Episode 233- Are you riding reactively or proactively?
I asked riders this question, “”Is there a feeling you really struggle with that seems to be affecting your riding?”
These are a few of the answers: self doubt, battling negative thoughts, imposter syndrome, inadequate, anxious, nervous, anticipating problems, judging myself, sad, frustration (time frame…taking longer than expected), lack of confidence, anxiety, fear, fear, annoyed, ashamed, mental exhaustion, short tempered, unsure, lack trust, annoyed, disappointment, frustration, uncertainty, worry, low self esteem, depression, frustration, anger, grief, alone, tense, overwhelmed, doubt, (time frame), lack of confidence, defeat, self-pity, dependence, guilt, frustration
In this podcast, I share:
- the problem with denying negative emotions
- five signs you may be a reactive rider
- what reactive riders create
- traits of a proactive rider
- the skills you need to become a proactive rider
If you would like to be notified when I offer another free training session (as mentioned in the podcast) go to my website and join my email list.
Episode 233- Are you riding reactively or proactively_.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
Episode 233- Are you riding reactively or proactively_.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
So we're looking for the root cause or a way in to breaking this habit of essentially having a busy mind and some kind of a something going on in your body. That's not calm because those emotions and that busyness in your brain is getting in the way of training your horse.
Speaker2:
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.
Speaker1:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall and I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy, and successfully train your own horses. On today's podcast, I'm sharing a segment of a webinar that I taught on Saturday. The webinar was titled Quiet Your Mind, Calm Your Body, Train Your Horse. And I've received hundreds of responses in just the last three days. So I decided to share one part of the webinar teaching here on the podcast. If you want to be sure to get notified about upcoming free webinars like this one, go to Stacy westfall.com and join my email list. In this section of the teaching, I'm discussing the difference between riding reactively or proactively. I began examining this cycle last year after I wrote an email where I asked this question Is there a feeling you really struggle with? That seems to be affecting your writing? I received a flood of answers to that question, and I'm going to read some of those to you right now. Remember, this is just a small sampling and any that I repeat, I left in because they showed up more frequently. So here were some of the responses to is there a feeling you really struggle with? This seems to be affecting your writing. Self doubt. Battling negative thoughts. Imposter Syndrome. Inadequate. Anxious. Nervous. Anticipating problems. Judging myself. Sad. Frustration. Lack of confidence. Anxiety. Fear. Fear. Annoyed. Ashamed. Mental exhaustion. Short tempered. Unsure. Lack Trust. Annoyed. Disappointment. Frustration. Uncertainty. Worry. Low self esteem. Depression. Frustration. Anger.
Speaker1:
Grief. Alone. Tense. Overwhelmed. Doubt. Lack of confidence. Defeat. Self-pity. Dependance. Guilt. Frustration. Not good enough. Failure. Tension Trying too hard. Frustration. Worry. Impatience. Lack of connection with horse, lack of confidence. Frustrated. Lack of time. Anxious. Frustrated. Should fear force annoyed. Guilt incompetent. Discouraged. Failure. Guilty should be grateful. Trapped. Rushed. Fear. Annoyed. Frustrated. Frustrated. Insecure. Due to the overwhelming response that I got. I took a lot of time and really thought about both why this is happening and how it's impacting riders. And this audio clip from Saturday's webinar picks up where I am discussing how I see it impacting riders. Let's listen to the audio. And what's interesting is that when I ask the question, I got the response. I just want to make sure that even now, as I'm presenting it, the reality is that the feelings that were on that list are not the problem. Even the really yucky ones. Feelings and emotions are part of the human experience. And I actually love the photo that I put with this too, because they're also part of the horse's experience. So the feelings are not the problem. The feelings are signals from our brain and our body that are just offering us information. The actual problem is a lack of awareness of the emotional state of the rider. We're going to talk a lot more about that in a minute. Riding reactively instead of proactively. We're going to do a deep dive into that. And I want you to keep in mind how riding reactively is going to create broken habit patterns.
Speaker1:
And a broken habit pattern is going to be hard for your horse to follow because literally it's not a foreseeable pattern. So when I thought about what all of those emotions that were listed, because again, we're here to talk about quieting your mind and calming your body. So we're looking for the root cause or a way in to breaking this habit of essentially having a busy mind and some kind of a something going on in your body that's not calm because those emotions and that busyness in your brain is getting in the way of training your horse. So when I looked for a word that would encompass all of it and what I see reflected in riders that are in this state is that I see riders that are riding reactively. So when we look up the definition of reactive, it is acting in response to a situation rather than creating or controlling it. Which fits exactly what I see because a reactive rider waits to see what will happen and then takes action. So if you go out and you go around, you go, I wonder what I wonder what I'm going to wait. And then when it happens, then you do something. You've got to be careful. That's a red flag that you might be in a reactive cycle. A reactive rider tends to be quick with their cues. How many times have you heard somebody say, Slow your hands down? I want to say slow your brain down because your hands are moving fast, because your brain is in a reactive state.
Speaker1:
A reactive rider tends to move quick with their cues due to a lack of planning ahead. A reactive rider often feels frustrated instead of curious. They often feel inadequate instead of equipped. And I think this one might be the most fascinating one. If you really want to like take it and think about it. A reactive rider is often afraid of harming their horse in some way. And I often meet riders who know they're not actually harming, but they have that feeling like they could be harming. They're like afraid of it, even though they have no evidence for it. And I believe the root cause of this is that intuitively, you know, that if you're taking action from a negative emotion, then you're not really making a choice. You're often reacting to it. So take it out of the horse world into the human world. You know that if you've ever snapped at someone when you felt angry, which is a reaction to a negative emotion, you've probably done that cycle in your life and realized that you often don't actually behave the way you want to when you're acting from a negative emotion. And so I think intuitively, a lot of riders are afraid of harming their horse because they actually can feel this negative emotion that they're trying to pretend isn't there or they're trying to push away.
Speaker1:
They're trying to cover it up with a prettier thought or prettier feeling. And I think intuitively, you know, that it's under there and it gives that vibe like, oh, I should be a little bit worried. And unfortunately, the truth is that if you spend time as a reactive rider, you'll tend to feel more of these feelings because a reactive rider creates a reactive horse. What I want to tell you is that this cycle of running into emotions or denying emotions, that you don't want to deal with frustration, pressure, anxiety, all these different things, this emotional thing, this emotional type problem, It can happen at every level of writing. And for me, the most dramatic illustration I ever had of it, and I have had it a lot of different times and I know how to handle it now. But the moment frozen on your screen right now is an is a grainy image from a ride I did in 2003. And for just a moment, I want you to imagine that the ride I did in 2003, in October, had a completely different result than that exact same horse, exact same rider, exact same knowledge level, exact same everything. I completely bombed and failed because literally just of what I'm about to teach you today about emotions, about me being reactive to my emotions, caused me to have a massive failure in October. But listen to this.
Speaker1:
The best part is that all I had to switch between October to December and the beginning of December. So it was just a little over a month. Like just in a few weeks I was able to switch from a reactive mindset. I changed nothing else about my body, my knowledge, my horse's knowledge, my training. Nothing else was added. And I went to my first major success in a much higher pressure situation, and the only thing I switched was what I'm about to teach you today about understanding emotions and not reacting to them. So same cue, different emotion, different result. It is possible. So let's talk about breaking the cycle. Let's talk about why setting your mind. And it's no accident that I put it in this order. Quieting your mind to calm your body, to train your horse. So the first thing you need to remember is that your horse experiences your body. So not just your physical body. Everybody thinks about the rider's seat, the rider's legs, the amount of contact on the reins. But I want you to really internalize that your horse experiences your emotional state. That ride I just pointed to that had such a dramatic change. What I wasn't in control of in October was my emotional state. I had control over my physical body, my seat, my legs, everything. But my emotional state was out of control. My mind was not quiet. My body was not calm. And without my body being calm, my horse could not clearly read my aids.
Speaker1:
So your horse experiences your body, but your body reflects what's going on in your mind. So for me, I was putting all this pressure on myself about performing in front of a huge crowd, and I was riding bridleless in front of a huge crowd for the first time and people were saying, Oh my gosh, she's crazy. I can't believe she's going to do this. And I let it in. I believed it. It's not a problem that they're saying it. They might still say it now, but it was a problem that I let it in because when I let it in and I believed a little bit that I might be crazy, it was in my mind and it showed up in my body and it showed up with so much tension in my body that my horse couldn't read my body accurately. And that's what caused the miscues that caused me to receive a zero for that performance. So the interesting thing here is that I do want to also be very clear. You're going to run into challenging moments. That's not off the table. You're not going to find a program or a training plan or something to follow or you won't have challenging moments. Challenging moments are not the problem. The problem is what you choose to do after they happen. So I want you to think about what would be different if, instead of riding reactively, as I described, you instead began riding proactively.
Speaker1:
So when we look up proactive, don't worry, I'm going to talk about the skill set in a minute. When we talk about riding proactively, what that means is creating or controlling the situation by causing something to happen rather than reacting to it after it happened. So here's what I see in Proactive Riders. A proactive rider makes a plan based on the information that they have. So that means that maybe the very first ride on a horse, you don't have a huge plan, although if you just bought the horse and you watched it ridden, you might actually have a plan. But let's just pretend you've owned this horse for a little bit of time. Let's just say a year, the last few rides, the last few weeks, the last few months, the last few years, depending on how long you've owned the horse. That's where you're getting your information, combined with your knowledge that you're learning somewhere to make a plan because a proactive writer is integrating those. A proactive writer. This is big, knows how to identify what they're feeling without reacting to it. So I'm going to share a list with you in a minute, but I'm going to give you a little preview right now. There are still times that when I'm doing things with my horses, I have a moment where I feel incompetent. Incompetent just means I have this moment where I'm trying to figure out how to communicate something with a horse, and it's not going the way that it has with a lot of other horses.
Speaker1:
And I have a lot of tools in my tool belt, but I have to figure out how to get this communicated. And maybe this horse needs a little bit of a different combination than what I normally do. Those outlier horses don't think quite the same as some of the ones that think straight down the middle. And so because of that, I have to play around and find that. But that also means that when I execute the way that works with 80% of horses and it doesn't work, I might feel like I'm doing something inadequate, like I'm not enough in that moment and I have to feel that and I have to not react to it and then make my plan. My favorite, favorite, favorite way to stick this in your mind is think of an emotion, one that you don't want to react to anymore. I'm going to grab frustration. So if you feel frustration and you know, that's a thing that you've done in the last week or two with your horse and you felt it and you want to make sure you don't react to it. I want you to think of frustration popping up like a plastic bag. So how many have you ever trained a horse to not react to a plastic bag? You take the bag and at first they react to it.
Speaker1:
But eventually you desensitize them to the plastic bag to where when you pull it out, they go, Yep, it's a plastic bag. A proactive rider has become aware enough that it's not that the plastic bag doesn't exist. It's not that the bag or your emotion in this case doesn't blow across the arena. It's that you have done enough work that you know how to identify it without reacting to it. So the next time you have an emotion come up, I want you to think of it like the plastic bag. A proactive rider evaluates what happened. So you look at what happened on your last ride. That includes your emotional experience. It includes the plan that you had going in. It includes what happened during the ride and it includes. Making a plan that will prevent that in the future. Something might pop up that you don't know how to handle in that moment. As long as you don't react to the emotion you feel and you keep yourself safe, you can actually still be on track. A proactive rider creates a responsive horse. Responsive means saying something in reply. So we actually want that scenario with our horses. We want the feeling that we offer something and the horse responds. We offer something else. The horse responds. Now notice the horse may offer you something that is not what you want, but the horse is following your lead, not doing something that you're then reacting to.
Speaker1:
This is how you develop a conversation with a horse. This is how you become the leader that your horse wants you to be. Quick success story. I love this from Nadia. I feel amazed about how our written conversations are developing. Thank you for your guidance. I wouldn't have been able to get here without this program. What I want you to see is that it really does resonate with writers as being a conversation. If you want to be able to develop that conversation feeling with your horse, if you want to quiet your mind and calm your body, these are some of the skills you're going to need to develop. You're going to need to identify feelings in your body. I'm going to talk about that a little bit deeper in just a minute. But you're going to need to be able to identify that feeling in your body. So to go on with that one of frustration. You literally need to start noticing. When you feel frustrated. And for me, the way that that happens for the negative emotions is almost always I'm going to catch him in my body before I catch him in my mind. So if you notice that when you go out and ride, you're not feeling like the emotions. Like you go out after this webinar and you're like, I'm not feeling anything. I don't know what's happening. Notice how much you're in your head instead of in your body, because you're going to need to identify the feeling in your body because there's going to be many times that you're going to be so focused on what you're trying to execute with your horse that your mind is going to busy be busy with execution.
Speaker1:
But your body needs to be able to interrupt you with a certain feeling and then you need to be able to assess it. So a super common one for people is fear and they'll actually feel fear, but instead of checking into it, they'll like stuff it over in their corner and be like, No, I don't want to hear from you right now. What I'm saying is you need to be able to you need to be able to feel like that feeling of fear. Like what does that even feel like to you? Does it feel like for me, like if I feel it, it feels like I start crumbling forward and shrinking? It's a little bit of like moving into that fetal position. So if I ride a cult, I know that when I get on on that first ride, I'm going to feel that temptation to go into like a more defensive posture because I know that however much preparation I've done, that first ride is still the first ride with some unknowns. So I know what it feels like to have my body offer me that, and then I can logically decide whether or not my body is accurately reporting, Hey, there's some signs coming from this horse that maybe you need to put some more steps in or I can accurately piece apart because I've practiced it.
Speaker1:
Whether or not that little bit of a feeling is just the natural level that's going to be there on every colt's first ride, and that comes from practicing it. What is not helpful is to stuff the feeling down, especially the ones like fear that you want to deny exist. If you stuff those down and don't address them, you will begin to shut off your body's communication with you because you'll assume everything is, you know, probably not accurate because you know, you really weren't in a fearful situation. That's what we want to avoid doing. You want to feel without reacting to it because then you want to be able to choose your response. You're going to need to develop the skill to see your habits. These are emotional habits and these are physical habits. So emotional habits are what we've been talking about. A physical habit could be you feel frustration. You notice that it's coming from your thought about how the horse is behaving because of what it's doing. And then you start to be like, Oh, you know what? Yesterday I did stop in that spot a lot of different times because I was doing blank, blank, blank. Maybe that's why the horse is offering that here or the opposite. The horse is offering to go or the horse is offering. To do this, you need to develop the skill to begin to see your habits because that's going to help you understand what your horse is doing and that's going to help you start to see the two of you as separate.
Speaker1:
Which I think you need to remember that even though you're building a relationship. You benefit from seeing each of you as an individual in this process? I hope as you were listening to that audio clip, you were thinking about how your relationship with your horse feels and what emotions frequently show up because you have listened to this far and invested your time today. Let's go a little further. Here are a few questions for you to answer. I'm going to read the question and then I will pause briefly. Answer my question immediately in your head. Or maybe if you're alone out loud. If it helps. Guess you can say it out loud if you're not alone. But anyway, answer immediately. You can always go back and even question why you came up with that answer. Or you can even change your mind. But when I ask it, go ahead and answer it in the time frame before I begin speaking again. Here we go. When I say your horse experiences your body. Does that seem like it's more your physical body, like your seat legs, etcetera, or do you believe that your emotions or feelings are impacting your horse's experience? Your horse experiences your body. Okay, next question. Did you identify more with the reactive rider description or the proactive description? Final question.
Speaker1:
Do you believe you have to deny your negative emotions exist when you are with your horse? Now, one final thing for you to listen to, and I want you to listen for the transformation from a reactive rider into a proactive rider and how that shows up in a success story. Transformation. This is a success story shared by one of my students from the Resourceful Rider program. It begins. I always thought that if writing didn't feel good, as in I felt more resistance on the reins than I expected, or the horse had a loss of balance or braced, then I believed I was doing something wrong. So I quit because I was afraid of harming my horse in some way. Riding like that. Our progress was pretty slow and the reality didn't match my admittedly high expectations. I was often frustrated and disappointed. In your program, I've learned that the process doesn't always look like the product. It's okay to wade through the messy middle. Things don't always have to look perfect. And most importantly. Just because I know what I have to do doesn't mean my horse knows. He also learns and needs to adapt to the patterns and use his body differently. You basically allowed me to dare to do things that might look a little off to experiment and stick with it. The result is a more balanced, broke horse, a nice trot.
Speaker1:
I never even dreamed of being able to improve my horse's gaits through riding better transitions and the beginning of collection in the Canter. The list goes on and on. But what I actually wanted to point out is the change in my emotions. Riding has become fun. I know that sounds crazy because why would you have a horse if not for fun? I feel amazed at how our ridden conversations are developing. I laugh about my horses, ideas and suggestions. I am joyful, happy and I feel pride because we have come so far. I've always dreamed of riding some sort of dressage, but with softness and lightness, I feel we're pretty much living that dream right now and it just keeps getting better. Thank you for your guidance. I wouldn't have been able to get here without you. When I read that success story, I know it's possible to look at the transformation in the physical writing, the way the horse may have had a loss of balance or resistance, and that transformation physically has now become a more balanced ride with more clear communication. But what really hits home for me is the transformation in the rider in the way that the rider was viewing the training process. Because the transformation of the physical riding will follow the transformation of your understanding. Which is why I open so many of the podcasts saying, I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy, and successfully train your own horses. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.
Speaker2:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit Stacy westfall.com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.
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