Ep. 61 I'm back!

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you. Would you believe to podcast number 61. It's now the summer of 2024 and the plan is to bring you 10 more podcasts. Many of you will know that these build on the original 60, which I did during lockdown. That was one of the cases in my life where desperation drove me to a really good idea. The podcasts were great for me to do, they reached a lot more people, and I know people who still listen to them several years on as they drive to their horse every day in their car. And the value of them, I think, has been immense. To those of you who contributed to our Just Giving page, which was set up to help us feed our horses during that time, thank you. Your contribution really did make a difference. So here we are three or four years on. I've had a lot of new learnings, a lot of new teaching experiences. The pieces in the puzzle come together for me now a little differently and in more depth. I have some good news stories and good new exercises to share with you. If you didn't hear those original podcasts, I really recommend you go back to them. There's huge information in there. Nothing ever quite beats beginning at the beginning. But meanwhile, here we go. The plan is that after five podcasts, we do an interactive webinar session via dressagetraining tv, which is the membership site that puts my work out on the Internet and that will allow you to ask me questions directly. And I'm really looking forward to doing that. Dressage Training TV has been out there for a number of years now. When we first did it, I thought it would help riders probably, and it was a good idea. But I had no idea that in time I would meet riders who really have done a good job at teaching themselves on the Internet. And to those that have, I take my hat off to you. That's quite an endeavour. But they've shown that it is possible. And I've met other people who've clearly thought, this is what I need to know, but I just can't do it on my own. And when they've turned up on my written courses, they have at least had a wonderful mindset which has basically gone, I get it all in theory, I just can't get it together in practice. Fix me. And that level of open mindedness is an absolute gift. So I'm going to start this series of podcasts with the story of three different riders in the hope that you can glean something from this about your own mindset as a pupil and the first person I'm going to talk about. I taught a few times during the lockdowns when I could travel out to places but people couldn't come to me. And after that this person came on one of my four day ridden courses. And in the process of those early lessons I kept feeling that I couldn't really get enough change to convince her. And given that I couldn't convince her that much, why should she believe me? She was pretty uncommunicative and uncommittal, but in a way you could say she had a reason to be like that. So it was when we got to the four day course that we began to talk about this. And the conversation I'm going to tell you about happened after she'd interpreted something I'd been saying via the lens of something I definitely hadn't been saying. So she wanted to get her sitting trot more organised. She was somewhat what I'm going to call blobby. There was a lot of bloop, bloop, bloop in her sitting and she didn't have that kind of really put together and still and organised on top of the horse kind of look. And I had her ride in the unicit strap system. Now you might want to look this up on the Internet. And my understanding is that it's the invention of a riding coach in Arizona in the US who was at one point coached by a Russian trainer. And Russians, I guess are renowned for their get to it whatever it costs kind of mentality and not for being particularly gentle. And this Russian woman linked together two stirrup leathers and these stirrup leathers went around the back of the rider's pelvis where one of the buckles was over the top of her thighs, down the inside of her thighs, between her thigh and the saddle and round under to buckle together again under the horse's girth. So yes, you really did hear that right. That means that the rider is actually strapped onto the horse. And this is not for everybody and it's certainly not for every horse. You can only do it under supervision. You can't put it on for yourself without supervision. And with certain horses and certain people at certain times, it can be a fabulous thing to do. And I have had people suddenly look like professionals and really begin to work out how to sit in trot and how to sit in canter in a way that they wouldn't have got on their own. This comes under the category of what I call teaching techniques, but other people call torture techniques and really they're ways of, as it were, giving the rider a taste of strawberry jam. Rather than talking forever about what ought to be happening or even how to do it, it just bypass his language to transmit a feel into the rider's body. So as this happened, we got to the end of this, and I said to her, so how was that? Did you like it? Did you hate it? How much do you think it helped you? What do you think it helped you with the most? And she really surprised me by saying, gosh, I found that really difficult. The reality is, she looked a lot better. It looked like it was really helping. I found that really difficult because I really struggled to keep my thighs off the saddle while using it. And at that point, I nearly fell over because we had had many conversations about the need for her thigh to be on the saddle. So those of you who know my work will know that I describe things slightly differently to mainstream teaching. In fact, sometimes radically differently, because I think talented riders do not often describe very accurately in what it is they're actually doing. And the words often used can be misleading. So I talked about her thighs being weight bearing, being on the snaggle, being snug, how the silicone or the fuzzy area of her britches needed to be part of the sitting surface, going all the way down to her knee and the top of the boot. I talked about the exercise where you put your. You make your hand into a fist. You put the first bone of your fingers so your knuckles against the side of the pommel and use pressure with that hand to help you make a counter pressure with the opposite thigh to snug in that opposite thigh. We talked about her thighs as an a frame, about them being her dancing partner hold with her horse just as if the rider is like the man in a couple's dance form. The horse is like the woman, the man leads the dance, and the man has a way of holding the woman. Not a death grip, but a secure kind of hold. And if the woman were to try and waltz off across the dance floor to dance with somebody else, the man would hold her a bit firmer. So there I was, sort of reeling from the information that despite everything I'd said about her keeping her thighs on the saddle, she struggled with the unicet because it was so hard to keep her thighs off. And I found myself saying to know I often get the feeling that you don't really believe me. I didn't wait for an answer, but what I added was, I'm not sure that that's actually really it. I think it's the problem of unbelieving what you've been told previously. That's the real deal. And of course, the truth is you can't just put the new stuff on top of the old stuff when they're diametrically opposite. This tempts me to get biblical. Man cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve thighs on the saddle and thighs off the saddle just at the same time. Something similar was happening between the old idea she had of stretching her legs down, riding with her stirrups rather long, pushing her heel down, putting a lot of weight into compared to what I've been a shorter stirrup, her thigh and her calf making an arrowhead shape, her thigh at about 45 degrees and her foot light in the stirrup. You have to choose between these two and commit to one of them because they're mutually exclusive. Trying to filter the information of the new idea through the old idea just won't work. It's a bit like secretly believing that the earth is flat, but whilst professing that yes, yes, the earth is round, it got better after that conversation. And I'm going to confess, though, that this woman is not somebody I'm still teaching. I think the difference was just too big for her and probably the effort involved in doing it was just too big for her. And I hope she's doing well now. She has a truly lovely horse with wherever she is. This next person, this was in America in a clinic. I taught this person in one three day clinic previously. This was our second three day clinic and in the first clinic I again had the feeling that I wasn't really getting through to her. In fact, I actually got the feeling that she found me somewhat annoying. Now she was riding in lessons shared with one other person. So I would work with her for a bit, send her down the other end of the arena to work on her own while I worked with her partner. And I quite like this format because it's real. The person goes down the other end of the arena and does what they do. Either they're practising what I've been telling them and doing repetitions of got it, lost it, got it, lost it, or maybe they go back down the other end and they do what they always did. So it's kind of like real life. And if somebody goes down the other end and does what they always did, ignoring what I've been saying, then I know that what I've been saying is not going to stick after this clinic. So through the corner of my eye I could see that this woman who I'd lined up, got her organized, got her rein shorter, got her more in place, would go back to leaning back with her feet slightly forward, doing a little bit of what I would call water skiing, where she and the horse both had a pull on the rein and a bit of a counterbalance of holding each other up. And when she came back in front of me again, I asked her, what goes on inside your head when you're riding? Is there a lot of conversation that you're having with yourself? Many people don't get to take new ideas on board because they're almost drowned out by the conversation they have with themselves. But it wasn't that she started to talk about feel and how she was searching for the feel that she wanted because. But what became clear was that she was in the pursuit of one big overarching feel. And I think where I was annoying her was by breaking her feel down into pieces and making her think about a small piece that was what I considered a bite sized chunk that she could change to make her biomechanics work better. Every time she got in front of me, we could get her and the horse working better, but never in a way that she took it with her down to the other end of the arena. So I offered her a money back guarantee that without her breaking what she was doing down into pieces and being prepared to work on those individual pieces, she would just keep the same overall feeling that from my perspective, was not a very correct overall feeling, and that I thought she could come up with a much better interaction with her horse that would change his way of going if she was willing to segment things a bit, to begin to think about smaller pieces, to have a checklist and to run through her checklist and have that, have her check in with herself to keep changing the feeling. And I did begin to sell the idea to her, and I can understand that she wanted to have that one big overarching feeling. I think most writers would like that and think that's how it's supposed to be, but you can't get there unless you're supremely talented without taking things to bits a little bit and rebuilding them back together in a better way. I think it's true that people don't come into clinics as new riders going, yeah, I really want to do that. They're just going, yeah, I really want to ride better. Folks I've known over time kind of say, I've got this thing that's really not working my left side, my this, my that, my horse. And they're Already perceiving what's going on through a much bigger lens that sees both the overview and realizes that there are a few levers to pull, places to tweak to get that overview to work so much better. And that becomes what they're looking for. I'm then going to tell you about another rider. This is someone I've taught for quite a long time. She's middle aged, although actually she's recently retired, so I guess she's an older middle age, she's short, she's rounder than she'd probably like to be. And we could consider her what gets called in America an average amateur rider, although actually she's not because she's had a training with me in both learning how to learn and learning how to organise her body, how to read her body and how to read her horse. So she was having a lesson with somebody who's a well known name in America, both as a coach and as a rider. And partway through the lesson this coach stopped her and asked, how come you can do all this stuff I'm suggesting? And that began an explanation of, ah, well, yes, Mary Wanlis and the last 20 years and Rider biomechanics and learning how to feel more and learning how to understand how the rider horse interaction works and beginning to know what to do. And it begged an interesting question for me, which is do most professionals, coaches, trainers, whatever they call themselves, not really expect that their students are going to change very much? And I think that this is very often the case and actually that it's a true statement that many students don't change very much, perhaps because they don't want to think outside the box, perhaps because they don't want to feel weird. They think the answer can't lie in feeling weird. They think the answer is going to lie in doing what they already do, but better, rather than doing something different on a bigger overview. The answer I think is about being really present. And in my viewpoint, my job is to become present in the arena with the rider and the horse I'm with, not to be thinking about anything else in my life or the last lesson or the next lesson or what time it is, or that they don't have a very nice horse or they do have a lovely horse or whatever it may be. My job is then to get the rider to be present, noticing, perceiving her body, perceiving her horse, so that she can get the horse to be present and then we're really onto something. But there's an absolute art in being a student and letting the coach into the bubble of your internal world. Because after all, you're paying the the person in the middle to disturb how you usually think, how you usually pay attention, how you usually use your body. On the horse, we have two perspectives, the inner lived perspective of the rider and the outer visual perspective of the coach. And my hope in a lesson is that we can meld those two together and communicate between us in a way which changes the rider's skills and gives her a new bite sized chunk that really makes a fix, a tool to add to her toolkit, to change her horse's way of going and her effectiveness. My aim is that change within a session is the norm. And the people who maybe hold out on me and don't change in the way I hope are the exception. But I have the feeling that out there in the big wide world, mostly the norm is that riders don't change that much. And the exception is the rider who does a really good job, is a really good learner, who's really present, who's really listening, who's able to ask questions and interact with the coach, and at times even coach the coach in how to coach her better. Which of course we hope the coach is open to. And in the meantime, whether you're riding in lessons or you're riding on your own, have fun with your horses, enjoy your riding, keep noticing, notice maybe where you think you come. On that scale of teachability, what would it need to make you more teachable? And I will see you again soon.