Mary Wanless - Ride With Your Mind

Send us your feedback!

How neurons that fire together wire together, in both real and imagined practice. We do mental rehearsals of personal bests, asking ‘What’s the difference that made the difference?’. We also rehearse fixing a pattern when it goes wrong, since that’s the skill you need to speed up the phase of ‘conscious competence’. I suggest some more creative uses of MR to find ways around the blocks to your progress.

Send us your feedback!

Research on mental rehearsal has encompassed dart throwing, piano playing, and many other skills, often reporting improvements in skill that surpass actual practice. Focussing in the effect of a movement works better than focussing on the movement itself, and the level of detail you can produce in your rehearsal says a lot about your actual skill level. There are a few ‘health warnings’ about ways of (perhaps inadvertantly) doing rehearsals that are not helpful.

Send us your feedback!

Research on mental rehearsal has encompassed dart throwing, piano playing, and many other skills, often reporting improvements in skill that surpass actual practice. Focussing in the effect of a movement works better than focussing on the movement itself, and the level of detail you can produce in your rehearsal says a lot about your actual skill level. There are a few ‘health warnings’ about ways of (perhaps inadvertantly) doing rehearsals that are not helpful.

Send us your feedback!

When pupils are ‘going through the motions’ of getting the horse to go, teachers tend to ‘go through the motions’ as well - or to get really impatient. Staying patient requires the coach to maintain and identity/behaviour separation for the rider, realising that she might have good skills in other fields. Ideally, the coach ‘tunes’ herself, getting centred and present, to help her tune the rider who then tunes the horse. The coach is a role model for the rider. The story of the day I heard myself say ‘Don’t panic!”, and realised that I had let the horse and rider lead me astray! On TT courses we have lots of fun role playing our most challenging pupils, and finding strategies to get them in a learning mode - learning how to learn is the biggest gift we have to give.  
MR: Stories of various clients, and also elite riders, and how they used/talked about MR. MRs of signing your name, and seeing/sensing a bowl of fruit. It is best to involve all of your senses. MR helps you discover how much your brain knows, and primes your brain, which cannot tell the difference between real and imagined performance.

Send us your feedback!

In riding, negative expectations so often become the reality (as in ‘I hope we don’t stop at the ditch!…’). When things are going well you have to ‘make it again, make it again’ - not stop doing it - and you can’t even afford to take time out and congratulate yourself! Hoping something good will happen is very different to expecting it to happen, and when it comes to impulsion, many riders set themselves up to ensure that it won’t happen. Naive teachers feed this rider lots of energy, and end up exhausted. There are other ways to encourage someone who is probably constrained by fear to step out of her comfort (and ineffectual) zone. I describe some difficult pupils who specialise in being their own worst enemy, and invite you to consider, ‘How teachable are you?’

Send us your feedback!

Most riders give repeated leg aids that actually train the horse to be dead to their leg. If you have to kick to get each step of walk, how are you ever going to ride a canter pirouette? To be an effective rider, you have to believe that you have the right to be up there, being the brains of the rider/horse partnership, and being the leader your horse really needs. This requires self believe, good technique for giving a leg aid, a lot of conscious attention, and the ‘kick, don’t, don’t’ technique described here.

Send us your feedback!

Trainers will always be prejudiced against the toolkits they don’t understand, can’t be bothered with, or do so brilliantly (and easily) that they fail to recognise their brilliance. This complicates the ‘map battles’ between the proponents of the various toolkits. It pays to ‘outframe’ the zero toolkit to include saddlery, farriery, bodywork etc. - the supporting arts that help your horse to not be one of the ‘walking wounded’ who doesn’t limp, but is not physically robust. If he throws tantrums, suspect a physical problem as you ask yourself if the issue rooted in pain, in his brain, or in his training. A kick or whip tap needs to change your horse’s brain chemistry (and can do so ethically) so that he has more ‘get up and go’ chemicals. The aid needs to rebound like a slap, and not be a nudge or squeeze.

Send us your feedback!

How proponents of the 3 toolkits interact like the proverbial 3 blind men with the elephant. More on the Zero toolkit, overshadowing, and the transition from ground work to riding.
Being strong in one of the ‘maps’ of riding and training makes up for weaknesses in the other ‘maps’ - and also allows trainers to negate the other maps. Trainers often attribute their skill to one of the toolkits, not realising that they are also strong in a different one. Incongruent riding happens where there are conflicts between two toolkits eg the reins say ‘stop’, but the rider leans back during a halt so the laws of physics say ‘go’. Operant and classical conditioning as toolkits zero and 1. Making the transition from groundwork to riding.

Send us your feedback!

On ‘the map is not the territory’, even though riders and trainers the world over act as if it is - and go so far as to ‘eat the menu’!

If a rider, vet, physio, saddler and farrier were all looking at a tricky horse, each would see a different problem within their area of expertise. We all see what we are looking for, informed by the ‘maps’ or internal representations that we have developed over years, and we tend to think that the problem we perceive is the one and only problem - complete with our tailor-made one and only solution. The zero, first and second toolkits are different approaches to riding and training that do not negate each other, but are simply different maps. But few exponents of these different maps perceive that their map might not be the only map.

Send us your feedback!

So much of riding is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get run away with from the moment you decide you’re being run away with… so we review how rider ‘lose it’ through the model of polyvagal theory. All of your insecurities are likely to be triggered when you buy a new horse, who may offer challenges that are on the limit of your skills (do you remember the flow channel, where these stay in balance over time?). The pitfalls are many, and when you buy a schoolmaster, a lot depends on how well he was ‘danced’ previously. If you start pushing and he starts pulling, it will feel to him as if he doesn’t know the steps. Remember what it’s like in a couple’s dance form, when you (the woman) go from the ease and delight of dancing with a good partner (where you don’t have to know the steps) to dancing with a partner who hasn’t ‘got it’. The dissonance can feel horrible! Also, when riders buy a young horse, they often have the equivalent of ‘eyes bigger than their stomach’, and when they cannot match the forces of his movement, things again go wrong. It’s humbling to realise that very horse can only go as well as he is danced….