Ep. 6 On Unconscious Incompetence

Hello, it's Mary Wanlis here, welcoming you to podcast number six. In our last one, I gave you the experience of folding your arms the opposite way to normal, lacing your fingers the opposite way to normal, just as the experience of what it takes to step out from an old habit to a new one, how that can be confusing and disorientating during the process, and how once you succeed in doing it, the payment, you get the result for your efforts, the reward actually is the feeling of being weird. Now, most people really don't like weird. And it is true that the brain is kind of set up to keep homeostasis, to keep us in the right kind of temperature, in the right kind of environment, and to not let us stray too far out of a kind of comfort zone and safety zone. But if that becomes where we always do the same thing in the same way, we always do what we always did, we always get what we always got, we're stuck in a habit that may be a really unproductive habit if you consider yourself a not very skilled or talented rider, or it may actually be a fairly productive habit if you are a more elite rider. But either way, you're in danger of becoming like the goldfish who would never discover water. The brain learns by contrast, we know hot in relation to cold, wet in relation to dry. We have to experience differences in order to really understand and navigate our environment. In fact, this is a story that you may not like. It's not wonderful in animal welfare, but if you put a frog in a pail of water and you heat that water slowly, the frog could jump out at any point in time. But this change happens so slowly, it doesn't really register within the frog's nervous system. And the frog will stay in that water until essentially it cooks. Now we have to experience news of difference and contrast to really know what's going on. Otherwise, we're always doing what we always did, and we're always getting what we always got. I am of the generation, sadly, that grew up on, if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again. And before I gave up riding, I was a rider who really tried hard. And essentially what that means is I bashed my head harder against the same brick wall repeatedly instead of thinking, you know, this isn't very productive. I need to find another way and not just work harder at the habit pattern, which is not serving me well. In fact, one of my old psychology teachers used to say that most of us leave school not with a user's manual for the brain, which it would be very nice if we had, but instead with a loser's manual for the brain. And I fear there's a lot of truth in this. So we talked last time about declarative knowledge and the fact that the horse should have its pole as the highest point. And this, that and the other should be happening in the horse's rider's body. And we can all glean this information by reading and listening and watching DVDs and going to webinars and all that kind of stuff. And most of that information, when it's talked about, is often prefaced by the word should. The rider should be like this. The horse should be like this. Now, I confess that should is one of my unfavourite words. Of course I should be washing my car and I should be cleaning my house, but instead I'm doing horse care during the time when our staff are furloughed and creating these podcasts for you. But there's all these shoulds. And one of the things that upsets me the most is when a new student comes in front of me and rides around me on a circle at the beginning of her first lesson and tells me things like, well, my teachers tell me that I'm stiff and that I'm crooked and that I ought to keep my hands still and that my lower legs ought to and my horse really ought to have more impulsion and I ought to should, ought to, should, ought to, should. And this person has a list of things that are wrong with them and a list of the things that should be happening. In fact, a while ago I bought a book by a well known name in the equestrian world and I kind of had an inkling at the time that this wasn't going to be a good purchase for me. And by the time I'd read the first 10 or so pages and it was all the Ryder should the horse, should the rider, should the horse, should the rider, should the horse should. I kind of closed the book and I never opened it again. For me, as a rider and a coach, should is not really the deal. When I ask a rider a question like can you feel both of your seat bones? And they say something like, well, I know they should be 50, 50 in weight. They're not telling me anything about what they're noticing. They're telling me something that they've read in this case, maybe in my book, but it is just 50 that declarative factual knowledge, and it hasn't got at all into the practical skill developing parts of the brain. So we are Looking for the kind of information that can get us to that. But we have to start from the beginning. Now, most people again arriving in my arena ride around me and they show me, you know, their walk and their rising trot, maybe just to begin with. And what is often the case is that that rider, and I would say the vast majority of riders everywhere, is suffering from something described by one of my favourite phrases. That phrase is premature automation. What this means is whatever age they were when they learned to go up down, up, down, up, down, and maybe they were 6 or 16 or 46 or whatever, they got a kind of vague version of up down, and whoever was teaching them went jolly good, went on decanter or something else, and that was it. They got their up downs and they prematurely automated a pattern which was not a useful, really well organized pattern. And it's X years later and they're still doing rising trot according to that old habit pattern. And they appear in front of me and they have this existential crisis over what I've been riding for 30 years and you're telling me I can't do rising trot. And basically I'm just saying, well, the patterns you have automated for your rising trot are not the ideal patterns. And actually we need to learn this all over again. So one of my jobs as the coach in the middle of the arena is a bit, as it were, to put labels on the bottles. So let's imagine you want to be a wine taster. If you're going to be an effective, sophisticated, knowledgeable wine taster, you have to taste an awful lot of bottles of wine, but all of those bottles need to have labels on. So you know that you're drinking a Chardonnay or a Riesling or a Sauvignon Blanc. You can tell I like white wine better than red on the whole. Is it French, is it American, is it Chilean, is it New Zealand? Where did it come from? What vintage is it? If there weren't labels on the bottles, you might not really develop your taste map, as it were. You'd know what you liked, you'd know what was familiar, but you wouldn't really develop a map and an understanding of these different wines. So I'm in the middle of the arena, helping people put labels on the bottles. And sometimes I'm saying things like, well, I know this is familiar to you, but actually it's basically cheap red plonk. Let's change this, this and this. Now, this is a much more vintage feeling to which the rider is quite often Going this. You're kidding me. This is better. This is really hard work. It feels weird. I'm not sure I like it. And then very soon, the changes in their horse start to sell it to them. And it may well take more than me. But without labels on the bottles, as it were, of the various feelings you're creating on your horse, you have no way of building a map or of what's a really useful feeling, a kind of halfway house. What you're really going for, what really doesn't work, how you get from A to B, how you recognize it, how you reproduce it again. So the idea of getting labels on the bottles and building a map, if you like, of what I like to call feelages, which is the feel sense version, if you like, of images, which would be your visual way of processing inside your brain. So I'm helping you to get labels on the bottles and to build that map of feelages. Now, let's come at this another way. I want you to imagine an iceberg. And an iceberg has, I believe, something like 7, 8 of the iceberg underwater and 1/8 of the iceberg showing. Now, we could draw this iceberg as a triangle with its tip at the top. And we could draw a horizontal line that separates the seven eighths that are under the water from the 18 that's above the water. And within that iceberg. We're going to be thinking of the kind of skills that riders ideally would learn at the beginning of their learning, and we're going to call those the ABCs. And the ABCs will be down the bottom of the Lysberg and the defs and the ghijs. And then above the waterline, we have xyz. Now, the waterline in our iceberg metaphor is consciousness. An elite rider's iceberg might have X, Y, Z in consciousness, but the ABCs way, way down in the bottom of that iceberg, functioning on unconscious competence. So when you ask that rider how you do so and so, how do you get a horse on the bit? How do you do so and so? How do you create bend? How do you get this horse to turn? They're going to give you an XYZ answer because that is the information available to their conscious mind. Now, let's take a really elite rider and imagine that really elite rider is on a pony by the age of six and naturally breathed well, naturally did bearing down, didn't need to blow up balloons to learn that, which I hope you've been doing. And that rider naturally sat herself in neutral spine where the length of her front from her collarbone to her pubic bone matched the length of her back from the nape of her neck to her tailbone. And she was a good kicker. She could keep her thigh on the saddle and kick with her lower leg and make this pony believe her. She learned that when she was 6. And then more got piled on that, building more skills between 7 and 10 and 10 and 13 and 13 and 15 and up through being a young rider and so on. Now, could that person ever teach those skills of bearing down and breathing? The answer, of course, is no. It's part of her goldfish would never discover water kind of environment. She might just look at you who didn't do that well and go, that's a bit weird. Why is that person doing that? Why ever would you do that? That's a ridiculous thing to do and not really understand your plight, because she's never been there. So some things, because she just did them naturally, she really wouldn't have a lot of hope of being able to delineate, verbalise and teach to you of the things that she learned between 7 and 10 and 10 and 12 and 12 and 15. If she's 30 something now, they're probably way in her unconscious toolkit that she cannot talk to you about. In fact, there's a wonderful phrase again that's used for this under the water part of the iceberg, and it's often described as being cognitively impenetrable. In other words, it cannot be taken apart and known by the conscious mind and therefore described in language. These are the implicit instinctive skills that therefore cannot be passed on to you. And the more you decide you want to have a teacher who's a really elite rider, the more you're going to find that teacher's vocabulary will be in the XYZs, and she's just going to presuppose that you can presuppose what she can presuppose. And yet those ABCs and the rest of the Alphabet are probably what you need to learn explicitly. So the folks that arrive in front of me in my arena are normally unconscious of their incompetence. They automated a pattern that was not a brilliant pattern. It's not working wonderfully well, and they just kept doing the same thing on autopilot. And they don't know what they don't know. That's really what it means, unconscious of your incompetence. You don't know what you don't know. And what that means is you also don't know what there is to know now, really this phenomenon is the origination of. Of the idea or the saying, ignorance is bliss. And sometimes ignorance is bliss. You have a wonderful pony, you ride by the seat of your pants. You're a kid, it all works well. And I have to say that quite often these folks appear in front of me again, having been to college, got a job, had a family, got married, got divorced, moved here, moved there. They're 40 or 50 or something, and they come back to riding and they go, it just isn't like it used to be. I used to be really good. And that seat of their pants. Unconscious competence doesn't work for them now as a mature adult in the way it did for them as a child. And I confess, sometimes I look at the patterns in their body and go, hmm, I wonder how good you really were. I wonder how your skills were at that point. So unconscious of your incompetence, what has to happen next is becoming conscious of your incompetence. And what happens in that moment is you get to know what it is you didn't know. This is the aha moment. Now, when this first happens to somebody, I often call it the S T hits the fan moment, because this is the. Oh, my gosh, you're telling me I've been riding all these years and I can't do rising trot moment. And it's a rather horrible thing at that point in time. But the reality is that becoming conscious of your incompetence, the aha, I stopped breathing. Aha. I curled my toes. Oh, I get it. I hollow my back. Oh, every time the horse does this, I do that. That tells you where you're beginning your journey in your aim to get to Paris. Without that moment of becoming conscious of your incompetence, no learning or change can happen. Now, I hope you really took this in, because most coaches and most riders are out there attempting to change without having this aha moment of what it is that's happening now and where they're beginning their journey. And the first time or two, it is culture shock and maybe really disconcerting, but it becomes the holy grail of what you're seeking, because it's always what brings the gold dust. Breakthroughs cannot happen without this, and that breakthrough heralds the next stage of being consciously competent. Now, at this point in time, you're working hard mentally to replace old patterns with new ones. This is where you're digging yourself out of that groove in the record, or you're not using the easy way through long grass and you're carving a new pathway. And to begin with, a bit like folding your arms, the old pattern tends to hijack you, and you find yourself back in the old pattern and really struggling for the new pattern. And then it gets easier to do and easier and easier until you're reproducing the new pattern much more easily and much more quickly. Now, this process takes time and our rule of thumb, which actually is not so far off, and I know this from the husband or of somebody I teach in Maryland who is a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. And it will take 10,000 repetitions, probably, for you to go through the got it, lost it, got it, lost it, got it, lost it, got it, lost it. Of this phase of being consciously competent. So the bottom line here is how often you check in with yourself and remind yourself and go, oops, lost it. Need to uncurl my toes. Oops, lost it. Breathe, lost it. Refined, whatever it is. Now, people normally get really daunted by this, and I have stood in front of audiences of hundreds of people and told them about 10,000 repetitions and literally watched the whole audience kind of groan and sink in their chairs, like, oh, my goodness, are you serious? They think it's the worst news they'd ever heard. But then I say to them, okay, would you rather go round and round doing what you always did and getting what you always got, or would you rather have 10,000 little oops. Switch it. That's better. Oops, switch it. That's better. Okay, here we go. Fix it. Feel it again. Fix it. That's 10,000 little successes, 10,000 little breakthroughs. Which would you rather have? And suddenly the audience perk up and go, actually, I'd rather have those 10,000 little learning experiences than just always do what I always did and always get what I got. But initially, this can take a little bit of selling to people, whether it's in a lesson or it's an audience like this in one of my demonstrations. 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 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 at Just Giving and then to search Overdale to find the Just Giving 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.