Our effectiveness at anything is governed by 3 factors: direction (what to work on); skills (how to work on it) and motivation (why to work on it). It is the same with learning!
Motivation is very important. Learning requires effort. Good learners are open-minded and proactive. They not only accept knowledge but go out and actively look for it. No one else can learn for you – only you. No-one else is responsible for your learning – only you. Not your school teacher, not your riding coach, ONLY YOU!!!
The learning I am talking about here is not rote learning, the cramming for exams that is then quickly forgotten. It is the learning that determines the fabric of how we live our lives, what we choose to do and how we choose to do it. This means that we don’t cram at all. Instead we become discerning and selective in terms of what we choose to use and store. And we continually revisit “our accepted wisdom”.
This process is best depicted as a funnel. Some people have a funnel with a tiny hole, some people have a wide funnel, some dismiss too early, some don’t discard enough and waste valuable storage space and thinking time. The secret is to keep an open funnel and pro-actively seek material for it and learn to discard that which is less useful before it clogs up the system! Diverging then converging.
We need to ensure our funnel is kept open! As we get older we tend to close down our funnel. We dismiss knowledge for a variety of reasons. We are sometimes prejudiced against the source or because we are too hierarchical and dismiss knowledge from those we consider “beneath” us. My first employer taught me that this is limiting. The new graduate was seen to have as much if not more right to speak and be a source of great new knowledge.
Figure 36 The Thinking Funnel
Horse riding is rather a closed minded discipline. It is very traditional, military in origin and hierarchical. Old and classical are seen to be “best” and new creative approaches seen as a “threat”. There are cries of “not invented here” and “why recreate the wheel” heard everywhere! Whilst I have sympathy with not wasting effort on recreating wheels I can also see that sticking to this by the letter limits opportunities for creativity and improvement. I think that a lot of this comes from seeing the world from our own tiny perspective (like the girl with the dominos in chapter 3) and not seeing the bigger picture.
Free your mind!
Imagine you are the first human being to contemplate riding a horse. You know what you know now but you are starting again! What would you do?