Episode 220: Showing vs. training and developing the rider’s eye

Episode 220_ Showing vs. training and developing the rider_s eye.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 220_ Showing vs. training and developing the rider_s eye.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Stacy Westfall:
So before you change how you're able to ride you're developing your skill to see what's happening, and then develop the skill to understand what would need to be modified and then develop the skill to be able to modify it.

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'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy, and successfully train your own horses. In this season of the podcast I'll be discussing lessons that can be learned through showing horses. Back in Season 9, which was Episodes 90 through 100. I discussed trail riding. And as I've been looking back through the episodes of this podcast, I realized that I've touched on the topic of showing, but I haven't stopped to focus on it, which is really interesting because it's very clear to me that showing has hugely impacted my development as a rider. Now, to be clear, I don't think that means you have to show to develop as a rider. However, even if you don't want to show, it is worth listening to the lessons that showing has to offer because all of these lessons are available without showing. But they may be very subtle and easy to overlook in other areas. Let me give you an example. When you're showing, and a lot of the times I'm going to be talking about either reining or ranch riding or western dressage or traditional dressage when you are showing, you will be riding transitions. If you're riding a reining horse that might be going from a standstill to a lead departure into a lope. That might mean in dressage, doing a transition from a halt to a trot. There are lots of transitions in all of the disciplines that I just listed. And what happens when you are in a show environment riding transitions, you have an exact place where that is supposed to be done and you are graded or scored for how well that went. If, however, you're trail riding and you're riding transitions or you're riding at home, it is very possible to not do the same type of transitions or to not be very specific when you are doing transitions or even not notice a lot of what's happening during the transitions. So although showing isn't required to ride good transitions, it is important to put a high priority on how you ride transitions of gait. Walk to trot, trot to canter, canter to trot, walk to canter, canter to halt. All of these transitions show the level of communication that you have with your horse and showing tends to raise the rider's awareness and focus on things like transitions.

Stacy Westfall:
When I think about showing some of the benefits that come to mind include it is a form of goal setting. So if you set a goal to show at a specific show in a specific event, on a specific date, then that is a very clear form of goal setting. Showing offers a clear path of progression. All the disciplines I listed offer entry-level classes and then progress the rider up through increasing levels of difficulty. Showing helps develop the rider's skill. Showing helps develop the horse's skills. Horse shows are a gathering of people with similar goals. And when you gather together a group of people with similar goals, you're also going to gather together a group of people with similar challenges. And as much as we talk about the benefits of showing from a setting a goal and achieving it kind of a standpoint, there is a huge realization that happens when you go to a show and you watch ten other people showing in your class and you realize that everyone's having similar challenges. Showing improves focus. It improves communication. It gives you, if you're traveling to live shows, it gives you the opportunity for both of you to become seasoned travelers. And it develops the rider's eye, which I'll talk about in a little while. When I think about why people struggle with showing, that means they want to show, but they either aren't showing right now or they're showing inconsistently or they're not enjoying showing even though they want to show. When I think about why people struggle with showing, a lot of times it's because they think they're not capable or ready or that the horse isn't capable or ready. Some people struggle if they're not riding with a trainer, and that makes them doubt whether or not they could go do this on their own. If you're just getting started in showing, people will struggle with where to start. And very often people fear making mistakes in public. They fear how they will look and they fear what other people will think. And many times people are unclear about how to improve without sending the horse to the trainer. Now, this is not an exhaustive list of the reasons why people struggle with showing. But what is interesting about this list is when I was riding it, I just wrote the first things that came to my mind that I've seen quite a bit. And when I look back at it, much of it, 90% of this list happens in the rider's mind. If we look at the four square model and we have the rider's mind, the rider's body, the horse's mind, and the horse's body, much of this is fear and fear and lack of clarity and doubt. So it's very interesting that many of the things that people struggle with are actually just the how-to and the thoughts and not necessarily the actual act of showing.

Stacy Westfall:
In this episode, I want to focus mostly on the idea of showing versus training. When I think about showing, showing is the process of refining the skills and taking a test. And that goes for all the disciplines that I listed, reining, ranch riding, western dressage, traditional dressage. And it goes for many others that I didn't list. It's refining the skills and taking a test. Showing is also interesting because it's an external evaluation. That's what the judge is doing. So inside the Resourceful Rider program, I teach people how to self-evaluate and then I offer video reviews, which is a form of external evaluation, and showing is another form of external evaluation. And the skill of learning how to evaluate, and then also signing yourself up to be evaluated by some external person is a huge skill set to develop because it just frees you up when you actually learn how to have your own opinion about what happened because you know your horse, your background and all of that. And then the judge's opinion and the judge in this case is trained to be evaluating you to a standard. The judge is evaluating through the lens of this is the standard we're aiming for and you're evaluating aiming for the standard, but also understanding the process that's currently happening with you and your horse. And to me, when those two skill sets come together and you can begin to see the judge's opinion, which is the judge looking through that lens of the show expectations, the show standards, and then your opinion when you can have both of those at the same time. It is an amazing feeling to understand what the judge is telling you and also understand what your path is. And the reason that I want to explain it in this way, where you can clearly see that you have your own opinion and the judge has their opinion, you have your evaluation and the judge has their evaluation. The reason I want to lay it out like that is that sometimes showing horses gets a bad rap because there is this sense that if you show a horse, you have to do what the judge says. And that's not exactly true. What it does mean is that if you show, the judge will be evaluating you through a specific filter, but you're on your own path with your own horse snd it's just the meeting of those two in the middle. And I think this is where when people go all the way to like, I'll do anything to make the judge happy. That's where people get the impression that showing is bad for the relationship. But I'm just here to say it doesn't have to be. It has been an amazing tool for me to learn more about my horses and myself, and in doing that, it has improved our relationship. And one of the upcoming topics I want to talk about is how much showing can actually help fearful horses, which I find fascinating. But I'll leave that until another episode.

Stacy Westfall:
The purpose of showing is to continually improve and refine and make things smoother. So if you go to four horse shows during a summer your goal would be to refine and make it more smooth and deepen the understanding. So showing is the part where you go and you show what your best-finished product today is. And at the show in May, that best finished product is going to look different hopefully, than at the show in July. Training is different than showing because training is understanding the components, the pieces that create that communication, that create that performance, that create that ability to show that horse in that class. Showing and training are a complementing skill set. To me, training is teaching, conversing, understanding. It's this role of teacher of the horse. Showing is when you go in there with the horse and you both take a test so that you can test what you know and what your horse knows. You can test what you think you taught the horse, you can test what you think you understand about what's expected from the judge. And so the showing to me has a bit more of a polishing or a putting it all together feeling. Which is different than the way that training typically feels. So if I stick with the phrasing, putting it all together. Think about what that means. If I say putting it all together, that indicates that there are parts or pieces. And training is the understanding of the parts. It's knowing what the different parts are and how to improve them so that on a chosen day. Let's say the 4th of July you go to a show and you can put all the parts together, polish them together and show. Now if you look at this as a concept, one challenge that I often see is riders who ride like they're showing all the time. And this includes people trail riding. So what do I mean by that? What this means is that if you don't clearly separate the difference between showing and training, which happens more naturally if you're in a show situation. But if you don't clearly separate that there's a difference between the show version or the polish version and the training or the communicating version. And yes, they get very close to overlapping. But what I want you to see here is that if we look at communicating with the horse in terms of polishing. And that's great if it works. But what if it doesn't?

Stacy Westfall:
So here's an example. Let's say that someone buys a horse and it neck reins. And so that's what they do when they're riding it. And let's just say you're out trail riding. And in this example, the rider doesn't understand how the neck reining was taught. So if that rider is riding in a polishing kind of way, a polishing or a showing or just kind of expecting it to work kind of a way, they will ride more like an operator of a vehicle expecting the cues to work and kind of expecting them to stay the same. A little bit like driving a car. Cars don't get retrained when you're out there operating them. If you are driving a little unsteady, the car just responds. And then when you stop driving unsteady, the car just straightens up. But horses can be retrained. So the neck reining cue, which is a higher level cue than the direct reining, will often deteriorate or at least begin to become modified by the rider who doesn't notice the subtle things that aren't working as well until there's a much bigger symptom like head tossing. So that's a version of somebody riding in a polished way, not at a show. They're just kind of riding and expecting that more polished cue to just kind of work all the time. Now when you're showing there is an element of polishing up what you have. And as I said before, that's going to be different hopefully in May than it is in July. So that's somebody polishing up what they have, showing, coming out and evaluating, looking at the pieces that need clarification, and then teaching or training or communicating that to the horse and to themselves. Because maybe they weren't cueing clearly and maybe the horse needs a little bit more explanation over here. It could be horse or rider, but it is that coming out and evaluating, looking for the pieces that aren't working and need clarification, making those clarifying movements that are often not the same as what you're doing in the show. So, for example, bend and counter bend. You may not be counter bending in the show arena, but that might be a technique that you're using to help the shoulder control, because that's what wasn't working when you were showing. And you go out and you do that and then you might go back and show again the next day. So showing, to go back to the neck reining example, would be like me going out and showing in reining and noticing a subtle change in the circle when I'm running my circles and in the middle, I notice that the horse is a little bit further to the right than where I wanted them. And even though I don't make an adjustment right then because I'm showing not training, I notice that subtle change. And then when I'm done showing, I evaluate to see if I was causing it by my cues or my lack of focus and therefore my lack of cueing. Or maybe I notice that my horse is simply thinking, Hey, one of these times we're going to come around here, do a lead change and go the other way. How about now? Maybe the horse is just simply anticipating a direction change. In this example of showing the very specific goal of running a very round circle has my awareness dialed up so I notice the subtle change in the circle? So the power of showing is that you have a set time, a set place, a set goal, and an external evaluation. And putting all of this in this one small container, these tests reveal much about the rider's mind, the rider's body, the horse's mind, and the horse's body.

Stacy Westfall:
Another thing I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast under Benefits of Showing was that it develops the rider's eye. And what this means is it develops the rider's ability to see and evaluate things. And there is a lot of magic in developing this skill because when you develop the skill of being able to see what's happening, even if you don't know exactly the next steps for changing it or modifying it, if you can simply see it, that is a huge awareness. Let's put this into an example. When people first learn about horses having a lead, when they canter or lope a left lead or a right lead, it's a concept in their head. Somebody says that horse is going on the right lead. Now it's going on the left lead. Then the rider has to develop their eye or their ability to see the lead when they watch a horse cantering. And what I remember about learning to see a horse cantering on a left lead or right lead is that first my eye was developed. To see the lead in the front legs. And then later on I was able to develop my eye even more to where I could see the front lead and the hind lead. And then I was able to develop my eye even more so I could see a horse maybe running through a pasture that was on one lead in the front end and the opposite lead in the hind end. Every one of those stages of developing my eye always came before developing my ability to execute. So my ability to execute having a horse go from a walk to a right lead canter, the eye, my comprehension of the concept and then my eye to see it in other horses and other riders, came before my ability to execute it. And the reason this ties together so well with showing is because when you look at showing, you get rider after rider, horse after horse, that is setting the same goal, riding the same pattern, being judged by the same judge. And this ability develops the rider's eye the fastest. Because when you see people doing the same pattern over and over again and you get to see the pattern stay the same, but the execution by each horse and rider vary a little bit depending on their training level. It helps develop your eye. This is something that we do inside the Resourceful Rider program because people are riding these set patterns that I give them and students are sending in their videos and we're all watching them together. And so what this does is it develops the rider's eye. So before you change how you're able to ride you're developing your skill to see what's happening, and then develop the skill to understand what would need to be modified and then develop the skill to be able to modify it. And this happens much faster when you're in a controlled environment, recreating similar patterns over and over again, because that's when you begin to see the more subtle details. That's what develops the rider's eye.

Stacy Westfall:
When I think back through all the years of owning and showing horses, I have definitely had an up-and-down relationship with showing when I was young. When I was six and I got my first pony my mom made showing into a fun experience where we got together and we got to see all the dressed-up horses. When I first became a trainer I experienced showing as pressure because I thought showing was a ton of pressure when showing horses for the owner. Then later on, I realized that I was creating a lot of that pressure and I actually found the ability to show without that same feeling, even though I was in the same exact situation. Same owners, same horse, different me. And now I enjoy showing my horses in multiple disciplines and exploring the nuances of the conversations as I change tack, as I change equipment, as I change settings, as I change goals. And so no matter where you are in your journey with showing, if you have questions, feel free to email them in or call and leave them on my voicemail hotline. And let's talk about your questions about showing. I have learned so much from it I would not be the person I am now without it. So I'd love to share some of that with you. 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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