There’s a question – connection, comfort and congruence are 3 things which horses respond best to and so do we, both at home and at work.

If Covid taught us anything, it’s that we’re built for connection. Isolation during the pandemic helped create one of the biggest mental health crises we’ve known in our lifetime. Like horses, it turns out, we’re herd animals too – we’re better together.

We also like being in our comfort zone, although if we stay there too long, we feel stuck, we stagnate and we make little progress. It’s good for us to be stretched in order to develop and grow our skills and build resilience.

Congruence, another word for authenticity and showing up as the real you, when who you are, what you say and what you do are in complete harmony. With horses, you can’t fake it til you make it and they’ll sniff out a pretender at 20 paces or less! Like us, they like it when what they see is what they get.

So what has this got to do with leadership and what can we learn from horses which we can transfer to our home lives and into our corporate world?

I first started making the connection between what my horse was teaching me and how I could bring it into my role at work back in 2018. I was working with a challenging senior leader and project managing an organisational restructure. I’d put meetings in, they’d decline; I tried to move forwards with the project, they would block it, and all it resulted in was frustration and disconnection.

One day, after more of the same, I thought about the problem on the drive home and then it came to me. I’d started training my horse in a different way to what I already knew. She’d suffered abuse before she came to me and her trust in humans was sub-zero. I’d had to rethink everything I knew about horses and start re-educating myself.

One thing which I learnt, is that it’s never the horse, it’s always you. The horse is just being a horse – either going into fight or flight out of fear or self-defence. And that meant I had to change my approach.

So what if I changed my approach at work? What if I applied my horse training concepts to people? What would happen? Doing more of the same wouldn’t work – I’d tried that and failed. So I thought about what I could do to change the narrative and build connection with my senior leader so we could move forwards with project delivery and meet our deadlines.

I considered what I knew – they cared about people, so I decided to appeal to that side. I stepped out of my comfort zone and met the challenge head on. I crafted an email asking if they were ok, that I was worried about the project and asked how I could support them better. That email led to a call and and concern that they’d upset me – that led to a great conversation and a great working relationship.

I’d shown up as me, and leant into a different side, but one which helped me grow as a leader.

Horses teach you a lot – very little of it is to do with horses. We come across difficult situations and people all the time and it’s how we approach it which makes all the difference.

If you were to change your approach tomorrow, what could you achieve? What if you step outside of your comfort zone,  build connection and show up as you, what difference could you make?

With love,
Nicky