I found this extract whilst searching for answers to questions I have regarding developing my own riding skills. It is taken from The Mary Wanless Ride With Your Mind website (www.mary-wanless.com)
"The following is taken from the booklet ‘Learn With Your Mind’, self-published by Mary Wanless, and available from this website on paper or as an ebook. I really recommend reading this before taking lessons, as it will prepare you to become a good learner. It illuminates some if the inherent difficulties in teaching and learning, which sadly are amplified by the traditional culture of the horse world. It shows how we as coaches limit their effects or turn them to our advantage. School and life do not always equip us well as learners, and whilst we will do our best to help you, you will gain much more from your lessons – and gain it more quickly and easily – if you are well equipped to help yourself.
What Learning is
We have all been learning throughout our lives. Yet very few adults are good learners, retaining the learning ability of their early childhood. We expect learning to be much less challenging than it actually is – a fait accompli if we take the lessons. Often, we do not realise what a satisfying and exciting process learning can be when we become proactive and engage with it fully.
*Learning is change. Without change you always do what you always did, and always get what you always got.
*It requires your perceptions to become more refined. It is a process which increases your awareness.
*It happens when ‘news of difference’ enters the nervous system, i.e. when you perceive a difference which you had been blind to/anaesthetised to before.
*It often causes you to feel strange, and possibly quite uncomfortable.
*It may require you to pass through a stage in which you are no longer happy about your old way of doing something, but not yet at home in your new way of doing it.
*When you are ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’ you may also become confused for a while. Being willing to sit with confusion and paradox aids the learning process. It helps to appreciate that when your brain goes foggy, you are about to have a brain-storm which will make everything become clear!
*Learning happens when you become ‘conscious of your incompetence’ and discover how to become ‘consciously competent’. It is sometimes an exhilarating experience and sometimes a humbling experience.
*It happens when you become what you were not, both physically and mentally. For example, if you were an upper chest breather, you learn to become a diaphragmatic breather. If you were hollow- or round-backed you learn to sit in neutral spine. If you were crooked, you learn to become straight. If you were impatient, you learn to become patient. If you never set goals, you learn to set goals.
What Learning is not
Many of us emerge from school and other childhood learning situations with huge misconceptions about the learning process. I believe that the educational system fails most of us in this respect, even if (and perhaps especially if) we succeed academically.
*You do not automatically learn because you are taking lessons.
*Learning does not take place when you repeatedly do the same thing in the same way. The statement ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ encourages and rewards trying, which is not the same as learning. Trying happens when you throw yet more energy and muscle power at the problem without realising that the technique you are using is doomed to fail.
*Learning is not continuing to do what you already do, whilst expecting that your teacher will somehow get you to do it better.
*It is not being the passive recipient of a magic pill, and expecting that someone else can make you better.
*It is not the same as practice. Learning and improvement does not always result from practice, since practice makes perfect not what you think you are doing, or what you ought to be doing, but what you are actually doing. So you can practise bumping until you bump perfectly.
*Learning does not happen by attrition, i.e. by dripping water on the rock. Thus here is no such thing as half-an-hour’s-worth-of-sitting-trot-without-stirrups better.
What Stops Almost All of us Learning
These issues seem to be all but endemic in riders. They arise because the brain does not come with a user’s manual, and few of us discover how to use it well and how to operate a cybernetic learning process. It is undoubtedly possible not to limit yourself in the ways listed below, but you may need to do some radical re-thinking to free yourself from these ways of being.
*Always doing the same thing in the same way so that you perceive only sameness. This leads to the experience of being stuck on a plateau.
*Deleting the part of the feedback loop which flows from the horse to you.
*Accepting a series of labels that describe you and how you ride. Believing that this is how you are.
*Obeying the rules instead of paying attention.
*Going through the motions of specific exercises.
*Wanting a specific end result whilst being unwilling to pay attention to the process through which you get there. This is known as ‘endgaining’.
*Thinking not about the present, but about what just happened or what you think might happen.
*Worrying about the external world, and what other people are doing, or what they might be thinking about you.
*Paying attention only to the horse, or only to yourself, and not to the rider/horse interface.
*Talking to yourself a lot, especially in a critical, derogatory manner.
*Being unwilling to leave ‘home’ (which is a metaphor for the familiar), and to risk the unfamiliarity of strange new feelings.
*Not realising just how strange you will need to feel in order to make the necessary changes. (When you lose a filling, the hole in your tooth feels enormous but looks tiny. Thus the change in your riding which feels reasonable will look very small to your teacher, and to satisfy her you will need to make a change which feels enormous.)
*Judging anything strange as wrong.
*Lying to yourself. Not being willing to look at yourself objectively, and be honest about your starting point, and about your strengths and weaknesses"