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Horses help humans understand themselves Mary Paramore
EAL employs horses to help humans better understand themselves and their relationships with other people and the communities in which they operate. Executive coach and EAL specialist Don Avery now offers this training to businesses and individuals at Chesapeake Therapeutic Riding in Havre de Grace. During a recent interview, Avery explained that horses don’t innately trust humans. What they trust is their predator vs. prey instinct, honed over the millennia they were, and in some places still are, hunted by humans and other animals for food. Noting physical size has nothing to do with a predator vs. prey mindset, Avery said, “In their mind, they are prey.” Avery described the emotions that research indicates many mammals share: sadness, fear, anger, happiness, love and sensuality/tenderness. Horses pick up on human emotions and reflect them, scattering when they encounter fear, nuzzling when they detect sadness, expressing angst when they perceive anger. “EAL is a process that takes advantage of the emotional mirror a horse provides to drive people where they might not go on their own,” Avery said, noting horses build relationships with humans based on whether they trust them. This equine trait mimics business relationships. “There is a big difference between a group and a team. The distinction here is also trust,” Avery said. “A CEO or senior leader sets the tone and the way forward, intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously. It’s absolutely key to your return on investment, communication and efficiency to learn how your organizational relationships, individually and collectively, look from the outside. What wake do we leave as leaders of an organization? There is no inspired creativity in an environment of fear,” Avery said. A one-day EAL experience at Chesapeake Therapeutic Riding might look something like this. In advance, Avery meets privately with organizational leaders to determine their goals for the training. Broad issues, such as poor communication, or specific issues, like “When will we ever deal with employee X and what will we do?” can be tackled through EAL. “We offer structured exercises with unstructured results,” he said. Every exercise, individual or team, features 1) a problem to solve, i.e. putting tack on a horse; 2) the rules and tools; 3) consequences for broken rules and 4) identification of desired outcome. EAL exercises can unveil, for the individual and for the group, people who are reluctant to ask for help when they need it, people who give up when something gets challenging and people who impose rules that were never intended, thus making the exercise harder than it really is.
“These challenges are reflective of work and life,” Avery said, noting EAL is also effective for individuals and families in mental health, marital and substance abuse counseling. Cathy Schmidt is founder and executive director of Chesapeake Therapeutic Riding, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that has added EAL to supplement the facility’s income. She said cognitive/emotional therapy fits in well with the equine-based physical, cognitive and emotional therapy some 60 volunteers provide to people with special needs. Avery was a Vietnam-era Navy cryptologist, vice president of three defense-industry corporations and is now a principle of the technology-enabling firm IntAlliance Partners, LLC. He is a graduate executive and leadership life coach, and serves as president and chairman of the Board of Directors for Chesapeake Therapeutic Riding at 120 Darlington Road. He also operates IntegralPaths Coaching. Photo caption: EAL specialist and executive coach Don Avery, Tilly, a registered paint mare, and therapy horse, and Cathy Schmidt, executive director of Chesapeake Therapeutic Riding.
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The age-old love affair between humans and horses has a somewhat tawdry past, but it is precisely that evolutionary history that renders the mammal uniquely qualified to shape a person’s future through equine assisted learning (EAL).