Training and Coaching Programmes

Our Equine Assisted training and coaching programmes use interaction with horses to help accelerate learning and performance for managers, teams and individuals.

We use the concept of equine assisted education to help people build their skills in the following areas:

Leadership
Personal Effectiveness
Confidence Building
Team Building and team working

When you come on one of our programmes, you'll find that the exercises we use are simple, but effective, and involve you interacting in with the horses who will react and respond instinctivly to your approach, providing honest and true feedback on your interpersonal and leadership skills.

It's a highly participative learning process and will allow you to learn from your own experiences and from each other and will give you a real opportunity to practice and improve on your skills.

The Philosophy Behind It

When interacting with people, horses look for the following attributes:

honesty

trust

concentration on the goal

focus and purpose

energy and intention

confidence and inspiration

internal strength

Horses survive in the wild by choosing to follow the most effective herd leaders and by working co-operatively with each other. The herd hierarchy is established and maintained mainly by non-verbal communication and their survival depends on this being effective. They have perfected these skills over thousands of years.

For this reason, they make great teachers in the areas of leadership and interpersonal skills.

In the herd they fight for their position in the hierarchy but also willingly follow the horse who demonstrates strong leadership. The same is true of their interactions with humans.

Horses, like people, are all different. This means that delegates may need to adjust their approach and style for each individual horse, which in turn means they experience the need to change their approach in different situations to be successful.

Horse assisted education (and psychotherapy) is being widely used around the world as a very effective enhancement to traditional methods.

The learning process is safe, and there’s no horse riding involved or experience with horses necessary.

Leadership Programmes

Attributes of great leaders
Your own leadership strengths
The importance of vision and purpose?
Engaging both minds and hearts?
Inspiring for the future

These are some of the concepts you’ll explore on the Leadership programme. You’ll receive valuable insights into your own leadership style, and the chance to discuss your skills and plan how to improve your chances of success in different situations.

Horses can provide open and honest feedback on these important skills. They are completely unbiased about who you are, your position in the company or status in life and will react and respond only to what they perceive from you, and reflect this back as accurately as looking in the mirror. It’s a unique opportunity to find out how effective your leadership skills really are.

Horses survive in the wild by choosing “good” leaders for their herd, and the herd hierarchy is established and maintained largely by non verbal communication. They are therefore an expert feedback mechanism for this type of behavioural development.

Personal Effectiveness Programmes

Albert Mehrabian carried out research into how a person's message comes across. He discovered there were 3 critical elements that impacted on this:

Body Language - 55%
Voice Tone - 38%
Words - 7%

Dealing successfully with people, either in your business or personal life, relies heavily on being able to build relationships and communicate effectively.

Being able to get the outcome YOU want, depends on being able to get your message across successfully.
Our Personal Effectiveness programmes look specifically at this area.

Based on the Albert Mehrabian model of effective communication, they use simple exercises with horses to give you feedback on your skills.

The programmes will allow you to find out how effective you are now, and to plan how to be even more effective in the future.

Learning with Evolutionary Training

Activist - the person who learns by doing/experiencing.
Reflector - the person who learns by thinking things through, listen and observe.
Theorist - the person who leanrs by exploring concepts and models logically.
Pragmatist - the persons who learns best when they can see how the learning can help them in their work.

We offer both bespoke and public programmes that cater for all types of learners.

The programmes are designed to include elements that appeal to all 4 learning styles in the Honey and Mumford model of learning: Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist.

The programmes are based on "Kolb's Learning Cycle" which suggests that although we all prefer to learn in different ways, to have a truly effective learning experience, you should use all four styles.

So throughout each programme we'll ask you to complete some exercises (have an experience); think about what happened during the exercises (reflect on the experience),
Identify what went well / could have been better (draw conclusions), and plan how to use this in the next exercise or in the workplace (plan the next stage)

The exercises are safe, simple and there's no horse riding involved or experience of horses necessary.