Equine Assisted Learning for Corporate Leadership Development is an engaging hands-on experiential learning process led by professional horsemen with both experience with horses and training in human development. Sessions are led by trained facilitators.
Horses use leadership assessments to ensure the wellbeing of their herd; they look for leaders who are assertive, trustworthy, and clear communicators (Shari, 2011). Horses can help develop these qualities in humans through interactions with participants.
Leadership Traits
Leadership is a complex art form, requiring the ability to establish trust, motivate followers and shape outcomes. EAL sessions offer leaders an exclusive opportunity to experience and benefit from instant, unfiltered, truthful feedback that provides immediate learning experiences and true assessment results.
Horses are herd animals that depend on one another for survival and have developed to read each member’s nonverbal cues to survive. Working with horses allows participants to discover their individual leadership styles while participating in team-building exercises and challenges.
Equine Assisted Learning for Corporate Leadership Development cultivates courage, compassion, integrity, honesty and sincerity among other traits. EAL also cultivates adaptability and creativity as participants work with horses who may prove unpredictable at times. At Dreamwinds we use an objective-based curriculum designed to connect equine experiences back to specific leadership skills needed in the workplace; this approach has proven its ability to produce long-lasting change.
Communication Skills
EAL sessions provide leaders with instant, unfiltered feedback about their communication skills. Horse reactions to leader actions reflect back the leader’s energy and emotions – like looking in a mirror! Understanding oneself through this feedback allows leaders to identify blind spots or biases which hinder their leadership effectiveness and make significant gains in communication skills.
Participants learn to recognize subtle body language and emotional cues they send out, which allows leaders to gain greater confidence in communicating clearly with other team members and understand the value of trust-building within a team environment.
Equine Assisted Learning for Corporate Leadership Development stands apart from traditional training and team-building workshops by harnessing the power of horses to transform your team into more effective leaders. Dreamwinds’ acclaimed curriculum has been demonstrated to cause long-lasting behavioral changes within teams. Get started now – contact us!
Self-Awareness
Horses are instinctively herd animals that depend on each other for survival. Horses possess an acute awareness of both their environment and physical behavior that allows for instantaneous feedback to leaders that cannot always be gained from traditional leadership development training and coaching programs. This experience provides leaders with insight that cannot always be experienced via traditional methods alone.
Learn to interact and motivate a horse using only energy and intention alone and you will discover an embodied wisdom approach to leadership that allows for spontaneous insight. Furthermore, participants gain a better understanding of themselves as individuals as well as what role they play in relationships with others.
Solid Ground’s professional horse trainers utilize their vast knowledge of horses to design interactive and challenging leadership exercises designed to develop life skill-based activities that encourage immediate and long-term changes in behavior and leadership traits.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is a crucial element of effective leadership. It encompasses the ability to recognize one’s emotions, understand their impact on others, and manage emotional reactions that create a safe working environment for team members to collaborate effectively. Equine Assisted Learning offers practical ways of developing these abilities that you can apply in the workplace environment.
Horses are herd animals that rely on collaboration for survival. With their genetic predisposition to recognize hierarchy and their highly sensitive somatic perception capabilities, horses make for ideal partners in developing leadership and teamwork skills.
Working with horses allows participants to quickly experience positive reinforcement for their emotions and behaviors, giving them immediate positive feedback that facilitates building trust, respect, problem-solving skills practice, decision-making abilities practice in emotionally charged settings, leadership styles insights as well as teamwork strategies implemented. This experiential learning is highly engaging and effective for professional groups.
