Good riding needs physical comfort and mental comfort. Whilst physical comfort is partly about equipment, mental comfort is about understanding. Physical core strength revolves around developing the core muscles deep inside the pelvis at our centre. Mental core strength is the size of our comfort zone. The core is strong, as it is at the centre of our mind. Outer layers are weaker at the edges and can be very thin, flimsy and fragile! It follows that the place of greatest security is at the very centre.
It follows that the things that are very familiar to us are in our comfort zone. The things that make us anxious are in our fear zone. Somewhere in between there is a zone called the learning zone…where we are operating in unfamiliar territory but with a feeling of safety that keeps us away from the fear zone. No learning happens in our comfort zone. No learning happens in our fear zone (for different reasons). The clever learner operates on the boundaries of the comfort zone – gradually building new areas of comfort in the learning zone but never overstepping the mark into the fear zone. The skilled trainer of humans or horses knows this and works at the boundary in order to put the pupil into a learning situation where they can experience new things safely.
Figure 38 Learning Zones
Comfort, safety, learning and development are very closely connected. To extend our comfort zone we need to understand how to learn. I believe that my comfort comes from depth of understanding. This means that I don’t need to have done the thing to feel comfort, but I do need to have understood it and to believe that it can work theoretically.
To understand how a physical thing works eg a car, a house, a boiler, a computer, we can literally dissemble it and understand what affects what. And to do that effectively and efficiently we need the assistance of tools, and sometimes workshop manuals. The skills are manual and involve dexterity.
It’s not so easy to do that with a person’s head or with a relationship. These are things that are “invisible” and affect our feelings rather than things that we can literally see, touch and feel…but it is essential to understanding. The tools here are cerebral and are about communicating and understanding.
How does safety affect learning?
We can see this in the diagram below. Feeling safe affects our need for stability (o) affects preparedness to experiment (try new things) (o) affects “success”/feeling of achievement (s) affects confidence/”OK-ness” (s) affects feeling safe (s) and we are back where we started!
Figure 39 Reinforcing Loop "Security"
Everything begins and ends with safety. This is the core growth and development loop and it is both virtuous and vicious as it is reinforcing. Whatever behaviour we start with will be reinforced – for better or for worse – unless something else changes. Reinforcing loops create exponential behaviour patterns that look like this.
Figure 40 Behaviour of Reinforcing Loops
So we can see that confidence takes a long time to build – for a while it looks like we are achieving nothing and we could give up.
Equally, small losses of confidence (little knocks) can be ignored as insignificant. Remember the frog in the pan of water that is brought slowly to the boil…
Can you think of any similar experiences that have affected you?
Something similar happened to me with my riding. I didn’t realise what was happening at the time as it happened over a long time period. First of all, I stopped competing. Then I stopped jumping. Then I stopped hacking out. Slowly but very definitely the world closes in…our comfort zones retreat. We take the knocks and try to patch up the pieces with whatever they have – cover up the damage! Don’t bleed – the sharks will smell the blood!
Gradually the knocks build up until eventually we literally “fall off the edge of the cliff” of an exponential decline! The inevitable crash seems out of all proportion to the one small thing before it. Especially if we don’t understand the mechanism behind it!
It is fine to support yourself through hard times with “props”. But make sure that you have chosen this route consciously and you know that they are not a long term solution. The long term solution is always to think through to the root causes of the problem and fix those slowly and clearly.
Copying
A few maxims, from my experience:
Copying without understanding is dangerous.
Achieving something without understanding is accidental.
Achieving something with understanding is repeatable.
Copying something you’ve seen someone else do, without understanding of how and why they were doing it, is mindless ignorance.
Who is responsible for the consequences? The copier or the person being copied?
Let’s consider an example that is topical in dressage today. Rider A is successful. She rides her horses deep. I also want success. Therefore I must ride my horses deep. In this thinking we have not understood why Rider A is doing this and we don’t know how this relates to success. We only think we know what to do (that which we see). It could be that this action is entirely unsuited to our own circumstances (often because we haven’t understood them either!)