Don’t feed the trolls. Or to paraphrase; don’t waste your energy worrying about what the bad guys are doing, because, as we all know, energy follows thought. I have been on a fairly steep learning curve this year in various ways, and one of my newly acquired and necessary skills is not to feed the dark side in any way, with energy or attention.
Dont feed the trolls. Every time we post a completely negative image of a horse ridden incorrectly, whether it is to stir up outrage or simply to dissect the ‘finer’ points of training, we are creating three inadvertent effects.
One is that we are exposing this image of incorrect training to a whole plethora of people who may not have seen it otherwise. If there are 500 people on my friends list, that is 500 people that have been exposed to a incorrect photo unnecessarily. Wouldn’t I rather ensure that those 500 people are exposed to the best most beautiful example I can find?
No photo is perfect, of course not. And not every photo of every old style SRS rider or every ODG is perfect.
But how much better to discuss nuance that would lead towards perfection rather than just complaining again and again about the head cranked in and the flinging legs.
Don’t feed the trolls. All we see in Horse and Hound and the other trade rags are horses held behind the vertical with cranked nosebands and flinging forefeet. If the general horse people don’t read other material and don’t go back to the old books where we can find the good photos, and the correct pictures, they may well never have seen a single image of a horse moving correctly.
And what is more, they don’t even understand that lack in their education.
When gold medals are won, it is a natural assumption to think that any image of that gold medal wining horse must portray the most correctly moving horse in the world moving correctly. How do we explain to those who don’t understand the fundamentals and have never seen correct that actually it is the most successful horse in the world, not the most correct; that they are simply the most successful horse/rider combination from a selection of horses and riders chasing a false paradigm.
Operating within a false paradigm
How do we explain to those who don’t know any different that this riding that is so highly rewarded in this current era actually causes horses to break down long before their time?
It is up to those who do know better to share the best possible images, and to keep explaining in a clear, concise and kind way why these better images are correct and beautiful and harmonious. It is up to those who do know better to keep teaching, with positive emphasis. People learn much better when they feel, relaxed, encouraged and safe. So rather than making them feel stupid, we have to teach, not preach. If people ask me why I ride the way I do, then I do my best to share what I have learned; as I do for the barefoot husbandry.
It is my duty and pleasure to help others on their journey.
The second problem with showing incorrect images is that our subconscious just absorbs those images. Our primitive brain doesn’t discriminate between good and bad images, it just retains whatever visual information it is exposed to.
- We retain 80% of what we see, 20% of what we read, and 10% of what we hear
- Visuals are processed 60,000X faster than text
This means the picture of the incorrect horse has gone in and been filed before we even get a chance to analyse it. As we stare at it, picking it apart, the details of that image are going in even farther. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use pictures as a visual aid to learning, but that we need to be scrupulous about how we use them. We need to ensure that we are exposed to many more good images than bad; so that it is the good images which are normalised and internalised.
We need to get over ourselves and accept that our analytical brain is simply not as quick as the lizard brain. We need to train our eyes so that the good images still have the ability to make us feel happy and incorrect images of uncomfortable stressed horses make us feel uncomfortable.
Think of Tarantino’s film “Kill Bill”. At the beginning the gore and violence is shocking. By the battle scene at the end, a bleak homage to the darkest of Samurai cinema, the violence is choreographed like a cartoon and we are strangely immune to the horror.
Tarantino is a master of manipulation of the human psyche.
So ideally we need to see at least 3 good images to every single poor image. The good images don’t need to be perfect, but they need to be near enough to good balance that we can see the next step might be better.
The third part of the problem is more subtle and a bit woo woo energy.
Energy follows thought.
We all know this. It’s why your mother always say “Oh I was just thinking about you” when you phone her, it’s how the dog knows you are coming home, long before he can possibly hear the car, it’s how the horse always makes sure he is at the far end of the field if you are in a foul mood from work, before you have even parked the car.
By sharing, discussing, dissecting a picture, be it with love or outrage, we are directing energy towards the subject of the photo. In the energetic universe, we are feeding them, powering them up. How much better it would be for all of us if we could direct our energy to power up the good teachers, the shining examples, the worthy mentors. And starve the others of attention and therefore energy.
That simple change would create the most amazing positive feedback loop.
I am doing other, to the best of my ability, and shining as bright as I can in my little corner. And I just hope the light from my horses’ eyes is warm enough that people feel the difference and are drawn towards it. Then we can show them how to do better.
And that shift in my mindset had provided a much better head space for me and the horses to work in. Riding is the ultimate martial art. And all martial arts are about discipline of the mind first.
If I tell you not to think about pink elephants, what have you just done? It is impossible to not do something without thinking about doing it. Rather than not doing what the bad guys do, do more of the good stuff.
Just do better.
Very true- thanks for the reminder 🙂