From Neutral Observer to Fresh Observer
Which is not the same as changing your mind
Aloha! This essay is publishing on the first day of June 2025. That means that I am on Day Two of my annual commitment to the 1,000 Words of Summer writing challenge. I wrote this essay prior to the start of the two week collective exercise which now has more than 50,000 participants all around the globe.
In order to clear my brain and freshen up my writing, I will not be writing content for this newsletter for the next two weeks. Instead, the next two weekly essays you receive will be re-posts of my 2023 and 2024 essays about 1,000 Words of Summer. In three weeks I will be back with my 2025 insights.1 For my newer readers, feel free to also take some time to look at the headings at the top and dip into content of interest - memoir or real estate or Tibet. Or have permission to take a nap on me.
Because it is efficient to live on autopilot, it takes intention and effort to become conscious of the observer we are and the interpretations we make. Last week I talked about a practice for strengthening that neutral observation muscle. It takes an even stronger intention and skill set to develop a new observer when we discover the one that has served us in the past no longer serves - or when new circumstances require a new observational framework. One key benefit in mastering the process of using neutral, non-judging observation to observe ourselves as observers is in order to give us the flexibility to choose whether we wish to become a different observer.
You have heard it from me again and again. When I need to get a fresh perspective on helping people navigate their lives, I look first to what works with horses. People and horse have similar nervous systems and social systems. There is one oft-noted difference. Horses are prey animals, born with heightened sensitivity to changes in their environment. Like us, they are extraordinary judgment machines, but their flight-flight-freeze responses kick in real fast. That works for them in the wild but is less effective partnering with us slower humans in the domesticated world.
Two contrasting options for helping horses change that automatic reaction cycle illustrate choices we can make as humans when the observer we are is not producing the results we want. One common method of creating a less reactive horse can (and usually does) cause them to shut down. Alternatively, we can empower them to choose a different response.
Personally, Iʻm all about empowering horses. And people. Moods of resignation or resentment generally do not serve humans or horses or communities well. Thatʻs why I want to empower people to get off of autopilot so they can make fresh observations. But we are like a manual transmission that has to pass through neutral in order to shift to a new gear.
The traditional approach of “sacking out” means overstimulating a horse until they donʻt react at all to the stimulus. This often creates the same kind of outcome as a learned mood of resignation in humans: “there is nothing I can do to change things, no one cares what I think, so I will go through the motions and stay alive through this day.” With some horses or humans it shows up as resentment “Iʻll do it but Iʻm not happy and Iʻll do the bare minimum or protest through quiet disobedience.”
The other path, the one that aims to develop the horse as an engaged, curious, willing partner, begins with helping the horse become competent as what I have called a neutral observer. The goal is to help them develop the ability to observe, pause, and assess before acting. A plastic bag blown toward a horse by a gust of wind is highly unlikely to pounce and eat them but youʻll find plenty of memes relating to horseʻs belief to the contrary. So we might create situations where they get rewarded for becoming curious about a moving plastic bag or a wing-flapping rooster or a child climbing in a tree. With structured practice and exposure to many different stimuli, pausing to observe becomes a habit and the horse can think its way through even extremely challenging situations with a self-regulated nervous system.
It is the same with humans. In order to reset our judging observer when circumstances require new thoughts and actions, first we need to have practice in becoming calm and accessing our non-judging observer2. But we need to do more. We also need to develop curiosity and confidence to investigate, to experiment with new thoughts, to try new actions and even to be wrong without collapsing back into habit, reactivity, resignation or resentment.
Others may have judged us to the point where we have internalized their negative assessments of us. We stifle our own natural curiosity and confidence. When our non-judging observer can give us breathing room to see the opinions of our inner critic for what they are, we can talk back! We get a little freedom to change.
I find it helps to practice a phrase to use when faced with your stuck observer, or your inner critic, or when other people say triggering words to you. My equine guided education mentor Ariana suggests something like “Thank you for your assessment. It is just an assessment. And I have a different assessment.” Replay an actual uncomfortable situation from your past and try it out. Or imagine your inner critical voice doing its worst and repeat the mantra. Practice saying it in your head, and in your calmest out loud voice. Try shouting over the leaf blower. Practice until it just rolls off your tongue and the negative assessments roll off your skin like water off a rain slicker.
And then suppose you decide to try something new and it doesnʻt go so well at first. Thereʻs a phrase for that too! Linda Parelli, one of my horsemanship mentors, would pause when a horse did something unexpected and unwanted in a clinic and say out loud “How interesting!” Rather than blame the horse or herself, she modeled open observation and curiosity. I use “how interesting” in a lot of situations where things donʻt go the way I wanted, hoped, or expected. It puts me in a way different emotional state than if I just blurt out “OH SHIT!” It keeps my inner critic at bay. It keeps me in a mood of creativity and openness rather than retreating as if the old observer was right after all.
I do want to talk about what comes next, the stage of designing and moving into action. But that will happen three or four weeks from now. Who knows what my 1,000 words a day will open up in my thinking in the interim! So excuse me while I go down a rabbit hole of my choosing. Iʻll be right back.
The still-insecure piece of my brain wanted me to add “if there are any insights…maybe I am just not that creative a writer.” And this is why I push myself to the challenge, taking on a new topic away from prying eyes, just to see where I end up with it.
There are many practices for learning to step back, to notice our noticing and how our thoughts about what we notice are something distinct from the act of noticing. I suggested a practice of silent observing out in nature. Meditation or mindfulness training is another obvious one.