Episode 206: How riders use planning against themselves or their horse
What is the point of planning your ride…if you don’t follow through on the plan?
And if you plan, but then ride without regard to your full experience in the moment, or your horse’s full experience…did the plan help or hurt?
In this episode, I share an example of a moment when I needed to re-evaluate my plan for the day. I explain how I decide to continue on with the plan or when and how I decide to stop, or even go back to review more basic skills.
I’ll explain the power of plateaus and how sometimes the best time to stop is when the plan is working brilliantly.
Episode 206_ How riders use planning against themselves or their horse.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
Episode 206_ How riders use planning against themselves or their horse.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Stacy Westfall:
This right here, this tension that I can feel between continuing on with my plan or changing the plan, this feeling right here is why people don't plan.
Announcer:
Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill, this is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple: to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.
Stacy Westfall:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall, and I help riders become resourceful. In this episode, I want to share a thought that I had while riding recently, and it illustrates a major challenge that people face if they plan their rides. It also explains why someone might try planning, but how they might use that against themselves or against their horse, which then in the future leads them to avoid planning. Do you see the cycle there? It will be clear by the end of the podcast. But first, a short story about blueberry muffins. When I think about resourcefulness, I think of my mother and cooking. She could take a limited amount of ingredients and create a meal that was delicious and unexpected. Or she could be in a situation and get creative with the limitations that she had for cooking on hand. A perfect example was way back when I was a teenager showing my horse in speed events, barrel racing, pole bending, that was my favorite, flag race, that kind of stuff. We didn't have a truck and trailer and so I would work and trade to have my horse hauled to the shows. And when we got to the shows, my mom and I would sleep in a tent and that included the weekends that were pouring rain. We would pack all of our own food to the shows and so that meant that we either ate cold food out of the cooler or cooked on a barbecue grill. Well my mom has been and is still famous for her blueberry muffins. So one weekend she decided that she was going to make blueberry muffins at the show. She could have baked them at home ahead of time, but she knew that she wanted to serve hot, warm, freshly-baked muffins. And just a reminder that 30 years ago at least we didn't have any of these fancy grills or any cooking gadgets that would have helped out on this. But my mom figured out how to use a few common items like a cookie sheet and an extra muffin pan and she made up a system that cooked the muffins perfectly. And to me that is an illustration of resourcefulness in action. She knew the end goal. She looked around at what she had available and she made a plan for how she could reach that goal. I think that when we look at a story like the blueberry muffin story, it's easy to think about resources as the items you have, the barbecue grill, the muffin tins, and those items that are available to you in the physical world. But I want you to think that resourcefulness is also something that you can apply to the way that you approach thinking and the decision-making that you do when you're riding your horse.
Stacy Westfall:
This came to my mind the other day because I had a ride with Willow that did not go as planned, and it occurred to me how in that moment I made a choice and I knew I needed to talk about it on the podcast because basically, it goes like this. I went out with a plan of what I was going to work on with Willow, and my plan was bridleless flying lead changes. And as you might imagine, I don't just mount up and immediately in the first 60 seconds of riding begin doing these. So what that means is that I have some kind of a warm-up. For me I view that as a physical warm-up, walk, trot, the things that you would do to warm up the muscles. And for me, there's also a mental checklist that's part of the warm-up. I'm checking the basic cues individually that will combine to create these bridleless lead changes. So about 20 minutes into my ride, I'm still very aware that my intention or plan for the day is lead changes. I'm also very aware that the physical warm-up is done, it's complete. The muscles are warm and the whole time I've been aware of the mental checklist. I've been testing little parts as I warm up. Can I trot in a straight line while leaving the shoulders on the line? Can I move the hips to the left? Can I come around the corner, trot another straight line, leave the shoulders on the line, move the hips to the right? Basically I'm doing all of the exercises in my collection and lead change course, but without the bridle. And on top of all of this, I'm also aware of Willow's experience. And what I mean by that is I don't assume that the horses come out exactly the same every day. So I am evaluating if she seems to be having a really good day, kind of average day, maybe not quite right kind of day. So it's not just evaluating her physical responses, but also her mental state during those responses. A lot of times what that ends up feeling like is, does it feel easy for her? Now, easy is relative as the training progresses, because in this case, we're doing physically challenging things. So canter-walk-canter might be physically challenging, so what I'm thinking when I say easy is it's more of like a relaxed, positive tension. If that's not the case, then maybe what I'm feeling is actual tension. So she's not relaxed so we might be doing the transition, canter-walk-canter, but there might be tension involved that would cause there to be jigging or a jerkiness to the transition where she maybe stops more completely than transitioning totally from the canter to the walk. So I'm evaluating her mental state while doing these transitions also. So I rode for probably about another 15 minutes after the warm-up was complete and I'd already been testing and I'm just kind of building things up. I'm testing out more of these transitions. I'm doing some counter canter and what I kept noticing over and over again was that she felt amazing. And so I kept realizing over and over again that she really felt focused on me. She felt right there. Her attention was dialed in. I could canter small circles, I could do transitions, and it all felt exactly the way I wanted it to, which feels amazing. It feels like they are an extension of your body. And after having that moment happen over and over again, I realized, because I'm kind of I'm watching myself have this reaction to Willow, so I'm noticing that. I'm marveling at how well it's going. Not once, not twice, but many times, I'm marveling at how well it's going. And that's when this little red flag pops up that says, hey, notice a pattern here. And I think so often when people think, red flag or notice a pattern, they think about noticing an unwanted pattern. But in this case, I'm noticing a very good pattern, a pattern of me marveling at how well it's going. And I think noticing good patterns is very powerful and is key to advancing.
Stacy Westfall:
So here's the moment in the podcast where you need to put yourself into this situation. In your mind, you're riding your horse. You had a plan. You're kind of checking along. You're about 75% along the way. Things are going extremely well. Darn near perfect. Better than expected. Here's the question. Do you go on or do you stop? And if you do go on, how far do you go? And here's my answer: It depends. Because in that moment you're going to need to make some decisions. In that moment, you'll need to have an awareness of not just this moment in time, this ride, but also you'll have to have an awareness of the things you've been learning about you and your horse as you've been training. So hopefully you've been practicing the skill of evaluating after your rides because the more you evaluate how a ride went, the more aware you're going to be of these habits and where you and your horse are. If you are not familiar because you haven't been practicing the skill of evaluating, here's what's most likely to happen. In this situation, it's more likely that you're going to default to what you desire because that one's really obvious. It's obvious because you had the plan, and the most obvious thing would be to continue moving on in that plan. You could look at what I'm saying with Willow as like, it's all green lights, everything's working, go. And that might be the case, or it might not be, because you're going to need to be able to factor in, in that moment, what your horse needs. And so if you are a rider who can be present right now, in the moment, in the arena, marveling at the horse–and I stopped to do this, by the way. Stand still, feed her a peppermint, that kind of stuff. And I–and I reflect back to the last ten or 20 rides. So I'm carrying a clear memory because of evaluating my last rides. I'm carrying the memory of being present for the last rides and being present right now and that is what influences my decision on whether I go on or not. We know I wanted to be doing lead changes. That was the plan. But the only way that you will be in that situation and be open to doing what your horse needs is if you have your plan, but you're willing to be flexible. And here's where it goes a little deeper. You've got to be open to the idea that you'll do what's best for the horse, which might mean not going on to the lead changes. But then we have to ask the question of how you will handle that failure to complete your own plan. Because if you label the decision to change the plan a failure or a problem or something that's going to predict failure in the future, then you're not going to be very likely to deviate from your plan. So in that moment, you might be marveling at how well it's going like I was, and you might suspect that you should stop, or maybe it's not going so well and you suspect you need to backtrack. But if you are likely to label that a problem, you probably won't be able to tolerate changing the plan. And that's when I see riders overriding their horses.
Stacy Westfall:
So for me, in that moment, when I'm standing there feeding her a peppermint and marveling at how well it's been going and deciding whether I'm going to continue on, I thought this right here: this tension that I can feel between continuing on with my plan or changing the plan, this feeling right here is why people don't plan. They don't plan because then you don't have to go off plan. And if you do plan, this is why people override, because you miss the dual experience. If you're not willing to factor your horse's experience and your experience in, if you can't tolerate being the planner that plans it and then the rider who then changes the plan, then if you can't allow that to be the case, then you're more likely to just follow the plan. And whenever you drop the awareness of what you're going through right now, like the awareness that you are making this decision because you don't want to be disappointed in following your own plan, so you're just blocking that, like you have to follow the plan. If you're not aware of that, that's going to cause you problems. And if you're not aware of your horse's collective experience over the last 10 or 20 rides, then you're also not going to be aware of what would be best for the horse. And don't get me wrong, there are some days when I make a plan and everything lines up and everything goes to the plan. I think this is more likely to happen in certain situations. Some of it depends on the stages of training. So there's spots in elementary, there's spots in high school, there's spots into college. But it also really depends on if this is a new concept or a complex concept. I can plan and this is something I highly suggest for everyone. I can plan a very successful day and you should be able to do that any time you want by simply going back to the basics. That is key. If you cannot plan a super successful day, even if that might seem kind of boring to you, then what you need to do is you need to go back to the basics more often. So I can always have a reliably consistent, successful day because all I need to do is back down my goals and just return to something more basic. All training needs plateaus because those plateaus where you can reliably create successful days, that is where the horse will gain confidence.
Stacy Westfall:
Inside of my course, students can share success stories. And Nadya wrote this one: I didn't believe in the value of repetition. So boring. But now I do. Thanks to the repeating patterns, I can now shift my focus more easily. I can evaluate the rides like the layers of an onion, on one thing at a time. I used to be overwhelmed with all the things I wanted to focus on at once. Repetition now gives me the opportunity to be able to evaluate everything I want without getting it blurred in the bigger picture. I am naturally a glass-half-empty kind of person and taking notes after every ride revealed to me that actually often turns out better than it felt after getting off. I find I can easily fill out the "What Went Well" column at length even after rides I didn't particularly like. So taking notes is a useful tool to align my often biased feelings with the reality of the ride.
Stacy Westfall:
This is a great example of a rider who is learning to evaluate and will be equipped to make better decisions in the moment, like the moment I found myself in with Willow. In my course, I do the planning for you, and I teach you the skill of how to ride certain patterns with certain techniques so that you can then also learn how to evaluate. Because once you learn these skills, you're then able to apply them anywhere. I'm using the same patterns and the same evaluations. I'm using the same leg cues that are shown in my course while I'm riding Willow bridleless. The skill of being able to evaluate in layers is something that develops a rider who is in turn then able to make good decisions and develop the horse. So I said, in the beginning, there was a challenge that people face and here it is: If you plan the ride and you stay aware of what your horse needs, you might need to change your plan. So that explains why people don't plan, because if they can't follow the plan because they'll miss the horse's experience if they do, then a lot of times they will just say, there's no point in making a plan if I'm not going to follow it. Or conversely, you'll find people who do plan, but then they use the plan against themselves. And that means they stick to the plan and they're not flexible. And in that case, they tend to override. Plans can work out perfectly, definitely more often if you're on a plateau and you're just kind of letting something settle in. If you have a day where you walk out to the barn and you feel that you need a nice, solid, consistent day, then plan for that. Don't plan to introduce new concepts. If you want to advance then what I suggest is that you plan for being flexible inside of your plan.
So what did I do with Willow at that moment? Well, first, as I've mentioned, I stopped and I gave her a peppermint. While she was chewing it, I was sitting there soaking in the feeling of everything working. That is a good one to sit with. And I saw her soaking in the feeling of a peppermint, and I appreciated that she was having the experience of doing hard work easily. And as I sat there, I decided to stop, to be done, because my decision was based on the idea that I want to create a plateau right here. I want this complex cue system to feel easy for her. So in that moment, she felt confident, she felt amazing, and I wanted to preserve that. I wanted to reward that level of focus from her. And because I had such a high level of physical and mental focus at the same time, if I can recreate that over and over again, basically creating a plateau, then what that's going to do is it's going to give me a solid plateau at a very high level. I should have looked up a word to try to describe the feeling, but the feeling of having a horse at that level of physical and mental focus at the same time, I just keep coming back to amazing, but it's much more intense than that. And if I can create that as a plateau that I can repeat over and over again, then it feels like I'm bringing this saying to life: Make the impossible possible and the possible easy.
Stacy Westfall:
Inside my course. Another student, Jen, shared this success story, and I'm going to read the last line first and then the whole thing. Because I think it really sums up one of the driving factors behind the decision-making I was just talking about. So her last line says this: Our tendency as non-pro riders is so often to keep adding more instead of making it more simple. That is so true. And for anyone wondering what a non-pro is, that's a term when you're showing your horse, that simply means that you don't make a living training horses. So if you don't make a living training horses, then you are a non-pro. Here's Jennifer's full story: I'm just beginning to understand better the use of my legs to send the horse to the reins. What I'm beginning to internalize is the idea that if I have a colt not understanding the guidance in the reins, the concept of using the legs to mean go forward is intended to make the reins more clear by keeping the legs very basic themselves. In the past I would have added more pressure from the outside leg to push the horse onto a circle or release the inside leg to allow the circle in. Now I see that adding more in this case really just covers over the problem. Peeling back to just the legs mean, go forward, is directly addressing the problem and fixing it. Our tendency as non-pro riders is so often to keep adding more instead of making it more simple.
Stacy Westfall:
Can you see how Jennifer's observation keep adding more instead of making it more simple, would impact the decision-making that I was making about do I go on with Willow or do I stop? If in the back of your mind, more is always the answer, then there's really only going to be one path available. It's working. Do more. It's not working. Do more. So I asked the questions earlier. Do you go on or do you stop? And if you go on, how far do you go? And I answered it. It depends. That day with Willow, I decided to stop and enjoy it. I won't always do that. If I always do that, I won't progress past that point. So there will be other days where I will reach that very same spot and I will go on. How far will I go on? I was thinking about it getting ready for this podcast, and I would say about 80% of the time that I'm doing a ride that is planned to stretch us, I probably lower the goal about 80% of the time during one of those rides. Is that surprising to you? So maybe 20% of the time I follow all the way through with the plan. But if I go out there and let's say I'm thinking I'm close to lead changes or I've even been doing lead changes and I'm doing them at a different level or improving them, I would say about 80% of the time when I'm stretching us, I lower the goal during the ride. I also don't make it wrong by thinking that I made the plan too big. It simply just shows me that I've got little things I can practice that are going to ensure my success on the way to that big goal. I'm using all the resources that I have available to me, but I'm not afraid to backtrack and practice the foundation skills because the ride is either going to work out as I planned or I'll be learning from the experience. Sometimes that learning is I stop and I enjoy the plateau and other times I keep going and sometimes I keep going and what I learn is that I wish I had stopped earlier. All of these decisions, when I'm willing to evaluate them from a neutral place, help me become more resourceful in future rides. If you would like to become a resourceful writer, come join me in my online program. Here on the podcast, I teach the concept of the four square model, which is the rider's mind, the rider's body, the horse's mind, and the horse's body. Later in the program, you'll learn how to apply all of these concepts to your own training with your horse. You will understand the training process from your horse's point of view, and you will learn to be clear and effective with your cues. You'll get immediate access to step-by-step instruction, including mindset and body awareness work, and live coaching from me every week. Go to stacywestfall.com and click the "Work With Me" tab. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.
Announcer:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit stacywestfall.com for articles, videos, and tips to help you and your horse succeed.
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I loved this podcast! When I think about adjusting a plan I think about that in the context of things not going well. In reality though, I’ve gotten pretty good at adjusting for that reason. I’m not so good at adjusting because everything is going great. Thanks for adding more layers to the way I think about things.