Episode 270: The Art of Being: Embracing a Way of Being Approach

Episode 270_ The Art of Being_ Embracing a Way of Being Approach.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 270_ The Art of Being_ Embracing a Way of Being Approach.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
So notice that all of these assignments can be done at home. They can all be done on non-riding days. They can also be practiced in horse life and in the rest of life. I think that's really key because way of being goals typically need to span across your life because you're addressing an overall view or an overall habit.

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 help you understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. And like I said last week, a big part of you understanding your horse is understanding yourself. Remember the rider's mind. Your mind is interpreting everything. It's interpreting your horse's behavior. Your mind is deciding on the next course of action. It is communicating what to do with your body. It is receiving signals from your body. And many of those signals are feelings or emotions that you're experiencing in your body. In last week's podcast, I planted a seed and gave you a three step process for turning a way of being a goal into something more tangible. In this week's podcast, I'm going to take that concept deeper. If you haven't listened to last week's podcast, you might want to hit pause and do that. If you don't, this one's still going to make sense, but your brain won't be making the same connections that it would if you listened to last week's podcast. Because by simply listening to that podcast, you'll already be moving down that path that I'm about to explain in more detail. A very short summary of the podcast from last week would be that a way of being goal is an exploration of your experience of something. So if you were going to show your horse instead of winning the show being the end goal, the show would become the situation where you get to study your way of being in that situation.

Speaker1:
So a way of being goal is basically an exploration of your experience. A direct goal becomes exploring your experience. The indirect goal becomes whatever you choose to do, like showing your horse. So for some of you, the way that you're going to express the opportunity for learning more will be something like showing or trail riding or teaching your horse a skill. But what you might actually be after is the way of being a certain feeling. For example, don't worry, this is going to get a lot more clear when we jump into Lauren's example. So I taught a free class earlier this month. It was titled Designing Your Journey, and at the end of the teaching portion, I opened it up for live coaching. Lauren raised her hand, got coached, and then gave me permission to share the audio here. I asked her one question at the end of coaching her. That resonated with many people who emailed me after the class was over. So I want you to hear this conversation so that you can understand more clearly what I'm talking about. When I say a way of being goal is more an exploration of your experience. The entire coaching is about six minutes, and you'll know when I ask the question because you're going to hear me pause. So here is the conversation with Lauren. I'll take one more. I'm going to grab Lauren and then I'm going to wrap this up. Lauren.

Speaker3:
Hello.

Speaker1:
Hi.How are you?

Speaker3:
I'm doing all right. How are you?

Speaker1:
Very good. So, do you have a goal and a question for me?

Speaker3:
Yeah. So I, um, my goal this year is actually to readjust my relationship with the word goal. Um.

Speaker1:
Perfect.

Speaker3:
So, uh, I am definitely a person that's, like, always been like, go big or go home. And, um, I think it's come back to bite me. So I think this year, uh, my theme is having fun builds confidence. Um, and so I'm going to take my horse, we're going to show, but we're going to show at a level that we can be confident in and just, um, as much as we can do those tests that I know we can go in and do well just to get out there and and have fun. Yeah. Um, so I'm, I'm trying to figure out how to build on that through the year.

Speaker1:
Like what?

Speaker3:
I haven't quite nailed down what my steps are going to be, um, where I should start and if I should try and advance in, like, level tests or stay all at the basic level or, or try different disciplines. Uh, at the basic level, I'm not sure where to go with that yet.

Speaker1:
Um, two things. So how are you going to track your happiness goal?

Speaker3:
Um. I'm not sure. I haven't figured that out yet. I know it'll be a feeling when I get a feeling when I ride and I go out, come out of the show pen. And I think maybe trying to document that as it's happening. But I'm not sure if there's like a, a tangible way.

Speaker1:
Yeah, yeah, I think documenting it and I think documenting it on a regular basis. So, you know, for example, like one of the things I noticed when I work with Ember is that she's young and so she's silly and she's got all these baby expressions and I laugh and so noticing little things to laugh about, noticing little things. Because if you start noticing that whether you think about it with a horse, I think sometimes it happens more naturally. Like for me, it's happening more naturally with the baby horse, because I think some of her expressions are funny, but it's reminding me to appreciate and explore those same expressions in my older horses or more stoic horses. And so I think that you turning up your radar on like, joyful moments is probably a piece of that thing. And then what you're sounds like you're looking for is to carry those joyful moments into what do you want to label the show experience? How is it different than a home experience? Does it feel like pressure? What does it feel like?

Speaker3:
Yeah, it definitely struggle with the pressure of it. So I want to have the I mean it'll always be pressure, I think. I don't think I can avoid that, but I would love for the joy and fun to outweigh the anxiety while I'm doing it, and be confident in my horse and my ability when I go in that I can focus on having fun and and doing the best we can.

Speaker1:
Mhm. Mhm. So I think some of the things for you to explore would be actually it's going to be that relationship with pressure, it's going to be that relationship with joy or fun. And then probably the relationship with making mistakes. Because what comes to my mind I'll offer you is that when I was doing the when I was had the five k goal, I noticed that I was getting into a real rut with like the idea of going and competing, which is actually kind of interesting because I also had a similar rut when I was professionally showing horses. I was like, oh, duh, I don't like any of this. It felt like pressure. And I decided one day that I was going to go to this five K race, and I said, you know what? I've decided winning is walking in, walking across the starting line. If I literally start the starting line and I turn around and go back and get in the car after I've literally gone ten feet, I'm calling it a win. And it was a fascinating thing. And it's very similar to the first time that I had them ring the bell when I was showing in Western dressage. Like, I didn't realize how much tension I was carrying until they rung the bell and I was like, oh, I didn't even die when they just told me that. I'm like, completely off pattern and I don't even know where I should go. And then I then they were like, come over here. And I decided to lope off over there, which apparently is also breaking some other rule in dressage. So they were like, now they're yelling at me to stop. So I was like, breaking rules, like fast as they could like report them to me. But but oftentimes for me, and this again is unique for everybody. Sometimes I don't find the tension until I'm making the mistake. So I'm going to give you a totally backwards way to think about it would be like, what would happen if you collected mistakes this year? What if you collect? Could you collect 100 written mistakes?

Speaker3:
Yeah, that's an interesting approach and.

Speaker1:
Be okay with it. Because then now when you're now, when you're now in the bells ringing, you're like, well, there you go. There's one more for the checkbox. There's one more on the list, like, yeah. Does that make sense that there's yeah to to explore what's going on. You're going to have to think almost a little bit outside the box to be like, what is joy and what is pressure? And can pressure be going in? And what happens if I go in and like, I mean, I paid my money, I can go in like, what is winning? Is it like, is it Stacy like going across the starting line? Funny thing is, like, I like you literally get to pick there's people that go in and raining all the time and walk in and go off pattern on purpose and call it a schooling show.

Speaker3:
Yeah.

Speaker1:
So those are some thoughts, some thoughts to think about.

Speaker3:
Yeah, definitely. Thank you.

Speaker1:
You're welcome. I hope you found that conversation helpful to anchoring into the idea of how you can turn a way of being goal into something measurable and actionable. In the conversation with Lauren, I said that turning up her radar on joyful moments would be one of the goals that I could see. Here are three ways that Lauren could make her way of being goal into something very actionable. She could have a goal of writing 1 to 3 joyful moments each day in her journal. These could include moments with horses, and they could also include moments anywhere in life. Another way to make this actionable would be to write each day about one moment where she experienced either pressure, anxiety, or a response to a mistake. It's also possible that this doesn't even have to be something that happened during that day. It could be something that happened during that day, but it could also be Lauren taking the time to reflect on a moment in the past where she felt pressure or anxiety. Because remember the goal of writing down the joyful moments, the goal of writing down the moments of pressure or anxiety or mistakes is so that you can get familiar with your experience. One other one. She could also have a goal, as I mentioned, of collecting 100 written mistakes inside of that one. She could also go a little bit deeper and say something like, when I made this mistake, I'll borrow one of my own.

Speaker1:
When the bell rang during my western dressage test to tell me that I had gone off pattern, I felt my stomach drop and then noticed that I felt fine right after that shock. And then she could write the lesson learned from that mistake: so it would be write the mistake, write the feeling experienced and then write the lesson learned. And as I already shared in the conversation with Lauren, the lesson I learned was, oh, I'm not going to die when I hear the bell ring. Apparently my brain thought this was going to be a major problem instead of a blip on the radar. Keep in mind that Lauren could begin using this system now. So even though her focus seems to be on shows, it would be wise to begin using this in a day to day situation. Because just like showing requires preparation, the rider's mind requires preparation in order to change the habit. So notice that all of these assignments can be done at home. They can all be done on non-riding days. They can also be practiced in horse life and in the rest of life. I think that's really key because way of being goals typically need to span across your life because you're addressing an overall view or an overall habit. So in last week's podcast, when I said I wanted to address my unfocused intensity by using the phrase focused intensity, what I was talking about, there was a broad way of being in life that I wanted to address, and also pause for just a moment and think about the three assignments I just gave as examples that Lauren could use.

Speaker1:
Two of them were writing every day. One of them was collecting 100 mistakes. Do you sense right now that you like the idea of heading for a number, like collecting 100 of something and then knowing that you were done there? Or do you gravitate more naturally to the idea of writing every day? Both of them have benefits. You could do both, but I would actually say do whichever you find easier. So if you want to know what it's like to collect 100 of something and then know that you were done when you hit 100, and then reflect and decide what you want to do. You could choose that because it felt easier. These things don't have to always feel like the hardest path. Sometimes the secret is making it the easier path. I often like charts that I can fill in. So you can create a chart digitally. You can create a chart physically, you can create a chart that uses stickers. You can create a bar graph like think about when they're collecting money and they're going up towards a certain goal, like a bar graph where you could color in each square that takes you further up to the top. I've done every single one of these, so whatever seems like it would help you find a little bit of joy in the tracking of it, is what I would encourage you to do.

Speaker1:
If I were going to list one danger of setting a way of being goal, it would be not addressing the other side of that feeling. So in Lauren's example, it would be not addressing the view of pressure or anxiety or mistakes. So if someone aims to only collect joyful moments, it can seem like something's going wrong when you experience anything other than that. So the way that I prefer to view it is that it's often like two sides of a coin. So the heads of the coin might be joy, happiness, fun, and the tail side might be pressure, anxiety, mistakes. And what I've found over the years is that turning and facing your fears, just like teaching a horse to turn and face something that scares them, turning and facing your fears, exploring the other side is so beneficial. In my conversation with Lauren, I mentioned creating your own definition of winning, and I gave the example of A5K race that I signed up for. So let's use that example. And if for you, you want to picture signing up to go to a show, when I'm talking about the five k race or deciding that you're going to go for a trail ride on a certain day, what I want you to think about is that those situations, the five K race, the show, the trail ride, those are the opportunities that we have to explore our own feelings around a certain situation.

Speaker1:
So let's talk specifically about pressure because it came up in the conversation. My view of pressure is that you're either creating your own feeling of pressure, or you're allowing the feeling of pressure to come from somewhere else. If you are directly creating the pressure. There's a very good chance that that pressure is coming from your idea about failure, or your ideas around making mistakes, or your expectations of the way something should be. Now, examples of allowing outside pressure to impact you. It'll often feel like it's coming from outside of you, but I assure you it is still your choice to participate in that pressure or not. When I was in that moment, laying in bed trying to decide whether or not I was going to get up and go run this race, it occurred to me that I was wrestling with my definition of success for me on that day. The pressure was coming from the idea that I had run a couple of five K's and my mind, without me even thinking about it, was offering that I needed to do it better this day. So as I was laying in bed, wrestling out whether or not I was going to get up and go to this race that had already paid to enter. I decided in that moment to redefine winning because I could feel my wrestling match with the external pressure, the outside views, the society norms that would say this only counts if you finish the race.

Speaker1:
This counts, especially if you run it faster. So I could say that that pressure was coming from outside of me. But in reality, I realized that it was my own view that I had decided to agree with the society norms of starting and finishing the society norms of starting and finishing and running faster. So whether you want to say that it's external, because that would be the normal way to look at it, or whether you want to say it's internal because I was the one accepting it or thinking of it or choosing it, I guarantee you this. I get to choose how I define my success on any given day. So for me, the two things that were the most tempting were all or nothing. Nothing would have been staying home, skipping the race, not getting out of bed for longer than what I laid there, having this wrestling match so nothing would have been just skipping. Totally out, not going all was looking a lot like pressuring myself into going and running faster and harder. And that was the resistance that I was feeling to getting out of bed was because it was just more and more and more, so I could feel the temptation to totally skip the race and the total temptation to go and push myself very hard. So you may have wondered when you heard me talking to Lauren, what is the point of walking across the starting line? Turning around and leaving without ever finishing.

Speaker1:
For me, the point was that I got to remind myself that I define what success is on any given day. The point that day was that I was also going to honor something I decided years ago, which was I will not force myself into certain things. I will 100% work with my resistance. I will work around the feeling of resistance. But that's different than when I say forcing myself forward. This is where this gets personal. This is why this work is important for you to do for yourself. But I'll share mine here. For me, forcing myself forward. I know when I'm doing it because it sounds mean. Forcing myself forward when I used to do it was always accompanied by negative self talk. The more I looked at it, forcing myself forward sounded like part of my childhood when one of the adults in my life would use taunting and mocking and insults as a form of motivation. But I'm an adult now, and that isn't me. It was in my head. It was a voice in my head, but it wasn't who I am and it wasn't who I want to be. And the day that I decided it was no longer allowed, I stopped allowing myself to talk to myself like that. And in the situation, laying in bed trying to decide if I was going to run this five k, I was not talking to myself like that, but I could feel the underlying vibe of pressure coming from more, more, more and the better I've gotten at understanding myself, the more I'm able to flex and understand the next step I need to take.

Speaker1:
My question that day was, what would it be like to find something in the middle? Not all or nothing, not skip the race and avoid this discomfort, but also not pressure myself into. You've already done these other races. This one should be faster. This one should be better. What would it be like to find something in the middle? And to me, that's when I know I'm dancing with the resistance, because it was way harder to show up and know that I could cross the starting line and turn around and know that I could walk back to the car and go home. And I had to address the idea that other people might have thoughts about me doing that. I had to address the idea that I might have thoughts about doing that. I had to decide that I was truly capable of deciding that that was an acceptable thing to do that day. And these are the moments that are full of self discovery. I looked up two words as I was prepping for this podcast, and here they are with their definitions. Self esteem refers to whether you appreciate and value yourself. Your self esteem develops and changes as a result of your life experiences and interactions with other people.

Speaker1:
And I'm going to add this. It develops as you interact with yourself, which is the way you talk with yourself in your mind and the way you focus yourself with assignments like collecting 100 mistakes and learning the lessons that those have to offer. Another word I looked up was self-confidence, which is your belief in yourself and your abilities. This can change depending on the situation. It's normal to feel quite confident in some circumstances and less confident in others. And I'll add, the first self-confidence to develop is your ability to treat yourself fairly. If you like to read a great book on this subject is Steven Pressfield's book, The War of Art. He discusses the topic of resistance with a capital R is how he refers to it, like it's a thing resistance, and he discusses how the artist must deal with resistance every day. Now he talks about art as writing and painting. But I'm going to add that when you read the book, go ahead and insert riding horses as an art form. So if you want to call yourself an artist or an artist in training, then read the book from the standpoint that horses are your chosen art, here are some quotes from the book so you can decide if it's something that you'd like to read. If you find yourself asking yourself and your friends, am I really a writer? Am I really an artist? Chances are you are.

Speaker1:
The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death. The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today, we put them off until our deathbed. Never forget this very moment. We can change our lives. There never was a moment and never will be. When we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on resistance. This second, we can sit down and do our work. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a byproduct of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows the rewards to come or not, whatever they like. Again, those are quotes from Steven Pressfield's book The War of Art. As I wrap this podcast up. If you enjoyed this segment with Lauren, I do this type of coaching every week inside the Resourceful Rider program. Inside that program, there's a Mindset Mastery course, and inside the course you learn how to do this type of work in a journal that I created, and you also have access inside the program to weekly live calls where you can raise your hand and get coached, just like Lauren did. The program will open again for enrollment in February, so if you're interested, make sure you're on the waitlist so you'll get notified when enrollment opens. 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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