Ep. 70 What does it take to become a skilled rider?

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 70, the last one in this series of the summer of 2024. And my plan is to be back to you in the summer of 2025 with some more podcasts. But meanwhile, let me tell you the story of a friend of mine and somebody I taught for quite a long time. She's now stopped riding as she's got older and her body is less resilient professionally. She had her own business as a graphic artist and I saw some of the brochures that she produced, which were absolutely beautiful. She started with some photographs and some words and put them together really quickly, boing, boing, boing, boing on her computer and turned out something with real beauty and real class. She did it so quickly, she never second guessed herself. I am no graphic artist, but when I've done publicity, I've tried this bit, that bit there, wondered about this, taken away that, done 49 iterations and ended up goodness only knows where. But not her. Her work was so streamlined, and when she retired from that, she started doing artwork, painting. And she paints mostly animals. She uses primary colours, so it could be, you know, yellow, red, whatever. And yet, even though she does that, she really brings out the essence of that animal. She did not ride as a child. She had three daughters, all of them now really accomplished riders, all of them still horsey. And I don't know at what stage in the development of these horsey children that she went, okay, I give in, I'm going to buy horses and if I can't beat them, I'm going to join them. So she learnt to ride as an adult and I think she thought riding was going to be rather like her graphic design. Bish, bash, bosh, done. And of course it's not like that. What it takes is a lot of introspection, a lot of time, a lot of peeling layers, a lot of noticing and putting two and two together. And she did get to ride pretty well. But I think she could have ridden so, so much better if she'd approached it from that perspective, rather than just the expectation that the skill and ease that she had in one field would carry over to similar quick learning and functioning in the other field. I often feel that I'm delivering a double message. One is, you don't have to have talent to become a good rider. What you really need is dedication, determination and discipline. If you can supply those, we can supply the technology, which shows you the hidden skills of talent and how they can be built one another through the kind of breakthroughs, which are each an incremental improvement at the margins of your skill. Having said they're incremental, they can feel so profound and over time, they. They add up to absolutely profound changes. But people don't appreciate that the laws of physics and functional anatomy are not that accommodating. They are dictating how skilled riding happens. And in other sports, I think people really realise that there is much more attention to stance, to angles, to how joints move, than there is in the world of riding. And if we taught riding as if it was a martial art, starting from that basis, stance, angles, breathing, noticing, we would have different ways of coaching, different ways of learning and a really different culture. And I am working in my own way to try and catalyze that change. Although whether it can actually happen in my lifetime, I doubt. It's not going to stop me, though. I live in hope and I'm up for it. I recently reheard the expression form follows function. That means function comes before form. And I was intrigued enough to look it up. And it came from an architect, Louis Sullivan, who said this in 1896. And it makes sense, because the form of a building that's going to be a library or a museum or a school is going to follow those functions. I found a lovely quote from Sullivan. All things in nature have a shape, that is to say, a form, an outward semblance that tells us what they are. Unfailingly in nature, these shapes express their inner life, the native quality. I love that quote, and it feels so true to me of horses, that the shapes that ridden horses express, when they can really express their natural gifts and their hoarseness is so beautiful. And the challenge for us as riders is to mold their energy, guide them, but not cramp them. That's no mean achievement. Optimal function creates optimal form. And all of the exercises in these podcasts, I hope, have helped you get closer to understanding that form between your boards, your rebars, the shape of your box, how you transmit force from the back to the front, how you work on your asymmetry and how doing that changes your horse. We could also say form follows fascia, and the difficulties, the stuck places, or the fluidity and the evenness within the fascial net. And if we learn like a martial artist, what we're doing is developing our fascial net. And I have so often, in my own learning, after a little breakthrough, gone, oh, my gosh, this was me all along. But maybe that's not actually true. Or I've thought, who's the Chicken and who's the egg here? And maybe even that's not actually true. And it's truest to say that the horse's fascial net impacts the rider's fascial net and could well disorganize it. The rider's fascial net affects the horse's fascial net and may or may not be capable of increasing the organization and the force transmission between the horse's fascial net. We hope so. And the more I learn, the more I do within riding, the more that geometry becomes so, so clear to me and whoever is the chicken or the egg, if you want to think that way, it really doesn't matter anyway, because the issues are always the rider's issue to solve. The horse is not going to figure out a way to do that, but we hopefully have the awareness and the noticing that over time we can. This brings me back to podcast number 61, where I talked about the wonderful bodywork, or really, I should say energy session that I had with a practitioner that really changed my body. When I got up off the table, my left shoulder was in such a different place, and it seemed like she'd done hardly anything. And when I said to her, well, what is it you really do? And she said, oh, I do the same as you do. I work with sacred geometry. That geometry between the horse and the rider really is something special and really is where it's at sacred or not? I don't know. But I like that idea. And I really like the idea of the ultimate dance between rider and horse being a sacred dance within that. The laws of physics and functional anatomy are really not that forgiving. And it saddened me when I watched the Olympics and listened to the commentary in the dressage where the commentator said, well, every rider has their own style. And this is largely true. But the bottom line is that some styles work much better than others because they are going with the laws of physics and functional anatomy rather than trying to pretend they don't exist. And they exist for all of us, regardless of who you are, where you live, what type of horse you have, what you paid for him, what your discipline is that you ride. We are all subject to those laws. Of course, rider biomechanics is not the whole of riding, it's one of the toolkits. But I really think it is the hidden one. And perhaps the other hidden one, too, is what we might think of as mindset, the learning how to learn, learning how to notice, learning how to pay attention. And that, too is something that I would like to see come much more to the fore. Since I made the previous podcasts, the issues of social license have come into sharper focus. And we all know the saying, when skill ends, violence begins. Apparently this was said by Abraham Lincoln, though I do wonder if it existed in the horse world as a saying before then. But almost all of us have limits to our skills. There are a few riders in each generation whose skill can seem all but limitless. But once that limit gets reached, and it could be in riding or it could be in coaching, things tend to go wrong. And in coaching it tends to lead to shouting louder at the natives or alternatively just kind of giving up and not bothering. I always remember a lesson I had in the 1980s with Danny Pevsner. Now, he died in 2014 in his native Israel, but as a young man he was at the Spanish Riding school, riding and training there, and he came to the UK afterwards, where he trained as an Alexander teacher. Now, this is a very subtle form of bodywork that takes quite a while to work for most people, and the way it exerts its subtle influence over time, I would have thought might have had an influence on Danny as a riding coach and trainer, but I'm not sure that it actually did. So I arrived for this lesson and his working student said to me, now, as long as he's shouting, don't worry too much, it means you're doing okay. It's when he goes really quiet that you have to start worrying. Well, I guess I did okay because he kept shouting for most of the lesson and I kind of did the best I could and on it went. But it was interesting. I was riding a school horse of his who was very, very bent to the left. And this wasn't a jackknife, it really was a genuine bend to the left. Of course, that meant on the left rein things went rather well and he was quite happy. But going to the right rein, where the horse was basically still bent to the left, that led to a fair bit more shouting, and I found myself thinking, well, surely since both sides of the horse's body are two sides of the same coin, I have to be able to have less bend on the left rein before I can have any chance of having more bend on the right rein. And I would have loved to have had a mature discussion with him about this. I didn't dare say anything. What's new now? X years later, I could have a much better discussion and a more knowledgeable discussion about that than I could then. But it was sad that I didn't dare say so. I know people who have spent lots and lots of money being intimidated in writing lessons and being shouted at. I know people who have spent lots and lots of money with trainers who basically didn't bother that much and sat in the corner paying more attention to their mobile phone. And I think this is really sad. And an example of where skill ends are not exactly violence, but disservice begins. Now, I think I really get it that riders and trainers who live in in the XYZ end of the Alphabet and can really only offer fixes from there because that's all they're aware of, are going to experience a lot of frustration when they have a pupil in front of them who they can't meet because that pupil needs ABCs or Hijs or LMNs and the trainer can't put those into language. But wouldn't it be better if we could be honest about this and really take into account what is known in the literature of expertise as expertise induced amnesia and the curse of expertise? And yet most riders are so besotted with the big name that they will sit there and be coached in a way that's less than optimal. I do love it, however, that I know several coaches within the horse world that I could watch coach all day and learn so much from. And that really warms my heart that these coaches exist and hopefully can proliferate their skills. Most often a coach's frustration is directed at the rider, or of course, that coach just gives up. A rider's frustration is easily directed at their horse, and horses are easier to blame than tennis rackets or baseball bats. Local versions of this get heard about in a local equestrian community. Some versions of it hit the equestrian news and some versions hit national news. And what can happen, especially on social media, is that the people involved are vilified. And the sin, whatever it was, and it's most likely something I would regard as a sin too, is seen as a statement about that person's identity. And from that follows the assumption that they're a bad rider and a bad person. And this suggests that up to this point, we've all been duped. Another possibility is to view that event as a bad decision made at a certain time on a certain day when that person ran out of tools. Now, I really like the schema created by NLP trainer Robert Diltz, who sees a hierarchy that at its bottom has environment, above that, behavior, above that skills and capabilities above that, beliefs and values, above that identity, and above that, spirituality and purpose. So between behavior and identity. We have skills and capabilities, values and belief. Below behaviour, we have environment. And most people have heard, I think, how people who, let's say, have had an addiction may do really well in rehab and then go back into the environment where they've been an addict and get addicted again. Environment has a huge influence. And some environments, some equestrian environments, make it harder for people to learn in the way I propose, just because they're in such a critical peer group. So skills and capabilities are the element that I really attempt to address, clarifying what riding skills really are. And I think it's true to say they're not what most people think they are and not what most people want them to be, but knuckling down and getting on with learning them, they're such cute. Rewards, beliefs and values have a big impact. So virtually every rider will tell you that they love their horses. And the question really is, do they live that love in the way they keep them, handle them and ride them? Not everybody does. Sometimes that's ignorance. And yet the truth of the matter is, today we have more choices and more possibilities and more knowledge about horses than we've ever had. And maybe the primary level of that is just the idea that horses need friends, freedom and forage, but we can get ourselves lost in what kind of saddle? And who do you believe? And should your horse be shod or unshod? Are you feeding the right diet? Are we overfeeding our horses and making them obese? How about breeding? Are we breeding horses who are having such big movement that their bodies are actually kind of on an edge of functionality? And what does that mean for now and what does it mean for the future? The small mistakes that all of us make don't hit the news. Some are individual, some are cultural. Over the 50 years that I've been involved with horses, our understanding of their needs and how we meet their needs has changed dramatically. And then we have the question of who you listen to. Who do we trust? Who do we believe is going to be very individual to all of us, different in different places on the planet and subject to change? Now, I believe I had some very good answers for the horse world in the area of skills and capabilities. And as we said, where skill ends, violence begins. Violence gets exaggerated when someone's identity is really bound up with their performance, that if they consider themselves a good rider for the day, they consider themselves a good person, and if they ride badly, they get into a morass of self doubt and self criticism and misery, or they take it out on the horse and Working with identity is a big deal for riders to know that we know what we know and we don't know what we don't know and we're on a learning journey. And if we have to win at all costs, our horse would like to have a miserable life. If our horses have to prove our okayness to us, they too could be in for a miserable life. Issues around identity determine how much we really live. Our values, skills and capabilities really give us way more ability to live our values and essentially to live the love that we have for our horses. With that, I get to sign off here to wish you lots of fun with your horse. Have fun being around your horses. Have fun riding your horses. Keep noticing, keep getting those little incremental improvements. Do the exercises in these podcasts to help you make the geometry of your body closer to something that it was meant to be. A pattern that can begin to pattern your horse in a really good geometry too. And meanwhile, I will be back next summer.