Horse Assisted Education: Jane Beverly

Working in my field of Human Resources, my love of teaching and my passion for horses I decided that I wanted to learn more about the subject of Horse Assisted Education.

After many hours of research, I reserved my place to study an intense training programme with HorseDream International;they have been delivering horse assisted education to businesses for over 12 years. They offer a business approach to developing the capability of people using horses as the facilitators. Individuals participate in experiential learning, supported by theory models. 

The objective is to develop leadership, communication, self awareness, team working and problem solving skills in people.

On my training course, there were 5 participants, all from different business backgrounds. Over the duration of the course we learnt about each others’ leadership style, communication, self awareness and ability to team work. The horses gave us insight into ourselves, who we are as a person, how we treat others. They made us more aware of our behaviours and the effect we have on other people. The horses reflected or mirrored our behaviour to us, they gave us instant unfiltered feedback on what they thought of us. Horses can’t speak to us, but they can communicate, they have very clear body language. We found that we had to refine our listening and observation skills and really pay attention to our actions, we had to be 100% present with the horse otherwise we lost its attention. 

How is that any different from humans?  We often see people failing to successfully interact or engage with others; or worse, alienate them because they are not aware of the effect of their own behaviour or approach. What feedback do those people get on the effect of their behaviour? Often, none whatsoever. Horses are very different, they don’t lie, or cover up how they are feeling they offer us ‘master-classes’ in receiving feedback and show us how to alter our approach. We also learnt that a ‘one size fits all approach’ doesn’t work either. Horses have a variety of different personality types; just because one style of approach worked for one horse, we couldn’t assume that it would work for another. We had to learn to observe and try a style of leadership that fitted the horse and the situation. This is exactly the same for people. All of our exercises with the horses were filmed; this gave us the opportunity to reflect and learn from our own experience and see how the other course participants approached the exercise. Each of us had a different approach, and we were able to learn from each other. We were able to discuss as a group what we saw, what had worked well and where we needed to improve.  At the start of the course we were just 5 people, each with our own agenda for being there. By the end of the course we had blended into a team, understanding which person would naturally suit different parts of the task, which approach to use with each person to get the best result. We worked collaboratively, without competition towards achieving our goals. 

We all learnt how to be a HorseDream Partner, and we also learnt a lot more about ourselves.