Back to horses

My life is wonderfully interesting at the moment, which is great for me.  I have better health than I have had in 45 years (that's amazing and totally goes against any assumptions about aging).  I am also incredibly busy doing really interesting things.

 I have spent a couple of week in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan taking an Equine Assisted Learning Certification course and I'm going back next week. It is a part of my Masters Degree program, so not only am I loving it, but I will get something permanent out of it.   I may or may not use this professionally, but it has already changed how I think and will change how I facilitate workshops.

Equine Assisted Learning is an approach to facilitating or enabling learning in life skills, problem solving, teamwork, and even creativity using horses as 'tools' in exercises.  I am blown away by the concept.  I am trying to learn to be the kind of facilitator that makes the process as powerful as possible.  Mostly that means stepping back and watching, letting people figure things out, and if there is a problem, asking questions to help them reflect, review, assess, and try again, maybe in a different way using a different approach.  It is about support, encouragement, and the positive learning atmosphere. It is also about the horses.

I grew up with horses.  I have a feel for them, what they will do and how they will respond. I knew I was not exactly a 'horse whisperer,' but really, my response right now is, "Who knew?" 

Who knew that horses were so totally intuitive?  The instructors (who facilitate a lot of different people and groups and have lots of experiences) tell a story of a couple in their 30s who came from a nearby reserve to look at their program with an eye to implementing and funding it for the kids on their reserve.  They brought a couple of their own children with them.  They took the opportunity to try some of the exercises, and so did the kids.  The kids were cheering and high fiving each other because they were totally successful at working together and accomplishing the tasks with the horse.  One of the tasks was to get the horse to side step into a box. (You lead the horse in front of the square, then using pressure and release, you get the horse to step sideways until he is in the box. You don't even have to push the horse or even touch it, just the energy from your hands sometimes gets him to move.) The kids did it, but the horse refused to move for the parents. It didn't matter what they tried, it just seemed to annoy him more and more until his ears were laid back and he was stamping his back legs.  The facilitators were very worried - it was important to them to get this contract and the funding, but it looked like the couple were not having a good experience.  The facilitator was silently cursing the horse under her breath and couldn't understand why he was responding to them that way.  Finally she went over and asked them how it was going.  They looked at each other and started to laugh.  "He totally knew! He totally knew!" the wife exclaimed.  They were sold on the program.  Apparently that morning on the way to the farm, they had had the biggest fight of their marriage.  They were acting all happy and friendly to others but were secretly seething and and not looking at each other.  Not a team.  The horse totally knew! He refused to do anything for people like that who couldn't even get together.

 I watched a young teen-ager who was very scared of the horse.  She wanted to do this reaching-in  thing without getting very close.  The horse responded by trying to nip her, not with his teeth, just his lips.  She didn't like it very much.  When the girl got more assertive, leading the horse through the course, he did things for her that he normally hates doing and balks at doing (going in a tight circle). He wanted to help  her to be more confident. She did get more confident for awhile. When the horse was tied up again, she went back to the reaching-in thing.  He went back to trying to nip her.  It will probably take her a couple of weeks to get it that the horse responds better when she is more confident.  We get more confident when things work for us. Not exactly an earth-shaking observation, but for her, life changing. Did the horse 'want' her to be more confident?  Who knows? He certainly did reward her immediately for it.  Blew me away.

That's what they tell me:  horses bring down the too-agressive ones and bring up the unassertive and fearful ones.  They sense beyond anger to grief and then they comfort and help.  When people are just angry at each other, a horse often won't work with them until they get over it.  Who knew?

More about context

In my last blog about context, I posited that it is impossible to make a judgment about anything without considering the context.  When we make judgments that ignore context we are highly likely to be wrong. Across my desk today came a very startling example of this.  Look carefully at the picture below.  It appears to be a quite ordinary single vehicle accident where a pick up truck went through a guard rail and off the road.

The truck was travelling right to left at about 75 mph (abt 115 km/hr) when it broke through the guard rail to the right of the culvert where the people are standing pointing...  It did an end-over-end on the culvert platform and landed as you see it, to the left of the culvert facing the opposite way.  The 22 year old driver and the 18 year old passenger sustained only minor cuts and bruises.  It is kind of interesting that the truck could land where it did instead of going farther down.  I can only surmise that, from a physics standpoint, its forward motion - going at a high speed - was enough to carry it directly to the left. 

Good thing the passengers were wearing seat belts, at least I presume that they were since their injuries in an end-over-end accident were minor.  This kind of accident seems common enough that it is hardly worth noting.  However, there is a bigger picture here - the context - that totally changes its significance.

Look at the picture below:

Kind of makes things look different.  Again, I wonder if, when we get to the final accounting, if we will be given a view that we missed on a lot of things.  Could it end up making us think we didn't know anything at all?

(The comment that came with this one was, "If this guy didn't believe before, do you think he does now?)

Context is Everything:The Parable of Pill and Pal

I woke up in the night with this parable in my head. It is all about context.
"Pill and Pal are scientists with offices at the opposite ends of a long hallway. They have collaborated on a couple of projects but try not to anymore because they can't seem to communicate. Recently they had a big blow-up that has not helped.
Pill is in the middle of a very big project. He has stayed up for two nights in a row monitoring reactions and recording data. He couldn't really ask Lab Rat to do that for him since there ARE labour laws after all. So he is tired, very tired.
Also, he is running through the funding really fast and has had to spend his own money on such things as beakers and test tubes, so that is making him feel stressed. While Pill is out for supper, Lab Rat, who is finished working, gets a small poker game going in the lab, inviting Barney from across the hall and Pal. While they are playing, Lab Rat's wife drops in with their child and while they talk the child inadvertantly knocks a rack full of test tubes onto the floor. They all stare at it. Wifey thinks Lab Rat has more time to clean it up than she does and leaves. Lab Rat, Barney and Pal think it can wait until after the game, or maybe the janitor can come in later and clean it up.
That's the situation.
Pill re-enters and sees the mess on the floor. "What happened?" he asks. The others are very focused since Barney is about to collect the whole pot. So Pill asks again. Lab Rat holds up his hand in a "just wait" motion. Losing patience, Pill tells them the game is over, they have to help clean up the mess (it is partly under their feet, broken glass and test tubes mixed up together). The others start to stand up but Pal says, "I may be missing something here but I don't see how it is so important to do this right this minute. Like what is so important about a few test tubes?"
Pill loses it here and becomes a genuine pill. He yells at Pal, "It's important because it's important to me! That should be enough, it is important to me, okay?!" He really is yelling and his face is white.
Barney pipes up here with, "Whoa, Pill, wait a minute. I don't think Pal meant anything!" They have a little exchange while Pal escapes down the hall to his own lab. Lab Rat, Pill and Barney clean up the mess in silence. Pill thinks about it and feels bad for over reacting. He knows it was all about his fatigue, worry about money, and feeling important. There is nothing like having people ignore you and try to brush it off when you are upset to make you feel unimportant. But he knows that Pal does not understand his context. He goes down the hall to apologize.

Context is a trigger for much of what we do. To ignore context is to ignore a part of reality that hugely influences how we will act and react. To ignore context means that we have little basis for judging anything.

Stephen Covey (in one of his books, I don't know which one) tells a story of a man getting on a Transit Bus in New York City with his children. He sits down and immediately puts his head in his hands, ignoring the children. The kids create mayhem, running up and down the aisle, wrestling with each other, knocking into the other passengers and grabbing things. The passengers are tisking, rolling their eyes, and in every way possible, indicating their annoyance. Finally one gets up and taps the man on the shoulder. "Buddy," he says, "you should control your children. They are bothering everyone." The man slowly looks up and then says, "Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. They're a little upset. We just came from the hospital. My wife just died." Suddenly the other passengers on the bus have a huge paradigm shift. Knowing the context has changed everything.

Those RCMP officers at Vancouver airport had a huge context that influenced them. The fact that four officers were sent to control a "violent" man scared them. He had to be violent, right, or they wouldn't send four guys to control him. They didn't want to get hurt and decided they would just tazer the guy - without seeing him or doing any assessment. Of course they did.
The Polish guy had just completed a TransAtlantic flight, had not slept in 36 hours, had eaten very little in all that time; his mother had told him to remain in the baggage area and she would find him there, the airport officials would not let her go to the baggage area; the guy could understand no English; and he was at his wits end (meaning crazy) from waiting in there for 10 hours; he didn't know what to do. When the RCMP told him to put down the stapler (he didn't understand) he yelled at them. Of course he did. So they tazered him. Of course they did. It was all about context. If they had taken time to figure out the context maybe the outcome would have been different.

Back to Pill and Pal. What do you think Pal did and/or what should he do when Pill comes to apologize?
a. ignore Pill and not say anything.
b. say, "That's okay, tell me why it was so important? I really want to hear about it." (find out more about the context)
c. say, "I don't care about your context. You're a real pill and you always yell at me, so we aren't pals," and then turn away.
d. say, "I'm sorry, I can be a pill too sometimes, when I'm in a certain context, and I don't remember ever trying to apologize. So I appreciate you coming to apologize to me. If I was insensitive to your situation, I apologize too. (show charity.)

I vote for b. and d. However, that hardly ever happens. Mostly we only care about our own context. That is the challenge of communication and relationships. I guess the issue when choosing our response is, how much do we care about our relationships? Do we care about our relationships enough to show some charity and then forgive, and I mean, really forgive.

Vagaries of Memory

When I posted "Broca's Brain" in December, I promised to do a post about memory. The thinking I have done since then has me totally befuddled about the accuracy of anyone's memory. If the accuracy of memory is affected by so many things, how can anyone testify as a witness at a trial, for example, or make a judgment of anyone or anything based on what we remember?.

My favorite recent example involves the incident at the Vancouver Airport where a Polish immigrant died after being tazered by four RCMP officers. At the enquiry following the death, these four officers recounted the incident in four very similar stories. They described the Polish guy as violent and threatening. (He had a stapler in his hand.) They said he threatened them and they 'felt' fear for their lives. After he was tazered once, he continued to scream at them and threaten them. The problem with their story is that it was not supported in any material way by the amateur video taken by a bystander. The ruling of the enquiry after the death was that their use of tazers was premature and inappropriate.

Most people think that after the incident, the four officers colluded on their story. There was evidence, contrary to their testimony, that they had decided ahead of time based on what they were told about the situation, to use tazers on the guy. They had a firm, pre-conceived notion about what they would encounter and as a result actually saw what they expected, even though it was not there.

Does this mean that what we think becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? We see what we expect to see, even though it doesn't really happen that way? The beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992 by four police officers using excessive force parallels this story of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport. There was an amateur video in that case also. In his book "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell adds some other vivid examples.

All this convinces me that suggestion, adrenaline, past experience, and expectation can create what is effectively a false memory. I have seen some examples of this process from people in my own life recently. As I result, I am very interested in memory and how it works. The examples above demonstrate that people's perception can be seriously skewed so that not only can they see miss crucial parts of the event, but they can actually see and then remember things that didn't happen.

Researchers interviewed a large number of people about their experience at Disneyland. In the corner of the interview room was a lifesize cut-out of Bugs Bunny. After the people had been asked a number of other questions, they were asked if they remembered seeing Bugs Bunny when they were at Disneyland. 45% of said them said they did. "He was a person dressed in a Bugs Bunny costume and he shook my hand." The problem? Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character and would not have been at Disneyland. The cutout in the room was a powerful suggestionthat created the memory for them.

Here is something else that research has shown about memory:
The more a person thinks about an event over time, the less accurate his/her memory of the event becomes. How does this work? Researchers have discovered a drug that causes a person not to remember events that happen while under the influence of the drug. In other words, it interferes with the brains ability to store the memory. If researchers administer the drug to people and ask them to describe their memory of a previous event, when the drug wears off, the subjects can no longer remember the event! The act of remembering erased the initial memory but the new thinking was not recorded so it was ALL lost.

The conclusion: Each time we remember an event, the act of calling up the memory erases the initial memory and the thinking we do about the event is stored as the new memory. That means that what we think about the memory becomes part of the new memory as if it had happened. If we overlay our memory with a series of what-ifs, or add our own meaning, or think about the situation, and even though we can't remember everything exactly, we imagine how it MUST have happened, these new details become part of our memory of the event. Ergo, over time the memory becomes less and less accurate.

What this all means to me, is that as humans with frailties, we can never be sure that we are remembering anything exactly right. If our judgments of other people are based on memory, and if we have done a lot of thinking and remembering events as the basis of our judgments, there is a gigantic possibility that we have got it all wrong. The implications of this are huge - what we think of our parents, for example. Negative events in our life probably were not actually what we remember. Because of this it is important that we be forgiving and give everyone the huge benefit of the doubt, even if we think we "saw what we saw and heard what we heard."

I wonder if, when we get the instant replay of our lives at the last day, we will find out that much of what we thought was just plain dead wrong.

I wonder.