What is Horse Assisted Education?

What is Horse Assisted Education?

Horse Assisted Education (HAE) is also commonly referred to Equine Facilitated Learning (EFL), Equine Guided Leadership (EGL) and a plethora of other names.  It is an effective and impacting method for participants to develop their communication skills, increase self-awareness and inspire teamwork, collaboration and trust through genuine leadership. All these attributes are readily transferable to the workplace which is why I believe that horses can teach us real lessons for life. During an HAE session participants discover a great deal about themselves as they learn to achieve tasks with horses without the benefit of verbal communication, building trust through empathy and finding solutions via inventive thinking.

If you want to achieve any of the following in your life then HAE might just be for you:

  • You want to develop an authentic leadership style that instills commitment and engagement in others, creates a high performance culture and a more productive and motivated workforce.
  • You want to be a better leader, trust yourself, inspire trust in others and be able to rely upon others in return.
  • You want to develop your own self-awareness, emotional intelligence, be more consistent, a better communicator, more confident.
  • You need to understand how your actions impact upon others.
  • You want to improve your working relationships, get immediate and direct feedback on your style, try out different approaches and see the response.
  • You want to work on gaining and maintaining trust, achieving rapport by establishing a relationship based on mutual trust.
  • You need your team to work more effectively.
  • You want to understand the dynamics, the successes and failures.
  • You want to achieve cohesiveness and alignment.

HAE provides a new approach to experiential learning with the distinct ability to rapidly identify the core strengths and weaknesses of your interpersonal skills. These results driven programme provide high impact personal and professional development with a difference via a uniquely interactive and rewarding medium. They are also cost-effective too when you consider that on average only 4% of what is learnt in a classroom is retained.  So what would you rather invest in a rather boring day of classroom learning or an interactive action based learning day where the horses are your teachers.

Welcome To Business HorsePower

Welcome To Business HorsePower

Welcome to my blog on Business HorsePower – the business and life lessons we can learn from horses.  My inspiration for this blog comes from my own life experiences and the lessons that horses have taught me. When I got my first horse I never dreamed that I was about to embark on a journey of personal discovery where my horse taught me more about who I was as a person and what type of leader I was than any classroom training and coaching that I have ever experienced.

So how come horses can be such great teachers and what life lessons can they share with us?  Well it all comes down to experiential or as I like to call it action learning.  We all have different learning styles but research shows that by actually getting involved in something helps you understand that activity.  This was summed up in c450BC by Confucius who said:

“I hear, and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand”

For many hundreds of years man and horse have worked together, however in recent times many people have come to realise that horses are not just good working partners and pets, but also great TEACHERS. We are learning that horses can teach us about many highly valued core skills that can get lost in today’s hectic lifestyle.

Given the current social and economic climate it is now more important than ever to rediscover these core skills.  Horses are the perfect teachers to help reconnect us to these skills as they provide immediate and honest feedback.  They act as a mirror of our soul revealing insights through eureka moments that hours and hours of classroom theory can simply never achieve.

Horse Assisted Coaching (HAC) a new field of experiential learning in which individuals develop their own style of leadership through a variety of interactive exercises with horses.  Today a diverse number of corporations use Horse Assisted Coaching as an integral part of their management development and leadership programmes.

I hope you will join me as I explore the lessons that horses can teach us about life.

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