Gail Boone: Horses as Coaching Partners Helping Clients Improve Leadership

What is it that horses can teach about leadership? A lot, as Anna (not her real name), a director in a health care setting, discovered. She wanted to try a different approach to figuring out how to lead her team in accountability. She booked a session at Next Stage Equine Facilitated Coaching. At Next Stage, I sometimes work with horses as my partners to create a unique experiential coaching opportunity where clients often discover how beliefs, habits, and patterns get in the way of moving forward.

Before Anna began working with the horses, we talked about how concerned she was about the lack of staff follow through on her requests. The staff was excellent at looking after the clients and ensuring their care needs were actioned. The issue was with meeting project deadlines and completing progress and monthly reports. Anna felt she did not have a handle on the overall operations beyond what she could glean through monthly one on one meetings and casual check-ins. She wanted to leave the coaching session with more clarity about how her actions affected the staff’s response to her requests. She had a sense that somehow she was contributing to the problem but was not sure how.

At Next Stage, we use various approaches to help clients get comfortable with their intuition and the body’s way of knowing before asking them to work one on one with a horse. Once Anna met all of the horses, she felt drawn to work with Royal, a 28-year-old Clydesdale and Quarterhorse Cross. Royal was big, gentle and very set in her ways. When it was time for Anna to enter the big round pen with Royal, she was more than ready for the work.

Anna’s objective for working with Royal was to connect with her and ask her to take a few steps to follow Anna. They established a lovely connection; however, when Anna asked Royal to move, Royal just stood still. Anna asked once more and again, no response. My job was to ask Anna a series of open-ended questions to help her discover what she believed about her ability to get Royal to move and how she felt when the horse just stood still. By tapping into the ‘felt sense’ to increase body awareness, clients can move out of their thinking brain and begin to access and understand different ways of working with their energy and emotion. This is what happened with Anna.

When Royal refused to move when Anna asked her to, Anna discovered that she did not believe the horse would do what she asked. Her tone, posture and other body language conveyed doubt. She did not convince Royal that she meant it. Horses are adept at sensing everything about their environment including, a human’s intentions. Anna was not congruent. If you have watched the movie with Sandra Bullock called ‘28 Days’, you’ll recall that a simple way to understand congruence is “having my insides match my outsides.” Anna’s insides communicated hesitancy and doubt despite her verbal command to move. Using this as a metaphor for working with Anna’s team, she discovered that her way of making a request was more of a plea than a concrete ask.

She would make a request, establish a soft deadline and then wait for staff to deliver. Often, the deadline would pass and, the necessary action had not happened. Anna’s typical response was to extend the deadline and tell the staff member what action to take to meet the new date. She admitted that she was not sure they made her request a priority to get it done on time.

Anna was coached to shift her posture, tone and to speak as if she were projecting from her core. The same words combined with an energetic shift and, Royal moved as asked. The difference was significant for Anna. She had not realized how the change in her soma, or body, could produce such a different result. Anna used the remainder of the coaching session to explore further how she could apply what she had experienced with Royal, to her team.

Horses make great coaching partners in that they respond to what is present in the moment. They help, by their response, to make the invisible visible for the client. Once the client has the experience of feeling the shift, rather than just thinking about it, new possibilities emerge.

Anna went back to her team, talked about what she had discovered and shifted the way she communicated when making a request resulting in greater clarity for team members and fewer missed deadlines. Way to go, Anna and thank you, Royal.