Episode 213: ‘How greed’ and your success pattern

Episode 213_ _How greed_ and your success pattern.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 213_ _How greed_ and your success pattern.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Stacy Westfall:
That step-by-step plan is going to turn out so much better when you can approach it with high-value thinking.

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 understand their own mind and body so they can clearly communicate with their horse. In this podcast, I'm going to explain one way that I see riders get out of balance in their thinking when they're trying to advance their communication and how studying your success pattern can solve this problem. So here's what I often see. I often see riders run into a roadblock in making progress with their horse. Maybe they set a goal and they're trying to stretch into some new area, or maybe they're trying to advance something like their steering and they want to go to neck reining and they run into something that they perceive as a roadblock. And when they do this, what often happens is they think, if I just had really clear steps. Now, mind you, really clear steps is a part of it, but when I think about phrasing it, really clear steps, a lot of times what that does is it puts the rider purely focused on their body and their horse's body. So if we take the example of teaching a horse to counter bend, which is the process of teaching a horse to travel in a direction, let's say to the left, but with their head tipped slightly to the right for the purpose of isolating the shoulders, which establishes really clear shoulder control, when we're teaching something like that to the horse, it is very possible for the rider who focuses on just the step-by-step to actually become so rigid that they become part of the problem. Because when riders are super focused on step one, do this, step two, do this, step three, do this, they often begin to focus so hard on the steps that they forget to breathe. They forget to look in the direction. They're so in their heads about what step is coming next that they operate their own body in a very robotic way. And the problem is that the horse is not a computer. I can go to YouTube and look up how to edit a video and I can follow things step-by-step. And if I'm holding my breath and forgetting to breathe or doing things in a very robotic way, my computer doesn't care. But if I ride the horse, especially as I'm in the messy middle and I'm trying to do more than just the basics and I'm trying to work my way up to more advanced communication, things start to get more subtle and it requires of you a full body awareness. And so what's interesting is that when riders begin to suffer from how greed and they want to know exactly how and they want to know exactly the next step, the how. The step is not the problem. It's the overfocus on the step that takes them out of their body and puts them really in their head. And that is where the horse begins to feel an incongruence.

Stacy Westfall:
As a side note, I believe this is also how riders who are learning something and they're trying really hard to learn a step-by-step, I believe that sometimes they try so hard that they actually block their ability to feel because they're shutting down the cycle. I'll talk about that in a minute. But they're shutting it down so much that they actually block their ability to feel, and in the horse world, that–that word feel–I've got air quotes around that–gets tossed around a lot, about a rider having a lot of feel. And I promise you that if you do the work of being able to think about what you're doing, but also being present and fully in your body and not just thinking about the step-by-step so you feel like you're in your head as you begin to be able to do that whole cycle more and more clearly, you will increase the amount of feel you have. If you don't do that, you will decrease the amount of feel you have. Ok, back on track. So can you see the cycle? A rider who sets a goal to improve something and hits a roadblock will often begin to look for a better set of, I'm going to call it actions because that makes it a little bit more clear that it's you doing something with your body. So you'll know you're doing this if you run into a challenge–and let's go back to that counter bend, and you're like, I really want to teach my horse how to counter bend. But right now I'm a little unclear about how the counter bend works and my horse feels a little bit unclear about it. And if you go into that and you try to find a solution that's really heavily focused on the body side of the four square model, that's going to be your red flag that you might be suffering from how greed and forgetting the dance between the mind and the body.

Stacy Westfall:
So here's how that works. The reason I came up with the four square model in the first place was because there is a huge temptation to focus on what we can see, which is the rider's body. So why don't you try sitting up straighter? Why don't you try looking over your left shoulder? Why don't you try doing these things with your body? And those are all useful and they do help. And we do tend to look at the horse's body and we say, Well, the horse is supposed to be traveling to the left, and the horse is supposed to be tipping its head far enough to the right that I can see the right eye, even though we're traveling to the left because we're working on isolating the shoulder control. And that is true. However, what begins to happen if we stay so heavily on the side of the four square model that is rider's body and horse's body is we start to disconnect from the full cycle of what's going on in the mind of the rider and the mind of the horse. Now, with the horse, we get a little bit of both because we are always reading their body language to figure out what's going on in their mind. So maybe you're working on this and you start to notice that you're losing a lot of forward motion and the horse's head is kind of up high and you start to be like, Well, that's kind of an interesting thing. I wonder why that's happening. Maybe you'll check back in and realize that you are clamping everything and you're holding your breath and you're not breathing and you're causing that. But so often when riders are stuck in the side where they're thinking about the body and the body, the rider's body and the horse's body, they don't often make that association. Because what's not happening is they're not getting an outside view on it. Like, what is my role in how the horse is carrying the head and neck? Is there a way that I can loosen up and change my body? How am I feeling right now? Am I holding my breath? Why am I holding my breath? Is it because I'm afraid I'm not going to get it done? So if they don't start spending some time going through this whole cycle of the rider's mind as well as the rider's body, the horse's mind, and the horse's body and that full body experience, what will start happening is they'll get super focused on the bodies, and this tends to be where the riders begin to do too much because they're not slowing down and experiencing the feelings of what's happening and their own habitual way of thinking.

Stacy Westfall:
If you remember last week's episode, I talked about the conversation with a horse and how one of the things that we do is we leave a little gap to be able to see what the horse is thinking. So that gap is when the rider lightens the aids, gives the horse a little bit more freedom, sees what the horse is going to offer, and inside of that gap, we get to see how the horse has been processing things and we get to see the habitual way of thinking that the horse has. Well, the same thing is true in riders. So I'm going to call this a high-value success cycle and a low-value cycle. And what that means is that when you become obsessed with the how, a lot of times when riders do that, they start focusing so much on the steps that they put themselves into a low-value thinking. It becomes grasp-y and greedy feeling, like desperate to get this done. I see these steps, I should be able to do it, and that is what colors the horse's experience of that ride. Now you can be doing those same exact steps. You can have step one, step two, step three, step four, and if you start to become the watcher of yourself while you are doing this, if you start to watch yourself while you're trying to work through something challenging and you start realizing that as you are working your horse through learning how to counter bend and you start noticing not just your mind and body from the aspect of, Am I using my reins correctly here? Am I using enough leg? Is this step three or step four? How can I clean this up? Noticing more than that is noticing how you're thinking about the process. It's noticing if you are being that how greed that greedy feeling of how. How can I get through this, this grasp-y feeling. Or if you're approaching it more from this level of curiosity, like, Oh, okay, this is the order of the steps. And I start noticing I'm holding my breath right here because I'm actually thinking, this is failing. This isn't working.

Stacy Westfall:
So one thing I want you to consider is what it would be like to look at your past success patterns. Because your success pattern is how you navigate through the tough stuff that comes up. Because I think that the real how is not the how greed of tell me the steps in the perfect order. I think the actual how of achieving something is a combination of the things you do. The step one, the step two, the step three, and the way that you think about it. So when you set a new goal or run into a roadblock on the way to a goal that you're currently seeking, it is very common for your mind to offer you lots of ideas. One of them that comes up is you should just quit. So when you are out there and you are working with your horse and it is day three of trying to communicate to your horse what the counter bend is and you've never done it before and your horse has never done it before and you're trying to work this out, it is very common that after you've had multiple attempts, at some point your brain may offer you that you should just quit. And when that happens, it is very likely that your brain will also offer you lots of evidence from your past. It will say things to you like, Remember when you tried this and it didn't work? And this when it didn't work? And this when it didn't work? And this when it didn't work? And your brain is so effective at doing this that it can do all of that inside of 15 seconds. Because you've got to remember that your survival brain default settings include conserve energy, avoid pain, and seek pleasure. And when you're learning something new, and especially when you're learning something new and you're teaching it to your horse who's also learning something new, a lot of times, learning new things doesn't immediately fit into your preprogrammed survival brain settings. A lot of times it actually takes you spending some extra energy during the learning process and you will often experience that discomfort that comes with change and your brain will often interpret that discomfort as a version of pain and a version of loss of pleasure. So the beauty of looking back at your past success patterns is that you will find evidence of past success.

Stacy Westfall:
So remember a minute ago, I said, Your brain will offer you that you should quit and then it will default to throwing all kinds of past places where you didn't get things to work out. If you start to spend more time looking at your past success pattern, you will be retraining your brain's habit. You will be changing that default setting and you will be encouraging your brain to remember evidence of your past successes. You will remember that you have done hard things before and you have made it through the discomfort of change. You will see how you overcame roadblocks in the past. And I will even suggest that many of the ways that you overcame those roadblocks, you will be able to apply again right now to this process. So inside of my program, I teach a process for charting this. It's called intentional thinking, and it's explained in detail inside the Train Your Own Horse with Confidence workbook, as well as in the Mindset Mastery course. And what happens is when you are going through this process, you discover how you created success in your past. Because the more times you look at a success you had in the past in detail, the more times you practice deconstructing that and looking at it, the more you will refine the process. Because just like anything else, you practice when you first start trying to look back at a success and trying to see how you got there, it will feel a little awkward and mechanical. Just like teaching that horse how to counter bend, it will feel unfamiliar. But once you master it, it feels really magical. So it turns out that you have more in common with your horse than you might think. Your habit thinking of defaulting to remembering all the things that might not work is very similar to the horse that I talked about last week defaulting to all the creative ways to head to the barn or head to the gate. Those things that maybe you wish they weren't offering, but it's just what's popping up into their mind when they haven't been trained and they haven't learned to think at a higher level. So when your brain offers you those similar thoughts, those low-value thoughts that have you putting your horse away early, withdrawing from a certain goal, when you begin to see those thoughts, the first thing to do is just identify that you're going into a low-value cycle, that the way you're thinking, the habitual way that you are responding when something doesn't turn out the way you think it should, that begins to point towards a low-value cycle of thinking. And what I'm suggesting is that step-by-step plan is going to turn out so much better when you can approach it with high-value thinking. Because the things that are going to change for you when you are thinking at a higher level is you're going to see the challenges, but you'll also see possible solutions. It'll be easier for you to stay in a creative, open space and it will be easier for you to stay in your body and feeling the experience of teaching this horse and communicating with your body while you are cycling through the steps and re-evaluating. All of this will make you more present during the ride.

Stacy Westfall:
If you take only one thing away from this episode, let it be that the real how of achieving something is a combination of the things you do, the actions that you take, and the way that you're thinking as you take them. When we talk about success, it's easy to focus on the moment that the label of success is applied. For example, when a winner is announced and the success label is applied to that situation. But the moment of success was actually an accumulation of events that led up to that moment. What I find really interesting is that the process of reaching that moment often feels completely different than the feeling of being in that moment. You've heard me talk on the podcast before about a concept that I have, that everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And if we look at that, then what the label of success is, is–is just labeling the end of those three. So it means that the beginning probably has a different energy than the end. The middle has a different type of energy. Or if you believe in my messy middle theory, then you probably get to experience a lot when you're in the messy middle. And then the end has a different feeling, which is the one that you may label success. Or maybe you get there and you label it, failure. If you overlay this idea of the beginning, the middle, and the end with accomplishing a goal and studying your success pattern, a lot of times what you'll start to find is that in the past when you had successes, you developed a skill for getting yourself through the hard stuff, and that pattern was as much or more a pattern of thinking when things got tough, the way that you decided you were going to go through it. That is what studying your success patterns will do for you. It will help you realize that in the past, when you had success, there are pieces of that that you can transfer into what you're doing right now with your horse, even if your past success was in a completely unrelated area. That is what I have for you this week. If you would like some help practicing finding your past successes and doing the intentional thinking that creates high-value cycles, come join me in the Resourceful Rider program. I will teach you the step-by-step actions to take and how to manage your mind to be in high-value cycles while you're taking them. 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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