Why horses?

Are you intrigued?  Are you wondering – What is it about using horses that makes such a difference in a coaching session?  What is so special about horses?

There is still so much we don’t understand but what I do know, having spent a couple of decades with them, is that they feel good to be around.

Horses are a prey animal herd species so they have an innate drive for self preservation and they work together to achieve this. They are highly organized, each having roles and responsibilities. They practice their leadership and roles constantly to maintain their hierarchy and readiness for what ever circumstances might arise.

This makes them great to learn from because you also need to connect effectively to reach your highest performance in your teams.

They are acutely aware of their surroundings and any changes in it. They feel everything in their surroundings. They are highly perceptive and intuitive.

Which makes them brilliant at seeing beneath our polished professional veneers to what is really going on inside us.

Their communication is almost 100% non- verbal and very much about physicality, space and movement. They are highly emotional and have the ability to connect and move as one in a heartbeat and with absolute synchronisity like all herding, flocking, shoaling species do.

This makes them awesome at showing you how you are feeling and behaving independently of what you might be saying.

They are magnificently athletic and strong, yet they are gentle and seem to want to and even enjoy interacting with us. I agree with Sir Winston Churchill’s quote and ponder this as I often find myself captivated and lost in the moment spending minutes simply gazing at the herd.

There is so much we have yet to understand about how they connect with each other and us and why they do this. What we do know is that they have a limbic system in their brains that is much like ours. It is this limbic system that connects the instinctive parts of our brains with the thinking part and where emotions and memories are held.  It’s this limbic area that responds to our relationships. That’s one of the reasons that horses are able to touch us emotionally and relationally and bring change to us at such a deep level with a long lasting impact.

If you want to delve more deeply into the science called Interpersonal Neuroscience then Dr Dan Siegel, Louis Cozolino and Jaak Panksepp have some great books, podcasts and other resources.