My experience with Equine Coaching

I spent a few hours at a farm recently, getting coached by Charlotte through a guided interaction with horses. She started the session by explaining the nature of horses.  

1.    Horses are prey animals and flight is their primary defence mechanism.

2.    Nature has given them the ability to detect predators through highly evolved instincts and perception. They can sense danger instantly.

3.    As horses are herd animals, a hierarchy of dominance gets established. This makes it possible for humans to control them if done right.

4.    Humans can exert their dominance by making the horse move when it prefers not to or by stopping them from fleeing when would prefer to do that.

5.    In a horse-human interaction, horses can sense the human’s emotions and thoughts and they respond accordingly.

 Because of their instinctive nature, horses give us the most non-judgmental but direct feedback  on our emotions and leadership skills. Are we able to overcome fear? Can we build trust? Do we create boundaries? How do we deal with rejection? Do we micro-manage? How do we resolve conflicts? These are some of the areas that we can explore through our interactions with horses.

The focus of my session was on developing trust, clear communication, and relationship-building. An interesting aspect that Charlotte brought out was the that of personal boundaries while building relationships. Sometimes, in our eagerness to please we fail to draw clear boundaries. Instead of letting the other person earn our trust, we give-in too much, too early in a relationship. I could relate to this personally as well as my observation of others through my work as an executive coach. 

 I liked the fact that we were not aiming for any particular outcome but were only opening ourselves to whatever would surface. In an outcome focused world, it was a pleasant experience to only lead with curiosity and explore where we would go.

My learnings from this equine coaching session were:

• I know how to draw my boundaries and I was quite pleased with myself for that since this was not the case until a few years back.

• I was quite scared of being in the arena alone with the horse (Ray) at first and it was visible in my body language, but I was able to overcome that due to my curiosity.

• I could have pushed myself a bit more, but I was happy in my comfort zone. This was a confirmation of what I have been feeling for a while now in my work.

• I have the ability to be patient while getting things done through others. Again, something which was not natural for me but has been developed over time.

Thank you Charlotte, for creating a safe but challenging space for me to understand myself better.

If you would like to find out more about equine coaching, please get in touch with Charlotte Leigh Kingsman. She does equine coaching one-on-one as well as for teams who want to understand their dynamics better and work well together.