Ep. 35 Some strategies for ‘What if’s?’, difficult emotions, and rising trot mechanism.

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 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 Overdale 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 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 end 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 Wandlis here, welcoming you to podcast number 35. There's one last story about mental rehearsal that I just can't resist telling you, and this involves the great British golfer Nick Faldo. It seems that mental rehearsal came very naturally to him. Nobody taught him to do it, he just did it. And he would imagine the ball going into the hole, the ball in flight, himself doing the shot, the club that he needed. And apparently one day he was talking to somebody, telling them about how he could feel his feet on the ground and his hands on the club. And his friend said, you know, that isn't good enough. Don't just feel this in your hands and your feet, you need to feel the swing right through your body. What great advice that was. And Faldo apparently thought, oh, this is different. This is a big upgrade. And of course you too want to feel right through your body as you're hopefully Maintaining your stability and your organisation on top of your moving horse. Faldo was apparently a formidable competitor and somebody you really didn't want to be up against in the last few holes of a golf tournament, even if he'd had a difficult time in the previous holes. And he had some really good tactics for dealing with his less than stellar performances. So if he'd had a few bad holes and he was behind, he would imagine that he played those holes two weeks ago and that he'd had enough time for all the emotion to dissipate and for that to become ancient history. Now, that's a brilliant tactic. And if you'd just ridden a not terribly good dresshard's chest but were at a competition where you were due to write another one, you. You could imagine you did that not so good test two weeks ago, enough time for all the emotion to subside and you to begin again. Or you could imagine a show jumping round that didn't go so well was two weeks ago. As you then go in with a clean slate to the next one. He would also imagine when things had not gone well, that he'd put those few holes on a train and send it 100 miles west and then he would very deliberately walk east. You could adapt that too, putting your less than stellar performances on a train or in a horse box, sending it off into the distance in some direction and very deliberately walking on your feet or riding your horse the opposite way. Creative uses of mental rehearsal like this are, are just brilliant. And they worked so well for him and he never, ever admitted defeat and came back on a number of occasions in phenomenal ways to win Masters tournaments. If you find yourself repeatedly doing mental rehearsal of things that are not helpful, maybe falls and spooks and wobbles get help. There are so many good sports psychologists around nowadays that, that you don't need to just suffer in silence. And I am going to recommend to you again the website equestrianconfidence.com run by my friend Jo Cooper. But there are many approaches to this that can work really well. Realise too that if you're a writer who's prone to thinking what if, what if this, what if that all your what ifs are little mental rehearsals that you would be much better off not running. And if you get into what ifs, do your what ifs ever include what if? You hold this together, you keep your bear down, you keep your body organised, you keep yourself breathing well, and you keep your horse's feet going round in the right order, coming to ground in the right way at the right time. What if you do a really good job? People don't think that in their what ifs, they only go into the what if of the worst case scenarios. But what if you did a really good job? Most people define confidence as believing that you can go into something and do it well or have a really good chance of doing it really well. I rather like though the definition of author and psychologist Dr. Joan Rosenberg. She's a teacher at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles. And she describes it this Confidence develops when you have the deep sense that you can handle the emotional outcome of whatever you pursue. And if you have this, then you can pursue anything you want in life. Be that to do with riding on horses or not. So maybe your what if mental rehearsals don't really have endings. Do they have an ending where you right yourself and everything's okay, or an ending where you hit the ground? Or do they have vague catastrophic endings, almost like falling into a big black hole that has no bottom. And if that's true, then you're probably not so scared of hitting the ground after all. The ground always catches you. And if you've had the experience of hitting the ground and then riding much better afterwards, you've discovered that the reality was, was not half as bad as your fantasy. And actually you come out of that alive and okay. And if your mental rehearsals have those vague non existence black hole kind of endings, you're not confident because of your fear of experiencing one or more of the eight feelings that she reckons we humans don't handle well. And those feelings are vulnerability, helplessness, disappointment, frustration, sadness, shame, embarrassment, and anger. Now what's interesting is that anxiety and fear are not on that list. Fear is a valuable emotion that gets you moving quick to take action when you need to deal with something. If the ceiling's falling in, you're going to get out of that room quickly. Quickly. And anxiety as a vague sort of COVID up, perhaps for the fear of other feelings. We use it just to express that we're really not quite okay. But if we went well, is my problem vulnerability? Is it helplessness? Is it disappointment? Is it frustration? We'd have something we could deal with more. And her thesis from neuroscience is that these feelings only ever come in waves that will last up to the 90 seconds. And anyone can tolerate 90 seconds. In fact, her book is called 90 Seconds to a life you love, which I rather suspect was the publisher's idea because I don't think as an author she probably would have wanted that. And as an author who's had a book called something she really didn't want it called. I know this happens all the time in the industry, but it's a catchy title and I'm sure it sold books. So anyone can ride these 90 second waves of this emotion. And if it seems to you that your emotions last longer than that, it's because of the ways you're ruminating on them. So this is an interesting experiment that was done with rats who knew how to run a maze. And at the beginning of the maze, there came a stage where the experimenters would shine a light. And then the rats will get an electric shock. But they could get away from the shock by just running down the maze. If they saw the light and ran down the maze, there was no shock. Early on, before they discovered this, they became anxious when they saw the light. And I imagine the researchers were measuring their cortisol levels and things like that to gauge that anxiety or fear. But once the rats had learned that they could escape down the maze, they lost their anxiety and they just got on with escaping down the maze because they knew what to do. And at that point, the light and the potential shock were no longer a stressor. So once they had ways and strategies for dealing with that situation that didn't leave them vulnerable or helpless, they no longer experienced the physiology and the biochemistry of anxiety and fear. Here's another question too. Every day, when you ride well enough and there are no disasters, do you, as it were, catch that experience and put it in a bucket? Psychologists often talk about your barrel of tolerance. And if your barrel of tolerance gets overflow and starts overflowing, that's when you're likely to get allergies and symptoms and lack of energy and those kind of things happening here. We could talk about your barrel of confidence as much as your barrel of tolerance. So do these rides stack up? Do they fill the bucket? Do they build a basis of confidence and skill that you can rely on? Or do you think, phew, I was okay today, I got away with it today. And if so, those rides will seem like one offs that don't add up to anything and don't build into skills that you know you have. And if that's the case and you do go, oh, phew, that was a one off, I got away with it. Your good moments don't add up, your good rides don't add up, and probably your good moments don't add up either because you think, well, that was a fluke, it didn't count. I only did one good corner. That only lasted for a moment. That doesn't count. But if you're the kind of person who doesn't let your good moments stack up, I imagine you might be the kind of person who does let your bad moments stack up. Oh, I just goofed up again. I can't write transitions. I'm not a good rider. We've been through this before. That's stacking up to I'm a bad person. That is a metaphorical mental rehearsal. But how about you turn this round? You stack up your good rides, you extract the learning and the small successes from the iffy ones. You let them then run out of the bucket that has a hole in while you stack up your good rides, your good learning experiences to a point that you fill the bucket or the barrel and you believe in the skills you have and you make those experiences count. This too is interesting if you have a history going back through time. This was certainly my history in my British Law Society training, and I think this is true of many people. Being faced with people who come on, girl, get on that horse. What's wrong with you? The kind of sense where you're feeling anxiety about a situation and maybe you're reading that situation really appropriate that your skills are not a match for the challenges, but you're just supposed to get on and get on with it. This experience can mess with your judgment and mess how you read a situation. There are many places in life where we take sensible precautions without feeling fear. And we don't look upon any concerns we have as a sign of weakness. So here's an interesting one. We look both ways before crossing the street. That's a sensible proportion. But we're not feeling fear about crossing the street. But we don't just charge into the traffic gung ho because we're not supposed to take precautions. We lock up our houses at night as a sensible precaution. But we don't feel fear of being burgled. But we don't just leave the doors open and go to bed and leave everything to chance. In the same way, we could walk our horse around a new arena before mounting or do some groundwork before mounting. And we're taking intelligent actions based on knowledge without the experience of fear. Those sensible actions are done much more nowadays than they were in my youth. And man are they sensible. So just to walk your horse around if he's a little unsettled, just to do some groundwork can be telligent actions that don't have to be at all embroiled with the experience of fear Just as looking both ways before you cross the street is a sensible precaution that you take, but you don't feel fear about it. You could say back then that my teachers were basically saying to me, just run into the traffic, girl. Don't be so ridiculous. Why ever should you need to look? You're stupid. And of course, that in itself is ridiculous. I want to come back now to a review of rider biomechanics, because we've been very mental in our last few podcasts. And next time, what I'm wanting to do is to get really forensic about rising trot mechanism. So I want to just sow the seeds with this short review. So you want to set your stirrup length so you have your thigh bone at 45 degrees. That's halfway between horizontal and vertical. And skilled riders can have their thigh a little more vertical than that. But 45 degrees is a great starting point, with your foot just resting in the stirrup and not pressing, and so that you have that vertical shoulder to hip to heel line, with the heel meaning the nobble on your ankle under the nobble of your thigh, on your panty line where your thigh comes into your torso under your shoulder seam. And if you have that organised, if your horse were taken out from under you by magic, you would land on the riding arena on your feet. And you are basically in a martial arts posture. To make that martial arts posture really good, you need your torso as a box. The length of your front from your collarbone to your pubic bone, matching the length of your back from the nape of your neck to your tailbone. And that will make your seat bones point straight down. No round backed with your seat bones pointing forward, or hollow backed with your seat bones pointing back. Your aim is to be supporting your own body weight as if you were hung in a harness. Think of a climbing or abseiling harness and your weight supported on that, rather than you going, okay, horse, I've had enough of today. Hold me up. So as well as the harness, you also get to transfer some of the weight down through your inside underside thigh. So that is part of the sitting surface. So going from your butt down your thigh to the top of your calf and the top of your boot. Thinking of being on one of those stools that are good for your posture, where it's like kneeling, your calves rest on a slope and your thighs rest on a slope. It's much more like sitting on one of those than it is like sitting in a normal chair. Your aim is to lose all the white noise, like Interference on a radio that isn't well tuned. That happens if you wiggle, you jiggle, you wobble, you shove. And it seems to me there's no end to this skill of losing that noise. I recently discovered a bit of a wiggle in my right side between the back of me and the front of me. And when I take that away and get more still and connected between the two of them, all of my horses respond better. And to one of them in particular, who has some issues with her right side, it makes no other end of difference. And half the time we're wiggling and jiggling not even knowing this is happening. The art of sitting light and sitting still is not to be underestimated. You might ask, why does all this matter? Well, if you haven't listened to the podcast Back Through Time, that's a viable question. And you know, if we go back to the days when my teachers were saying, just do it, girl riding was more groups of horses going in straight lines doing what was easy for them as a herd with enough adrenaline to not really worry too much. In those intervening years, we've come to ask much more of our horses, much more training done in riding arenas, more turns, more circles, more transitions, more lateral work, more athleticism expected, rather than just going from from A to B. We now have Sue Dyson's work on the ridden horse Pain Ethogram, showing us the signs of pain in ridden horses. And myself, as the years go by, I realise how many horses are the walking wounded with backaches and headaches and goodness only knows what kind of things that may not make them limp but are limiting their performance. The ethics have changed over time, both from how my teachers would have yelled at me, which wouldn't wash. Now, with health and safety and concerns for risk as it is in society, and as this happens too, we have more concern about horses and therefore more requirement from us to get it right. From the horse's perspective. We as humans need to learn to say it in the language horse. We need to be the ones to cross the species divide. We have the big brain, they have the very much smaller brain. Even though they manage to outsmart their humans so much of the time, ethically, as time goes by, we have, I think, a bigger and bigger responsibility and I'm so glad that I can bring this work to the world, which means if you don't have talent, you're not doomed. The skills of riding are learnable in bite sized chunks. I've had so much positive feedback from these podcasts where they've helped people. And also from the webinars that we put on dressagetraining TV which really spells this out and makes it learnable. There's my Winter webinar series now too that can use PowerPoint and our simulator to give you more visuals to to go with my words, anyone that has the dedication, the determination and the discipline can really learn to ride better. The mystery has finally gone out of it. I think this is so timely when I think back to the changes of rushing around in straight lines with teachers yelling just do it girl. To the ethics and the concerns that we have today. Before I see you next time, keep working with mental rehearsal. Add some of these metaphoric mental rehearsals. See if they can help you with your less than stellar performances and your what ifs. And next time I see you we will take apart rising Trot mechanism in some very practical ways because it so pays to be good at this skill. And in the meanwhile, enjoy your horses, have fun riding and I will be back with you soon.