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.
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
