Episode 286: When Words Fall Short: How You See It vs. How I See It

Episode 286_ When Words Fall Short_ How You See It vs. How I See It.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 286_ When Words Fall Short_ How You See It vs. How I See It.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Stacy Westfall:
What I want you to walk away from this episode thinking is that there is a lot of power in the words, and there is a lot of grey area that's still left there.

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 help you understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. In this podcast, I want to discuss the challenge of using words to describe what's happening with your horse. This episode can stand alone, but I also see it as closely related to last week's episode about the five levels of distraction that you can see in a horse. I'm going to jump straight in with an example of how I frequently see this, and then I'll expand into how you've probably experienced it. In my Resourceful Rider program, I do student video reviews. And what that means is that the students have the opportunity to upload a video, share the link, and then write their question about the video. So when I prepare for a class, I open up a folder where I can see all of the questions and then the links to the videos. So when I sit down to prepare for the class, I read the student's question or description where they feel stuck. What they're wanting to know depends on what they're presenting with. That day. I read the description and I watch the video, and depending on the day, I will sometimes watch the video before I read the question, and then other times I will read the question before I watch the video. And very frequently, let's say I have watched the video and then I go back and I read the description. I will often think, do I have the correct video? For example, somebody might say, on this day my horse was very reactive.

Stacy Westfall:
She was looking all over the place. Her head kept popping up, totally losing focus. And I'll watch the video and I'll see a horse that has rhythm. They are looking around, but the rhythm isn't broken and they're never entering a state of what I would call crossing the safety line. They're never having a moment where even the rhythm is substantially lost. It's very rhythmic. So what we have going on there is a pretty drastic difference in the interpretation of what's happening on the video. So, for example, the phrase looking all over the place for one person that could mean the horse's head is up pulling the reins out of the rider's hands. And for another person, that could mean the horse has elevated the pole two inches and the ears are rotated to a neighboring field. So there's a huge difference between the description oftentimes and the video and what I'm seeing. Another example might be a rider reporting that they are working on a particular exercise, and they keep getting stuck, especially when I'm going to the right or especially when I'm doing this. And if I read the question first, a lot of times I imagine what a horse really getting stuck looks like. And so in my mind, I'm visualizing before I watch the video what a horse getting stuck might look like and when you might want to move away from a particular technique because of a horse getting stuck, then oftentimes I'll turn on the video and what I'll see won't be a horse getting stuck, at least not by my definition.

Stacy Westfall:
So maybe that horse is experiencing a slight loss of forward motion or a break in the rhythm, but to me, getting stuck involves a lot more than that. And at the end of the day, it's not so much about the words that matters, but it really does matter how we are describing it, how we are experiencing it, and how that's going to influence us making a plan to move forward. This is why I thought it would be beneficial to discuss last week the five different levels of distraction that you can see in a horse. Because if we go to the concept of there being a safety line and that there is such a thing as being below the safety line, just hovering at the safety line and above the safety line, we begin to get a little bit more clarity around what might be happening. Now, the point of this podcast is not to be critical of the phrases or the words that people are using. Reactive, getting stuck, looking all over the place. What I want you to walk away from this episode thinking, is that there is a lot of power in the words, and there is a lot of grey area that's still left there. If you're a long time podcast listener, you know I love words. I frequently include definitions of words in the podcast.

Stacy Westfall:
I'm closing in on 300 podcast episodes. That's a lot of words. There is a magic in practicing describing it, but there's also a great deal of benefit in watching a video together. What it comes down to for me is there's how you describe it. There's what it looks like, there's how I describe it and there's what it looks like. And if we want to bring those two together, the fastest way to do that is with video. Without video. This often times reminds me of the game telephone that a teacher in the first or second grade taught our class, and the way that she taught it was she had us all sit down on the floor in a circle, and the teacher turned to her left and whispered in the student's ear a phrase, and then told that student to turn and whisper the phrase in the next student's ear, and the phrase went all the way around the circle of us that were sitting there, and our instructions were to repeat it exactly. And by the time it made it back to the teacher, it was not what she said. Again, there's what you say, and then there's what someone else hears. So there's how you describe what happened with your horse. And then there's what it looks like. So the value of adding a visual component is very real. And I'm going to talk about how people often do that in just a minute. But I want to remind you of a secondary challenge, even if you do watch your own video.

Stacy Westfall:
Often times, your judgment of the video of yourself, of the situation, of what's happening, will get in the way of your ability to view it clearly. Recently, inside the program, a student shared a success story about a video that she had taken. But then she delayed watching the video. And because she's been in the program, we also work a lot on the idea of why you might avoid videotaping in the first place, or in her case, why you might avoid watching the video even if you did take the video. So listen to how she described the experience. I put off watching the video because it's so insert difficult emotion depending on the time of day. My mood annoying. Hard. Sad for me. So do you hear how before she even hits play to watch the video? That is just a factual representation of what happened that day before she even hits play. She's now aware that her viewing of it is being skewed by those difficult emotions. So without that awareness, many times riders completely avoid videotaping themselves and then if they do videotape themselves, they either have trouble watching the video or they have trouble watching the video from a calm, neutral place. Which again, if you think about it, how you describe it and what it looks like might not even line up when it's you videotaping you and watching you. So I am very aware that when I am recording these podcasts or when I'm speaking with people, that when I describe things that are happening with my horse, I try to use lots of descriptors and I try to come at it from a lot of different angles.

Stacy Westfall:
And that's because if I say something like this, I was out trail riding and Willow offered to take the shorter trail home. There's my experience of that and there's what I picture. If somebody had been recording it. And then there's what you picture when I say Willow offered to go on the shorter trail home. This just happened to me the other day. I've been riding different trail configurations out behind my house, and because I've ridden so much out on the state park, my horses all know which turn takes us home shorter. And so when I come to a fork in the trail and I choose the longer path, I can feel Willow either offering to go on the shorter trail before I decide where we're going, or as I guide her to the longer trail, I can feel her slight hesitation. Now, when I describe that, I have a very particular vision of what that experience was. So imagine a group of ten different people and how different their representation of a horse offering to go on the shorter trail, and what that might look like. I've seen riders out here on the trails that don't have any break in the discussion. When their horse starts taking them down the trail ten feet, as they use the rein, to guide the horse back, the horse is flipping their head up and up, inverting, almost flipping the bit over.

Stacy Westfall:
And yet the rider is undisturbed by any of this, because that's normal in their world, and the fact that they were able to turn and able to go on the longer trail is good enough for me. When I am picturing that Willow offered to go on the shorter trail, it means to me that I felt her lean that direction before I had actually given her directions on which one we were going to go on. I could actually feel that slight lean to the right to go down that trail, or when I pick up and ask her to go, there's a slight slowing. We're talking like a quarter of a mile per hour, as she kind of slightly bogs down as she goes. Okay. And then her recovery is 3 to 4 steps later, and visually, from the outside, no one would even notice that this happened because it's so subtle. So there's what I am experiencing and there's what it looks like. So in my case, I'm actually feeling a lot more detail than what's going to visually show up. I've said it over and over again when I watch the Live Like You Were Dying video. There are a couple of spots in there where I felt Roxy lean in a similar way that I'm describing Willow leaning on the trail, but if you go watch the video, it's probably going to be hard for you to see it because it was so slight that it was felt more than seen.

Stacy Westfall:
Because I teach every week inside the Resourceful Rider program, I frequently see this disconnect between what the rider is describing something as and what I see on the video. So there's how you describe it, what it looks like, how I describe it, and what it looks like. The way that you have probably experienced this is if you have attended a clinic or a group. Riding lesson clinics and group riding lessons are great opportunities for you to be able to see this in action, because you might recognize the way that another student is describing something that just happened, and you might recognize that that's not the way that you would describe it, because you get to be that outsider who's watching what's happening and then listening to how it's described by the other student. It's common for you to see that disconnect that I'm explaining in that situation. If you pay attention, the same thing's happening when you take a one on one riding lesson. So when the instructor is there helping you, what they are often doing is they are often describing what they see. So in that moment, that instructor is helping you find the terminology. They're saying your horse is pulling on the left rein. They're saying your horse is slowing down. They're saying this is a problem right here, and it's a big deal that you handle this right now.

Stacy Westfall:
Because if you don't handle this right now, this is what eventually turns into rearing. What I often find, though, in live riding lessons or there at a clinic, and they're the one in the spotlight. When that's happening, the rider tends to be largely focused on what the instructor is telling them to do, and then it's like a side dose of absorbing how the instructor is describing the situation. So if you pay attention to your experience over time, you're getting both. You're getting the instructor saying, this is what you need to do with your left rein, hopefully you're getting this is what you need to do with your left rein, and this is why. And then also you are getting that instructor's description of what is happening. And hopefully they're even anchoring that into why it matters. So with repeat interactions with a writing instructor or a clinician, what you'll start to notice is that you begin to view things differently. I think this happens even faster in group lessons, because it gives you exposure to multiple horses and multiple riders that are having both similar issues and slightly different flavors of those issues. So it gives you a more broad perspective. But when you expose yourself, you'll start to view things differently, and then you'll start to describe them differently. Another student inside my program sent this in as part of her success story. So again, this is just one sentence out of it.

Stacy Westfall:
But it said as I was putting these videos together to send to you, I was also thinking about the last zoom call, the one with the reviews on the greener horse, and I wasn't as discouraged when watching my videos again. So to me, when I hear that feedback, what I recognize is that this student didn't have a calibration of what that greener horse normally looks like. And by attending the previous zoom call, she was able to get an idea of, oh, this is a normal thing in this greener stage with the horse. So now when I see it with my horse, I'm not discouraged. This is just one of the stepping stones. Which brings up another point, which is in last week's episode, I described five levels of distraction, two below the safety line, one just at the safety line and then two levels above the safety line. And there is something important here to pay attention to because all horses, if we think about them when they're not started under saddle, they are below the safety line to when they are being ridden and they can walk, trot, canter safely. They all go from below the safety line to above the safety line at some point. So I say that just to say that you don't completely skip the safety issues ever, because that's just part of the normal learning process. But one thing that I did leave out of last week's episode is how things are so different for pros or people with experience, and the reason that is true is because when someone has more exposure to and more knowledge of these levels, for example, below the safety line, at the safety line and above the safety line, when someone has more knowledge and experience of that, they will aim for being above the safety line sooner.

Stacy Westfall:
Which is why it often appears that pros don't tend to hover around the safety line. Think about this if your goal when you ride your horse is to be safe for many people, when I watch them ride, I would translate that into just barely safe. So without the awareness that the level you're aiming for is just barely safe, but technically kind of safe without the awareness that this is just barely safe. People get there and stay there, and they stay very close to the safety line. And what that means is that on bad days, they dip below it. And when you dip below the safety line, those are those moments that feel unsafe. But these same people with more exposure, more knowledge, more understanding, these riders can move further up a little further away from the safety line. And when you move further up, what that means is that on bad days, you might not love the response, but you won't slip below the safety line. And this is only possible if you begin to calibrate your view of what the safety line is, what being close to the safety line looks like, what slipping or dipping below the safety line looks like, and what getting some distance away from the safety line looks like.

Stacy Westfall:
This is possible, and it's not as hard as you would think, because oftentimes the biggest thing that holds people at just barely above the safety line is their lack of understanding that they could go a little bit higher and not be in that constant edge of struggle. I think sometimes that the access to things on the internet is both really helpful, but also causes people to look at drastic differences. So if you want to move to just above the safety line, but when you Google things that are more advanced, you start watching Grand Prix dressage or the reining Futurity finals or some massively show oriented version of advancing, that becomes discouraging because it's not what you're after, necessarily, when you're just going to the level above the safety line. That's the level that I want to get to as quickly as possible when I'm starting a horse under saddle. So I want to go from below the safety line with Ember to at the safety line and above the safety line. And I want to get that gap to where I'm not dipping below the safety line, and I want that before the end of the summer. And it's May right now. So my window of going from unsafe never ridden to above the safety line securely enough to go on trail rides and to feel safe and to know that I'm not going to dip below the safety line in a way that's going to threaten me.

Stacy Westfall:
I'm going to expect that to happen in a matter of months. That will still be very far away from being polished into a show horse. They're not the same thing. But in my world, that safety line and getting that solid foundation, a level above the safety line is where really great trail riding and the foundation to everything that comes after that, that's where it begins. So can you hear it again? I just described wanting to ride Amber safely on the trail by the end of the summer, and there's how I describe it and what I imagine it looking like. And then there's how you imagine it when I say that in a matter of months, I want to be riding her on the trail. The benefit of recording your rides is real, and then those videos become something that you can look at immediately. When you are in the emotion and you are in the state of mind that you were in when you took that video or near that video. And then what's fascinating is you can watch that video later, a week later, a month later, when you're in a different state of mind and see what you see differently, and it also becomes a tool, it becomes something you can show someone else so you can get their feedback on it. Every week, I show students what I see when I watch their videos because horses are communicating with the rider using their body.

Stacy Westfall:
I show students the way I would describe what's happening, and then I can describe the next step forward. Before I created the Resourceful Rider program, I taught only in person, and that meant that people could, if they lived close, haul in for lessons, or if they lived further away, they could haul in for clinics. And what I noticed over time was that I knew the information was the same, but it was fascinating to look at the difference in what people absorbed, because those who had regular repeat exposure to hearing me describe something, seeing others ride, hearing me teach and explain they once they got past that, getting on the same page phase, they began to see how things were connected quicker than those who didn't have that exposure. So then in clinics, people would come and there would be the time spent kind of calibrating or getting on that same page. But what they walked away with was a lot of the technique, but not necessarily that exposure that changes the way that you think and view and interpret your horse. By creating the Resourceful Rider program, I can offer people a way to learn to get on the same page, to ask questions, to see videos reviewed, to have their own videos reviewed, and that produces a rider that can see what I'm seeing and can learn to identify what I'm identifying. The podcast is amazing.

Stacy Westfall:
Now imagine adding visuals to it so you can see exactly what I see. If it's possible for me to read a question or a description and then watch a video and wonder if I have the correct video, this is a yellow warning flag. The warning flag says the calibration could be off. If that's a thing for one person, it could very easily be a thing for you. Use last week's podcast and the idea that there are five different levels of distraction that are possible, and begin categorizing your rides and your horses using some kind of a scale like that. The exact scale is not as important as the idea that you begin to draw a safety line that you begin to identify, even if you're watching somebody else's ride, what you would label below the safety line and what you would label a level above or two levels above the safety line. How you describe it and what it looks like matters. Getting a professional's opinion helps you understand that calibration even more. There is so much value in educating yourself about the system and about these scales, because it will help you understand your horse and your riding more accurately. If you'd like some help with this. That's what I do inside the Resourceful Rider program. Visit my website to learn more about when the program is open and how it can help you and your horse. That's what I have for you this week, 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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