Ep. 34 The deep dive - let’s do it! DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST WHILST DRIVING YOUR CAR OR OPERATING MACHINERY

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 34. In this, we're going to do several mental rehearsals and that means you cannot listen to it safely whilst driving your car or operating other machinery. I'm serious about this. Mental rehearsals and tasks like that are not compatible or safe. Ideally, you might do these mental rehearsals sitting on your saddle on a sturdy saddle stand. Next best thing would be a kneeling stool, one of the office stools that are good for your posture, where you rest your thighs on a slope and also rest your shins on a slope or a relatively hard chair. If you have a gym ball and it's something you sit on regularly, you could use the gym ball, but I think you need to keep your feet on the floor and not attempt to do that balancing as such on the gym ball. When you choose a personal best for your mental rehearsal, it only needs to be a few seconds. What you then do is you go over and over and over it. Of course, it could be a longer mental rehearsal and that's fine too. Whatever level you ride at, you have personal bests. Now, I actually still remember the moment I first got up, down, up, down on my very first hack.

I went on well over 50 years ago. That's one of my most memorable personal best, which I sincerely hope I've surpassed.

But there will be some. However much you feel your progress is not what it might have been. Realise too with mental rehearsal that I'm sure you will have heard and read things about just imagining yourself on the podium, winning the medal and all that kind of stuff. And whilst there are occasions I think where that has worked, all the research on mental rehearsal is about rehearsing the skills that will get you there. The research too emphasizes how mental rehearsal improves concentration skills, improves self confidence and reduces stress and competition anxiety. And it will do that, and that's fantastic. But my emphasis here is on skill building on those 10,000 repetitions that makes neurological pathways work better. I'm sure you've heard the term muscle memory when it comes to skill development, but that really is a misnomer and a misunderstanding for a different age. Instead, we need to think about circuits and how neurons work. You've probably heard the neurons that fire together wire together. It's also true that neurons that fire apart wire apart. Neurons out of sync fail to link. If you have a sluggish and unreliable circuit, you will have sluggish and unreliable skills. And in contrast, a fast and synchronous neurological circuit means fast and synchronous skills. Remember way back through the podcast, in some of the early ones we talked about changing habits and it being like making a pathway through long grass and how that's difficult at first, but gets easier the more times you travel that pathway. And so it is with the circuits that are sending signals to your muscles. And in experimental situations, they can measure that those signals are being sent and received by your muscles, even if you don't actually perceive any muscular change, although you may do that. When it comes to neurons out of sync that fail to link, I think it's really interesting.

One way of talking about this with.

The synapses and the connection of one neuron to another is that the junction could be a bit like a door. And opening that door takes two people.

To run at that door and whack.

Themselves against it, because it takes their combined weight to open it. And in the neurological circuit idea of this, those two people would need to arrive within 2 milliseconds of each other, and their impact would need to exceed the threshold of activation to activate the next part of the circuit, or it doesn't work. That means those two impulses have to arrive within 2/1000 of a second. That's amazing, isn't it? And also with all these repetitions, one of the things that's happening is that myelin wraps all of the circuits. And myelin is an insulation material. And a well insulated circuit can improve your information processing capacity by up to 3,000 times. And yes, you did hear that right. This kind of information always leaves me in awe of the human body. So whatever your best moment is, don't dismiss it as not good enough or not long enough to count. You have to grow rightness from even tiny beginnings. And maybe you're feeling that from a certain ride, or even from your riding life in general. You just have to dismiss the garbage and extract the learnings, both of the positive moments and at times the learnings about what not to do. We're going to do a mental rehearsal of one of your personal bests, and I'm going to ask you a few questions about your experience as we go through it, and then also afterwards. So remember, it can be a tiny snippet that you can go over and over and over, or, or it can be a longer period of time, so you get to close your eyes and imagine yourself back in that situation of being on your horse, whatever you're sitting on now, can you recreate in your mind's feel sense, the sense of sitting on the saddle, your thigh against the saddle, the movement of the horse underneath you, your feet resting, I hope lightly in the Stirrups, your hand holding the reins, and how the horse moves underneath you, and perhaps how you hear the footfall, even if it's the quiet footfall in an arena, or maybe there's a surface and you're hearing a louder footfall. You want to be seeing what you'd see out of your own eyes with the horse's neck in front of you, your arms and hands in front of you, the arena around you, and whatever the sights and sounds are of that place and that day and now. Imagine yourself going into the gate or movement that is this little moment of a personal best. And if you need to, you run and run and run it over and over again. As you do this, you might notice some changes in your body. You might notice, too, how your horse responds to those changes. And a great question to have in the back of your mind when you do mental rehearsal is the what's the difference that makes the difference? How is this time different? What's making it so special? What are you doing differently? Keep running your special moment and keep asking yourself, what's the difference that makes the difference? And now open your eyes and bring your attention back to the here and now and the room that you're in. So how did you do? Were you able to stay with it or did you get distracted? That could, of course, be the first skill, just being able to pay attention rather than daydream off somewhere else or start talking to yourself or something. If you find that difficult, be patient with yourself, but see if you can keep coming back to little bits of practice. Could you find your way into that kinesthetic bodily experience rather than doing a video, as if someone took a video of you from the outside? You might remember that roller coaster mental rehearsal, the research using darts, the rider who would jump into the video and rewind it and ride it again. And it's true that these skills don't come naturally for everyone, and they can take a bit of learning, but. But don't let it become a chore. Be patient with yourself. Do little bits at a time. How clear and detailed was your mental rehearsal? Remember, lack of detail says your brain doesn't really know the pattern. You might remember the story of the woman who did her mental rehearsal of cantering one day and kept telling me it was like flying. And I contrasted that with a young professional who could tell me an awful lot about how she had to organize herself on a circle to really change her steering. Was your mental rehearsal an experience of interface, where you felt how changing you changed your horse? Perhaps the Bigger question is, have you got to the stage where you're riding is on interface. If you don't have that in your riding, you're not likely to have it in your mental rehearsal, but realise it is really what you're aiming for. What we just did with a really good feeling is a great way to do mental rehearsal, but in this next one, what I want you to do is incorporate losing that feeling a little bit and then getting it back.

Now, this is analogous to earlier in.

One podcast where I compared this kind of learning to recognising a face and you can have seen somebody very little to meet them again and go, I know I've met you, but you maybe don't remember her name. And the brain is brilliantly specialised and at recognising faces. And if recognising a face was like recognising a really good feeling, you might have that really good feeling and lose it for years on end and then realise when you get it back again. In fact, I told you a story.

Of myself and that in a few.

Podcasts ago, but the question here is not, will you recognise that feeling again? It's do you know the way to its house? The same question would be, do you know the way to your friend's house? As opposed can just recognise her face. So the real deal here is you need to know how to fix it when it goes wrong. And that's what you most need to practise during quite a lot of the stage of becoming conscious of your competence when you're learning. So as you do this, you could choose a different personal best moment, or you could choose the same personal best, but the challenge is to, and I'll talk you through this, lose it a little and get it back. And you might only lose it 10% or 5%, or you may be a little braver and lose it a bit more, but you're trying to lose it in a way that enables you to retrace your tracks, as it were, and find your way to that rightness and ingrain the circuits of finding your way there. So you get to choose a personal best and you get to close your eyes again and to think your way back to that time, that place, that horse again, searching for the experience of being in your body. And if this isn't easy for you, can you somehow find a way to jump into your body from a video and get that internal experience of your butt on the saddle, your thighs on the saddle, your feet in the stirrups, the horse's head and neck out in front of you, the time, location, arena, whatever from that day. And again, can you run the feelings of what makes this moment special? Are you clear on the interface connection you have with your horse? And if not, it says you haven't got there in your riding yet, and that that waits to be discovered. But whatever your good feeling is, carefully, slowly, let yourself lose it a little. Maybe you felt a change in your own body here and now in your chair, as you did that in your imagination. Maybe you felt your horse change. Can you refind your way to that feeling? Feel how it changes you and it changes your horse. If there are some words in your head as this is happening, can you keep the words down to shorthand? Remember, you want small reminders of the positive points, and doing this may give you some better words and more clarity in general. So let it go again and can you refind it? You may feel that as a difference in your body here and now. Feel how your horse changes. And now one more time, as you let it go in you, what happens to your horse? And can you refind what you need to feel? Notice think really asking yourself the question, what's the difference that makes the difference? What do you need to make this feeling again and to make it more reliably and then open your eyes again and bring your awareness back into the room you're in. I hope you were able to stay with it through that and were able to learn a little bit more in the lose it and the get it. Because when you know how you lose it, you know how to get it back. I love that saying from Moshe Feldenkrais, which I've said to you before.

When you know what you're doing, you.

Can do what you want. I'm going to suggest to you a couple of more creative uses of mental rehearsal. If you need to, you can slow it down if things happen too fast for you in real riding and your body and your perceptions can't keep up. Mental rehearsal gives you the opportunity to.

Go slower, more opportunity than your horse gives you.

You can also do an as if mental rehearsal. You might remember the story of my pupil who came on a course with me, rode a much bigger horse than hers, didn't really get it together, did some mental rehearsal of riding her own horses, and kind of went, what were the missing pieces? What would it be like if I can do it on that horse as if I were riding my other horse? Another creative version would be if you have someone who's a really good role model for you, especially if that person is your kind of body type to see that person doing a skill, a skill you'd like to be better at, and maybe step in her body to get a sense of feeling how she'd do it. Now, if the gap between you and her is too big, you may not be able to do this. But if the gap between you and her in skill is not that big, that could work for you. And then you might imagine her body becoming your body. Or you may need to step outside again, see yourself do it, and then step into your own body to do it. Another possibility is to do a mental rehearsal in which you put together two personal bests and you create something you haven't actually been able to do in real life yet, but you have the component pieces. I've been able to do that at times with great, great effect. And another thing that you could do is do a mental rehearsal that just focuses in on a quality that you really need. Maybe it's flow or, or power or energy or stability. And actually with elite riders, and especially before a competition, a mental rehearsal that focuses on quality and a certain specific emphasis is reckoned to be one of the most helpful. So I hope you've been able to stick with me through doing these. I hope even before today, you've begun to integrate mental rehearsal into your normal.

Ways of riding and doing things.

Remember, just halting for a minute during your ride, dropping the reins and re running what you just did is a great way to learn this skill. The value of this skill is immense. I hope you have fun doing it.

So you're having fun at this point.

In imagined riding as well as real riding. Enjoy your horses, enjoy your mental rehearsals, and I'll be back with you soon.