Hi there Thinking Doer-ers!

I hope you’ve been enjoying some excellent times outdoors embracing the lovely spring weather – or the magic colours and feelings of autumn for northern hemisphere readers!

This newsletter includes a big thank you, a story about what your trail talk reveals about your riding and your mind, and a perspective shift courtesy of a $2500 TV for parrots.

I hope you enjoy the read and it gives you a new idea or two to experiment with next time you're out riding. If you're reading with a different sport or passion in mind I hope you can take some gems from these insights on riding and make them your own.

Kath

The joy of connection: thanks for making the last couple of months a dream!

The last couple of months have been huge and exciting from this end, with the biggest highlights being meeting and talking with so many riders at workshops and events: the DHaRCO x MTB Ladies Day Out in Sydney, a Refine Your Racecraft Workshop with the Hunter Mountain Bike Association here in Lake Macquarie/Newcastle, a Brainy Biking talk and a couple of panels at the inaugural Sea Otter Australia Summit in Batemans Bay on the NSW South Coast, and a career talk on thinking, working, failing, leading and resilience at the Developing Mountain Biking in Scotland Women in the Bike Industry Summit. That’s quite a list!

After one session, a friend said, “This is your dream, right?” I’d been so focused on delivering the sessions the groundingness of the comment caught me off-guard.

When I first started Intelligent Action, I was looking for a way to continue the research, teaching, and presenting I loved from my academic life, but to share it directly with people outside of university walls. Not just mountain bikers, but especially mountain bikers.

The feedback from these workshops and talks over the last couple of months has been more overwhelmingly positive than I could have hoped for – confirmation that diverse types of riders and industry professionals are able to take this knowledge and run with it (or ride with it!) to respond to challenges of their own, my ultimate goal.

It’s hard to overstate how much I’ve loved what people have shared back from these events: Trailbuilders talking about how they design a trail for flow, or to make someone’s shoulders move in particular ways. Women who’ve worked so hard to empower others in the sport soaking up a moment that empowers them on their journey as well. Other coaches so genuinely curious to learn more about how to support the mental side of riding in their own clients, and the passion for coaching that spills out of them at the same time. Neurodivergent riders reaching out to share their own journeys in the sport and how central it’s been to the strategies they’ve developed for other parts of life. People getting in touch after a workshop or during coaching session, exploring different ways making something unconscious conscious, and sharing what this opened up for them.

As we approach the end-of-year-reflection season, I want to use this section of this newsletter to share a heartfelt thank you for what your interest, enthusiasm, energy and feedback has continues to give me as well! I'm a big believer that it's our communities that make us strong. I feel this again and again in my own life, and it's really meaningful to share my professional work in ways that offer additional tools, strategies and perspectives to others.

Trail Talk: what your words reveal about how you move

This month’s story is a prompt to reflect on what your descriptions of movement, and the places you move in, reveal about what you think, notice and joyfully ignore. My own prompt for writing about this topic came from a conversation I had after showing one of my favourite people in the world, Big Dog, around our local trails at Glenrock two weekends ago.

There’s no tap at Glenrock and no toilet. There is almost every type of trail you could hope to find though: bike park flow, secret technical descents, stunningly beautiful linking trails, hills that keep you honest and challenge your skills, gumtree-lined fire roads for bonus chat time, and trails of all types that take you to stunning lookouts with breathtaking views of the ocean. (Read more about the past, present and future of Glenrock in this story I wrote for Flow Mountain Bike.)

Big Dog and I have ridden together, raced, travelled, eaten a lot of pizza and lived as flatmates over the years. We share a love of exploring quality local trails. We also have a good sense of what the other likes to know before riding a trail blind, something that’s particularly useful in a location as varied as Glenrock.

Instead of describing the trail in its entirety, I’d say things like, ‘Look for high lines on the extreme left or right.’ Or ‘There’s a section partway down this one that looks like a jump, but someone’s put a ramp on the other side of it. The other side of it is pretty sketchy and worth seeing before coming in faster.’ Or ‘This one crosses a heap of other trails, so follow my wheel!’

The fascinating thing about trail talk is how much it reveals about cognition while riding. What we notice, what we anticipate, what we scan for, how we help someone else to do the same, and how much you don’t need to notice or see to ride something pretty well.

Even more fascinating is what these conversations reveal about our abilities to notice differences and similarities between ourselves and others. Trail talk after a trail usually reveals what we noticed about a trail on the way down. Trail talk before a trail guides someone else’s noticings. This reveals a sophisticated ability to notice the differences and similarities between our own bikehanding skills, perceptive and predictive abilities, and those of the person we’re riding with.

For an unknown trail, thoughtfully shared background info can be the difference between scanning for a thousand things or safely focusing on a few key features. It ups the flow, ups the safety factor, and reduces mental load.

The things we scan for become cues: cognitive shortcuts that let us perform extraordinary mental and physical feats without having to think each thing through in exhaustive detail. Spotting lines on the high left or right become cues for direction and speed, with the confidence that an eroded mess of possibilities will link up without forcing you to a halt. A log becomes a cue to modulate your speed and body position to roll down the other, steep side of it that you can’t see yet. Following another rider provides a myriad of cues for how to move, what the surface is like underneath them and where to go for maximum enjoyment when several, criss-crossing, unmarked trails suggest multiple fun ways down the hill.

Good cues make us mentally efficient by narrowing our focus into the part of the movement that helps the rest of it flow. They free up our minds from monitoring or assessing a thousand other factors that contribute to how we move well, safely, and at speed.

Next time you’re exploring somewhere new with a friend, or sharing your thoughts on how to approach a differently challenging task in sport or at work, take a moment to notice what the banter between you reveals about how you both think, move and contribute to each other’s success.

What cues cut through the clutter or add smoothness and efficiency? How would those cues change if you were talking with someone else? What cues have you noticed yourself falling back on that someone once said to you?

My favourite part of the course I made on Mastering Cues for Riding Well Under Pressure is hearing the massive variety of cues riders draw on in a thousand billion different situations through their activity responses and the live lessons. If you’ve done the course, I hope you are still enjoying finding more and more cues that work for you in all kinds of situations. And that you keep feeling the confidence and strategies this brings to your mental approach to riding in ways that extend far beyond the time spent doing the course itself!

Last week on the internet: what governs your big decisions?

Our TV broke on Thursday which was a big sad. So instead of watching it, I started learning about advances in TV technology over the last 15 years and how hard it is to find a TV as small as the one we know and love. That’s when I came across this review of the Sony Bravia 8. While I was thinking through the merits of spending more than $350 (AUD) on a TV, Sebastian O was supremely satisfied with dropping over $2500 on a 55” OLED TV for his parrots.

Sebastian's passion for his parrots is a reminder that we all bring a different perspective to big decisions. He very likely thinks spending that much, or more, on a bicycle (or several) is a lot. That said, one of the reasons I quickly knew Big Dog and I would get along as flatmates back in 2008 was because, in that sharehouse, the bikes had a room of their own as well.

What values govern your big decisions? Does connecting to what you value make those bigger decisions easier to make?

Expand your skills with personalised strategies while you give your body a rest!

That's it for this newsletter! If you want to expand your set of mental strategies and apply them to curent and upcoming challenges, here’s how I can help:

1:1 Online Coaching Session: Get in touch for a personalised session to address your specific goals and expand your set of mental strategies. As a Cognitive Performance Coach and Neurodivergent Support Coach, I have a rich catalogue of riding, racing and research experience to draw on.

My aims are to support you with tools and strategies that continue to pay forward in your riding and carry over to important parts of your life off the bike. For autistic, ADHD and AuDHD folk, we can also use a love of riding and why its important for you as as tool for working through challenges in your off-bike life.

Book an online coaching session

Mastering Cues for Riding Well Under Pressure Online Course: Check out my self-paced course to learn more about cues and how they can help with riding technical features, pacing, managing anxiety, and being more mentally efficient on the bike. The course includes bite size lessons, practical exercises, a 1:1 live session, and a bonus curated selection of bike handling skills videos to keep you improving long beyond finishing the course.

Explore the online course

Did someone forward you this newsletter and you want to subscribe?

Join The Cognitive Advantage email list here

Stay connected via all the places and things!