THINGS YOU DO WITHOUT HAVING A CLUE – PART 2
THINGS YOU DO WITHOUT HAVING A CLUE – PART 2
Shame & the Evil Voices in Your Head
Recap: In this series of blogs I am delving into the reasons why people still have shitty riding, training and horse keeping practices even though information is out there at people’s fingertips, they love their horses and are sincerely trying their best!
The reason for this is that we humans have some shitty flaws that get in the road of us being able to take on board and learn how to do things better….or at the very least actually SEE we are doing shitty things and get motivated to fix it!
In Part 1 we looked at how we don’t like feeling crap about ourselves, so we tend to handle positive and negative outcomes or feedback differently. When something we do is received positively or we have a good outcome we tend to perceive it over favorably and attribute that success to our own abilities and efforts., if we get negative feedback or we fail….well…..we go and blame someone or something else! We do this to protect our fragile egos and how we want to be perceived by others.
In this blog we are going to look at a massive nasty hurdle that adds a whole level of “hard” in overcoming this trait of wanting to protect our fragile egos.
Let me introduce you to shame. Shame has been described by Brene Brown (researcher of shame and author of many great books) as the swampland of the human soul. Shame exists in all of us as a wound that can be easily triggered. Having your ego hurt is one discomfort but having shame triggered is a whole next level in emotional pain. We all have shame wounds. I have a truckload of shame thanks to crap life experiences (no one escapes these, they just vary in crappiness) and things that just get programmed into all us throughout life. Trigger my shame wounds and I can feel unworthy, stupid, ugly, fat, unlovable, lazy, a failure, an imposter….and these are just a few!
Shame is so shitty because even if you are able to accept negative feedback or start to identify you may be causing the problems in your horse, this just pokes a pitchfork in your swampland of shame and all the evil voices in your head start confirming what an unworthy, stupid, useless failure you are ☹
So, you must overcome ego just to be able to SEE the situation with your horse is connected to your actions. That is a feat but then you have to drag yourself out of the swamp of shame to fix, improve or change what you need to change to help your horse!
This is incredibly hard and a massive reason why people avoid all that great information out there because it “touches a nerve”. When we get hurt, we protect ourselves from the source of information that triggers the evil voices in our heads by either ignoring or rejecting it or its source. The more hurt, the more aggressive a person will fight back.
How to Overcome Shame and Stop it From Holding You Back
Start by being aware it exists and has massive control over you. Realise that it is shame behind those voices in your head. Wounds that were planted in your soul by people, places or events that have no right to hold you back in life. Researchers think humans evolved to experience shame as it can help keeps us compliant when we live together in groups. Basically, we follow rules better when the consequence of not following them causes us to experience and feel shame because it is so painful. But in our modern existence, this pain can hold you back and make you continue doing things that can hurt yourself or others.
I have great respect for people that come to me and ask me for help with their horse. It takes great courage to feel like a “useless stupid failure” OR risk people discovering “you are a useless stupid failure”…..and pick yourself up, confront it and try something new.
My next bit of advice is to focus on love. Love is powerful and can make you very brave. I have told the story many times of the day I made my horse’s mouth bleed. The sight of blood was too strong for my ego to ignore and the shame moment unleashed still affects me till this day. The voice in my head told me I was an unworthy stupid cruel horrible evil person that hurt animals and it paralysed me with pain. But that horse had tried so hard for me and had given me so much joy. I had a choice:
1) continue with the way I was riding and risk doing that again,
2) quit riding horses, or
3) work out if there was some thing I could do to stop it from happening again….
I opted for number 3, because I loved my horse and love riding. It’s my thing, it is what makes me feel alive and I wasn’t going to give that part of my life up because I had made a mistake. I took a risk by opting for number 3. I lost my coach of 9 years, many friends and acquaintances and I become an outlier in my sport. However, by making this choice I learnt what I was doing wrong and not only did I protect my horse from suffering like this again, I have now taught countless people how to protect their own horses.
So, in a nutshell, be aware of what is driving your feelings when you hear negative feedback or are dealing with the outcome of an event or situation as you will have ego and shame in the mix. Next, be prepared to take risks - explore, experiment, tinker with ideas.
In horses as in life it is not about being brave to do dangerous things, it is about having courage to be honest about your weaknesses and learning how to do things better. Do this and the dangerous things get a whole lot safer and way more fun 😊
Finally, do yourself a favour and invest some time into the work of Brene Brown. Here is a link to her TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o , it is 20 minutes and she knows a lot about how powerful it is to overcome the shame demons in your head….plus she has a hilarious way of explaining things!
