The River Tiger Podcast from Dynamics Coaching
The River Tiger Podcast from Dynamics Coaching is a space for curious, evidence-informed conversations that sit at the intersection of learning, movement, skill acquisition, ethics, and philosophy — with a particular love for adventure, lifestyle, and equestrian sports.
Hosted by Marianne Davies, the show explores what it means to become skilful in environments that are complex, fluid, and never fully controllable — where risk can be managed, but not eliminated.
Each episode brings research and real-world practice into dialogue through spontaneous, thoughtful discussions with practitioners and researchers. Expect deep dives into ecological and systems perspectives, coaching practice, decision-making under pressure, and the socio-cultural realities that shape how we train, compete, and care — for ourselves, for others, and (in equestrian contexts) for the horse as a partner in the learning environment.
The River Tiger Podcast from Dynamics Coaching
Learning in the Ugly Zone: The Importance of Play and Exploration (with guest Snoopy)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This is an audio version of the blog post 'Learning in the ugly zone: the importance of play and exploration.'
The out-take at the beginning is Snoopy (my border collie) helping me by highlighting play and exploration with his 'squeeky piggy' Christmas present.
The full blog post including the diagramme of the Ugly Curve can be found on the Dynamics Coaching website by following this link https://dynamics-coaching.com/articles/learning-in-the-ugly-zone/
Dynamics Learning (ugly) Curve (Davies and Davies, 2019)
The dynamics challenge-performance learning curve, adapted from Davies and Davies (2019) is an ecological dynamics model of optimal challenge for learning. It is based on the self-organising properties of movement dynamics (e.g. Kelso, 1984) the ‘cusp catastrophe model’ (Thom, 1923; Hardy & Fazey, 1987) the ‘challenge point framework’ (Guadagnoli & Lee, 2004) and Dave Alred’s (2015) concept of the ‘ugly zone’..