Ep. 5 On finding ‘weird’…

Hello and welcome. It's Mary Wanlis here with podcast number five. In the last one, I asked you a question. I'm going to ask you again. Are you the kind of rider who's taken the lessons, had the training sessions, read the books, been to the lecture demonstrations, watched the DVDs and the webinars? My previous question so in all this information, how do you know who to believe? And suggested that really and truly the answer to that comes from your horse. Now I'm going to ask, having done all that, how much difference did that information make to your skill level? Now, very often the answer to this is very little, because the truth of the matter is that you can hear the words, you can know the theory, and you're addressing in that the left brain hemisphere that deals with language, with logic, with step by step understanding. And you could be an armchair expert who could say everything, every last detail of how the ridden horse should look and how the rider should be, and you can spout all that theory without it making a jot of difference to your practical skills. That's because practical skill and really originates in a different part of the brain and is a different kind of learning. So psychologists talk about declarative knowledge as the kind of knowledge you can declare. You can say that the horse's poll should be the highest point and his nose should be on or ahead of vertical and his hind foot in trots should track into the hoof print of the forefoot and you could go on and on with that kind of knowledge. The rider should be relaxed and should have her hands out in front of her and all of this. Loads of us can recite that and of course criticise riders as we watch them on TV or in real life in competition, and see what they're not doing and what might be better. Practical knowledge. Practical skill is different. And the question is, how do you get from the one to the other? So in a skilled performer, an elite rider, we could be talking about intrinsic knowledge, instinctive knowledge, know how and unconscious competence. Habits that function on autopilot and that are really good, valuable habits. You may have habits that function on autopilot that are much less useful habits. So how do we change habits? So I think one of the sad things is that when we leave school, hardly any of us have very much clue about how to learn. I mean, that is sad, but true. And if we figured out how to learn in an academic sense, we haven't figured out how to learn in a body sense. Most people go into a riding lesson or a training session thinking that they're going to end up doing what? Whatever, they're already doing better. I'm going to suggest to you that learning actually happens not by doing what you're already doing better, but by doing it differently. And that means change on a much more fundamental level. So you cannot change by staying the same. And whilst that's blatantly obvious, it's what most people attempt to do, and a student in a riding lesson or a training session, and I think what most trainers are actually trying to get to happen, which is impossible. So you cannot change by staying the same. And there is no change without a sense of strange. You will feel different and you will feel weird. Back in the days of vinyl records, when this work began, back in the 1980s, after I gave up riding in despair and rethought everything I knew both about writing skills and learning, I used to compare habits to a vinyl record where there's a scratch and the needle is stuck in a groove and it just goes round and round and round and round and round and round and round, repeating that same groove. That is like stuck in a habit pattern. And change happens when you jump out of that groove into another groove, and that's a fundamental change. Another way to look at this, too, is an entrenched habit is as if you have made a pathway through long grass, and having made that pathway, it's much easier to just keep using the same pathway. When you go to cut a new pathway or just begin to walk and make a new pathway through another set of long grass. It's difficult at first, but with each time you pass that pathway, it gets a little easier. The grass comes apart, it gets kind of beaten down and a new pathway is eventually made. And it's as easy to traverse as the old pathway, which may actually have grown over a bit, and not be as appealing. So how do we get from one pathway to another? Do this for a minute. Fold your arms. And now I want you to unfold your arms and fold your arms the other way. Now, most people, when they do this, go through a kind of stage of confusion where both arms are waving about and they can't work out which one should be on top and what they're supposed to do. Not that many people. Go straight to it. Go back to folding your arms the normal way. Most people, but not everyone, when they do this, has one set of fingers buried under the opposite elbow and one set of fingers showing. So look down at your arms and see if that's you at the end of reversing how you folded your arms, the set of fingers that were buried have to be showing and the set of fingers that we're showing have to be buried. So fold your arms the other way again and see if this information helps you get there. Have you made it? If you're doing it differently, you're going to. What does it feel like compared to normal? Most people answer is weird. And I think what really happens is if this is a metaphor for a change to happen in your riding and if this was a lesson, especially if it was a group lesson, you'd get to this new way way and you'd go, ooh, this feels weird. This feels funny. I don't like this. This is really odd. This feels wrong. And the moment your teacher wasn't looking, the chances are you'd go back to your old way and as it were, unfold your arms and fold them the way you're familiar with now. When I was a kid and a helper in my riding school, I was saving up, I think it began at 5 shillings and it went to 7 and 6 and 10 shillings and 12 and 6. And through those years and every time I responded to what my teacher said and found that I felt funny, I thought, oh, that can't be right, that feels weird. And went back to the old way, which felt familiar. So somewhere my brain was going weird, new, different equals wrong. Familiar equals right. So the brain likes to make that equation just because familiar is safe and known, unfamiliar is unsafe and unknown. But if you're going to learn and do it differently, you have to step out of that familiar groove into the unfamiliar groove. Try this. Lace your fingers together. One of your thumbs will be closer to you than the other one. Now unlace your fingers and lace them the other way. Most people find this change easier than the change of folding your arms the other way. But for a small percentage of people, this feels more weird. But just notice again the feeling of weird and how if I wasn't talking you through this, you might be tempted to just go back to the old way that feels familiar and which your brain thinks is quote right. I've discovered another of these recently with washing my hands a lot. And if you put one hand over the other and kind of wring your hands in a hand washing way, you will be going in one direction. Next time you wash your hands, or maybe now with pretend, put the opposite hand in front and wring your hands in the opposite direction, that too will feel weird. There is no change, no viable change, no starting of a new pathway, no jumping out of an old groove, without this sense of weird, and we just don't naturally embrace it. And very few coaches are really encouraging people to make new weird feelings. For me as a coach, one of the most exciting days in somebody's learning is when somebody comes back on another course and I haven't seen them for maybe six months or something like that, and they ride around me, first of all, at the beginning of the first lesson going, I've got this thing I really want to show you. My gosh, it feels weird. It feels so weird. I can hardly believe it, but my horse reaches into the rein so much more. He's telling me it's right whilst my body's telling me it feels so wrong. And nine times out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, they're absolutely right. The new coordination and body organization they found, which feels so wrong, their horses really telling them is so right. Here's one of my favourite if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. You cannot change by staying the same. And there is no change without a sense of strange. If you're not making new strange feelings, the chances are that you're stuck on a plateau and maybe you're trying harder and perhaps you're a rider like I was in the days before I gave up, where in my attempts to improve, I did what I was already doing, harder, until it became clear to me that I was just bashing my head harder against the same brick wall. And I was in such a state at that point that. That I actually quit. And that was the beginning of me really starting to realise that I had to be searching for new weird feelings if I was going to step out of those old habitual patterns. All of this also gives the answer to my persistent thoughts I had in those days of there's something my teachers aren't telling me. There's something my teachers aren't telling me. They weren't holding back information, they just didn't have the words to describe their instinctive responses, their know how, their practical knowledge that they couldn't put into words. And the gap between skill and the words used to define those skills or describe those skills is so immense, it has led the whole culture, I think, down a bit of a blind alley. My job really has been to put words on feelings and find ways to explain the rider horse interaction, explain what ideally would be happening in the rider's body, explain how she's influencing the horse and put words on feelings that nobody's ever used before. So in one of the previous webinars we talked about stuffing. I couldn't teach in the way I teach without the concept of stuffing. That's vital for my understanding of how the rider horse interaction works. Now let's do another of these little coordination exercises. I want you, and you can do this either standing or sitting. But if you're sitting, be pretty upright and aim to be box shaped with your torso so the length of your front matches the length of your back. And put your arms out in front of you horizontally, parallel to each other with your palms down towards the floor. Now close your eyes, raise one of your arms through 45 degrees. That's going to aim it up halfway between horizontal and vertical somewhere towards the ceiling of the corner of the room, where the wall meets the ceiling and wherever you are. And put the other arm 45 degrees down towards the floor. So one arm is up, one arm is down, and your eyes are closed. You get to stand like this for the next minute or two, just closing your eyes, breathing, holding your arms in that place. Now in a moment, but not yet. I'm going to ask you to keep your eyes closed and bring your arms back to shoulder height. But don't do it quite yet. Okay? So let's do this. Now, keep your eyes closed. Bring your arms back to shoulder height. And now open your eyes. Now, if you're like 95% of people, you are going to find that whilst you would have sworn blind that your arms are level, they actually aren't. There's a height discrepancy. The arm that was up is a little higher, the arm that was down is a little lower. If your arms came out level, don't get excited. It almost certainly means that you levelled them up before you realised you'd done it because you couldn't bear the thought of being wrong. It is perfectly normal that even after a very short time of standing with one arm up and one arm down, we lose our sense of where level is. So I always vividly remember a lesson I taught once in California, and this was many, many years ago. And the rider had quite a big sideways C curve to her torso. Her butt was going off one side of the horse and her shoulders were going off the other. And I said to her, are your chin and zipper lined up over the horse's mane? Which they would be if she was vertical, but not if she was leaning off to the side. Oh, yes, she said so I know when I'm beaten. So I shut my mouth and we did other things and five minutes Later I came back to this and I said, are your chin and zipper lined up over the mane or are they off to the side? And she, oh, no, they're lined up again. I left it. And I came back to it a little while later and said, is your torso leaning right or left or do you reckon you're straight up? And she went, oh, I'm straight up. And then I explicitly said, okay, look down at the horse's mane. Is your chin to the right of his mane, the left of his mane or over his mane? And she went, oh. Oh, my goodness, it's off to the right, isn't it? Now, she was so dead sure she was lined up. She really hadn't checked in at all. In my first questions to her, she just assumed, yes, of course I'm vertical. Well, she was, if you like, blind in a kinesthetic sense to that. But having done the little exercise with your arms and realised you only have to spend a couple of minutes with your arms not level, you can understand how she had probably spent a lifetime of riding with her butt falling off in one direction and her shoulders leaning the other direction, just gaily assuming that this was vertical. One of our problems is that up there on the horse, we're a bit like the goldfish who would never discover water. Our bodies do what our bodies have always done. We're gaily going on run by our habit patterns and so consumed by them that we can't see them for what they are. First of all, as I said, I think in my first webinar where we talked about, if you want to get to Paris, you have to know where you're starting from. Are you beginning your journey in London or Berlin or Miami or Stockholm? It's a different journey, a different distance, a different direction. Wherever you start from, realising what's happening now is the key to making lasting change and stepping out of habit patterns is the name of the game. If you're not doing that, you're not learning. And we have to get what? In neuro linguistic programming, they talk about news of difference into the nervous system. If you're always doing what you always did, there's no new information coming in and your brain can just do that on autopilot, a rather poor autopilot, which is not propagating good patterns in your system. So somehow you have to get off that plateau of sameness and do something different enough that your body registers the different and registers weird. The challenge now is to find the kind of weird that has your horse go, yeah, well done. Dummy. That's right. The human's finally getting it. She's beginning to say it in the language horse. I get this because if your body is not working according to the laws of physics and biomechanics, you're putting your horse in a kind of bind. So I'm encouraging you here to begin to embrace weird. And in our next webinar, we'll talk a bit more about weird feelings. The first one we've really looked at is bearing down. The pulling of your tummy in to make a wall, the pushing of your guts against the wall, the creating that forward force which allows you to push your hand forward and be with it, with it, with it, with it in every stride the horse takes, rather than, as it were, falling off the back of your space hopper or hippity hop and maybe using the reins to save you. Bearing down is our first weird feeling. Then we added hung in a harness and supporting your own body weight. And I promise you, I have lots more weird feelings for you coming up. And those weird feelings are the keys to change, because you cannot improve by staying the same. And bizarre as that happens, I reckon 98% of riders think that's the name of the game, where actually it can't possibly be a productive avenue. All the best to you. I hope I'm giving you a bit of permission to think of experimenting rather than just obeying the rules that you've been told. The bottom line is you and your horse have to figure this out for yourselves. But I sincerely hope and intend to help you on that journey. Good luck to you. Have fun. These podcasts are linked to two other Internet sites. One is Dressagetraining tv, which hosts a whole variety of webinars taught by myself, Mary Wanlis and my colleague Ali Wakelin, where we're working live with a variety of horses and riders, showing them the basics of biomechanics and helping them build their skill and train their horses, and explaining to the audience as we do this. There's also a groundwork certification course on that site, but based on the work of Dr. Andrew MacLean and Equine Learning Theory. And this too gives you a step by step guide to building your skills. We'd also love you to take a look@justgiving.com and then to search Overdale to find the Justgiving page for Overdale Equestrian Centre, which is my UK home base here in this time of lockdown in 2020, we have 10 school horses eating, of course, and pooping and doing all the things that horses do and no income to support those horses. And whilst they're having a wonderful time for us, this is something of a stress. And if you've enjoyed these webinars or enjoyed these podcasts and benefited from them and you're willing to give any small or large amount to our Just Giving page, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.