Episode 347: ‘I Just Want to Feel More Confident’—but Which Kind?

Episode 347.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 347.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
So if you find yourself thinking, I just want to feel more confident. Be sure you define which type of confidence you’re talking about.

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. In this episode, I want to discuss mastery of the basics, which has been on my mind because I am in the middle of editing a new course. Yep, I think it’s been 3 or 4 years now since I launched a new course. Anyway, all I’m going to say about it right now is that the topic is creating safety when writing. I will give you more details, but not right now. And here’s what’s standing out to me while I’m editing. Safety comes down to skills, not luck. Not hoping for the best. Not just trusting your horse, but specific learnable skills. These skills include physical skills that you might expect, like how to handle your tools, or the timing of your aid, or the technique that you choose to use in the moment, but also skills that are less obvious like your ability to read what your horse is communicating, your willingness to put in the practice, and that knowing of when to move to the next step or knowing when to go back to the previous step. One thing that I often hear riders say is I just want to feel more confident. What I’ve discovered is that the confidence that they’re often looking for is hiding behind the skills that they haven’t learned yet. Years ago, I memorized a quote that has stuck with me and it says mastery of the basics creates success as I’ve been working on the safety course.

Speaker1:
I want to put a twist on that quote and say mastery of the basics creates safety. Let’s look at that desire that so many riders have. I just want to feel more confident. The way I see it is there are two different kinds of confidence. Someone could have self confidence, and I’m going to define that as confidence in yourself. Your commitment to stick with something, to figure it out, to put in the work. This type of confidence helps you keep going. As you learn a new skill, because you might remember when you learn a new skill. It involves making mistakes. A different type of confidence a person can have is skill. Confidence. Skill. Confidence can be defined as confidence in your skills and the ultimate skill. Confidence would be skill mastery. So if you find yourself thinking, I just want to feel more confident, be sure you define which type of confidence you’re talking about. I think sometimes people try to imagine what it would be like to have mastered the skills, and then they imagine the confidence they would have if they had mastered the skills, and then they try to put that type of confidence on, like you’d put on a jacket or a shirt. And the problem here is that skill. Confidence is something you earn. You can’t pretend you’re way there. Self-confidence is chosen. It’s a decision or a commitment.

Speaker1:
It’s something you can choose to have right now. It actually has kind of a childlike quality to it, at least the way I experience it, because young children think about a child learning to walk. They actually have self-confidence. They are confident they will figure it out, despite the fact they keep falling flat on their face. As I’m editing this course, the thing that strikes me so clearly is how true the quote mastery of the basics creates. Success really is. I am keeping the number of techniques and exercises to a minimum, but no matter how simple I keep it, it is still so rich in detail. I can explain things very simply so you can execute them. Then I can explain the same exact thing with more detail. No changes in the technique or the exercise, just more detail in what you perceive as you’re doing it. And what I’ve learned from coaching thousands of riders over the years is that both people and horses learn best when the concept is simple, but the implications go deep. What I mean by that is when I can teach you a concept that you can use today, and I can also show you how it ties together with more advanced concepts down the road. It does two things. Number one, it inspires you to do the repetitions because you can see how it fits into your future goals, whether that’s trail riding or showing or simply enjoying your horse.

Speaker1:
The repetitions matter. And number two, it allows you the ability to master something, to practice over and over again and allow it to become habit, to become muscle memory for both you and your horse. And that’s the power that comes from skill. Confidence. Think about an area where you have physical skills already developed to the point of muscle memory or habit. Maybe it’s typing, or maybe it’s driving a car. There came a time when your physical skills felt automatic, and it frees up more space in your mind and in that free space. You not only find confidence and freedom, but you also find the room to comprehend another level of detail. But here’s the thing about mastering skills. It can feel boring. Practicing the same basic exercise over and over again is not as exciting as imagining yourself on that perfect rail ride, or riding that advanced maneuver. The fundamentals done really well, are kind of boring until you start seeing those layers of detail. That’s why you need what I call self-confidence, that commitment to figure it out, to stick with the process even though it feels repetitive or slow. Self confidence is what gets you to show up and practice those skills that create the foundation for everything else. I actually recorded a podcast back in 2021, over 200 episodes ago that talked about the difference between skill, confidence, and self-confidence. It focused a little bit more on self-confidence, which is why I open today with a little bit more of a leaning towards skill confidence.

Speaker1:
I’m going to go ahead and play that episode for you again right now. And keep in mind, skill, confidence and self-confidence are two separate things that work best together. Today I’m going to be talking about confidence. Do you consider yourself a confident writer? What do you envision when you picture a confident writer? How can you tell if a writer is confident? Now here’s another way to look at it. If you’re out riding your horse and you think you might have started with confidence, at what point do you lose your confidence? If you’re in the middle of a work session and things aren’t going the way you hoped they would, do you lose confidence. If you’re in the middle of the week and you’ve been riding and things aren’t going the way that you think they should, do you lose confidence? How about if you’re in the middle of the season of riding and wherever you are? See where I’m going with this? When I was thinking about this topic, it came from observing a lot of riders having self-doubt. And this shows up in a lot of different ways. But for this podcast, I’m just going to say that self-doubt is the flip side of self-confidence. And when I was thinking about this, it got me thinking about skills versus mental confidence a belief confidence. And that got me thinking about people that I’ve seen over the years, that I saw in their very beginning stages.

Speaker1:
So I saw them when they didn’t have all the skills that they now present with. And when I think back to seeing these people, myself included, in the early years, the vast majority did not have special talents that stood out. Except one thing they were committed. And when I see people like this. Sometimes I see people and when I meet them, I can see that commitment that I’m going to tie back to confidence in a minute. I can see that commitment. And then there are other people that I meet and start working with, and I can see that commitment develop like they start to choose to be committed. But the one thing that really stays across the board with people who I’ve seen, you know, start and really achieve exceptional things, big things that they set out to do in the horse world is that they were committed. And this is where I think the idea of breaking confidence into a couple different ways to look at it, a couple different parts is kind of interesting. What I want to propose is the idea of there being something different between self-confidence and skill. Confidence. The way that I would describe it is that when I see people that have self-confidence, there’s a level of commitment that they have to the process. So for me personally, when I decide I’m going to learn something, I commit to showing up and learning it.

Speaker1:
So when I was learning to podcast, I had no idea about podcasting, but I decided I wanted to learn it and I committed to it. And I did have a confidence in myself that I would show up and I would study, and I would be a student that would learn to podcast. Now, that is my definition of self-confidence, this idea that you are confident in yourself, in that ability to show up. Now, to me, the difference that I see in a lot of students is that they’re tying self-confidence and what I’m going to call skill confidence together. Now, to me, skill confidence is completely separate. So again, back to podcasting. When I first started podcasting, I had no skills when I signed up for the class. I had no idea about any of the equipment, about audio levels, about editing audio. I didn’t know any of that. So I had no skills. So I had no confidence in my skills because I had no skills. So if there had been a pop quiz, I would have failed on skills, even though I had confidence that I would show up and study and do the work. Now, when I watch students working with their horses, it often shows up when they are working with their horse and let’s say they’re doing groundwork or trailer loading or something. The ability to handle the tools, whatever that is. Let’s just say that that’s a rope and a stick and string.

Speaker1:
The ability to handle the tools goes into a skill. Reading the horse in the situation and deciding how you want to respond to what they just did, and how you’re going to give them feedback. That is also a skill. Now the good news is skills can be learned, skills can be practiced. But here’s where people often get tangled up. Let’s go ahead and use the trailer loading as an example. If someone is having trouble loading a horse in the trailer, they could lack confidence or they could lack skills, or both. So if someone has confidence that they can figure this out, that they’re going to figure this out, if they’re determined, if they’re committed. Then the interesting thing is they’re going to show up in a different way. During that interaction at the trailer. And I think this again, is interesting with horses in particular, because in the podcasting example, I can show up and turn knobs and do different things, but the knobs don’t actually respond differently depending on what, you know, vibes I’m giving off. But the horses, the horses do so when I am showing up at the trailer, and I have self-confidence, even if I lack the skills that knowing that I’m determined actually helps influence it now, even if it doesn’t influence it in the way that the horse gets on the trailer that day. Just me standing there, Learning. Knowing. Learning from the failing of not getting them on the trailer.

Speaker1:
What I see in people who are in this type of confidence is that they tend to be more open and more curious, and more willing to try different things. In the situation of, let’s say, the trailer loading, and what’s interesting is that openness and that curiosity actually helps them because of what the horse reads from them, but also just because they’re not blocking themselves with the way they’re thinking about it. So they find new ideas even easier. Now, if you take somebody in that same situation and in both of these situations, let’s say their skills are lacking, but one had the confidence like self-confidence and the other one is in the same situation. What often happens is that they’ll depend on the the outcome to give them confidence. And what happens there is they start to take the horse to the trailer. The horse says, no thanks. I think I’ll go over here and eat grass. And every problem that the person runs into is an opportunity for them to kind of judge themselves for not being enough, because it’s really challenging if things aren’t turning out right, but you’re looking for confidence from the thing turning out right, it’s not a great circle to be in. And so a lot of times when people are, let’s say, trying to load the horse in the trailer and they’re having trouble because the skills are lacking, but they’re also lacking confidence.

Speaker1:
It will sound a little bit like, I’m just not getting this. I’m not any good at this. This just isn’t going well. Which is kind of interesting because you could have a different person in that same situation. They still lack the skills, but they’re confident that they’re going to stick with it and figure it out. And it will sound different, because even if they’re not getting the horse loaded on the trailer, they’ll be I’ll figure it out. I’ll keep on going. I’ll do as much as I need to. I’ll work as hard as I need to. And so even if the result at the end of it is that they don’t get the horse in the trailer like so, the outcome is the horse is still not loaded on the trailer. It is just really interesting to see that the way that they approach it with that confidence, that self-confidence, that self-confidence actually really impacts not just the experience at the trailer and not just that, you know, idea that the horses are feeling some of what you’re giving off there, but also it shows up in the fact that it’s really hard when you’re saying you’re not any good at it, to look for the ways that you could be seeing little things that are working in that session that might not work perfectly that session, but could pay off down the road. So I guess another way to say it is that this lack of confidence actually overlaps with self-judgment.

Speaker1:
And a lot of times, if self-judgment starts to creep in, it becomes making things worse with the way that you’re thinking about it. So if I have confidence in my commitment to learning how to load my horse in the trailer, then it makes learning the skills less threatening. But if someone is looking for their skills, which are currently lacking, to give them confidence. What’s really interesting is a lot of times they get really tied to the outcome of getting the horse in the trailer, and they start to get this like more desperate feeling and it starts to look like if they do get the horse in the trailer, I’m going to use some some words. If they do get the horse in the trailer, they quote when they quote succeed, which are both ways of kind of saying good enough. But if they don’t get the horse in the trailer, they’ll quote, lose or quote, fail. Or another way of saying it is they’re not good enough. And it’s just a really interesting thing to watch this dance. I think it’s really interesting. If you can pause for just a moment and see the separation between the idea of what I’m calling self-confidence versus skill confidence, because lacking the skills doesn’t mean that you’re never going to figure it out. It just means you’re gaining skills right now, even in the process of figuring it out, making mistakes.

Speaker1:
There are times that I still will sit down to record a podcast, and I’ll hit a button wrong, and I’ll get to the end, and the audio file won’t be correct. But because I’m approaching 150 episodes, I’m more skill confident. But I’ve also practiced in other areas of my life. Self-confidence that well, I guess I will rerecord it, and I guess that this will be an opportunity for it to be even better than the first time when I thought I was recording it, but I really didn’t get that button quite right. So it’s just an interesting thing to watch, because this idea of confidence being separate than your skills could be very useful for a lot of people. So here’s a list of some questions. That instead of saying to yourself something like, how can I be confident when I’m not any good? Instead of saying something like that, you could actually just start asking better questions and you could say, how can I choose to be confident when I’m learning a new skill? And maybe that comes back to commitment for you like it does to me. And what does confidence look like in action? What does confidence look like when things aren’t going well? I love the idea of how our confidence and commitment connected because they’re connected in my mind. But it would be interesting for you to explore that for you. I just I sit here and I reflect back to the fact that the bareback bridles ride was first.

Speaker1:
Before that, I did a bridle ride, and I did that bridle ride three years before the bareback and bridle ride, and it took me ten years to go from the first time that I dreamed about riding in a freestyle, reining without a bridle into making it a reality. It took ten years, and if somebody were to say, did you have confidence along the way, I would actually hesitate there because of the way that I spent a lot of my life defining confidence. I’ve now switched it to more of what I was describing today that self-confidence, that stick to it. I would always have said that I felt committed, which is why I think it’s interesting to to kind of look at your view on what goes along with confidence. To me, I was committed and that meant that I was showing up. I was exploring different options, I was learning, I was trying new things. I was failing and failing and failing and failing, and I was using one of my strongest skills, stubbornness. So even though I didn’t feel confident at the time. Now, looking back, I can see that if somebody had told me that self-confidence was the ability to be committed to something for as long as it took, I would have identified as being self-confident. Now, one last thing I do want to say that I still feel the temptation to feel lack.

Speaker1:
I’m tempted to say the lack of confidence, but I feel this feeling of lack in myself, especially when I. Lack skills in a certain area. So back when I was podcasting, I felt a lack that could have been labeled a lack of self-confidence by some people. But I’m going with it was a lack of skills. I still feel that when I am taking dressage lessons, when I’m showing in dressage, I can feel this lack of, you know, because it’s a lack of the skills. It’s still kind of a lack of the knowledge. It’s a lack of some of these different things. And so there is this temptation when I feel that sensation of lack, to think that it’s a lack of confidence or a lack in myself personally. But I have practiced and I now have the skills to understand that I do have confidence in my ability to stick with things as long as it takes. And so I realized that even though my skills might be lacking, I am totally committed to taking the time it takes to change that. So interesting way to look at it. I’m curious, where do you have confidence? How do you define the word confidence? How do you see it showing up? And what words do you connect with it? Like I connect the word commitment with it. What word do you think goes well with 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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