Episode 236: One skill that rules them all…first ride to bridleless

Episode 236_ One skill that rules them all…first ride to bridleless.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 236_ One skill that rules them all…first ride to bridleless.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
This is the skill set that takes me beyond basic knowledge and gives me the ability to combine techniques and deal with challenging horses and challenging circumstances.

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. Today I'm discussing a subject that comes up most often while I'm interacting with riders. Sometimes this is in real life and sometimes it's when people send me voicemails, emails, or show up inside of my courses and they're talking to me. So it's often not something riders report, but it's what I see or hear that shows me this is an issue and the issue is self confidence, which is different than confidence. But before I begin, I want to say I am sitting on my front porch recording this. So there's a slight distraction because my mini foal is running around in the pasture out in front of me. But the reason I'm sitting out here is because just like any good lesson you're going to teach, it's always good if you've recently run into a challenge with it. And the difference between self confidence and confidence, for me boils down to how you handle challenging situations. So I had this podcast all planned out and sat down to record it with my podcasting equipment and all of the settings are off. The audio didn't sound at all like it was supposed to, and in that moment I felt a little sinking sensation in my stomach because it was not working. And right after that I thought, I don't want to lose any time. I'm going to pivot.

Speaker1:
I've got this. I'll go do it a different way. And I moved out here onto the front porch. So let me pause here and read just a few of my notes. When I was preparing for this, I wanted to talk about self confidence. So of course the first thing I did was Google the definition of self confidence, which comes up confidence in one's self and one's powers and abilities. I thought that was a little vague, one's powers and abilities, so I kept looking. Confidence comes from a Latin word, which means to trust. Therefore, having self confidence is having trust in one's self. I think that's a little bit better. Self confidence is an emotion you generate without any history to back it up or external evidence. It's based on a belief you have about yourself. That is the definition we're going with for this podcast. Confidence, however. Confidence is supported by experience and external evidence. So let's circle back around to my current podcasting dilemma. If my confidence. Is in my equipment. If it is supported by external evidence and my confidence is shaken because the equipment doesn't work, then I could have a confidence issue. The minute I walk in and turn on the equipment. But if I have self confidence, it is an emotion that you generate without any history to back it up or external evidence. It's based on a belief you have about yourself. If I have the thought, I'll figure this out.

Speaker1:
Then what I do is I pick up my iPhone, I walk outside and I record my podcast. The reason that I think this is a valuable subject to reflect on over and over again as a writer is because if you don't slow down to pull apart the difference between confidence and self confidence, I believe it's possible that you'll begin gathering information in the wrong direction. So let's look at something like Haltering a horse. If we take something like putting a halter on a horse. Putting a halter on a horse is a skill that you can learn to do, and you can have confidence in the skill of putting a halter on a horse. If you've put on a halter 100 times or a thousand times, it would make sense that you would have confidence in your ability to put a halter on a horse. The test of whether you have self confidence, confidence in yourself is going to be revealed to you when you have a challenge. So if you experience a task like putting on a halter and there is very little challenge, you'll probably have a lot of confidence in your ability to do that. But if you now go to Halter, a horse that has maybe never worn a halter before or has presented a challenge to many other people in the barn, when you walk in the system, you've used to successfully halter your horse a hundred times.

Speaker1:
The thing that gave you the confidence in the task of Haltering a horse is slightly different and it overlaps with your self confidence. Your self confidence will be. How confident are you in yourself that you will figure it out? So this is going to come up more often when it's a challenge. When I use the example of the skill of putting a halter on a horse, I think it is a little bit easier to see that you could have the skill of technically putting a halter onto a horse's head and that if you walked in to Halter, a horse that had never worn a halter before, the challenge is in actually putting the halter on the horse's head. It's actually approaching the horse. It's getting the horse to accept your presence. Maybe it's dealing with what the horse may offer you, spinning around, offering its butt to you, reaching out, maybe nipping at you. There are many, many things the horse could do that could make Haltering a challenge. What's interesting is that the challenge isn't putting the halter on the horse's head. The challenge is dealing with all of the other movements the horse is making. So in this more simplified version, I want you to look for how the possibility of thinking you can't halter is on the tip of your tongue. I can't halter this horse when in reality you could halter this horse if it was standing still.

Speaker1:
Your actual challenge is I can't get this horse to stand still in the way that I would need to put the halter on the horse. So when you look at it in a more simplified way, you can begin to see that there is a bit of a difference between why you're having a challenge haltering the horse. Because the skill set you have for technically putting the halter on the head is actually rock solid in both examples. It's just that the horse's head isn't staying still. Most likely in the never worn a Halter example. If it does stand still, you can probably put it on just as easily as any other horse. But where people get confused is that when they have the wobble in the task completion of putting the halter on the horse's head and it's important to separate out, you're actually having a challenge getting the horse to stand still to then be able to put the halter on the horse's head. Let me pivot and approach this from a different angle. Several years ago, I had a string of interviews where a very similar question came up over and over again. And essentially it was something like this. But if you couldn't ride any more, what would you do? And so the interviewer was asking me in these different situations, yes, this is what you've done with horses. This has been amazing.

Speaker1:
What would you do, though, if you couldn't ride any more? What would you do if you no longer could show? What would you do if you could no longer train? What would you do if you could no longer go out and teach and do this? Essentially, it all boiled down to what would you do if you couldn't ride any more or be involved in horses. What's interesting to me is at the root of the question, they were. Basically asking how I would express my desire to work with horses if I was no longer physically able to work with horses. It's a question that's actually rooted in the physical expression of my desire to work with horses. So what they were not assessing in their question was my self confidence, my confidence in myself that I would figure something out. So they kept asking, But what if you couldn't? But what if you couldn't? But what if you couldn't? And finally, I would say, what are exactly my limitations in this make believe world? Because if you tell me those, I'll then share with you how I could still write about horses, speak about horses, teach about horses, even if I had to dictate it because I no longer could use my hands to write. And so this is a different way to approach the answer. I'm no longer being handicapped by every What if you couldn't ride? What if you couldn't own? What if you couldn't travel? Because the root of it is if I have a strong desire to work with horses or be involved with horses in whatever capacity I would be able to, then my self-confidence, my confidence in myself that I would figure it out is actually more important than how I would express it.

Speaker1:
The reason this is so important for you today is because this is a habitual way of thinking. If you practice self confidence, confidence in how you will approach challenges, confidence in how you will treat yourself during those challenges. If you understand this, then you're practicing it every single day and it becomes a new habitual way of thinking. So for me, self confidence most often sounds like I'll figure this out. So when the interviewers are asking, But what if you couldn't do this? But what if you couldn't do that? I can stay stuck in the well. I pivot to this and I would pivot to that. And on the surface, it looks like I'm just changing the actions I'm going to take with horses. Well, in this situation, I'm going to ride them. And in this situation, I'm going to write about them because I am pivoting the actions based on the twists and turns that they throw at me. But it's rooted in my belief that I will figure this out. This ability to have an underlying belief in myself that I will figure it out is at the root of what has made me successful with horses.

Speaker1:
It's also made it possible for me to continue podcasting despite whatever editing issues I have, no matter what challenges I run into when I'm looking at creating a video or posting something online, if I run into a challenge, then I'm going to figure it out. I have been in situations where I've really wanted a Starbucks coffee while pulling a horse trailer and I have pulled into parking lots that I probably shouldn't have pulled into with a horse trailer. And then I had to figure out how to back the horse trailer out of the Starbucks parking lot where I wouldn't fit. It's my habitual way of thinking that I will figure it out. I want you to contrast that with some of these thoughts that I pulled out of emails that I've received. These are some thoughts that riders have reported having. I just pulled just the thought. So here's one We're probably going to have the problems we had yesterday. Here's another. If I was just a better horseman, I would be able to figure this out. I've been doing this for 20 years. I should be calm and confident when I read these thoughts. I want to say in the moment they may seem very real. And if you experience a thought like this or something similar, what I would love to point you back to is a podcast I recorded back in episode 187, The backwards cycle of Learning after, during, before.

Speaker1:
Because your default thinking is going to seem very normal and real. But what I want you to think is, is. It very useful. So just like in my haltering example, what you're experiencing may be more complex. It might not be that you can no longer halt or horses. It might be that the horse you're choosing to halter doesn't stand still and present its head in the same way that yours normally does. So now it looks like you have a haltering challenge, but your brain might prefer to simplify it to I can't do this. I'm probably going to have the same problems we had yesterday again. So if we look at just that one thought, we're probably going to have the same problems we had yesterday. On one hand, if you follow that with so why bother, it's going to leave you with something like feeling defeated or if the thought were probably going to have the same problems we had yesterday is then followed with I'm figuring this out. So today because I know what's going to happen. I'm going to approach with this different plan. Then for me, that leaves me open to learning more. I can go out day after day and feel like I'm truly gathering more and more information about the situation. Let's go back to the Haltering. I wasn't able to halter the horse yesterday.

Speaker1:
This is what I tried. I might have the same problems I had yesterday, and because I know what I had for problems yesterday, I'm going to approach it differently today. And if I do that ten days in a row, if I stay open to the experience, instead of condemning myself and saying I should have figured it out already, then what's going to happen is I'm actually going to collect more and more evidence that I am figuring it out. This is the difference between self confidence, my confidence in my determination to figure it out versus getting confidence from the situation. I didn't get the halter on yesterday and I didn't get the halter on the day before. Therefore I won't get the halter on tomorrow. Can you hear the difference? I speak very frequently inside my courses and quite frequently on this podcast about how when you are riding your horse you are creating habit patterns for your horse. These habit patterns are physical habit patterns that then influence the way your horse thinks. Did you follow that? You create a physical habit pattern that influences your horse's thinking. You are doing the same thing to yourself. Also, you are creating for yourself physical habit patterns that feel normal, feel and give you a certain result, and you are creating mental habit patterns that are creating certain results. It is very important that you begin to gain awareness over especially your thought patterns.

Speaker1:
You can gain them over your physical habit patterns. You can set up a video camera and you can watch for that, but also be aware of your thought patterns. Even if you just take 15 minutes each ride to slow down and capture one physical habit that you're creating, something you're doing over and over again. And notice at least one pattern of thinking it will change you. When I watch riders who commit to figuring it out, they are much more open to observing their physical habit patterns, understanding when they have an urge to leave what they're doing, understanding when they have an urge to change their plans, understanding when they have resistance to riding a pattern, understanding when they're riding a pattern just to get it done versus discovering something while they're riding that the rider that commits to understanding all of that will begin to see how they are creating certain habit patterns in their horse and how they could improve those. As the riders figure this out, the riders are rewarded with their own steadier thinking habits and more consistent physical habits. And then that. Is reflected in the horse, and when it reflects back into the horse, you begin to see a horse that's more relaxed and you get a horse that has better rhythm when you're riding it. Where riders often get it backwards is that they wish they had no challenges because if they had no challenges, they could then believe that they had the ability.

Speaker1:
That's a sign that you're looking for confidence from the external situation, and that will come as you understand more deeply your desire to figure it out. Your commitment to figure it out and how you treat yourself in the process. If this is seeming a little vague and hard to put into practice, here is an actual thought experiment you can do today with physical items. Gather together ten small items that you can carry in your pockets. Ten pennies, ten pebbles. Doesn't matter. Something small that you can put in your pocket. Start with all ten pennies in your back pocket. When you have a challenge, doesn't matter if it's with your horse or if it's around the house or at work. When you have a challenge, notice your immediate response. If it leaned towards, I'll figure it out or some version of that. Then move a pebble from your back pocket to your right front pocket. But if the thought was something like, I'll never figure this out, here it goes again, or some other version. Take one of those pennies and put it in your left front pocket. Listen closely to yourself all day and you will move all ten pebbles or pennies before lunch. After lunch. Keep going. As you notice, thoughts take from the opposite pocket. So if you have the thought, we're probably going to have the same problems we had yesterday.

Speaker1:
I'm not figuring it out. Make a withdrawal from your right front pocket. Take something away from your all figured out pocket and put it in your. I can't figure it out pocket. At the end of the day, see which pocket has more. I have gathered many skills with horses. I have lots of tools, lots of techniques, lots of patterns. They are very useful. I have confidence in them. And if you took it all away tomorrow and you put me in a completely different situation, boom, you're locked in a room and now you have to make all of your living with just a computer and you don't get to go outside and touch a horse again. I would have to self confidence that I would figure it out. This is the skill set that takes me beyond basic knowledge and gives me the ability to combine techniques and deal with challenging horses and challenging circumstances. The basics stay the same. My bridleless work like I talked about in the last podcast, my bridleless work is rooted in the same fundamentals that I use when starting a cult or teaching students how to improve their steering or stopping my ability to combine the basics into master skills is a combination of confidence in the skills. It's mastery of the basics and then my self confidence. And this is possible for you, all of it. 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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