Do You Claim Your Victories As Well As Your Mistakes?

Typically at CEC each week there is a new lesson plan. The instructors teach this lesson to all the jumping classes (as is appropriate or can be modified to fit varying skill levels and horses). It's great because it means no matter when your lesson or who is teaching, you can feel confident that everyone is working on the same concepts across the board.

This is also nice for me as an instructor because it means less work and more confidence. Kris has years of skill and practice at both riding and teaching so I know whatever lessons she chooses are going to be great for helping my students to learn and grow. 

But every once in a while I am in a position to create my own jumping lesson plan and sometimes that is really fun. 

The Scenario

I had three riders coming to this jumping lesson. Two of them are good friends of mine, and the other is one of my regular students who is high school aged. Two of the three riders are notoriously hard on themselves in terms of self-criticism and one has recently been concerned with her jumping form. 

I was looking to create a lesson plan that would primarily be very fun. All 3 riders needed a reminder that this is supposed to be fun and enjoyable. I also wanted this lesson to be able to boost their confidence in their own skills. And I wanted to set it up that they could work specifically on form.

Sometimes knowing what the goal should be or what you want to work on is the hard part of decision making. I already knew what we needed, it was just a matter of coming up with something to fit the bill. 

The Lesson Plan

I set up a single cross-rail in the middle of the long edge of the arena. Lots of space for the approach, easy straight line, no hard corners before or after. As the lesson progressed I would change the jump after each round of jumping. It was a cross-rail first, then a plank, an oxer, a wider oxer, and a three bar oxer. 

We so often work on track and pace, how to see and find good distances, that I didn't really want that to be a factor this time. Distance still had to be part of the equation, but I didn't want it to be the focal point. By setting up only a single jump with a simple approach I was hoping to leave a lot of room to think about form before, during, and after the jump. 

I also wanted the riders to really have to focus and get good results out of a single jump. I think often if we have a full course we may flub the first jump or the last jump, and have to move on to think about the rest of the course.

Not getting mentally stuck on past mistakes is a great thing to learn, but I wanted to create a one and done type setting. Almost like a puissance, but without the challenge of extreme height. Of course because it is a lesson format we would go back and fix things as needed, but the idea was to get a good jump the first time so we could move on to a different version of the jump.

The other piece to the puzzle was I used my phone to video everyone's first couple of successful jump rounds. The idea was to be able to give them immediate visual feedback after a jump. Sometimes it's hard to marry the feel of things with how it looks/what's actually happening. 

Much like how a dressage rider would use arena mirrors to help get feedback on position, that's how I wanted to use the videos. It's always good to get videos of your riding for feedback, but I feel like we rarely actually see them in a time or space to be able to react to what we are seeing, or remember how it felt.

After watching their video I wanted each rider to choose one thing that they would like to work on improving for the next go-round. Since I knew I had riders who are hard on themselves already, I also asked them to pick out one thing they felt they did well. 

I've talked in previous posts about how riders tend to compare themselves to each other. A nice side-effect of this lesson is hopefully for students to realize no matter how good a rider is, we all have mistakes and flaws we see in ourselves. 

Unexpected Discoveries

It doesn't particularly surprise me that everyone was quick to pick out their flaws but had a much harder time finding something they did well. It's human nature.

Also constructive criticism is encouraged as a learning tool, meanwhile self-congratulation is often viewed as boastful and distasteful. We unfortunately train ourselves and others to view faults and ignore things we do well.

As we went through this exercise, I did notice some semantic patterns that I found really interesting. 

When pointing out things to work on, they tended to phrase it like this: 

I didn't do (X) well
I sucked at (that)
I messed (this) up

Meanwhile, when picking out things they did well, the phrasing was like this: 

(This) went well
(That) was good
I liked (X)

Every single rider would claim ownership of their mistakes, but would phrase their accomplishments as a thing that happened or a statement of fact. And I'm positive I would have responded the same way. No one said, "I did (X) well" in those (or similar) words. 

We claim ownership of our mistakes and faults, but our speech indicates that we think of our achievements and victories as fluke or happenstance.

Retrospectively, I wish I had called this to everyone's attention during the lesson. Taking and replaying videos did eat up a good chunk of time so there wasn't as much room for chatting after a while. That's part of why we didn't do videos for all the jumps in the lesson, I was getting a little crunched on time. 

I think if you were going to try this with more than 3 riders you would want to have a helper and a second phone on hand to video and replay videos while the next rider is already going. 

I did have the chance to talk to both of my riders-who-are-also-friends after the lesson and point the semantic trend out to them. For my high-school-aged-rider, we touched on it as I was actively helping to rewrite her internal narrative to something more positive. 

If she would say something like "this sucked or I was really bad at this" as her thing to work on, I would help her put it into more constructive words like, "Ok so I hear that you want to try to do more of this on your next go around." 

And likewise when her positive thing was, "well X wasn't bad" I rephrased it to, "I did X well" and she would repeat, "yeah X was good." I did after that make her actually repeat it the way I had said it, to make a "I did ... well" statement out loud. 

Hindsight is 20/20 and I wish I had more explicitly told her why I was making her rephrase and repeat it this way, but oh well. Explaining things carefully doesn't always go over well with teenagers anyway. 

Phenomenal Results

I absolutely love how this lesson turned out. When I'm experimenting with a new plan I put careful thought into making a lesson in which people can learn and grow and feel confident, but sometimes things don't go how you expect. I'm happy this one went even better than I imagined. 

Everyone had fantastic rides and all 3 told me how much fun they had. Main goal achieved!

One of the riders was more experienced and was placed on a speedier training horse. She had a great confidence building ride and we had a chance to work on fine-tuning some aspects of form and position. She also had a chance to try a higher than normal jump.

Another rider said she wanted to work on not rounding her shoulders for her next trip around. I suggested that instead of focusing on pulling her shoulders back, think about pushing her sternum up. Because you can actually do the former without the latter but you need both.

She was laughing at the end of that round because she was exaggerating the movement. It felt funny to her, but it looked great from the ground. I was glad to have videos ready to show her that it didn't look funny at all. It looked fantastic and her jumps turned out great too.

The last rider's breakthrough was perhaps the most fun to watch. The thing she picked out to work on was getting tossed around and falling all over after the jump (her words not mine). What happens is that once she realized that the jump distance was not going to be perfect she would stiffen and freeze up and sort of leave the horse to figure it out on his own.

My recommend was to try to not give up or throw it away as a lost jump, but still do what you can to make the best of it and go with what you get. I'm not even sure that's super great advice because it's not a very concrete thing you can "do" but she really figured it out!

What happened was she figured out how to loosen up and really go with her horse. The jump distances weren't always better. Some of the jumps were really ugly in fact. But I was so happy with her progress because she wouldn't get tossed around or jarred nearly so badly even on very awkward jumps.

She told me at one point that she forgot there was a jump coming up because she was just having so much fun going fast. She's a pretty timid rider so fun going fast is really atypical for her. In her case that's fantastic! I really hope she can hang on to even a fraction of the relaxation she learned  because it really will help her so very much.

I'm really proud of all three students but also myself for creating such a successful lesson for what we were wanting to achieve. It's moments like these that make me really happy to be an instructor in addition to a rider.

The Take Away

Based on the lesson I had planned, the take away should have been to have someone video your rides. Take a break in your ride to check out how it looks from the ground and use real time, immediate visual feedback as a powerful learning tool. 

But quite by accident, I discovered there is a totally different takeaway here. 

Make sure you are as good at identifying what you are doing well as you are at picking out what you've done wrong. This takes practice! Maybe train your friends to ask you for one of your successes each time you mention a mistake. 

But also, be mindful of your word choices. Be sure to claim your victories as much as your flaws. Deliberately use the word "I" to take ownership of the things you have done well. So often we think the bad rides are all our fault and the good rides are just something that happened by chance.

That's not true! We can re-train our brains to speak differently and ultimately think and believe differently.

One of the trainers at CEC always likes to say "Success builds confidence and confidence builds success" (or something close to that.) 

We work to build successes and confidence for our horses in their jumping abilities so plan to do the same for yourself. It may seem like a silly and small thing but I promise, just try it and you will see big improvements in both your riding and your ability to have fun.