I was reading a post from a reward based horse trainer the other day (I don’t have a horse, but I love watching happy horses enjoying their training)
This trainer wanted to improve her jumping position, but was struggling. It’s all over in a moment, so it’s tricky to make changes!
So, she applied her animal training skills to the problem.
- Break down the behaviour into small achievable chunks.
- Reward at every step
- Improve iteratively — i.e. small changes build on each other.
In her case, she chose releasing the arms to avoid catching the horse on the mouth as the first part of the new ‘behaviour’ she wanted. She concentrated on that, and then gave herself a mental high five every time she managed it.
This was so lovely to see because this sounds like Alexander technique (AT) in action
AT is LIMA, reward based training for yourself…
Contrast this approach with how we often talk to ourselves — “why did I do that!” , ” god, I’m an idiot”
That’s punishing yourself for your perceived ‘bad behaviour’. It’s self-training, but with a poor choice of method. Punishing does work sometimes, sure, but we know it’s not the most effective, and certainly not the kindest way to teach!
Train yourself with rewards.
This goes all the way down to the level of building body habit awareness: you should be giving yourself a mental high five every time you notice what your body is up to. You can even give yourself an actual physical reward too.
The alternative to not paying attention is :ignoring your body, probably pushing through and not having the option to change unhelpful habits, because you don’t know about them.
So awareness should be rewarded!
Habits are persistent little buggers, so you will catch yourself in odd postures, breath holding or tense again and again and again. But imagine if you punish yourself for this each time by telling yourself off?
Your brain is not going to want to play that game for long!
That’s basic animal behaviour. We do more of what is rewarding, and less of what is punishing.
Self kindness and reward is the way I teach you to teach yourself.
Reward yourself, so you enjoy playing the game of changing your body habits!