Last week, I said that I was going to
talk about the learning zone, and I can think of no better way to explain what
that means to me, than to revisit one of the proudest achievements of my life
to date; training a young unhandled horse from scratch and teaching him to be
ridden.
I wasn’t sure if
I could do it. I’d only owned/ridden one horse before, but I decided to give it
a go
anyway.
The
experience showed me that a horse, very directly and powerfully, demonstrates
three distinct zones of experience; the comfort zone, the panic zone and right
between these, the vitally important learning
zone.
If you’ve time,
(and you didn’t see them when I first wrote about this experience back in 2012)
take a few minutes to
have a look
at the videos I made during the experience. Good examples
of the learning zone in action occur in part 1, when Merlin is learning to
jump, and when he’s becoming familiar with the plastic
bag.
When
Merlin is learning to jump, he’s comfortable when he’s stood a distance away
from the jump – this is his comfort zone. He’s relaxed here. Time spent in this
zone can be useful – it gives him breathing space, a space to gather his
thoughts and reflect on the experiences in the learning zone, but if he stays
here too long, he’ll become reluctant to move away again, and less willing to
enter the learning zone.
I use gentle ‘pressure’ – a flick of
the string, or assertive body language - to encourage Merlin to move out of his
comfort zone and approach the jump. The learning zone is that mental space
where he feels challenged, a little bit nervous, a little bit anxious – but not
to the extent that he’s in a state of
panic.
If I pushed too
hard, and he panicked, he’d stop learning. Actually, that’s not true, since we
never stop learning – he’d just be learning all the wrong things – like, for
example, that jumps are scary, I’m scary, that scary things happen when he
enters the training ring etc. Panic would undermine Merlin’s willingness to
move outside of his comfort zone
again.
So,
when training Merlin, I had to strike a fine balance between encouraging him
into the learning zone, whilst avoiding the panic zone. (You can see a case of
near panic in the second video when Merlin shies away from the dreaded puddle,
and how we then took things down a notch to re-find that learning
zone.)
The
learning zone exists in just the same way for people. Sometimes learners might
show a reluctance to ‘try’ something knew – a role-play, or presentation, for
example. The skill, for us as trainers, is gauging whether we’re pushing people
into the learning zone, or beyond it into the panic zone, and being able to
adapt our approach
accordingly.
But
it’s not just the learners. Sometimes, I see a reluctance by trainers to use
some of the really engaging, experiential training activities we’ve developed,
and hear things like, “It’s a great exercise, but we couldn’t use that here”.
Our materials might encourage you to take a step out of your own comfort zone
sometimes, but as we’ve seen, that can be a good thing. So, why not take a risk
this week and enter your own learning zone by using an activity you’ve never
tried before? We’ll give you lots of support through detailed trainer’s notes,
reviews from other customers and our mentoring programme, and there could be
amazing rewards in terms of your participants’
reactions.
Here
are a few you might not have tried:
By the way, you might be wondering about Merlin's
colour. All grey (white) horses are born dark but change colour. The top
picture was Merlin when he was three, on the day he arrived - the bottom one
was taken this year, aged eight.