Episode 226: The trainer, the showman, the judge: ways of thinking that impact your riding.

Episode 226_ The trainer, the showman, the judge_ ways of thinking that impact your riding..mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 226_ The trainer, the showman, the judge_ ways of thinking that impact your riding..mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Stacy Westfall:
And one of the most interesting side effects of training your brain to think like this is you will become less and less likely to have thoughts like, Ooh, I messed that up, or, that was terrible, and more and more likely to think, right there, I see how I could prepare for that better.

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 in this season of the podcast I've been discussing lessons I've learned through showing horses. Today I want to talk about a mental aspect of showing that is happening in other places when you're riding, trail riding, riding at the barn. But it is the most clear if we look at it in showing. Here we go. When you attend a horse show and you ride into a class, there are three primary ways that you can show up thinking. You can show up thinking as the showman, as the trainer, or as the judge. Most people are doing a mix of all three. Before I dive in, I want you to listen to these three statements that a rider could have flashed through their mind while showing or riding, and I want you to line it up with one of those roles: trainer, judge, or showman. So phrase number one: I hope they didn't notice that. Phrase number two: That was terrible. Phrase number three: Let's try that again. Showing contains all three of these areas because they are simply different ways of looking at the same thing. So let's look at each of these roles individually and then how they show up when you're showing. So the trainer is often thinking about, how can I prepare the horse. How can I help the horse? How can I support the horse? How can I make this more clear for the horse? The showman is thinking, how do I make this look the best? Where is the edge of my best right now? How can I get close to that edge without crossing it? And the judge is thinking, how did that look? What was the level of difficulty? How does this line up with the standard? Let's look at this even closer.

Stacy Westfall:
When you show and when you ride even out on a trail ride every movement has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So if you are showing and you are trotting and doing a transition from a trot to a walk, there is a beginning of that transition, there is a middle to that transition and there is an end to that transition. If you're trotting, the beginning would be however you begin to cue for that transition to the walk. The actual transition would be the middle. It would be the happening of that moment, the transition, the step where the horse moves from the trot to the walk, and the end would be how the horse begins that next movement in this case, which would be stepping off into the walk. And that transition that has a beginning, a middle, and an end is actually looked at differently by each one of these people in these roles. So the trainer is thinking, how can I prepare for this trot to walk transition? How can I help? How can I support? The showman is thinking, how do I make this transition look the best? So that means that although they are also preparing the horse for the transition, they are going to do it at the edge of what their best is right now because they're trying to make it look very good. So the trainer may support the horse a little bit more during that transition because they're not worried about being judged. They're not showing. Where the showman may support the horse just a little bit less because the point of showing is to show the clear, the smooth, the seamless communication with the horse. And one representation of that is that the horse is carrying a slightly higher level of responsibility than the less trained horse. So the more responsibility the horse takes during that transition, the higher the degree of difficulty will be. So the showman is not trying to overhelp because they're trying to show that the horse is also understanding and taking responsibility. The judge is looking at, how did that look? How was the transition itself from the trot to the walk? What was the level of difficulty? Did they prepare for ten steps before they asked for the transition? Because if they prepared for ten steps, that's a lower level of difficulty than if I couldn't even see the transition preparation happen if I barely saw anything happen. And that was a very smooth transition. That's a much higher degree of difficulty than if I visually see somebody preparing, preparing, preparing, preparing, preparing, preparing, preparing, executing at whatever level, and then finishing. So you start to see how the dance of the beginning, the middle, and the end is playing out for each of these different viewpoints.

Stacy Westfall:
Now, in last week's example, I talked about how I love trail riding and how all of these truths still exist out there. Let me tie this together for trail riding. The same thing happens when you're out trail riding. It happens when you're trotting or jogging down the trail and you want to do a transition to the walk. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even if you're not thinking of it like this, there is the moment you make the decision, there is the way that you prepare the horse, whether that's ten steps or whether that's no steps. There is the actual transition from the trot to the walk. And then there is whatever happens after that transition, how well the horse steps off into those next 1 or 2 or 3 walk steps. So that beginning, middle, and end exists everywhere. So it's happening when you trail ride, you just may not be nearly as conscious of it. So the question is, if you're not paying attention to it, how well are you riding it? So one thing that I really encourage people who show to do is to understand the three different roles so that they can actively choose how they want to show up. And the first one of these roles that I encourage people to do is to drop the judge. I've had people tell me that that's not a problem because they're not judging themselves while they ride. But I bet they still do. When I say drop the judging of yourself while you ride I think their first thought is well, I'm showing in reining and I'm not thinking plus half on that, minus half on this. Or if they're showing in dressage I think their interpretation of what I'm saying is I'm not thinking, oh, that was a 6.5. That is one version of judging. That is the educated way of judging. I'm asking, are you judging your ride? If you have thoughts like, oops, just messed that up. Ugh, that was terrible. Or ah, that was really bad, while you're showing, you are judging, but you are judging from an untrained perspective. Judging from the trained perspective will sound more like the judging system that's used in whatever event you're showing. In reining that would be plus half. In dressage that would be 6.5, 7, whatever the number is. But if you have time to complain or admire while you are showing, you are in judging mode.

Stacy Westfall:
So the first thing I want you to practice dropping is the judging. The way that I do this is I have someone record my ride or I set my own tripod up. Yes, at a show by myself I will run over, set a tripod up, put my camera on it, hit record. And even if it has to record two people before I show, I will get a recording of it. Because in watching the recording, I can put on my judge's hat and I can judge it from the judging perspective. And one of the most interesting side effects of training your brain to think like this is you will become less and less likely to have thoughts like, Oh, I messed that up, or that was terrible and more and more likely to think, right there, I see how I could prepare for that better. Right there, this is what actually happened. I thought I was doing this, turns out I actually didn't move my hand the way I thought I was doing it. Now I see on video I was confusing myself. Okay, I know what to do differently. So dropping the judgment is actually a huge part of learning to show because judging–what the judge does to you–is much more factual than judgment.

Stacy Westfall:
Now let's talk about the challenge of choosing between the showman and the trainer. The good news is that you can actually decide a lot of this ahead of time by visualizing your ride and the possible outcomes. So if I am preparing to show my horse in a reining class, that means I have some information. Either the information comes from how the horse has been during training, or it might also include previous times the horse has been shown. So it could be one or the other, or it could be both. If I am about to show a horse for the first time, then I'm going to use an educated guess based on the training. I'm going to know the horse's strengths and I'm going to know the horse's weaknesses. This is my own personal opinion before any judge has given me their opinion. When I know this, I can choose to show, in air quotes, show more in the areas that the horse is strong, and then I can support or lightly train in the areas where the horse might be weaker. So maybe my horse is pretty good at running circles. And just to visualize this, maybe this is a reining pattern where I do a lead departure, which would be the beginning. And then I run two large fast circles and transition to a slow circle. And when that slow circle is complete and I do my lead change, that would be the end. So that entire maneuver that would get a score would start at the lead departure. It would include the two big fast circles, the one small slow circle, and the lead change and that would be my score. If I know this is an area of strength for my horse, I might show a little bit more like the showman. However, in that same exact scenario, if I know that the lead change isn't very strong, then I may transition from showing, look how good my horse is, look what we can do. I may transition out of that mindset and way of riding halfway around my small slow circle, and I may smoothly transition into a little bit more of trainer mode and support the horse for the lead change, if I know that the horse is a little weaker in the lead change, if they need a little help. So the trainer will step in and help where the showman is trying to show any of the strengths and disguise any of the weaknesses.

Stacy Westfall:
So you can see where this dance between the showman and the trainer is a lot more intricate. And what I have experienced for sure over the years is that the greener the horse is, then the more appropriate is for the trainer to be showing up. And there are times when I go in to show where I feel like I'm lightly training across the board. I also know that as I'm doing that, I'm probably lightly negatively impacting the judge's view on the degree of difficulty, because if the trainer tends to support more, then obviously that would reduce the degree of difficulty. If there's more prep needed, more support needed, at some point the more becomes less degree of difficulty, which is one of the ways the judge is making these decisions. Having said that it still can be a very good idea to do that in the show arena situation because so many things have changed for the horse if that horse is new to that experience. Sometimes I think the showman gets a bad rap as I am discussing this. But what's interesting is that the showman is actually trying to make it look good all the time. So the showman is actually the one with a very optimistic look of like, Look how great my horse is doing. Look at how well this is going. Okay, I'm going to back off just a tiny bit here because I actually don't think it's going to go great. So the showman has a place because when I have talked in previous podcasts about responsibility and the shifting roles of responsibility between the horse and rider, that change from elementary school where it would be natural for the rider to have a lot of responsibility and the horse to have some. But if the horse is in elementary school, I don't want to give it the keys to the car and let it go to town on its own. So as they move into high school, then we have a responsibility shift where if the rider is responsible but the horse is now carrying more responsibility, you do give them the keys to the car, you do let them do some things alone. And then when we get to the college level horse, where the college level horse really understands, those are the horses that while you're showing you as the rider, can afford to make a little mistake and the horse has your back because the horse is now able to more than enough show up to actually help you. So we actually have to layer the horse's training level and understanding level, elementary, high school, college against this showing level. And that's what makes some of these higher-level show horses. Sometimes they call them schoolmasters. That's what makes them so fun.

Stacy Westfall:
One of the ways I would describe this is when you have the experience of riding a horse that is trained up to like a college level and you show up and you're showing that horse, that's where I very strongly have that feeling of having a very seamless communication like I would with a friend. It's like when you know your friend so well that you know what makes them laugh and you know their sentence endings before they even say them. It's got a very seamless feeling to that conversation. And that's how it can get when you really know your horse well. And that is possible showing or not showing. But it does involve a high level of understanding when the horse needs support, understanding the horse's training levels, what they're capable of, and knowing the horse themselves. At the beginning of the podcast, I gave you three phrases and asked you to decide who was saying them, the judge, the trainer, or the showman. Here are my answers. For the phrase, that was terrible, I would say that's the judge showing up, but it's not a well-trained judge. It's not a judge telling you that was a 5.5. It's self-judgment. It's judgment of what's happening. Phrase number two, I hope they didn't notice that. To me, that sounds like the showman. But can you also hear how you could have that thought when you're out riding with other people and you think, I hope they didn't notice that. You'd be in the showman mode. And the final phrase, Let's try that again. That sounds like the trainer. And there are times when you'll be watching a show and you will see the trainer actually stop in the middle of showing because of something that happened. I just had a video sent to me of a dressage horse, a very, very famous dressage rider showing a new horse. And in the middle of the test, the horse became spooked at something. She circled around and the horse, you could see, was still visibly disturbed. And she chose to come to a stop and she stood quietly. And that is a version of the trainer showing up. That woman switched out of show mode and fully into trainer mode to the point where even showing in the class was now off the table. She removed herself from the show situation by simply stopping in the middle of the ride. And although, let's try that again, might sound like repeating something over and over again. Let's try that again could be we're done with this for right now. Let me come back to a level where you are comfortable and then we will try this again at a future date.

Stacy Westfall:
So as I wrap up, here are some of the layers that I see when showing. Showing is like taking a test. It tests the rider's ability to see what's coming and to prepare for that mentally and physically. Showing is an opportunity, an opportunity to accept where we are that day, an opportunity to see where we can make adjustments for next time. Showing involves training, the training before the show, each decision, moment to moment while we're at the show, nd it's the learning that comes from reflecting back and thinking about the show experience for our horse. Showing is an opportunity to get to know us better. Our horses sense our changing focus. Our horses feel the energy of the other horses and riders. Our horses ask us questions about what is allowed and they gather information as to how you respond, the same or different at the show versus at home. The horses draw conclusions based on the evidence that they collect being at the show with you. And you thought you were the only one gathering information here. Showing is automatically different than riding at home. It's a different location. It's a different arena. It's different, different, different. And the key to developing your relationship with your horse in this situation is for you to stay the same. Can you be the same you that's been training when everything else is changing? Are you practicing being the showman when you're at home? Are you understanding the difference between judgments and judging? The deeper you understand that these three roles are impacting you, whether you show or not, the better it will make you as an overall horseman. 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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