Coaching with horses

This week was International Coaching Week - a chance to highlight the benefits of coaching. I've been coaching for 15 years and for the last 12 I've coached leaders and team with the aid of my horses.

Why horses?

1. Horses respond to your nonverbal behaviours. When I say this, I often watch people get uncomfortable or sit up straight. There is a tendency to think that nonverbal means body language but it's much more than this. Horses respond to what you are thinking and feeling, your energy, emotions and intentions. As a result, we can coach around what is being revealed by the horses so the coaching goes deeper and quicker than it would without their presence.
2. Horses reveal your unconscious patterns of behaviour. We all have default ways of doing things but what do you do when those default patterns don't work? Often we repeat them anyway because we don't know what else to do. Working with horses enables you to try something new instead.
3. Horses provide instant feedback without judgment or agenda. When a horse refuses to engage, it's not because they don't like you or because they are "stubborn" as people often think. It's because you haven't met the conditions for them to feel safe enough or interested enough to engage. Imagine if you paid more attention to this in the workplace?
4. Horses heighten your sense of emotions so you explore your emotions and use emotions like frustration to guide your decisions and actions instead of allowing those emotions to take over.
5. Horses connect at a deep level with you. People are often surprised at how deep and intimate the connection is. When you deepen connection in this way, you learn to create better relationships.
6. Horses show you the difference between doing and being in relationship. Often you may spend time building a relationship because you think it's important, rather than because you want to. Horses show you the difference and expect you to be in relationship with them.
7. Horses require an authentic leader. Horses won't engage if what you are thinking or feeling inside is not congruent with what you are showing externally. As a result, I can coach around the incongruence and enable you to be more authentic and congruent with your behaviour.
8. It's embodied learning. You literally feeling what is happening during the coaching, so you learn how to recognise changes in your body, including your energy, emotions, thought processes, nervous system regulation and where you hold and release tension and stress.
9. It reduces stress. Research shows that in the presence of horses, you slow down your breathing and heart rate. People with anxiety often say they've never felt so calm.
10. It's enlightening, empowering and exhilarating. When people realise they can lead a 700kg horse with a strong opinion, it gives them the confidence to know they can stretch much further out of the comfort zone.
11. It shows you how to lead through uncertainty. Uncertainty creates emotional responses that you may want to avoid. Instead, you learn to work through them and lead with confidence.
12. Horses' physical size shows how you respond physically. Sometimes men in particular feel intimated by the horses because they've never led anyone bigger and more physically powerful than them before. It enables you to find a renewed confidence in your leadership without resorting to intimidation.
13. Horses require a confident, grounded, calm leader. They won't engage with high stress or "pushing through" so they expect you to continually re-ground yourself under pressure. You learn how to manage your stress and regulate your emotions.
14. Horses require clarity of direction. If you are not clear enough or not focused on where you are going, horses will disengage or take over and drag you around.
15. Horses won't be coerced. You can't make a 700kg horse do anything it doesn't want to do so you have to find ways to change your own behaviour to engage them.
16. You can practice new behaviours. One of the main reasons people don't change behaviour is because they don't know how else to be. Coaching with horses enables you try out new skills e.g. what happens when you are less aggressive or more assertive. How do you know when it's too much or not enough? The horses show you by how they respond so you come away having practised the new behaviour and embedded it.
17. You learn to recalibrate your approach. The instant response from horses enables you to fine-tune how you show up so you learn how to continually refine your behaviour in the workplace too.
18. Horses reveal your subconscious behaviours. You can't change what you don't know. Horses reveal what is happening subconsciously so we can coach around how you use your strengths more and change the behaviours that don't serve you.
19. Horses work as a team. Their survival depends on them working in harmony and unity. Coaching a team with the aid of horses shows where the team is aligned, where they get distracted and how they can continually recalibrate to find the alignment and flow again.
20. You never forget the learning. The combination of the embodied experience and me coaching to help you process the learning cognitively provides a unique and insightful way of ensuring you never forget the experience or the learning. People can cite their exact experience and learning years later and explain how it created change in their work and life.

What can you learn from coaching with horses?

I've coached more than 4000 leaders and teams with the aid of my horses and I've found that coaching with horses is faster than other forms of coaching and more enlightening. Some of the common behaviours that people learn include:

• Trust
• Mutual respect
• Stress management and self-regulation
• Managing emotions and using them as a source of information
• Taking responsibility and accountability for success
• Managing boundaries and testing assumotions
• Empathy and compassion
• Acting intentionally with purpose
• Increased courage, confidence, self-awareness and self-belief
• Balancing results and relationships
• Executive presence
• Flexibility and adaptability
• Confidence in leading through uncertainty and change
• Ability to step out of the comfort zone and be bolder
• Increased connection and better relationships
• Increased clarity and focus and less distracted
• More authentic and transparent conversations in the team
• How to balance changing priorities without getting derailed
• Discover and use your key strengths
• Leading from the front, middle and back
• Managing assumptions
• Knowing when to challenge and when to support others
• Overcoming obstacles
• Resolving conflict and handling difficult conversations
• And much more... whatever you are struggling with will be revealed so coaching with horses can help you make sense of what is happening and you can practice how to approach things differently knowing the instant feedback from the horses will demonstrate what is working and what is not

Coaching with horses provides a powerful and rapid way of highlighting and changing behaviours so you can be much more effective in different situations.

Jude Jennison is an author, speaker and leadership coach, working with a herd of horses to create rapid changes in leadership and team behaviour.

To find out more, go to: www.judejennison.com