Equine Facilitated Coaching - Saddle Up Magazine - July, 2012

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Kenneth Buck, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

Equine Facilitated Life Coaching

“Coaching with horses as co-facilitators is a collaborative and focused performance-improvement and experiential dialogue (spoken and unspoken) based on disclosure and feedback, and deepened by curiosity, courage, and commitment.”

Coaching is distinct from therapy (dealing with events of the past). Coaching is all about looking forward by creating a process for fulfillment, balance and ”Life” with a capital “L”! While Coaching offers a powerful problem-solving platform, it serves best for teaching, developing, and performance improvement for individuals and groups. In the course of ongoing coaching conversations, both parties are working together toward predetermined goals and performance improvements.

Coaching is about designing the future:
• Creating and achieving the Client’s full potential
• Filling the Client’s heart and soul – reigniting spirit
• Making informed choices for the long term – recreating and living “Life”

People are attracted to Coaching because of an implicit “knowing” that aspects of their lives are not serving them as well as they would like. This could be in the areas of career, relationship(s), finance, health, personal development or a variety or combination of other motivations. The role of the Coach is not to prescribe what their Clients “should” do in any particular set of circumstances, but to empower the Client to find his/her (or their) own best answers.

Coaching is based on four philosophical “cornerstones”
• People are naturally creative, resourceful and whole – whereby the Coach is the champion for the Client’s “greatness”
• Focusing on the whole person – including mind, heart and body – the “spirit” of the Client – creating whole life, through emotional intelligence and emotional agility
• Dancing in this moment – without scripts, creating consensual (or co created) leadership/relationship through vulnerability and trust
• Evolking transformation – connecting today’s goal and life’s full potential – creating the AH-HA! moments

Life changes are inevitable and becoming more and more frequent. Change can be fought, or it can be embraced. If nothing changes, nothing changes! The Coach is the “change agent” for the Client’s transformation.

Why Do The Horses Make Equine Facilitated Coaching So Powerful?

Horses are prey animals (meaning that they are food for others further up the food chain). As a herd, and as individuals within the herd, they must rely on each other for their very survival, yet most of their communication is non verbal (even more than the 90% of all human communication that is non verbal). The horses “speak” with their bodies, their souls and their spirits. In a time of crisis, such as an approaching, hungry cougar, they all instinctively know what to do and who will do what. Horses are black and white – they have thrived for centuries based on simple answers to simple questions: flee? fight? mate? or eat? As a herd, they deal with the cougar crisis and then “go back to grazing”. On the other hand, people are generally multiple shades of grey, with perhaps no black or no white at all. In life, let alone in a crisis, the grey can result in indecisiveness (as teams or as individuals), confusion, and incomplete or unfulfilled lives / careers, despite all of the luxuries people have created for themselves.

Horses are very suspicious of “incongruity” in the individuals comprising the herd or in people, trying to interact with them. When the body language being depicted on the outside of a person does not match the language speaking from the inside of the person, (much the same as what horses “read” from a predator), the horses sense the incongruity a mile away and leave the scene immediately if they have that choice. If humans only make the effort to notice, they will find that the horses speak very loudly and very vociferously when someone is trying to “pull the wool over their eyes” in such a way. Alternatively, when there is consistency in what a person’s body language is saying and their intent, horses are among the most willing of partners and communicators! All we as the humans need to do is recognize, learn and apply their lessons.

For example, one of the most fundamental equine facilitated coaching exercises is to experience and work with the energetic “boundaries” established both by people and horses. Science has proven that there are invisible energetic layers around sentient beings that define the layers of a relationship. If those boundaries are violated without the other’s consent (as we do every day when approaching our horses, our colleagues at the office, or other drivers on the highway) it can create fear, anger or mistrust, sometimes very subtly and other times explosively. Pretty simple isn’t it? All we have to do is experience these lessons using our whole bodies, (mind, heart and gut) and not just the space between our ears! For example, the energetic field created by our hearts is 5,000 times greater than that created by our brains.

Horses have supported human existence for millennia. Despite all the injustices which continue to be perpetrated upon them, they still support us unconditionally. Learning their lessons through Equine Facilitated Coaching is perhaps among the best ways to acknowledge their continuous generosity and wisdom! Connect with an Equine Facilitated Coach and learn who you really are, how you interact with others, and how to use this new knowledge to the advantage of all around you!

Ken Buck is a Registered Landscape Architect, a Certified Equine Alchemy Coach and an ICF Certified Coach. He and his wife Helen Russell offer a variety of equine related services through their new corporation International HorseCentred Collaborative Ltd., in Armstrong, BC, Canada