Listening to your gut

In the days since my last post, here’s what I’ve learned: sometimes you need to manage your internal state—and changing that can make a lot of difference—but sometimes your internal state is telling you that something external needs to change. Translation: sometimes you need to listen to your gut.

While Lupin and I did make some progress with the cow, the tying, and ourselves in certain ways, our sessions did not continue to head in a direction that felt right to me. For one thing, no matter how much progress we seemed to make, Lupin continued to pull back day after day. We were definitely being successful in conjuring a primal fear to confront, but we seemed to be less successful in actually dealing with it.

I began to sense, in fact, that things were unraveling. I knew I couldn’t walk away from this issue now that it was in front of us, but I was concerned that it was going to start to destroy our relationship, and I could see us going back to the brief and bizarre period during which things had gotten so bad that, while I could do highly advanced moves with Lupin, I couldn’t lead him in from the field.

So I retreated some. We started working on tying in a totally different location. Once again we used the blocker tie so he could move his feet, and I confronted Lupin with a series of potentially scary things, each time starting small and close and then getting to where I could run at him with the thing from a distance. I used violently flapping plastic bags right up in his face; I had a friend run at him shouting and wearing a tarp cape; we took turns banging trash can lids right next to him.

I had done some of this before with Lupin without much effect; now, re-energized by his encounters with the cow, Lupin pulled back—sometimes quite violently and for several repetitions. We kept the stimulus up each time until he came back forward, lowered his head, looked directly at the thing instead of turning away, or licked and chewed. Since we were able to control the stimulus (and therefore both the extent of Lupin’s fear and when the stimulus stopped), we began making rapid progress.

Not only did Lupin pull back less and less far with each repetition, he began to get curious and mouth/lick the objects after he came back forward, even though they continued to scare him a little when they were in use. He also stayed very connected to me and looked to me for reassurance in a way that he hadn’t done much around the cow: there, he tended to stay focused on the cow and on getting away. That was what my gut had been responding to.

Being a recovering perfectionist, I try not to get too hung up on progress simply for the sake of reaching a goal, but sometimes a lack of progress is a good indicator that your strategy needs to change. Ultimately, it was the lack of progress that confirmed what my gut had been telling me and gave me the incentive to try something different.

The resulting change in Lupin has been huge. As soon as I saw the difference in the way he responded--not without fear, but with the ability to work through his fear--I finally understood what my gut had been telling me. The cow experience didn't look like learning; this does. And that gives me the motivation I need to commit to a long-term program (with plans to include bicycles, fake cows, llamas, and every potentially scary thing I can think of). I’m even resigned to the fact that I’m just going to have to buy a cow at some point.

But if we can work through a major confidence issue for Lupin, it’s worth the time, the effort, and even cow ownership. And the day that Lupin walks up and licks a cow? That will be priceless.

Joy, ease, and lightness

I’ve been working with Lupin on tying for the past week or so and, suffice it to say, it’s been emotionally challenging for both of us. The only way I’ve been able to push Lupin enough to really test his tying is by introducing a cow into the equation, and yeah, that’s done the trick alright. Lupin tends to have bits of unconfidence mixed with defiance that only come out every now and then, so I’m trying to intentionally provoke him a little so that we can deal with these issues in a controlled setting. But even with that, it’s been a little scary.

I’ve been concerned to keep both of us physically safe, and also concerned, as he plunges around on the end of the rope, that I am asking too much of my prey animal. Is it fair of me to ask Lupin, who is genuinely bothered by the cow, to stand tied on the outside of its pen?

But I learned in the Fast Track course that the only way to find out if you are doing the right thing for your horse is to try something and see what happens. There are no guarantees that you’ll get it right. In fact, it’s almost certain that a lot of the time you won’t. But as long as your intention is to do something for your horse rather than to him, you are on the right track even when you make mistakes.

My confidence that I am on the right track with this specific approach, however, was severely tested a couple of nights ago when, just as it seemed we had made real progress, Lupin suddenly blew his lid, started violently pulling back, and even flipped himself over, despite the fact that the blocker tie I used gave him a lot of slack when he needed it.

I had some dark hours of doubt after that. I back-pedaled and did more preparation playing games around the pen, and then I simulated tying by sitting on the fence myself and holding the rope. And I called my left-brain horse guru Alex to get an outside perspective and some moral support.

All of that helped. But what really helped was when I came across a line in one of Eckhart Tolle’s books: “Is there joy, ease, and lightness in everything you do?” I thought about this. What I was doing with Lupin had begun to feel like gutting it out and being stuck on a path that I couldn’t get off of more than enjoying my horsemanship journey.

Today I decided to go out with the attitude of keeping joy, ease, and lightness in our entire session. To me, that translates this way:

Joy.

Staying in and enjoying the present moment ('I'm getting to play with my horse!') instead of focusing on the goal (in this case worrying about getting Lupin to be totally okay with tying). This helped me meet Lupin where he is right now and be pleased with what he is offering and able to do, rather than concerned about what he can’t yet do ('and oh my god! what if he never learns?!'). Less focus on the goal also made it easier to do a lot of approach and retreat—accepting less and rewarding more.

Ease.

I can’t expect zero brace in my horse if I have brace in myself. I focused on my own rhythm and relaxation so that Lupin could have some chance of finding those things himself. We practiced, for instance, turning slowly away from the cow with fluidity rather than beating a hasty retreat.

Lightness.

For me this is mental lightness—not making such a big deal out of everything and having a little bit more of a playful spirit, even in the face of a scary cow. From Lupin, I want physical lightness (which is a good indication of how much he’s trusting me and following my lead). Interestingly, when I focus on his lightness—when I make that the goal—I start to feel more like I’m dancing with my horse and less like we’re confronting something scary.

And everything felt so much better. I was able to problem solve more creatively: I experimented with reverse psychology by demanding a really fast backup in the yo-yo game so that going backwards fast from the cow would start to seem less appealing to Lupin (since it wasn’t his idea any more). I also started to want to be more engaged in the process rather than keeping my distance: I put the rope around a post so that I could control it more rather than relying on the blocker tie I had been using. And I felt much more connected to Lupin throughout the whole session.

So my new goal is to have joy, ease, and lightness in myself and see if maybe, just maybe, Lupin starts to have more of that as well. Whatever happens, though, this way is bound to be a helluva lot more fun.

Marian's Manifesto

As with everything in Parelli and in this blog, this manifesto applies to more than horsemanship. Just because it seemed like time . . .

Be yourself, wholly and without controlment. Own who you are, every bit of it, down to the most embarrassing detail. Act in a way that you feel good about without reference to the opinions of others. Be as excited about what you don’t know as you are about what you do know.

Accept what is and look for the good that is already there. If change seems necessary, ask what you can realistically do and don’t feel bad about what you can’t. Before you fight something, ask whether you created the fight through your own need to control, or to win, or to be right.

Practice non-attachment to outcomes. Do your best and be satisfied with that, no matter how imperfect. Trust the process and that you are exactly where you need to be within it. Make fluidity of movement and your relationship with others your primary goals in everything you do. Focus on the joy of doing rather than the triumph of accomplishment.

Live in the present moment. Breathe. Pay attention to sensory input. Look around. Revel in all the amazing things your body can do. Ask whether there is anything at this moment of your life that you can’t handle. Look at things with curiosity, as a child does, rather than with fear or judgment.

Make sleep a priority. Sleep when you are happy because it feels good. Sleep when you are sad because then you really need it. Never, ever feel like a slacker for taking a nap.

Leveling the playing field

"If you look for the bad in horses and other people, you're apt to find it, but if you look for the good in them, you're apt to find that instead. But you can't do that unless you also look for the good in yourself."

--John Baar

I went to a yoga class this summer while I was on vacation, and the teacher had us do a meditation on loving kindness. It started with visualizing someone you love. Then you direct that love toward yourself, then a stranger, then someone you're having difficulty with at the moment. I was completely stuck at the second step. I'd never even considered what a self that I could love might look like. I realized that generally I see myself as an amalgam of skills and talents that are in constant need of improvement, and I focus almost exclusively on the parts that need improving. Good lord! Was this also the way I see and treat my horse?

Right about this time I also started reading a book that a couple of friends had recommended. Titled The Introvert Advantage, it bills itself as an effort to level the playing field between introverts and extroverts. The author contends that, in a world where extroverts both out-number and out-speak introverts, it is their values that are considered the norm, and introverts internalize those values and consequently feel inferior when they don't live up to them.

I felt that I was pretty in touch and okay with my introvert nature, but I read the book anyway. And it was, I'll confess, really nice to have someone validating the way I often react to situations, even if I didn't feel that I needed the validation. The author discusses everything from the way that introverts have to budget energy to the way that their brains actually use a different neural route to process information, thereby making them slower but deeper thinkers. Most of all, though, she argues for all the important things that introverts bring to the table, including "the ability to focus deeply, a propensity for thinking outside the box, the strength to make unpopular decisions, and the potential to slow the world down a notch."

It was fascinating to study the physiological differences between extroverts and introverts, and I read the book with a lot of interest, too, because it discusses right-brain and left-brain types, so it has a lot of overlap with Parelli.

But it wasn't until a few weeks later that all this mushed around in my brain and changed something fundamental there. I realized that I'm always hard on myself not only because I focus on the skills I don't have, but because I give myself absolutely no credit for anything that comes easily to me.

Here's how I tend to operate: I find people I admire—people who have skills that I don't. I then compare myself to them, giving them full points for all of their skills, whether they are innate to them or not, and myself points only to the extent that I compare with this person. Now, because I'm only comparing myself to people I admire, and only comparing myself on their terms, who's going to come up short?

So, taking one particular friend that I admire as an example, if I were to assign actual points to the way that I'm subconsciously scoring things, here's how it would stack up:

My friend	Me
+1 reliable	+1 reliable
+1 willing to try new things	+1 willing to try new things
+1 good under pressure	+1 persistent, keep at it
+1 hands-on skills
+1 decisive
+1 confident
+1 can think and act quickly
+1 dedicated mother
+1 nurse/firefighter
+1 tolerant of family
+1 assertive
TOTAL = 11	TOTAL = 3

And actually, this is a generous score, because what I'm really doing is not only finding myself lacking in all the things I admire in my friend, but also assigning all the negative corresponding traits to myself. Thus, my naturally extroverted friend gets points for things like being able to think quickly, even though that's not necessarily a skill she worked for, while I beat myself up for being such a slow thinker. So my subconscious score really looks something more like this:

My friend	Me
+1 reliable	+1 reliable
+1 willing to try new things	+1 willing to try new things
+1 good under pressure	+1 persistent, keep at it
+1 hands-on skills	–1 inept
+1 decisive	–1 indecisive
+1 confident	–1 second-guessing
+1 can think and act quickly	–1 slow to think or act
+1 dedicated mother	–1 overwhelmed by the idea of a family
+1 nurse/firefighter	–1 largely useless
+1 tolerant of family	–1 intolerant of noise, commotion, and demands
+1 assertive	–1 non-assertive
TOTAL = 11	TOTAL = –5

Now, I'm not saying it's a good idea to compare yourself to others, but if you are going to, you should darn well use the same scoring method for both of you! I realized that I needed to give myself points for my innate—if less flashy—qualities, rather than just seeing my differences in a purely negative light.

I thought of a particular incident when this friend lost patience with my non-assertiveness in loading my horse. She was absolutely right that my problem in that instance was a lack of assertiveness, but that didn't, as I initially thought, negate all of my leadership skills.

Yes, I needed to be more assertive (a constant theme for me), but it wasn't just unwillingness to be assertive that caused me to back off. It was also because I was taking the long view of my relationship with my horse and putting that before the goal, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that it could be a confidence issue for him, and I was willing to be patient. I started to see that these are positive traits in me that, in the long term, stand me in good stead. 

That doesn't mean I don't have room to improve and become more balanced, but I'm not, as I initially thought, standing at the bottom of a mountain of achievement with no worthwhile skills. Rather, I have a different skill set and a different leadership style.

After that realization, I re-did my comparison, and here's what I came up with:

My friend	Me
+1 reliable	+1 reliable
+1 willing to try new things	+1 willing to try new things
+1 good under pressure	+1 persistent, keep at it
+1 hands-on skills	+1 conceptual / analytical skills
+1 decisive	+1 thorough / don’t rush to conclusions
+1 confident	+1 stick to my principles even when unsure
+1 can think and act quickly	+1 patient / wait to understand the bigger picture
+1 dedicated mother	+1 dedicated horse-woman
+1 nurse/firefighter	+1 teacher/trainer
+1 tolerant of family	+1 tolerant of living on my own
+1 assertive	+1 fair-minded / give the benefit of the doubt to others
TOTAL = 11	TOTAL = 11

Once I plotted this out, I realized that while I do admire assertive people who can act quickly, I also really appreciate people who, for instance, think generously of me and are patient with me, and by dint of that fact, I’ve found a new way to appreciate myself for those same tendencies. I've found, in other words, a positive self that I can love. 

I also began to realize that life choices don't make one person inferior to another. Take the example of living situations. I’ve always thought that anyone who lives with a family could probably just as easily live alone because, from my perspective, living alone is easy. Meanwhile, the thought of having a family is pretty intimidating to me, so I’m always impressed by people who go that route.

Yet the fact that I don’t choose to have a family doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it, any more than the fact that my friend doesn’t choose to live alone means that she can’t. It’s just a question of having different predilections, neither one inherently better than the other.

If this all sounds obvious, that’s good, because that’s the way it should be. Everyone should walk around realizing that they aren’t less than other people just because they have a different skill set. The trick is to know that AND to believe it. 

Happily, as I thought about my view of my horse, I realized that I'm not actually as hard on him as I am on myself. I do tend to be critical, but when I think about the things I love about him, it's his curiosity, his understated playfulness, and his confidence—all things that are innate in him, and that luckily I have not discounted just because of that fact. I have, however, recently been appreciating him and loving him more.

Don't make it personal.

This is what I've been telling myself for years, but without any perceptible change in my tendency to be reactive. Taking things personally is, I believe, the root of so much of our emotional baggage, and yet so few things actually are personal. But knowing that doesn't change your perception.

Lupin and I just got back from our first Parelli clinic since Colorado, and it was astoundingly refreshing. I forget, for one thing, how nice it is just to be around Parelli people, who are so calm about things that normal horse folk freak out about (like a horse left loose in the ring during a lesson). And then there's the delightful feeling of your brain really processing things as you hit one A-ha moment after another.

I had a lot of A-ha moments courtesy of Dan. Many of these are cumulative: you've heard it before, you've felt it in action, and yet it can be a long time before it clicks in your brain in a way that is habit-changing rather than just intellectually interesting.

In terms of taking things personally, I watched Dan give a private lesson where the horse was being super dominant. Dan showed the owner how to apply an action/consequence way of thinking to deal with the horse: the horse still gets to choose what to do, but certain choices have consequences. You're not punishing the horse, or forcing him to do something different; you're just showing him that sometimes he needs to make a better choice. So, for instance, rather than chasing the horse out of his space, Dan turned his back on the horse and gave a big yawn and a bigger stretch that just happened to land on the horse's mouth.

Oh. Look what might happen when you stand too close. Action, consequence.

The next morning, we were horse-shoed up, and Lupin was playing his usual game of creeping forward between me and whoever was talking. As I listened to Dan, part of my brain noticed how difficult it was for me to ask Lupin to back up, and I realized that's because I was thinking of being assertive with Lupin in personal terms: that he was challenging me, and doubting my leadership, and I had to prove it to him. Yes, that's probably what was going on, but for Lupin there's no emotion in that--it is truly just a game. For me it's an assault on my sense of myself. Sometimes that makes me angry ("How dare he!"), but more often it just makes me tired ("I can't believe I have to stand up for myself again.")

Note that just the physical action of backing Lupin up takes very little effort--in fact, I was sitting down, and all I had to do was lift my stick. It's the psychic energy of powering up for a perceived emotional confrontation that's draining.

Later, on board, I was asking Lupin to stay on the circle using John's method: if the horse comes off the circle, you get very buzzy--your energy comes up, you use your aids quickly and with a lot of noise--so that the horse wants to get back on the circle where you're calm and quiet. Lupin took this a little personally--or at least got impulsive. I just kept playing my game as he went up to a trot, then a canter, then finally back to down to a trot. But I noticed on one circle toward the end a slight hesitation: I waited longer than I should because I didn't want to apply the aid. Maybe it was because I wanted to believe he was with me, or because I was tired of being assertive, but there it was again: that emotional reluctance to be assertive.

It was a quick mental fix for me, though, when I thought about the action/consequence idea. You don't have to make being assertive a personal issue, and it doesn't have to cost you emotional energy. As soon as I started thinking just in terms of the actions, I had no problem: Lupin comes off the circle, I use my leg. There's no emotion there, whether it be hope for Lupin to do better, worry that I'm doing wrong, feeling inadequate because Lupin isn't with me. It's just an action and a consequence. The circle game was a good one for this because it is so clear and simple.

I'll be curious to see how this realization continues to work for me. I think a lot of the strength of it comes from the fact that it's hard to work off of negative stimuli ("don't make it personal") and much easier to change a habit when you have a positive model to substitute in place of your old mental habit (action/consequence rather than provocation/emotional reaction).

Thanks to Parelli, as always, for giving us so many new positive models.

"That's just your ego getting in the way."

This was something that John said to us when we were having emotional difficulty with our horses, or when we were experiencing frustration during our sessions in Arena Grande. At the time, I felt both the fairness of that assessment and the increased frustration that came with my inability to do anything about it. It's one thing to know that your ego is getting in the way; it's quite another to get it back out of the way.

Ego--not just your vanity, but all the things that are wrapped up in your sense of identity and that can therefore make you feel vulnerable and defensive--is a huge roadblock on a horseman's journey. So a few months ago when a friend mentioned he was reading a book about dealing with your ego, I said, "That's exactly what I need."

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle is a sort of spiritual self-help book that is geared toward helping you be in the present moment without being mired in excessive analysis or emotion. Tolle's book is unlike anything I've read in its immediacy: rather than just telling you how to change your focus, the process of reading the book itself changes your focus so that you feel lighter and happier just by reading it.

And it's absolutely what every horseman needs. It helps you understand how to be more like a horse by living with the horse in the present moment. And it gives you a road map out of resentment and frustration by showing you how to get outside of the stories you tell yourself that create those emotions.

In that sense, it builds on Linda Parelli's strategy of stepping back and saying, "How interesting . . . ": rather than just giving you a strategy for when you're already emotional, it gives you a whole new way of looking at the world that--hopefully--helps you not to go there in the first place.

I know I'll read this book again and again if only because reading it is like an active meditation that makes your thinking--and therefore the world--a better place.

Horseanality/Personality

As I pause and re-group between completing my Level 3 On Line and launching into my Level 3 Freestyle, I’m doing a little review of my Fast Track notes, and my plan is to do some blog posts on some of the main points that I’ve taken away from the course now that the dust has settled.

First off, I have become truly fascinated by horseanality and personality. I've appreciated the work Parelli has done on horseanality ever since it came out as being something that immediately clarified so much about how to understand and interact with different types of horses. But personality has always seemed a bit more muddy to me, partly because there's so much complex stuff out there on personality (who can even keep track of all the Myers-Briggs designations?), and partly because people just seem unnecessarily convoluted compared to horses.

So I was intrigued when John went over personality a bit on our last day. As I've mentioned before, because of horses, I've begun to see the benefits that thinking about personality can deliver: the ability to be a little kinder to yourself and others by seeing characteristics as just that--characteristics rather than limitations--and the opportunity to establish better relationships based on a better understanding of what motivates both yourself and other people.

But reading horseanalities and personalities doesn't come easily to me, so I've been really happy with the information Parelli has distributed. As far as horseanality goes, everyone involved with Parelli has seen these charts:

Click on charts to see a larger version.

But when it comes to similar breakdowns of personality, I haven't found much out there. Alex directed me to one Parelli instructor's blog that had the following personality chart:

Though things line up differently on this chart, there are some useful parallels here. Sanguine roughly equates to RBE, Choleric to LBE, Melancholic to RBI, and Phlegmatic to LBI. But the obvious limitation is that this chart sees half of the personalities in a purely negative light. The wonderful thing about the way Parelli views personalities and horseanalities is that each type has its challenges, but also its opportunities. You work with the horse/person you find to help them become more centered no matter what their type is (because any of the 4 types, taken to extremes, is going to become negative), but at the same time, you also consider what that horse or person is ideally suited to do or be, given their natural aptitude. And every quadrant has positive potential linked to its characteristics. Here are the horseanalities from this view:

So I'd like to add some (slightly less pretty and less detailed) charts that we got in class to help flesh out personality along similar lines:

Self-talk of the different personality types breaks down in the following way:

(I find this chart a little odd in that it implies LBE's are the clearly desirable personality; however, in terms of what their unconscious tells them they may indeed have fewer challenges.)

Left-brain extroverts and right-brain introverts are on the group/family axis: they are both oriented toward thinking in those terms, though the RBI's run the risk of over-sacrificing for the sake of the relationship.

Right-brain extroverts and left-brain introverts are both on the "self-centered" axis and are the two personality types that tend to butt heads. I can attest to this myself, as I'm an LBI who's had intimate dealings with two RBE's, and it's a situation built for frustration. RBE's tend to be unconfident and get emotional, which is a huge turn-off for LBI's who sit there and wonder to themselves what in the hell is wrong with these people that they can't just sit down and be calm and rational about things. Meanwhile, the RBE's read the LBI's calmness and reticency as not caring, which pisses the RBE's off because they don't understand how the LBI's can be so unfeeling. This whole situation causes the RBE's to go more extroverted and the LBI's to go more introverted, and nobody has much fun.

I find that I can understand and even move into the RBI and LBE quadrants sometimes, but I just don't get RBE's, so I'll be needing to get a good deal further along in my horsemanship journey before I even think about owning a RBE horse (though having a horse with such a horseanality would probably ultimately make me more tolerant of people with that personality, as I find myself a lot more forgiving of horses than I am of people).

Okay, one final personality chart, courtesy of my friend Alex, who is an absolute whiz at nailing other people's personalities. (Alex, incidentally, claims she is a RBE, but while I put a great deal of faith in her readings of people generally, I have trouble believing her reading of herself because I got on with her so well and saw no sign of her going emotional during the month we spent together, despite the fact that we were both under-going a lot of personal growth. It's possible, though, that Alex is just a very together RBE, though she would deny that as well.)

In any case, Alex and I spent a good chunk of our drive home from Colorado talking about personalities, and she explained that she factors body types into her readings as well. The following is how she pegs the different personality types, though I don't recall exactly how she described RBE's:

John did give us a couple of references for further research. Linda based her horseanality stuff on the work of her teacher Glynn Braddy, who came up with something called "The Elements of Man," though I haven't been able to find this. John said the closest book out there is called The Personality Compass by Diane Turner, which I've got on order.

2014 update: I've just taken Linda and Patrick Handley's Horsenality/Humanality course, about which I've begun blogging here.

I'm including below a brief and entertaining video we watched in class that illustrates the four humanalities by the Eysenk names:

 (1) sanguine=RBE
(2) choleric=LBE 

     (3) melancholic=RBI

   (4) phlegmatic=LBI

(Click where it says "Four Basic Personality Types" to watch a larger version on youtube—this video is subtitled.)