Attune to Your Horse-Body: What a Herd of Horses Can Teach About Culture, Purpose, Belonging, Connection, and Ourselves.

This is part 1 of a series of articles that explore how the way of the horse can serve as a model for leadership and how to be successful together, what horses teach us about executive presence, and how to lead authentically.

The Art of Care, Presence, and Power

While I feel that the most important conversation we can have is with our own heart, the other equally most important conversation we can have is with another’s heart, and that, perhaps, can be successful even without words.

To be fully human in the world means to meet the world and the other hearts in it with care for the vulnerable pulse within the body that looks out into the world and wants to be seen in return. That pulse of life itself that knows its mortality is a survivor, and protects the soft vital aliveness it possesses. That part of us that wants to be met in that safe place carved out by the invitational presence of curiosity and silence and an open heart, that allows us to feel the belonging that comes from being fully seen and understood, in a true experience of what it means to be with.

That is the art of care and the art of presence and the art of power, all in one. My mentor, Kelly Wendorf, founder of EQUUS in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and author of the book Flying Lead Change, often notes that “care without presence is ill-placed, and presence without care is aloof.” The right mix is powerful not only for the leader of the herd but for our company cultures as well.

In The Art of Power, Thich Nhat Hanh tells us: “Your action, what you do, depends on who you are. The quality of your action depends on the quality of your being. […] So there is a link between doing and being. If you don’t succeed in being, you can’t succeed in doing.” I know this maxim to be true with the clients my colleagues and I work with at Reboot, and we see how a leader’s way of being echoes through their companies.

Stretching these themes further into an organization, we can see how working with horses provides somatic insight for the leaders of organizations and what that might mean for their company culture. Daniel Coyle notes in his book, Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, that the word “culture” comes from the Latin ‘cultus’, which means care. In his discussion on the secrets of highly successful groups, he may not have talked about horses directly, but he talked about the qualities that successful human culture-groups have, which bear a striking resemblance to how the herd operates. Much of this has to do with our social brains (from brainstem to old mammalian, to new mammalian, also the same brain domain as the limbic system) and how we are together in groups.

“Our social brains light up when they receive a steady accumulation of almost-invisible cues: We are close, we are safe, we share a future,” writes Coyle. He posits “a model for understanding how belonging works as a flame that needs to be continually fed by signals of safe connection.”

The language of horses is just that: they are continually seeking signals of safety and connection for their very survival. What working with horses also gives us is an opportunity to experience this with a 1200-pound animal, or a herd of them, and to feel and awaken those various parts of our human neurology that can serve our leadership and our way of being with each other that are beyond words.

Meet the Horse: A 55-Million-Year-Old Survival System

To begin, let’s learn a bit about the horse.

The horse is a 55-million-year-old system, making it one of the most successful land animal systems on earth. Their ancestors were cat-sized and hung out with the dinosaurs. As the environment changed, the horse adapted and evolved into what we know them today. Part of what has made them successful is how they evolved and what was prioritized evolutionarily for their survival as a species.

As animals of prey, the limbic system of the horse is highly sensitive. This is key to their survival. Kelly Wendorf will often say, “If a predator misses a sensory cue, he misses lunch; whereas if a non-predator misses a cue, he becomes lunch.” For the horse, their sensitivity is exactly what keeps them alive. Horses are branches of cladistics and generations from their cat-sized relatives that were around from the time of the dinosaurs, but deep inside their DNA is the residual wiring of evolutionary history. They can still feel like a small, cat-sized prey animal, vulnerable and small, regardless of their actual size in their present-day form.

As an incredibly sensitive being, a horse can feel a fly land on them. They can sense their environment from a half-mile radius surrounding them. They can literally feel the vibration of the earth through their feet, which is also connected to their heart by way of a main artery running down their front legs. And, they can communicate and feel each other through space, entirely using body language.

As bodies in space with no words to speak of, horses are committed to a life devoted to talking about feeling — how they feel about things in their world — with their bodies as one large communication tool. Feelings are the basis of what horses are interested in talking about, and their ability to comment on feelings is of utmost importance: the feelings of the herd determine the safety and security within that group.

Boundaries, Space, and the Psychology of Safety

A horse needs clear, healthy boundaries like the way a river needs two banks to flow. Together, they thrive on clear boundaries amongst themselves. The cohesiveness of their life together depends upon their ability to move their large bodies deftly around each other. Clear boundaries make that possible. They need to know: “I am here. You are there.” To establish that, they communicate via their bubble of space to others. In the case of a crisis, this clarity means they can run together at top speed efficiently, without running into each other or tripping each other up (and therefore becoming lunch).

For horses, space is more important than touch. Horses use their bubble of space to connect. To a horse, they respect the space each other holds above touch, and much of their acknowledgement begins with knowing where each other’s bubble of space exists and respecting it as such. To think about it from a horse’s perspective for a moment, consider that a horse’s peripheral vision allows it to see 340 degrees around its body. In their worldview (literally), they perceive an orb around their horizontally oriented bodies (quite literally a bubble of space). The space bubble is not only necessary for their survival, but it’s also part of the psychological safety for them to know where their herd mates and objects in their environment are in relation to themselves. The stronger their boundaries of self, the stronger the bonds between them can be.

The Herd Is Not a Hierarchy: What Real Leadership Looks Like

Horses need each other to survive (a horse flying solo is not a safe horse). The herd structure itself is more of a lateral system than a hierarchy. Contrary to the popular motif that a herd is led by a stallion with a harem of mares, a herd is often led by a mare or group of mares. Each horse knows their place in the herd, and like a chessboard, they know how to relate to others in the herd, as each horse has their own role. The leader is the one who moves the least. The best leaders make sure all members of the herd are cared for and that they know that the leader has their backs.

Horses move and think as a group. They are individuals, but they are designed to be in a group mind, like a murmuration. Most often, they ask of each other, “How can we do something together?” And, also, what are the terms of being together? This means checking in with each other, establishing rapport (and respect and trust), who’s leading, who’s following, and naming (for clarity of roles) where we’re going and who is looking out for safety. All of these parts of a conversation help them determine how to move together (who does what, when, who scans the horizon to keep us safe, where do we want to go, etc.). As Brene Brown says, “Clarity is kindness.” When these conversations are had, they can relax together.

Harmony is important to the horses. In addition to a horse’s basic needs of food, water, and shelter, safety, and connection, they have existential needs of safety, freedom, connection, joy, and peace. “The leader of the herd is selected on their ability to keep these five pillars intact,” notes Wendorf. “She does so by her care and presence. Therefore, it is the one who is the most present and cares the most, who leads.”

A lot hinges on upholding the success of these five pillars, much of which has to do with maintaining harmony among the herd, which is of utmost importance because of its value for the safety, connection, and survival of the herd itself. Maintaining harmony is accomplished by a distinct way of being and navigating in the world. The key to that way of being is arriving at an inner state of presence.