"First of all, I want to say that, for me and many other people, Ride With Your Mind ® (RWYM) is many, many things....Secondly I want to say that whilst I will be as factually accurate as I can, this is my personal view, having been coached in RWYM for nearly 30 years and having coached it myself for 18 years." Olivia Pollard

 

RWYM is the brain child of an amazing lady called Mary Wanless who, despite doing "what she was told"  by her riding coaches, could not get the horse she was riding to look like her coach's did. Frustrated, she gave up..went and explored many other non-related activities...and found they were related...and found that many of the things she was learning about explained the huge gap between what good riders said they were doing, mentally and physically...and what they were actually doing. 

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People who are good at what they do "suffer" from 'expertise induced amnesia'- this means that they are not aware of the entirety of what they are doing as much of the processing has become part of their 'unconscious competence' or their autopilot - what they can do without thinking about it. If you come from the horse world, how many times have you heard the coach say "Relax!", "I'm just sitting here!" ..I even saw Lucinda Green saying in a FB video "Let your body go all floppy..!" to get the horse to relax.... Now, if you truly let your body go floppy, you will slide off your horse..pretty quickly...This is NOT what good riders are doing...yet we get told this all the time. IF you aren’t already in the horse world, you might imagine how easy it is now to drive a car...but do you remember your first lesson? It was anything but easy! For my younger readers, imagine what it is like trying to get your parent or carer to take a decent selfie(I definitely can’t do this!) or text only with your thumbs (or this ) or keep up with the gazillions of notifications (or this !!) you get every day.... NOT SIMPLE..until it is!

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I said  "suffer" because this is an inevitable and necessary part of learning a skill...if you had to think about every single tiny part all the time, you would never become good at it...there is a limited amount our brains can process so we NEED to chunk information together and our autopilot is very important...HOWEVER..this is no good if you are trying to coach someone what to do...you have to be able to pick apart the skill, teach it in little chunks..so that your pupil can learn the first few pieces, practise it until it becomes part of their autopilot, then you give them some more chunks :). So a big part of RWYM is the HOW of actually learning ANYTHING...which makes it an incredibly useful transferable skill…(you can apply what you learn with us to every other area of your life..wish someone had explained this to me while I was still at school, that’s for sure!)

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In RWYM, we are learning alongside our horse or pony partner and we also learn a lot about how horses learn…and not just horses but dogs and other animals (including humans…) and about how important the learning environment is. We can learn about how good and bad stress affects concentration (think excitement or anger…both are pretty distracting) and we can show you and play around with different ways of getting learning across – for example learning by association (when my teacher is in a good mood, we get cake in class), by consequence (how many times would you touch a hot pan?) by observation ( as a toddler you will have walked how your family/carers did), by emotion (ideally through curiosity and trust rather than fear) , by problem solving (How do I get the biscuits down off the top shelf without making a sound?), by testing (Will I get told off if I do that..?). Many of the things we use to teach horses what we would like them to do work surprisingly well on us too..:) 

 

As you might expect from a technique called Ride With Your MIND, many of the skills we use are mental ones. So many people I have coached over the years really struggle to concentrate…to make realistic, achievable plans, to see those plans through, to control that inner voice to make sure it’s helping us, to get rid of unhelpful mental habits, to be nice to themselves and others when things go wrong..some of us struggle when things go right too!We can show you how to learn techniques to calm yourself and your horse, how to learn to concentrate, how to make a realistic plan and carry it out, how to deal with both success and failure, how to NOTICE what is going on INSIDE your head and how to make it help you to achieve your goals, instead of getting in your own way (like so many of us do!)

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A big part of RWYM is what the parts that make a good rider actually are, right from the beginning..what Mary calls the A,B,Cs of riding..This is where good biomechanics come in….the better we sit, the easier we are to carry, the more we can influence the horse in a way that is good for both of us! And sitting better for us, always means using our bodies in a way that is straighter and stronger, more efficient, more in tune with how our bodies have evolved to function… For example, how many of us spend hours of our life sitting down? Or hunched over a computer or folded over a mobile phone? How many of us either have back ache or are heading that way? Human bodies evolved to move…our sedentary, modern life is literally killing us! (Squatting to eat meals uses our thigh muscles and helps our heart – sitting down is bad for our health and yet most of us spend most of our days doing just that…. ) We will teach you about to create and control forces in your fascial network (the substance that wraps every single bone and muscle in your body) and how to do the same thing in the horse….I think of RWYM as like the old Heineken adverts…reaching that parts that other hobbies don’t! This can help reduce backaches (this is starting surprisingly young…I had a 7 year old client with backache!!), prevent injury, increase strength and range of motion, increase aerobic fitness…(you’ll be running to the muck heap!!)  You will also become more in touch with your body and more in tune with your body….it’s an amazing thing to experience. This process, called interoception,  as well as helping your riding, will help you in other sports, dealing with past and present trauma, in dealing with stress in other parts of your life and in finding your happy place!

 

I know that’s a lot of words..but as you’re not sitting in the room with me so I can SHOW you what I am talking about, I hope this is at least a start.. I’d love to talk to you about about inattentional blindness, how important exquisite timing is when we are teaching our horses, how they are more logical than we are and about the importance of the Vagus nerve and whether purple really suits Apache and if the other horses have worked out that Ted is my favourite..and if Ted is actually benefitting from that or not..!

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I look forward to meeting you very soon – come and find your happy place with us…and see if you can spot the deliberate mistake in the previous paragraph!

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Liv and the team😊

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The pictures below show a round backed rider, a rider in neutral spine and a hollow rider..can you see the differences? Which one would you rather carry?