The Importance of Knowledge & Action

In my last post, I touched on how research has proven that there is no fast track to becoming a high achiever. It is all about practice and most importantly high-quality practice of 10,000 hours or more. You may be thinking if that is the case, why do we hear about so called child prodigies and how do some people attain expert level, and others do not despite putting the same hours in?

In the case of child prodigies, studies have shown they have compressed enormous quantities of practice into a brief period from an incredibly early age, this has essentially given them a head start. With regards the latter, the key aspect is the quality of practice. I have some lovely riders who wanted sessions because despite riding for twenty plus years, were frustrated that they were not improving. The reason for this lack of progress was because they were missing key components in their knowledge.

Experts in any field have amazing levels of knowledge accrued over years of experience and high-quality practice. Why is knowledge important? It is required for complex tasks where there are lots of variables. Equestrian sport falls into this category.

The complexity comes in the changing variables. Think about the number of variables you must deal with in many real-life situations. The ability to sift through all that information within seconds to make a decision would be virtually impossible. This rapid escalation of variables is known as Combinatorial explosion.

I have experienced that for myself when I was asked to talk through what I was doing whilst schooling a horse. I was often making multiple aids with regards to what I was thinking, doing & reacting in one moment. It was impossible to convey them all in real time before moving onto the next stride. It really hit home as to how many of my responses were automatic, and although it was helpful to give pointers of what to look for and avoid, the reality was far more complex because of the often-subtle relationship between all those factors.

Extensive studies have found top performers and experts in their fields can take all the information they have acquired over years of experience (motor & perceptual skill, theory, patterns, cues) and then compress it by decoding the meaning of those patterns to create a quick decision or action. This chunking of patterns bypasses this combinatorial explosion through advanced pattern recognition. It recognizes which patterns will not get us our desired outcome and ignore them!

This is not something you are born with, it must be lived and learned through practice. Some top performers may refer to it as a sixth sense and may not be aware of how they even come to that decision. These skills & strategies are so deeply ingrained through years of practice that they cannot tell you how they did it. They might be able to tell you what they were thinking at the time or the importance of what they were doing but cannot give you any insight into the mechanics of the movements and all those subtle cues that formed that decision at that time. It is done unconsciously. This huge bank of quality knowledge gives them lots of strategies/tools & through practice they know exactly what they need at any one point without even really thinking about it!

In my former years whilst training, I have had some amazing rider’s/trainer’s coach me; but what I found was that the focus was on the horse, jumping exercises and dressage movements. The problems I was experiencing were due to me, giving confusing signals, lack of true understanding regards the biomechanics of the horse & myself which resulted in below par performance & poor decision making.

So why were those skills & knowledge (or lack of) not addressed by those trainers? I realized that it is because they were not on their radar, these skills were lodged in their unconscious & had effectively been forgotten about. That knowledge had been unintentionally locked away, to be drawn upon as needed in a similar way to how the rest of us would breathe.

This was further enforced when I was gifted some lessons with a trainer whose methodology was different to any others I had met. I was curious as to why he took this approach. He explained that through ill health and injury he had no longer been able to get on his client’s horse’s when there was an issue. He had tried to find a solution by taking his own trained riders along to clinics to ride them instead but that had not worked. Why? Because when he asked for feedback to help the owners understand why there had been a change in their horses, these expert riders struggled to explain exactly what they had done. Their skill sets were at such a level that they were executed unconsciously.

This experience made him rethink his approach. Riders could only make informed judgements and take the correct action if they were furnished with all the skills and knowledge he had acquired and taken for granted for so many years. Until riders understood the minutiae, they were never going to become truly accomplished and the all-important quality practice would be missing. So, the focus was directed on understanding rider biomechanics, horse conformation & awareness of correct movement.

He would spend hours showing videos of expert riders and their horses, pointing out the tiniest movements they were doing with their bodies, explaining exactly how and why those intricate adjustments were crucial to success, indiscernible to the eye. He referred to them as your tools. It was like being invited into a vault full of hidden treasures, the good stuff that you normally did not see!

He had grasped that it was no use on focusing on the training process of the horse, the Scales of Training, if you had not got the foundation stones to be able to successfully implement it & that was only just the beginning!

“I can give you the tools, but the hardest part is learning which ones to use when” was a favourite phrase.

That came down to hours of quality practice & that is the beauty and challenge of being an effective coach. A skilled coach can reduce the time it takes for a rider to become competent by helping them discover these skill sets so they can reach the same degree of technical excellence as others, able to perform effortlessly, making the right decisions and reaching their desired goals. If a rider’s practice is less than perfect & there are large chunks of knowledge missing then the reality is the process will be far slower, or the end goal may never be achieved. Those 10,000 hours evolve into 20,000, 30,000 until you run out of hours! The bottom line is:

The power of knowledge & sustained high-quality practice= good decision making/actions = a successful outcome!