Episode 216: The base layer goal that will ensure your progress

Episode 216_ The base layer goal that will ensure your progress.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 216_ The base layer goal that will ensure your progress.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Stacy Westfall:
When you find the answer to that question, you will have a very strong base layer to achieving your goal. You will have something that you can repeat week after week, knowing that just completing each of those weeks is a success in itself.

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 set and achieve their goals. This is the first podcast episode of 2023, and in keeping with my yearly theme, I want to touch on the topic of goals. Now, we've talked in quite a few episodes about setting goals and different versions of this because it's a process that really helps me bring my ideas or dreams into reality. Here are some of the past episodes that you could also reference. Back in Episode 160, I talked about choosing a yearly theme instead of a goal. So if you are very against setting specific goals, I suggest you try on a yearly theme. I do this every year in addition to my goals. It just offers me a direction of focus in my thinking. So last year, two of my words from my yearly theme were mastery and magic. And so it kept me searching for those things throughout my year. In Episode 149, I reviewed the three traits that I see in riders that reach their goals. That's a really good one if you want to reverse-engineer the process. Back in Episode 113, I discussed how to calendar your horse goals and in Episode 112 I also talked about, can you have a relationship and get results with your horse? Because sometimes I think people don't set goals because somewhere in the back of their mind is an unexamined thought that they have to choose between relationship or results. In an upcoming podcast, I'm going to talk more about how setting goals can actually improve your relationship. And you can also go back to Episode 112 and hear my ideas there about relationship and results.

Stacy Westfall:
But in this podcast on goals, I have a question for you that I've been asking myself. And it is, What one thing could you set out to do that if you did, it repeatedly would ensure progress toward your goal? So sometimes I think it's possible to overcomplicate things, especially if you are really into studying the subject. I love studying goals. I study it a lot. I look at it from a lot of different angles and sometimes my brain offers me it's too much. And that's when I say, What if achieving my goal was simple? Not necessarily easy as in, like hard or easy as an effort. But what if it was simple? And one of the ways that I do always put this simplicity filter over my goals is that as soon as I have that dream and that direction, that's kind of helping me pick the specific goal for the year, as soon as I set that goal, I want to go all the way down to how I'm going to put that into daily and weekly actions. So in this question, what one thing could you do that if you did it repeatedly would ensure progress towards your goal? That's what I want to look at. So I have a couple examples for you. And the first one I'm going to do is a non-horse one, because I think sometimes it's good to look at it in different parts of life so that you can then take that skill that you may have somewhere else and apply it to the horse skill. So I had in a past year a time management goal, and I made it simple, like meaning very doable. I decided that the simple plan was to decide on Sunday the things that I would accomplish each day for the next week. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Basically schedule all that on Sunday. Do them each day and review again. So it was a simple plan, but the challenge was committing to follow the simple plan. The challenge was learning how long it took to do certain things. The challenge was failing and trying again. Seeing some progress with the information that I gained, failing again, and I did that process for months. I would have to look back, but I know it was at least six months of doing this every single week before I was actually getting like 95 or 100% of like what I scheduled I could do. The whole process was really about learning more about myself and then stretching my mind into choosing different paths. My brain was like, Nope, this is never going to work. And I had to like, stretch myself into trying something else and failing again. So in a way, it was a very simple process. Decide on Sunday, execute through the week, review at the end of the week, do it again. But in another way it was super challenging and really rewarding because even though it took half a year or more, I am still reaping results from that because of all the skills that I learned.

Stacy Westfall:
So what if you could do something very similar with your riding goals? So when I look at riding goals. I see the majority of them falling into two different areas. And keep in mind for this, I'm going really broad, just like time management is really broad. So in this riding example, when I think about riding goals, they tend to fit into either some version of like a fitness type goal where there's going to be a heavy emphasis on getting the horse more fit as part of the process or some goals don't really require the horse to have a lot higher fitness level, and they're more about refinement, more about gaining more clarity or understanding. And then other goals have both like almost equal parts or maybe stair-stepping parts of fitness and refinement. So what I mean by this is when you're looking at your specific goal, see if right now in your head you can see which way it leans. Does it lean more towards like a fitness goal? So if you're an endurance rider, there's going to be a lot of fitness training for your horse where if you are doing something like dressage, it might be like more of a balance between the two. And so there are different things that you can be doing. You could be doing like a lot of trick training or some of the different liberty training things fall into like a lot of refinement. Now they definitely can also step up into fitness so it kind of just depends. Like a lot of times when I'm doing pure trick training, like teaching horse to bow or lay down or something like that, that feels like pure refinement to me. It doesn't feel like a fitness goal. So when I look at the different goals that I have with horses, I'm calculating how that's going to work. So, for example, if you are somebody who trail rides your horse, mostly walk and trot, that's going to be like a low level of aerobic exercise. So the rider is probably trying to advance some kind of refinement, like more control or more clear communication versus saying, Hey, you know, I usually ride this loop and it takes me an hour and I want to be able to speed it up to take a half an hour. This is where it starts to be interesting to say, like how much of this is changing, a lot of the fitness or how much of this is more about refinement. Now, if we look at something like reining, the entire class is shown at a lope. So it's basically, are you loping or are you going really fast to the lope or slow the lope? Are you spinning? Are you sliding? It's basically a lot of high-speed bursts of anaerobic exercise. For that reason, there's fitness involved as well as the refinement. And so when you're looking at your goals with your horse, that's one lens you can look at it through because it will help you figure out what these main blocks that you could set up would be.

Stacy Westfall:
Before I go to a totally different thought process, one possible problem area that I see riders run into is sometimes the rider desires to work primarily on refinement, so they want to work at like a low energy level, let's just say walk and trot, and they want to work on refining the cues and improving the understanding. The one thing to keep in mind is that your horse gets to have some opinions. And so sometimes horses are totally into that. They're completely willing. Other horses will struggle if they don't have some outlet for the extra energy they may have due to who they are. So just for an example, imagine a young horse that naturally has a strong desire to be more playful and forward and loping and basically expressing extra energy versus some older horses that are more okay with like, awesome, glad you just want to walk and trot. So I just want to put that out there because sometimes when I see riders who basically want to keep it nice and easy, if their horse is asking a lot about, you know, I have this extra energy, just keep in mind that sometimes the horse might need a different way to express that. Maybe that would be lunging the horse or more turnout time. Just keep in mind that your horse may report that they have some desire to do more physical exercise than maybe what you want to, and you might need to find another way for them to express that.

Stacy Westfall:
So now that you're kind of thinking about, does your goal focus evenly on fitness and refinement, or is it more going to be, you know, the first part of the year is going to be fitness, the second part of the year is going to be refinement. Once you've looked at that, what I want you to do again is ask what one thing could you set out to do that, if you did it repeatedly, would ensure progress towards your goal? This could be, again, something aimed at your horse, like the fitness or the refinement, but it also can be something aimed a little bit at yourself. So let's just say you look back over 2022 and you realize that you didn't ride as often as you wish you had, so you had thought that you were going to ride 4 to 5 times a week. But when you look back and you see that what caused that was probably a time management issue, then what you could do is you could set your goal and that one repeatable thing could be something around time management. You could also look and see that if refinement is something you really want to do with your horse. It's one of the goals. It's one of the areas. Maybe the umbrella challenge that you could do repeatedly is going to have some sort of focus time. And so when you are looking at these things, the challenges that you faced last year, like if the challenge was riding regularly and you look back and you go, time management was what got in the way, I wasn't managing my time. I can see how I could clean that up, then make your repeatable actions for this year something that are going to affect your time management. So depending on what your challenge is, maybe your challenge is riding regularly, or maybe your challenge is riding with a plan in mind, or maybe your challenge is sticking to the plan that you had made. Maybe that is actually like honoring your decision to do a certain thing on a certain day. Whatever your challenge is, ask yourself what one thing could I do that would ensure progress in this area or viewed from another angle? What I'm asking is what one habit could you establish that would ensure progress toward your goal? So every year at this time I look at goals and this year I've been studying goals from a different angle and I've been looking a lot at the neurobiology, the science of goal setting. I will link in the show notes to where this information came from. A lot of it came from the Huberman Lab podcasts, and these are three things that I've learned so far that I find fascinating on their own. But I also really find fascinating when I go back and overlap them with what I've talked about in all the previous podcasts that I already referenced, because I love finding the similarities in the things that I learned. Because I think when I find those golden threads that they really can lead me somewhere. One thing that I found fascinating is that any goal you set goes through the same neurocircuit. So that circuit in your brain, it goes through the same exact process whether you are picking out a movie to watch tonight or whether you are setting a big goal. The process that you go through is exactly the same. That is fascinating. Another thing I learned is that when you're trying to learn something new, you want to set the goal with something that's hard but not too hard. So you want to get things right. About 85% of the time with about a 15, maybe 20% failure rate. So it's like that 80 or 20 or 85, 15, you know, you're kind of going to be in that range. You want something that's pretty hard but not too hard. So you want this realistic but lofty goal because of the way that it will trigger your systems inside your brain.

Stacy Westfall:
So when I look back at Episode 165 of my podcast where I talked about mastery and the plateau, it makes sense to me that we want to be stretching ourselves, but we also don't want to be overstretching. That 80 to 85% success rate will be much more possible if you've been building plateaus along the way. Now, this last fact, when you make mistakes and you have that slight feeling of frustration, it actually cues your brain to increase focus the next time. Again, I will link to the full-blown hour and a half long podcast that goes into much more detail on this. But the short version of it is that when you make those mistakes and you feel that little bit of frustration and your brain says, next time we need to pay more attention, it's actually increasing your neuroplasticity. That is fascinating to me. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you'll know that I talk about training. Having layers and goals have layers. Also, one of the most important layers is the one that you're looking for. When you ask the question, what one thing if you did repeatedly would ensure progress towards your goal? When you find the answer to that question, you will have a very strong base layer to achieving your goal. You will have something that you can repeat week after week, knowing that just completing each of those weeks is a success in itself. And then because you are practicing that same skill over and over again, you will begin to see the layered effects of it over time. This does not mean that you don't need to look for other layers along the way to your goal. But any time your brain wants to overcomplicate it, remember to go back to what one thing if I did it repeatedly would ensure progress towards my goal. And this fits perfectly with what we are doing inside the Resourceful Rider program this month where I'm teaching on goal setting and I'm coaching students and helping them set their goals as well as breaking them into small or action steps. And one thing that we're going to do is really discuss success and failure along the way. I have an entire mindset mastery course inside the program that really breaks down the dance in the rider's mind and the rider's body as they're training their horse. So if you would like help breaking your goals into small, doable steps and then support through the process of navigating the ups and the downs that are all part of this process of pursuing goals, come join us in the Resourceful Rider program. 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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