Transcript for this weeks message

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of The Horsemanship Journey podcast. Hi, my name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Cowboy Cuffs, Elevate Your Style, Elevate Your Life. This particular, the name of this pretty cool shirt… I saw the material before it was made, and I didn't think I'd like it that much. But it turned out really nice with the shotgun cuffs. Double cuff or French cuff with my cool brand M&S Extraordinary brand cuff link. The name of this shirt is called ‘Rained On Hay.’

Alright. Anyway, so today I was gonna talk about one of the four core beliefs that we use in Stable Living. Those four beliefs aren't just some random concepts. These four beliefs, number one, faith in God, two, faith in ourselves, three, personal responsibility, and four, communication, are actually what I believe are the, will yield that if you just spend, I mean these are massive subjects. But if you just spend your time on four subjects ,on four principles alone, that these will have the biggest yield, the biggest positive results in your life. Okay, so that's why. And communication is one of those. They're not in any specific order necessarily. You can put them in whatever you want, but communication is one of those.

And so, I wanna talk just a little bit about communication and what it is and how to begin. Inside of itself, communication is a massive subject. So, let's just start to break that down a little bit. Why is it important, and what does it mean? We'll talk a little bit about what horses, what it means to communicate with a horse and such.

So, what is communication? Okay, a lot of times we just think that communication, a lot of us can think that communication could just be just transferring or transmitting information. So somebody just put a lot of words out there, you could call that communication. You could call writing and writing and writing and writing and volumes and volumes and volumes of books, and you've created a whole bunch of communication if your idea that communication is simply transmitting, somehow transmitting information.

I like to believe, and I encourage you to take on the definition that communication is understanding. And it means understanding two things. It means that I understand you and that you understand me. My ability to communicate or for you to understand my thoughts and feelings. And my thoughts and feelings, and my ability to understand your thoughts and feelings, and my ability to have you understand my thoughts and feelings, is basically the essence of communication. So, it's a two-part deal. You understand me and I understand you. So that is the goal. The goal should be understanding.

And so, I mean, why don't we understand? I mean, what's so hard about that? Well, sometimes it seems like it's a huge, huge deal. And there's so much that stands in the way. Really, when you think about why we don't understand each other, it's just like, it's a miracle we can get anything done and understand anything ever when two people, because we're so different, right?

So, it kind of goes like this. We're born with these amazing supercomputers, I call them, and they have their own DNA. They're unique only to them. You know, even in the example of identical twins have different fingerprints. They have slightly different DNA. And then we also have totally different environments or life experiences. Those life experiences, so let's just look at it. We're born, we have our own individual computer, our own raw material, this thing called the brain. No one else is the same. Second of all, no one out of all the millions of people that have been on this earth, that are on this earth, that will ever come to this earth, is going to have the same brain as you and is going to have the same life experience as you. No one.

So, as we're born with this raw material, this brain, everything that happens to us from the time before when we're in the womb to the time that we're coming to this world, to the time that we leave, we're getting input into our brain. And this combination of the DNA that was our brain to start with, what we began with, and our input is how we make meaning. And so, what does make meaning even mean? What it means is that it's how we create thoughts. All the noise and all the chatter and everything that's going through our brain, that's where it comes from, our DNA brain and combined with the input that we've got. Okay. This gives us thoughts. Those thoughts is what making meaning means. I mean, so when I say something to you, it's a miracle you can even have any clue of what I'm even talking about because of this different place that you come from with your own experience and your own, your own DNA.

So, and then, you add the difference of the sexes, and it's like, my goodness. Now you're adding like another vastness of differences and then add species, okay? Try to communicate with a horse and see how well that goes if you don't understand horses. So, we make meaning, or we have thoughts, like I said, making meaning is having thoughts and we do this consciously and unconsciously. There are thoughts and impulses of thought going through our brain, whether we're aware of it or not. Okay, and this is happening all the time. So let's see, let me take a look at my notes here. So, so why does this matter? Why is it important that, I mean, why do we need, why is this one of the four core principles, and what does it mean to you? Why does it matter?

Okay, it matters because if you commit to being a great communicator, and if you become a great communicator, or if you even improve the way that your ability to communicate, your ability to understand and to be understood, it will improve your ability to progress in everything that you do. Okay? In everything. You'll have stronger, deeper relationships. You'll have more efficiency in your goals and your projects and your vision. You'll be able to illicit more cooperation. You'll have more intention. You'll be able to work with more intention. You'll have less stress. You'll surely have less frustration, and you'll end up with better results. And I think that's what we're all going for. So that's why.

If you don't have, with a horse if you don't have good communication, the why is, one of the why is you're going to get hurt probably. Okay. And it's just terrible. It's the same as with people, with horses, okay? Here it goes, kinda like this. I try to communicate with the horse, and if I'm not intentional, if I don't understand how to communicate, what happens is frustration. I get frustrated, the horse gets frustrated, and it escalates, and it gets bad, and ugly, and worse, and it's terrible. And I didn't get the result that I wanted, and your horse isn't happy, and it's a downhill from there. The horse is every bit as frustrated as me, it’s like, I am trying to do what you want. I have no idea what the hell you're even saying and what you're asking me to do. And I've tried 90 things to try to get this to be okay with you, but you're still, there's something still wrong with you, you know, that you're, you don't seem to be pleased with me because you continue to add pressure to me. So, I don't know what the deal is.

On the other hand, you're over here. I don't know what's wrong with this stupid horse. You know, he can't do anything, and he won't listen. And you start putting your own thoughts and ideas about what this horse is thinking inside of his head. And then you get madder, and he won't listen and he's stubborn and, on and on and on it goes. I see this so much. mean, and plus we do it with people we do with ourselves and our, to our relationships and the people that we love the most too.

So, the people, most people haven't committed to be a total badass communicator. But most people don't commit to be, you know, just kind of get by anyway because it's a lot easier and we don't need to and that's kind of what our default brain does is just like make it easy rather than difficult. This will yield, this is worth it, okay. So I hope that you do commit to be a badass communicator.

When, the question is, is when is too much communication the problem? Okay. And the answer is never. You know, too much noise, we hear you, like you're over-communicating or you might be over-sharing. Okay. So, well, you may be asking somebody to understand something that's maybe inappropriate for them or they may not... If they think that you're over-sharing, you didn't understand them very well.

Too much communication, a lot of times, like you can have too many words, right? Somebody, you can just have a lot of words like I began with, like words and words and words and words and words and words, and there's no intent for you particularly to understand. Maybe I'm just making noise out of my mouth, and maybe that could be too much noise and too many words. But was it really too much understanding? Because I think not.

Okay. If communication is not just words, if communication is understanding, then there shouldn't be too much, ever. I mean, when have you ever said, you know, we just had too much understanding. We understood each other just way too well. You know, the thing of it is, probably never. But what we always say, how much do you say, “We had a misunderstanding. My feelings were hurt so bad, but it turned out to be a misunderstanding. We had a communication breakdown. You know, we didn't have a communication solid and put together and too much clarity. I didn't understand way too well.” That's the point. We're constantly saying, you know, things like, you know, we're aware that the lack of communication is a problem, and it makes everything break down .But a lot of times we're not doing much about it.

TMI, right, TMI is a case of I am not understanding who I'm giving information to. Okay, because I may have not have used judgment, the best judgment, or may not have been appropriate, or they may not have wanted to, wanted to understand what I have to, some of the things that I want them to understand. Or did I intentionally, did I actually want them to understand? I mean, was I even aware of what I was intending to communicate that they thought was too much information? Usually it's one thing or another, but neither one of those have to do with understanding each other, as the result of understanding each other or setting out with an intention to be understood and to understand.

So, if the goal is understanding, okay, how can I understand you? And, how can I get you to understand me? And the other thing about it is, not every communication is intended to be both ways. Okay? Sometimes it's intended to be a one-way communication. So, for example, if I'm riding a horse down the street and a car comes whipping around the corner and going 90 right towards me, if I go, yeah, “Yah! Get out of the way.” That communication of me going, “Yah! Get out of the way,” to the horse, whatever I did, if I kicked him in the belly or whopped him with the reign over his rear, or whatever I did, that was not, at that moment, that was kind of a one-way communication. And, I was communicating to do whatever is necessary right now to get out of this road. Okay, and I didn't take into consideration a lot right there of understanding how the horse was thinking and feeling at that moment.

However, this is important, had I not understood that horse to some degree, at some level, okay? And by the way, to the degree that I understood that horse and how he communicates, would be how effective I was able to communicate to him to move out of the road. Which, my ability to understand him and to start with before the car came around the corner may have been the thing that either got us both killed or saved our lives, okay? So the point is that in that moment, that communication was intended just for him, but the quality of that communication was based on my understanding before it even happened.

Okay. And so, let's apply that to people. How about the example of the, I'm going to give you instructions on how to do well on a math test. Okay. Now this is not about me making the test, and I don't care what you think about me. This is intended to you, for you, so that you go get a good grade on this test. Okay. So, I'm going to tell you how to take the test, and how to do good on it, and there you're to go do good on it. But see, the same thing applies. This was intended, I didn't take too much into consideration right now about, this is intended as a one-way communication. However, the quality of the communication and the way that you're able to understand it if you're the one going to be taking the test, is going to be based on my understanding of you to be able to present you with the most effective way to take the test. If I don't know you, or know where you're at, or know what you'll understand, or so on and so forth, I'm not gonna be able to communicate that as well.

So, I'm coming back to this whole idea of understanding, and really, it's understanding to begin with the other side of it, not begin with who you're communicating to. Okay, so the paradox is that if I want to be understood that the highest odds to increase the high, the best chance that I have to be understood is to understand you. Let's see. There is a, check my notes here and make sure I'm not missing anything that's important in my notes about this, because I wanted to say that the more that I know you, the better I can formulate how to communicate to you, like I said. And, how to present to you my volume, my body languages, and all the ways that I can communicate. Do I know it's a good time for you? Have I even, do I know it's a good time for you? Have I checked in with you? Do I even know that you have a willingness to understand me? Like I said before with the TMI, do we have an agreement? Do you know I wanna communicate with you? The more I know about you, I can find out more about you if I listen more with my eyes, and my ears, but listen with my eyes.

Somehow, sometimes you can, it's also a good idea to see how people communicate and kind of mimic how they communicate to increase understanding. With horses, everything matters. With horses, they are so reactive that every time that you come into proximity, everything that you do matters. They're picking up on it. It's communicating something to them, everything that you do they're paying attention to. And so, the thing about it is, is we're not really realizing it, but the same thing is happening with people. They're picking up and taking little clues on everything that we're doing. Okay. And that begins with how we feel, how we present, how we act and so on.

So how do we even communicate? How do we get this thing done? When we come in contact with another human being, how do I get you to understand me? How do I understand you? I talked a little bit about that, but then how do I get you to understand me?

So, we have these words, and we have a vast choice of words to choose from. But then I don't know if you're going to understand my vocabulary, but having a good vocabulary is surely a good idea. We have all these words to choose from, okay? So we can choose our words, and then we can choose how to say them, how to arrange the words in a certain order so that we can, people can take meaning or have thoughts about those words from the context of the words. In other words, how the words themselves were arranged, right? And then they can also make meaning by how I present them, right? My inflection, my volume, the way that I pronounce the words, right? How they come out.

Of course, we know that through texting and email and writing and such that the communication is just not going to, we're not going to have the understanding. Okay. We can have more understanding in less time when we use more of the senses. When we use hearing and seeing, even if you touch somebody on the arm or put your arm around their back, when you're having a communication. You're communicating something, you're going to have more understanding as you involve the number of how many senses that you can involve in it.

So, just for an example, like if I say, well, there's a bird, you know, like how many ways can, what can that mean? You know, it can mean, it can mean that I could be talking about an airplane. I could be talking about a bus. I could be talking about the tens of thousands of species of different birds that there are. I could be talking about somebody giving me the middle finger. It's like, there's so many things that words mean. And so that's why if we're aware of how we go about this, it makes a huge difference.

So, Julie Goodnight is one of the best horsemen of our time. She's been in the horse industry as a teacher and a trainer for a lot of decades. I had her on the podcast some time back, and she said that one of the two things that she sees the most struggle with, what people have with horses is miscommunication. What she said was, she says that, she said that that she finds people that say that, well… What she said is that she ends up teaching awareness of horses more than she teaches horsemanship because people are just like totally oblivious to what's going on, okay?

And I think a lot of that is because we just don't know. As human beings trying to communicate with horses, we don't know what we're seeing. I mean, we don't know what we can't know. Horses are doing all these subtle, simple queues that means something, okay, unless we know what all those little, like the flick of an ear or… I'll read what she said here. Julie Goodnight said that, she said that horses, the can be quite obvious in their behavior and what they're wanting, whether that's pulling towards a gate or pulling towards a friend or something. And the people just kind of go about their business in an oblivious way. They're stuck on what's going on inside their own head, and they forget to be aware of the horse and its motivations, what its intentions are, and what its emotionality is. And then, also being aware of its environment and what's around you is super important to the horse.

So that is one of the two most, the biggest challenge that we have with horses is first of all, just to know, and then to be intentional about being aware of what they're communicating. And I submit to you that the same is true with people. Okay? We're missing the clues, man. Because we're not listening, and we don't have a habit of doing it. And it's super important. Human beings have a need to be heard, okay? We have a need to be heard. want to be understood. Why do you think that is? Why do think people it's important for us to be heard?

When we feel like, when people take their time to hear us and when we think that they understand us, we usually have thoughts in our own mind like this, “They must think we're important. They value our perspective .”Like Joe Caruso said, you know, “Take time to value people's perspective.” We might have thoughts like, we have positive thoughts about ourselves and about the listener when we know that they take time to listen to us and be understood. Positive thoughts equal positive feelings about ourselves and the listener. And positive feelings equal positive actions, equal positive results.

So, if you can buy into this idea that it's a good idea to focus and become a great communicator, to add this to something that is a worthy cause and worth of your time and to prioritize it. The first steps, one of the first things to do, is to just start looking at communication as understanding. Just simple, make it easy to begin with. Know that it's gonna take some effort, and it's gonna take some time. And just start thinking as communication as understanding. And then, seek to understand first. Stephen Covey said, “Seek to understand, then to be understood.”

And if you just begin, okay, just to start with, just begin to attempt to listen with your eyes, listen with your ears, and attempt to understand, okay, to have more understanding in everything, every communication and all the thousands of communications that happen to you each day. If you just take a little time, especially if you're a parent, especially if you're a parent. And it doesn't matter, you know, who you are, what you're doing. It's really easy not to, right? We want people to hear what the hell we got going on. And it's pretty damn important to us that they do. And a lot of times, whether it's with kids, or if it's people we love, or it's people we work with, or whoever it is, it's pretty, it's easy to neglect the other side of this, or to put a lesser value on it. I'm just suggesting to increase the value, intentionally, of what people are trying to get you to understand.

And if you do that, there's a lot more that goes into this communication principle. It's something that we really get into in Stable Living, and we really break down. And we have a lot of tools, and we'll talk more about this in some other episodes in the future. But if you just begin by knowing, looking at communication is understanding. Knowing it's gonna take some effort and then just start listening and start seeking to understand first. Just that alone will have a positive impact that you will be shocked and amazed. If you commit to that, it'll make a difference. Just with that. So, begin with that.

There's so much more to talk about, and we will do that. I’m gonna just, I wanted to touch on if you're a parent. I said that, but then I didn't finish my thought. If you're a parent, super, super, super important because those kids are just like horses, and just like people, in that they're hearing everything, man. They're cluing in and honing in on everything we do. And if we're busy or sidetracked or don't have time right now or whatever, and we don't have a clear communication or even if we need to put it on hold or do it… But if we don't take time to understand our kids, we're missing a huge opportunity. And it's probably going to result in something that we're not going to be happy with in the future.

So, I encourage you to begin with this step. We'll talk more about it in the future. Thank you again for joining us. Remember, you cannot fail if you Don't Ever Stop Chasing It.

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