Ep. 7 On noticing mode, trying mode and tune out.

Hello, it's Mary Wanlis here, welcoming you to podcast number seven. You might remember, in our last podcast, I talked about the rider who appears in front of me for a first lesson and tells me all the things that are wrong with her. She's been told that she's stiff and she's crooked and she's this and she's that. And maybe they've become the labels that she's been known by in her peer group and by her teachers, but she knows her horse ought to be doing this and her body ought to be doing that, and the whole thing is a list of declarative statements. It's intellectual left brain knowledge, and it's really part of the rod she uses to beat herself and often the cause of her despair. That kind of knowledge is not helpful. It makes me think of people who might have been involved in psychoanalysis for years, and they can tell you that they're a certain way because their mother did something or other. And yet they're not healed. They're not cured without a different kind of insight. Now, I used to feel like that rider. I had the labels of being stiff and crooked back in the days before I gave up riding in despair. And all this work on rider biomechanics and steel acquisition was begun as I brought myself back into the horse world from a different perspective. So that person probably rides in trying mode. I too, as I said last time, was an ardent trier. And when I have someone who tries a lot, I'll often do a little experiment in a workshop, a group setting where we're having exercises and discussion, and I will put a chair in the middle of the room and invite that person to try and pick up the chair. And normally what happens is she just goes straight up to the chair and picks it up. And I say, well, I asked you to try and pick up the chair. So maybe she kind of does it a bit in slow motion and makes it look a bit harder. And I say to her, well, you're not really trying. Want you to try harder than that. And maybe she goes even more slowly and groans a bit, and I say, well, that's still not really trying. You could try harder. And it normally ends up with me giving a demonstration of trying. And what I do is I put my calf and my knee on the chair. I pick up the chair with both arms from the sides of the chair, whereupon I can pull on the chair with all my might whilst grunting and groaning for dramatic effect. And of course, I could sweat an awful lot because I'm Actually recruiting, recruiting the set of muscles I'm using to attempt to pick up the chair and the set of muscles that are stopping me. And actually, the truth of the matter is when somebody does this, there's normally, as it were, two teams of muscles and the referee inside their head going, you ought to be able to do this by now. What's wrong with you? You've had so many lessons, you've been doing this for so many years, it's ridiculous. You can't do this. So with both teams and the referee, there's one heck of an internal struggle going on there. Trying mode is really different to noticing mode. And really part of what I'm trying to encourage you to do in general through these webinars, is to ride in noticing mode. And noticing mode involves being present. You've probably heard those terms before. Being in the moment, noticing what is noticing how your perceptions change moment to moment. Now, if people aren't in noticing mode and they aren't in trying mode, they're often in tune out mode. Some of the best of those are the teenagers who roll their eyes and go, whatever. But somehow that person isn't taking in information. They're off doing their own thing somewhere inside their heads. Or they're noticing the birds and the bees out hacking, and they're just not noticing in the moment and being present. A great metaphor for this is to think of a manual camera lens. Now, most cameras nowadays have automatic focus, but let's think of a really good camera that you manually turn a dial to change the focus on the lens. Being under focused, the tuned out person is like seeing a lot of information as a blur. It kind of goes past you, you don't really notice. Turn the dial a little more and you'll find really clear focus where reality comes into sharp view and you're perceiving what's happening. Turn that dial further and you get into trying mode. This is like you're overdoing it and you can't see the wood for the trees. The more you sweat, the worse it gets. Now all of us have to learn, as it were, to tune our brain, rather like tuning that manual camera lens. And all of us have a slightly different starting point again to get to this ideal that we might call Paris. So if you're an ardent tryer, you might do noticing mode and find yourself thinking, this isn't hard enough. This is just too easy. I'm floating along. What's with this? And if you're somebody who tunes out, which I think actually is more young People nowadays, you kind of might find yourself really going, whoa, this is hard work. My God, my brain's working overtime here. But we all have to learn to find noticing mode. It's challenging for a lot of people and challenging to maintain, and it's really part of being an elite rider. Remember my story of Sandy Howard, who died a few years ago, telling me about five years into our work together. Oh, gosh. I've just realized I have to teach people how to concentrate. I thought everybody paid attention just like me. This makes me think of teaching a lesson in a riding arena that belongs to a colleague of mine who is an international rider. And I was teaching somebody in their first lesson, and we were setting up how she had to bear down and how she had to breathe and how she had to organize her body so the length of her front matched the length of her back. And she had a few things on her checklist. And I was encouraging her to keep noticing. Have you got it? Have you lost it? Have you got it? Have you lost it? And my friend rode past my colleague and said, I think of those things too. You know, as I'm riding down the center line to begin the Grand Prix test, and the person I was teaching visibly kind of went, you what? Firstly, because she thought my colleague rode on water. You know, walked on water, and she is a beautiful rider, and that she wouldn't be doing these things inside her head. And I think she was thinking that the things she were doing inside her head was just what she had to do through this remedial stage. And then she'd find herself evolving into real riding, which was what she imagined my colleague was doing. But really and truly, noticing is all there is. And to use another analogy, you could imagine having a microscope lens, and that enables you to see whatever level of detail in whatever you're looking at on that microscope slide. And maybe you hadn't seen that landscape before because you didn't have that augmented vision. And then a while, through this process, somebody substitutes a more remarkable microscope lens and you see a whole new landscape that you didn't know was there. And you become familiar with that landscape and its amazingness. It. And then as you're familiar with that, you discover a more strong, remarkable microscope lens and a whole new landscape is revealed to you. This is how the learning process works. It's the way that the folks who are unconscious of their incompetence don't only know what they don't know. They have no clue what there is to know. And of course, nobody beginning any Skill, as a beginner, can have any clue about what there is to know. The microscope lens and the camera analogies, I think, are brilliant. And that microscope lens, for me, has been getting a more profound and more profound and more profound landscape revealed to me as the years have gone on. And sometimes you have no clue what is going to be revealed. And I have heard coaches in other sports who were themselves really good performers and good coaches talking about how their pupils at an elite level who are making these discoveries with their own microscope lens, in whatever skill it is, telling them about feelings, where they're going, whoa, this is a landscape. I don't know. I never experienced this when I was performing. And yet a good coach, even if they don't have that personal knowledge, will still be able to augment the way that the performer is paying attention and processing the input that they're getting through their nervous system and translating that into more skills. Our idea of 10,000 repetitions. This is a great idea to have to begin with, and I hope you have made that mental translation from, oh, my goodness, how awful and impossible to that's 10,000 little successes, 10,000 little learning moments. Those 10,000 repetitions are how it is at the beginning, but actually it changes as time goes on. And there's a very interesting story here about a gymnast called Mitch Gaylord who was in the Los Angeles Olympics years ago, not sure what year that was, and he had already invented a dismount from the two high bars that aren't parallel. And that dismount was known as Gaylord1. And he was on those bars doing his routine in the Olympics. And it was going so well that he did a dismount that became known as Gaylord ii, which nobody had ever seen before. Now, the story goes that in real practice, he had done this dismount three times. What we don't know is how many times he'd done it in mental rehearsal. And mental rehearsal counts because your brain can't tell the difference between real and imagined performance. This is a topic we'll come back to in future podcasts. But right now, realize he had done that three times in reality, and he pulled it off in the Olympics. Now, that is a stunning feat of a highly, highly developed nervous system. But I can tell you, whereas back through time, the initial ABCs of my learning, as I was refiguring this out, seemed to take forever, those 10,000 repetitions seemed to take forever. It often felt like I was grateful, groping in a fog, to find my way to the new pattern. Nowadays, most of the time I get new patterns way, way quicker. And the elite riders I teach, and there are some international team riders that I've coached a fair bit, those riders, when they have a new pattern, they're on it. It takes them very few repetitions. They make it a part of their repertoire very, very soon and quickly, skillfully. But that is what can happen in a really well trained elite brain and nervous system. And it takes time, probably about 10 years of really good practice to get to that stage. But if you think of any change you're in the process of making, realize that in that time of being consciously competent, or as my pupil said, in semi conscious, semi continuous competence, what will happen is you will get it and lose it and get it and lose it and get it and lose it. And over time, you get it more, you hold it longer, you get it more easily. What happens as well is you start to catch yourself quicker when it goes wrong. So let's just say that 10 out of 10 is your new pattern working really well. And what happens is it starts to fade and. And it goes 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3. And if you realise at that point it's a massive climb out of a big hole you've got dug into to get yourself back to 10, then it starts to go 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5. And you notice and you're a bit slicker on your correction. 10, 9, 8, 7. You still probably lost a mark or two in that one. 10, 9 and a half. You caught it as the thought went through the horse's brain. It's a conversation you had with him that maybe the dressmar's judge and the spectators never even saw. And then pretty soon the nine and a half doesn't even happen. Your horse's performance doesn't even deteriorate. You've nipped it in the bud, reorganized yourself and him before anybody ever knew that it happened. So this means that change is a kind of digital thing, not an analogue thing. You're doing pattern A or pattern B. You're caught in the old groove, you've found your way into the new groove. There's no half groove. Whilst we get better over time, the bottom line is that most of the time we're got it, lost it, got it, lost it, got it, lost it, got it, lost it, lost it. That can stay the same over years of skill development. But what changes is the it that you're getting and losing? It starts on ABCs, it becomes hijs, it becomes PQRs, it becomes XYZ, the it gets itself more skillfully down the Alphabet, as it were. And the nervous system, the sophistication of the nervous system that you're processing those changes through is now so much more, but what you're still doing is processing. Got it, lost it, got it, lost it, got it, lost it in essentially the same way. Now this form of practice is known as deliberate practice or deep practice. This is the practice that builds skills. It's been part of the research into expertise, largely led by Anders Ericsson, who's been a professor at Florida State University. And this was popularized in the book the Talent Code, written by Daniel Coyle. Now, I can't recommend the talent code highly enough to you because skill is only built through this kind of practice. And you may have heard of this through Malcolm Gladwell. He wrote about it in his book Outliers, which has been a very popular book, but in a way got it wrong because he implied that all you needed was 10,000 hours of practice and you could become elite at anything. But how you practice is really key. You've probably driven your car for 10,000 hours. The question is, do you drive as well and as skillfully as you did when you passed your driving test? Supposing you decided you wanted to get your advanced driving test? Well, I think it's highly likely that your instructor would take you to the cleaners on your lack of looking in the mirror and your lack of perception of the road around you and how you didn't read other motorists actions as well as you could do. And you'd be perceiving life through a different lens, a different landscape, and you'd be building your skills and you'd be becoming conscious of your incompetence to piece those back together to a new level of unconscious competence. But if you didn't choose to do that and you just drove your car and you listened to the radio and you tuned out and you did this and that and the other, you won't have gained that kind of expertise. And it is often found that people who've been practicing a skill for a long time don't get any better. Now this is true of many riders who spend their life stuck on a plateau, maybe trying harder, maybe just giving up on themselves. But if we can ignite this process of noticing and deliberate practice, we can change the game. Remember, this is going to involve weird. So now we're going to do an exercise that rather than the metaphor of fold your arms the other way is, is a real riding exercise. I want you to sit yourself on a Hard chair. And if you need to pause this now to get one on your chair, I want you to sit on your hands. I realise this isn't very comfortable, but it won't last for very long. Round your back. Where do your seat bones point? I hope you can feel your seat bones clearly on your hands and that it's clear to you that rounding your back makes them point forwards. Hollow your back. This makes your front longer than your back. Where do your seat bones point? Now it's going to be backwards. So can you find the place where your seat bones just point straight down on your fingers down to the ground and that will be the place when you're in what we call neutral spine and the length of your front matches the length of your back. It's highly likely, though, that you are a rider who spent a lot of time growing tall and stretching your legs down. And I want you to grow tall now. Grow really tall, taller. Really, really, really tall. Sit there for a moment and notice what's happened to your breathing. Now, quite likely there isn't any breathing, or if there is any breathing, it's really shallow. Growing tall is not good for you. Come back down to the length of your front, matching the length of your back. Let's repeat this. Grow tall again and I want you to notice where your chest aims. So I'm sorry, this is a little crude, but I think you'll find your bosom aims quite significantly up. Of course, if you've been trying to stick your chest out as you grew tall, this will be your norm. I want you to make your front the length of your back again and your chest will drop down. And if you were riding, most folks need to aim their chest to somewhere about the base of the horse's ears or the brow band or his eyes. We can't make a rule about this because it depends how tall you are and how big your horse is and where his head is. But if your chest is aiming up towards the roof line on an indoor riding arena, things are going wrong. You might of course be a round backed rider and habitually point your seat bones forward and have your front shorter than your back. In which case you really do have to lift your chest and maybe grow tall and stick your chest out would be good words for you, although it wouldn't be my favorite words to use. So we're trying to suggest here that rather than growing tall, you make your torso into that box and you think of a martial arts posture. A martial artist would never stand there doing aikido or Tai Chi or any other form, with their front longer than their back, their back hollow and their chest up, it just isn't strong and stable. So when you do this, you're going to feel weird. It's going to feel very different. Most people go, I feel like Quasimodo. These are the people who've been too tall. I feel like Quasimodo. I feel like the Hunchback of Nostradam. This can't possibly be right. It feels terrible. I'm so slouched. I'm so crunched. I'm so short. I normally find myself reminding these people what it's like when you lose a filling in your mouth or you get an ulcer. And to your tongue, it feels like a huge, great yawning chasm. And then if you kind of contort yourself and look in the mirror, you see it's a teeny, tiny pinprick. What feels huge looks tiny. What feels really weird is really weird. And to your feel sense, the difference is way more exaggerated than it would to be anybody else's visual sense. And of course, these days we have more riding arenas with mirrors. We have iPhones, we have iPads, we have video. We have the possibility of instant visual feedback. And very often I give that instant visual feedback to somebody, and the rider goes, oh, that looks all right, doesn't it? And she's then beginning to really process this dual reality of it feels so exaggeratedly weird, odd, strange, and yet she can see that she looks like her torso is a box, the front matching the back, and that that actually looks elegant. So my invitation to you at the end of this webinar is to sit on your hands. Maybe when you're riding, if your horse is safe and somebody can hold him for you and figure out where down is for your seat bones, somebody could take a photograph for you to get your front and your back matching and double sec your feel sense against reality. Remember, there is no change without strange. You cannot change by staying the same. Weird is the name of the game, and I really hope you're going to take these ideas on board, take them to your horse and find out what happens, and he will change when you change. Good luck to you. Have fun. Bye for now. 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 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@justgiving.com 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.