Great Expectations: How Your Predictions Shape Your Animal's Behavior

Your brain is wired to predict what comes next. It's an evolutionary advantage designed to keep you safe. But when it comes to your horse or dog, those same predictions can limit what's possible between you.

In this episode, Mary Debono explores how our nervous systems are constantly making predictions, often below the level of conscious awareness, and how those expectations show up in our bodies and get reflected back to us by our animals. 

This isn't about abandoning caution or ignoring real history. It's about learning to notice when your brain is protecting you and when it's simply running an old script. And then asking: can you stay open to something new?

If you've ever caught yourself dreading how a walk or a ride will go before it's even started, this episode is for you.

Resources:

Grab your FREE video training to help your dog. 🐕 https://www.marydebono.com/lovedog 💥

💥Learn how the Feldenkrais MethodⓇ can help improve your seat, position, and balance on your horse! Free rider videos masterclass: https://www.marydebono.com/rider 💥

Get Mary’s bestselling, award-winning book, “Grow Young with Your Dog,” for a super low price at: https://tinyurl.com/growyoungwithyourdog. Demonstration videos are included at no extra cost. ⬅️⬅️⬅️

All information is for general educational purposes ONLY and doesn't constitute medical or veterinary advice or professional training advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider if you, your horse, or your dog are unwell or injured.  Always use extreme caution when interacting with horses and dogs.

About the Host:

Mary Debono is a pioneer in animal and human wellness, blending her expertise as an international clinician, best-selling author, and certified Feldenkrais Method® practitioner. With over three decades of experience, Mary developed Debono Moves, a groundbreaking approach that enhances the performance, well-being, and partnership of animals and their humans.

Mary's innovative approach draws from the Feldenkrais Method®, tailored specifically for horse and dog enthusiasts.  Her methods have helped animals and humans:

• Improve athletic ability and performance
• Enhance confidence and reduce anxiety
• Reduce physical limitations and discomfort
• Deepen the human-animal bond

Mary's flagship online programs, "Move with Your Horse" and "Easier Movement, Happier Dogs," provide animal enthusiasts with an innovative approach that combines the concepts of Feldenkrais® with her signature hands-on work for horses and dogs (Debono Moves). Through this transformative approach, both people and their animal companions discover greater harmony, ease, and connection.

Transcript

What are you expecting to see today? What are you expecting to experience today? You know, here's the thing. Our brains are prediction machines. We, you know, the nervous system, the brain, everything wants to keep you safe. So to do that, it kind of like jumps ahead and predicts what's going to happen next. And this can work very much in our favor. I mean, it's an evolutionary advantage, and it can also work against us, and it really depends on the stories we tell ourselves.

So, for example, you know, if you're going out maybe to do a walk with your dog or a training session with your horse or whatever it may be, you start to already imagine maybe unconsciously what's going to happen. You imagine how your dog is going to react to those skateboarders coming down the street. You imagine how your horse is going to react maybe to those same skateboarders. Whatever it happens to be, we try to fill things in.

And yes, this may be very useful because maybe your dog or your horse has a history of responding in a way that you don't like to skateboarders. Okay, so. So that's valuable information. So your brain is trying to protect you. Like, hey, if skateboarders come down the street, things might get a little, you know, quirky, so they might get a little unsafe for you or your dog or your horse.

However, there's so many instances where that isn't the case, where we don't give our animal, like this space in a way to have a different behavior, because we're already making up stories in our head, and then our nervous system is reflecting those predictions, because, remember, the brain is a prediction machine, and then our animal is responding to that. So there's this kind of a delicate balance. You know, we want to use that ability of the brain to protect us in those ways.

Right. We don't want to give that up and say, oh, I'm sure everything's going to be fine. And then. And then the skateboarders come by and our horse or our dog wigs out, and it's not good for any of us. However, once we recognize that we are creating these, like, often unconscious ways of seeing our animals and the world and what we're going to experience, we can gain more control of them.

We can gain more control of our own nervous system reaction to something that hasn't even happened. So we can be prepared. We can, you know, learn all different kinds of training things that. That will make it so that our animal is less responsive. We can manage the environment. Like, maybe we don't go down that. That street that we know that. Or that trail where we know the skateboarders will be adjacent to us.

Right? We can change things up so we can use our brain in those positive ways. We. Without automatically falling into the trap of predictions that weren't going to happen until we kind of thought of them. So, you know, this is really fun to think about in smaller ways, in ways that will keep you safe. So, for example, if you're going to, you know, maybe groom your horse or your dog, you have certain ideas, like, again, maybe they're at the unconscious level, but your brain is already predicting how your animal is going to respond to things.

So just notice that. Like, notice if, oh, you know, what you're like, oh, my horse or my dog doesn't like when I do this. Is that true? Or is it something you're bringing to the experience? So I just find it fascinating to think about these things because, you know, we see what we expect to see. Again, I'm not telling you to throw out that. That safeguard, right, because that can be very, very useful for keeping us all safe.

However, it can work against us where we just make assumptions. Like, I found myself doing this. So my horse, Breeze, he's since passed away, but we were together for 20 years or so, and. And he was a rescue. And he had been very badly abused, actually, through several different people had him. And they were very abusive. I mean, I was able to track down a lot of his history, and it was not good.

And I found my. And he had scars on his body, had all kinds of things. And I found myself, you know, people would ask me because they would notice the scars and they wanted to know, you know, all this stuff. And I found myself repeating the story about, oh, what he went through and blah, blah, blah, and, you know, kind of making myself out to be the hero, let's be honest, because, oh, well, you know, I adopted him and now he, you know, we just do positive reinforcement.

He's great and he's so happy and blah, blah, blah. But I was. I was kind of reinforcing that story about the abuse, right? In. In many ways, I was reinforcing that. I. And again, people were asking me, but I finally figured out, like, let's stop going down that road. Like, let's not talk about that anymore. So, of course, here I am talking about it. But Breeze is in heaven now, so.

But. But it was really something because it was like that and his reaction to things and then what people did to him based on his reaction and, you know, you know, it Just became more and more part of what my brain was expecting to happen or maybe what Breeze was expecting to experience. So, you know, it was like this whole, you know, non productive, non helpful dynamic I was engaging in.

And we do that with our dogs, too. I did that with, you know, all our dogs are rescue dogs and, you know, that we've had over the years. And, you know, there are definitely situations where we realize, oh, like, like my previous dog, Ruby, she definitely had people doing harmful things to her. And, you know, before we got her, obviously, and she was given up, she was relinquished to the county shelter where she could have been euthanized.

By the way, thank goodness we adopted her. She's the most. She was the most wonderful dog. But, you know, I sometimes thought about that. You know, I was using the example of skateboards. Well, she was a dog who, when we first got her, she really reacted to skateboarders, which is not that uncommon. But this was the really sad thing. She would react like barking and kind of lunging toward them, and then she would fall on the ground and in this horrible position of trying to protect herself from being beaten.

Yeah, it was really awful. And of course, through positive reinforcement, we, you know, she stopped doing that and she realized we were never going to do that to her. But, you know, that was something, by the way, that her brain was predicting what the next thing was going to be, right? So I. We helped her get out of that. But these are cases where, you know, we're recognizing both the power of the brain to help us, right, to help us solve problems, to help us navigate through life safely, and the power of the brain to sometimes, by its overzealousness at keeping us safe, to limit us and to cause us to be kind of stuck into these habits of, oh, I expect this to happen, whether with myself, with my animal, both, whatever it happens to be.

So it's just a matter to me of being aware of that. Like, can you. Do you find yourself doing that? You may have to, you know, kind of ask the questions, because again, a lot of this is on the unconscious level that you're not even aware that you're thinking these things. So, you know, ask yourself, maybe as you're about to do something, am I predicting what's going to happen?

Or am I, you know, allowing myself to certainly take advantage of my knowledge and my experience, but be open to new possibilities? Can you be open to new possibilities? My work is all about expanding possibilities for humans and their animals, right? Expanding how they can live their life with greater ease, greater joy and greater connection. So this is one way to do that is to ask yourself, am I allowing new, very wonderful possibilities to emerge?

Well, I'll leave you with that, and thank you so much for listening. I so appreciate you, and I look forward to talking to you again soon. Bye for now.