I light the fire and I sit down and I pour myself a glass of wine and I just sit there and I go through some of my favourite rides. Now realize what she was doing without even realizing it. She was getting herself really comfortable, maybe somewhat drowning her sorrows in wine, but also saying to her brain, forget today, brain. That was an aberration. We don't do it that way. We do it this way. So she naturally, without knowing it, had come up with a way to go. Delete that. Not brain, not relevant, not useful. Remember this. This is how we do it. If you only do your mental rehearsals before a competition, you are really missing a trick. You want to do your mental rehearsals of your personal bests, and then you're adding to your 10,000 repetitions and helping to bring that new skill into your repertoire of unconscious competence. But you could get through the stage of being consciously competent a lot quicker and you might find that you can make a huge difference in based on that. So someone I used to coach when I lived in London who had her own two horses and they were kind of 15, 2ish, not terribly big horses. She came on a course I did in a beautiful countryside location in the uk where she rode a horse from that centre. This was before I had my own place and held courses in various different places around the country. And on the first day, she rode a horse that was much bigger than hers, a big warmblood, and it didn't go terribly well. Despite my best attempts to help her and her best attempts to be organised, this horse managed to disorganise her. He was a lot more protoplasm than she was used to dealing with, and at the end of the ride she was rather disappointed with herself. The next day, I was teaching in the arena and out of the corner of my eye I saw her warming up in the field beside it and I saw it was going rather well. And when she walked into the arena, I said, wow, this is a better start. What have you done? And she said, well, I was really disappointed yesterday and I went and lay on my bed and I imagine some of the feelings of riding my horses and then I imagined how I might take those feelings onto this horse and I realized that the way he was disorganizing, we was making me topple forward and, and, and, and I just thought about how I could correct myself and keep it together on him like I do on my horses and how I might make him feel more like one of them. And there she was riding around me, demonstrating how well that strategy worked. So in our next podcast, we'll look more at mental rehearsal and how to do it. We'll do some riding mental rehearsals, and we'll build your skills in this to help you use it as an absolutely invaluable tool. Until then, you'll get to ride your horses and have fun, I hope, and maybe you'll begin on your own to do a few mental rehearsals. I'll be back soon.