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Lynn, Welcome to Creative spirits unleashed, where we talk about the dilemmas of balancing work and life and now here's your host. Lynn Carnes,
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welcome to the creative spirits. Unleash Podcast. I'm Len Carnes, your host. This episode includes dancing the tightrope. Chapter 14, commitment and chapter 15, curiosity. These are the first of two chapters in the book outlining the building blocks of self awareness. If you've listened this far, you've certainly heard me talk about the value of these inner tools, both commitment and curiosity, I decided to highlight the five building blocks of self awareness at this stage in my story, because I found myself not always showing up in pressure situations the way I would have liked to, it was clear to me that sometimes I could reach for my tools, and other times I had to reach for my rules. Awareness was the difference, but there was something more. For several weeks, I became more and more aware of my awareness. It was through this focused attention that I began to see that I fell off at different points of the five building blocks of self awareness. Sometimes it was at the level of being committed.
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Sometimes it was lack of curiosity, or one of the other three layers, which I dive into in the chapters to follow. I revisit the lessons in these chapters over and over again now, because they help me fine tune my awareness when I get off track. And the nature of the game is not being perfect all the time. It's about having lots of ways to get back on track.
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Speaking of curiosity, by the way, this podcast was created because of my budding curiosity to have different kinds of conversations. And you will hear about one of my early podcast guests, Warwick Schiller, who has been on his own journey of self discovery. He's mentioned in chapter 15, which has a special surprise in it. As always, I hope you enjoy this episode of creative spirits unleashed. And if you like it, please be sure to share it with your friends, your colleagues, others that you think might be interested and help me get the word out. Because this is a tough game guys getting the word out. There's a lot of competition out there, and the more you share it, the more it helps. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoy this podcast. Chapter 14, commitment a source of energy.
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Commitment provides an intangible, but very real source of energy to get something done in context of a self awareness journey, we have to first commit to learning things we have kept hidden, either intentionally or unintentionally. How willing Am I to understand more about my inner self? How willing Am I to understand my impact on others, as with so many factors we can either under commit or over commit. In many companies, I've seen under commitment in the form of compliance. People are obediently doing their jobs, but without the vitalizing energy that shows they care. Sometimes we can get over committed.
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Usually it happens when we are giving more than the company is giving back in return. As with anything else, there's a balancing act with commitment.
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In my deep dive of learning different philosophies of horse training, I saw some trainers who focused almost exclusively on compliance, and others on gaining trust, to the exclusion of asking anything from the horse at all. Both ways are out of balance. Horse woman Lee McLean says, imagine an old fashioned scale in the balance will hang discipline on the other side, that intangible thing I call feel. If this was your scale, which side would outweigh the other? Most of us, if we are honest, struggle with balancing the two based on our inherent personality traits, along with who has mentored us.
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We will embrace the one mindset while struggling with its opposing view. Those of us who expect obedience seldom have our horses flat out say no, nor do they ever behave badly. We usually feel safe in the saddle, but we can miss out on a lot of the good stuff by enforcing rules and concentrating on precision. We sometimes lose our ability to give at just the right moments. Our riding can have a taking quality while our horses lose their natural flow.
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We're big on rules. Those of us who are all about the connection with our mouths can have the opposite problems in our quest for giving and feel we may not send our horses enough leadership. Sometimes our horses can be unreliable or inconsistent without firm boundaries. We may value the concept of peace and harmony above working through the underlying problems or times of discord. We're all about the love. Often our horsemanship mirrors our human relationships.
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For most of us, the challenge comes in trying to find a balance. But. Between those two extremes, basic safety demands that my horses go in a disciplined manner, but the joy in my horsemanship comes from developing the soft feel. I don't necessarily think that one is any better or any worse than the other, for when we live and believe in only one approach, our horses will never rise to be their best, nor will we many days before I swing a leg over I'll stop and breathe. This is my mantra, especially on those days when I'm fierce and more like or days when I'm feeling frail, and used love and rules, love and rules. Love and rules, trademarked and used with permission from Lee McLean, author, horse woman of Keystone equine, Alberta, Canada. Back to the book McLean directs our attention to the balancing act of the tightrope. Yes, we need to provide safety for the horse.
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We also need boundaries. We must be be prepared to deal with a large animal should he decide he is the one in control and he has nothing to fear from us. The same is true in leadership, all too often, we seek quote, unquote, obedience from those we serve, not recognizing that compliance comes with its own costs. On the other hand, I've seen leaders become doormats. I was one of them when we become so busy focusing on safety that we forget the dangers of having no boundaries. Leadership is a constant game of give and take, as we ask people to rise to their greatness while at the same time controlling the heat so they stay in the froth and below their pressure threshold, too much fear and too much help.
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On one of my visits to Bruce, I went into the round pen with Mac, a horse who is quite committed to being close to humans. He's a small horse who can tend to act like the annoying little brother constantly poking his nose into my space. It was Mac in the round pen when the big tree fell the year before, and Mac who came running at me full speed, hoping to jump into my lap for safety. Bruce has a very useful technique to keep a horse out of a human space, jumping jacks.
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The beauty of doing jumping jacks is that the energy created by the movement raises the horse's negative pole, creating a bunch of energy with jumping jacks allows him to build his mental tools by making the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. On that day, when Matt came running, I did those jumping jacks like my life depended on them, and he chose to stop and figure out how to self regulate. On this day, Bruce was sitting in his usual spot outside the round pen, and I was just inside the fence as we were planning our session.
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Mac was free to graze or walk around or stand next to us. He chose to crowd me, thankfully for the sake of a lesson.
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Anyway, I forgot one of my most powerful tools as we were speaking, Bruce ignored my failed attempts to keep Mac from pushing into me. First I would step back or step aside, that only emboldened the needy little horse. Then I would wave my arm like I was waving off a fly.
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That worked for a millisecond, then he would be back, pushing in, threatening to get nippy. In the meantime, I kept trying to keep up the conversation with Bruce. I was like the little man in the Wizard of Oz frantically moving the levers while yelling.
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Pay no attention to the woman flailing and failing to move the horse away. Now that Bruce had a clear picture of where my pressure threshold was, he asked me, why are you not raising his Polo? Why are you not choosing to do jumping jacks? Is he not telling you how much pressure to apply be the conduit? Oh, yeah, I had a better way. Jumping Jacks was a skill I learned as a child. Yet in this case, the pressure of the situation was greater than my mental tools.
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Under the pressure of Mac's overtures, the simple skill of jumping jacks was not accessible to me. With this reminder, I did a couple of jumping jacks and Mac moved away, we continue talking now about boundaries and how we can set them even more importantly, how we defend them or don't. In this case, I had failed to keep Mac out of the perimeter I had mentally drawn around me. The same often happens with the people in my life as well. It could be a boundary as simple as, don't be late yet, I failed to defend the boundary. Instead constantly tolerating lateness until we have a blow up. While we were talking, the ever committed mat crept back in as if to say, Are you sure this time, rather than doing typical jumping jacks, I jumped forcefully towards him. I was quite proud of myself. My forceful way seemed to be a good way to raise the pressure and tell him, in no uncertain terms, to back off.
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Bruce saw something different.
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He asked, what was that? Did you notice what you did there? Well, yes, I did. Thank you very much.
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I was very decisive. I thought to myself, another part. Me thought, Uh oh, here we go again. What is it this time?
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Yeah, I made damn sure he stayed back. I said, Was that really it, or were you trying to help him too much, and were you a bit angry with him? Why would you not let him make the mistake?
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Did you not overreact? Bruce asked. Now we were getting to the good stuff. These questions led us to a deep conversation about over and under reacting, especially from the parent child dance that is the hallmark of kid mode. On the parent side, I was trying to help too much, and I was angry with him. I was angry that he was making me expend the energy, angry that he might make me look bad, and angry that he didn't get it right that first time, I wanted to save him from having me correct him on the child side, I was aware that he was bigger than me, stronger than me, and could run over me. I did not want him to use his power against me in the grand scheme of things. I wanted him to be perfect. I wanted me to be perfect. When I'm caught in the perfection game, I'm not being the conduit. I'm not assessing, recalibrating, correcting, I'm caught in the control trap thinking I know what to do, when to do, and how to do. I'm stuck on the attachment side of the human tightrope, banking my worthiness on the behavior of the horse. I've completely focused on my needs and ignored the needs of Mac, and that's when things start to fall apart.
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Bruce asked, why would you not give Mac the opportunity to build his mental tools? Does he not need to learn how to survive in the world that we have created? Does he not need to learn how to be okay standing two feet from you instead of all up in your space? How can he learn that if you insist on throwing anger at him rather than raising up his negative pole, you were using pressure to intimidate instead of using pressure to communicate.
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Apparently, my attack Jacks were not the answer to Bruce's questions. Bruce was looking for me to be here now in the mind state he calls alpha, where my needs are balanced with Max needs, where Mac is telling me how much pressure to apply.
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Tyrant mindset runs on my past rules where I assert either too much parent or too much child and ignores the valuable Intel available to me. Human attachment needs are integrated and balanced with self expressive needs. Together, we walk the tightrope where things are just so the space is elusive. On this day, Bruce described it as passing through the line. The picture is more like loops to me, back and forth across an imaginary line where everything is balanced, if only for a moment. Staying on the tightrope is incredibly difficult, and the real work happens in the recalibration back to center in both mind and body. We overshoot and correct, we undershoot and correct with clarity about using our tools, it's possible for the swings to become smaller and smaller when our focus moves from thinking and balance is a mistake and instead transitions to asking, what's next. Recalibration happens through our tools, such as patience, timing, feel, discipline and problem solving.
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Each side of the tightrope offers a different type of over and under correction. On the child side of power under we might lack confidence. We want someone to give us the answer.
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It's all too easy to feel helpless. Our frustration turns inward, bathing us in the mantra and inertia of what's wrong with me. Why is this happening to me?
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It's not fair. The child side of this tightrope screams victim.
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On the other hand, the opposite will throw us out of balance.
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The other way, on the power over side of the tightrope, we might get angry. I've been known to throw a tantrum when I can't make something go my way, as evidenced by my attack jacks with Mac. Frustration rules our choices. Suddenly we wield our power over by blaming others, seeing them as the problem.
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Bruce called this beating yourself up to the other person.
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Now instead of being a victim, we become the tyrannical parent with all the answers, or we help too much because we think no one else can handle the situation.
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If we are to do anything new and do it in a meaningful way, we must first commit it helps to tune into our tendency to do things out of people pleasing, or to seek approval or to not disappoint someone. In those cases, we are complying rather than committing. True commitment comes from within us. It helps to be curious about what is within us. CHAPTER 15, curiosity a super tool. The gateway to our tools is curiosity and. In some ways, Curiosity is like a super tool setting the conditions for our mind to listen, hear, solve problems and feel if we're not interested in what's happening, either internally or externally, we're not going to be able to make the moves to adjust, nor are we going to learn anything the need to be curious often happens right about the time our mistake button gets hit, if survival mode kicks in, we are more likely to be self protective rather than open to learning. Yet that's the time when we most need our curiosity.
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The sooner we can recalibrate back towards center, the better curiosity and experimentation go hand in hand. We get to stress test our assumptions play warmer colder and seek the balance point. It's always there. If we can get out of our own way, if we double down on showing what we know, we are simply putting off the moment where we are forced to deal with the truth of what's happening. I once had a coach ask me, where do you think that comes from? Referring to one of my intractable patterns, my first answer was, I don't care and I don't want to know.
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In other words, I was not curious about my inner world at all. Given the tools I had cultivated at that point, my fear of what was in the basement outweighed my desire to know more vulnerability. Over the years, I've coached many executives who were in a variety of transitions, such as joining a new company, taking on a new role in their old company, or changing careers altogether.
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I've also worked with teams that were charged with a new project or responsibility. The common thread in all transitions is the uncertainty. They are leaving what they know in exchange for what they do not know.
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Uncertainty puts us in the froth, it breeds all kinds of emotions, anticipation, excitement, Dread, self doubt and caution are just a few a lot of high achievers, and I include myself in this group. Answer uncertainty with a proving mindset. When I was working in banking, every merger brought with it the hidden questions of uncertainty, who will get which jobs? What will happen to me?
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How will the new leadership team know what I can do? What will I have to do to fit in? Sometimes they voice these questions. More often than not, they answered with more answers here. Let me show you what I know. I can do this better than anyone else.
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See how valuable I am when working with leaders taking on a new role in a new company, I remind them that the first 90 days are a free pass to be curious and learn about the organization. The most important thing they can do is listen and learn. Yet it can be quite difficult to meet uncertainty with vulnerability. And make no mistake, curiosity and vulnerability are close cousins.
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We are choosing to open our minds and hearts to something new, something we may not know yet. We are saying I don't know.
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Tell me more. We might discover something that rocks our world.
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We might find out that what we believed before is not true.
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Curiosity asks questions with wonder. I wonder why I wonder?
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What I wonder how I wonder if rocking back and forth to find the middle involves being curious. I wonder, is it better over here take a few steps or over here, the game of warmer colder takes us away from the comfortable place and intentionally through the places that don't work so that we can find what does work. Proving mindset stories come from insecurity. The core question, am I enough? Interferes with the desire to learn instead of wondering. We often make up stories based on assumptions from our past. The antidote to assuming we know things is curiosity. My old stories were written to protect me when I'm living in this moment, my story naturally unfolds with curiosity leading the way. When something happens, I can think to myself, How fascinating. I wonder what's going on. However, when I'm caught in the past or fearful of the future, my reaction is likely going to come from a story that doesn't serve the current moment. In my book, The elegant pivot, an inspired move for navigating corporate politics. I share many examples of my early corporate life where I was the champion of making up stories. Most of the stories involve someone being out to get me or make me look bad in front of the boss, while corporate life does have some dog eat dog aspects. Making up those stories was on me. Survival Mode is about the fear in learning about horses. Both Bruce and Lynn encouraged me to focus on the behavior happening in front of me, not on some made up reason the horse was doing something early on, I said things like he's not respecting me, or the horse is mad at me, or why doesn't he like me, none of that was true. The horse was behaving in a perfectly logical manner, given his history and his survival. Brain, my job was to understand the horse, to listen and hear what he was telling me. I could only do that if I chose to open up myself to be curious, but it's difficult to be curious if you are under pressure. No one wants to look bad, and one of my hot buttons is caring what people think of me. Sometimes it helps to see it from a distance. One day on a trail ride, another rider gave me a chance to see from a distance. We had stopped in a busy area where there were lots of other trail riders. Our group decided to get off and have a drink and rest, we saw a small group of riders coming down the trail towards us. One of the horses in the group was backing up, walking crooked and seemingly refusing to go forward. As the rider passed us, she looked over at us and said, he's being such a jerk today.
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She said this as she was kicking him to go forward and pull him back hard on the reins, as if to stop him. The horse held his head high, and we could see the whites of his eyes. We watched as they continued on the horse jumping side to side and somehow making it down a steep hill nearby. It looked to me like an accident waiting to happen. What I saw differed from what the other rider expressed. I saw a scared writer riding a scared horse. I saw myself a mocha the day all hell broke loose. I saw myself in every corporate meeting where I said one thing and meant another. Survival Mode is not curious. Survival Mode is all about fear. There's no room to rock my world. The job of my survival mode is to batten down the hatches. Curiosity is the gateway to being able to reach for our tools. If we aren't willing to listen, hear and learn, there's nothing to recalibrate. We just simply march on doing what we've always done, wondering why we're not getting different results.
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Warwick on my podcast in early 2020 I started a podcast. Now that I was giving myself permission to be more curious than ever, I decided it would be fun to record conversations where I could ask all kinds of probing questions. Bruce was my third guest, where he willingly shared his entire method, including his passion for helping horses to be horses in the people's world. One morning, I was scrolling Facebook when another Warwick Schiller video popped up, as usual. I watched it. Warwick explains things very clearly, and I had learned many practical horse related skills from watching his videos.
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However, he was also sharing his personal journey. These days, he was talking about vulnerability, recovering from trauma, and how changing himself had changed his relationship with his horses.
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Thanks to his engaging presence, I felt like I knew him, even though we had never met what struck me most was his willingness to share his journey and to even go so far as to say some of his training methods were wrong. He was evolving right before our eyes, and in ways I could deeply identify with over my journey. As I read this post, I had a strong urge to invite work on the podcast.
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Almost immediately, my rules kicked in, though, with thoughts like, what a crazy idea. What makes you think he'll go on the podcast you don't even know him, and he certainly does not know you by now, I was much more practiced in recognizing the trap and pivoted to reach for my tools. Instead, I wondered if and decided to ask. I made myself a cup of tea and sat down to write him a note on Facebook.
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It said, Hi work. Lynn Karn is here writing to invite you to be a guest on the creative spirits unleash podcast which focuses more on a leadership and corporate audience than a horse audience. They need to hear from you because horses have much to teach us leaders about truly creating partnership, trust and affiliation. It's time to stop using dominance as the primary tool of leadership in business, I think our planet depends on it. I've watched a ton of your videos, and we would have much to talk about since I fell off a horse almost three years ago and got to spend three days in the hospital, I've been on a very steep learning curve to get back on the horse, and it's transformed my coaching and leadership practice. I know you mostly focus on people who work with horses directly. Are you willing to share your message with people who need to learn how to develop their presence, to work with other people. I really, really hope you will say yes. Within minutes, I got his response back, yes. I would love to a week later, we had an incredibly memorable conversation filled with his stories of learning to develop presence. We talked a lot about mind chatter and its impact on our horses and on our own well being, at one point, he confirmed a question I had asked, yes, horses can read your mind. Had he said that to me before this pressure journey began, I would have dismissed him as a kook. However, I had experienced a horse reading my mind far too many times by this point to doubt his claim. What kind of chatter was the horse reading in my mind? Early in the podcast, I mentioned my accident and my illusion that trail riding was easy, he said just trail riding is like jumping out of a plane, as long as nothing goes wrong. It's really, really easy, but you've got to make sure there's quite. Had a bit of preparation for it not to go wrong. He summed up my whole journey in that one sentence. So much of that preparation occurs in developing safety for the horse, as I had been learning on the podcast, Warwick said,
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what makes horses feel safe in a herd situation? If someone goes and gets a horse out of a herd and leads them away from the herd, the horse, a lot of times, is winging and running around like and you think, what is that? What does that herd horses provide that I don't what I think horses feel safe in a herd environment is the awareness of all the other horses.
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He went on to share lots of examples of ways we humans are not present with horses. We may be three seconds ahead or three seconds behind, or we may be thinking about what our teacher in fifth grade said about how we slouch and told us we're not really all that coordinated, as my journey had shown me, developing my own presence under pressure could have life threatening consequences. My incident on Shaw, where the turkey flew up under his nose, showed me the benefits of being in the moment when it counts. Much of the friendly advice I had received after my accident had nothing to do with being present or with my energy. It was all about improving my skills, or learning how to do a winery and stop or picking a better horse. It makes sense in this modern era, we tend to focus on the tangible and provable. We want the Push Button answer. Just as energy and thoughts are invisible, so are our beliefs. If we are brought up in a belief system that says we can fix problems with horses by either controlling the environment or training the horse to be nothing but obedient, then we will reach for the rules that give us the answers we seek, reaching for the tools of listening and hearing does feel more uncomfortable. So many times in the past three years, I had longed for an answer that did not involve me having to own my part of the problem. Ironically, owning my part gave me the opportunity to change it, if I were willing to work on my own mind. Warwick had seen plenty of people who held a belief system that wanted tangible proof and avoided anything that felt too Woo. Woo. He described what often happens when he asked people if they meditate.
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You know, at clinics, I tell people that, you know, I asked, Do people have a meditation practice? A lot of people go, No, I don't know. You know, I don't like that, or whatever. And I said, you know, meditating is just controlling what your mind thinks about. And when you are around your horse, you need to be able to control what your mind thinks about. So it's basically practice. It's practicing what you can do with your horse when you're not with your horse, and especially if you're out trial riding like you, and that horse runs off, right then you have to be able to control what your mind thinks about. And a big blue tree thing would be pulling back on both frames, squeezing the legs, going, Whoa. An orange basketball thing would be thinking, Okay, what have I got to do here to ensure I survive this thing? I reach down this rain, put a band out. But it's just, it's controlling what your mind thinks about. And if you can't control what your mind thinks, your mind thinks about when nothing's going on, you really can't control what your mind thinks about when you're on the back of 1000 pound animal.
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Let's leave in town.
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Horses know if we're not here right now, whether we are living three seconds or 30 years out of the moment, they crave our presence, choosing to be all knowing rather than curious, leaves us divided. Part of us keeps stuffing emotions and hiding, and the other part demands to be heard. The subconscious mind plays a way bigger role in our actions and decision making than our conscious mind. It takes courage to see our truth. Thank you for listening to the creative spirits unleash podcast. I started this podcast because I was having these great conversations, and I wanted to share them with others. I'm always learning in these conversations, and I wanted to share that kind of learning with you. Now what I need to hear from you is what you want more of and what you want less of. I really want these podcasts to be of value for the listeners.
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Also, if you happen to know someone who you think might love them, please share the podcast and, of course, subscribe and rate it on the different apps that you're using, because that's how others will find it.
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Now, I hope you go and do something very fun today. You.