A Guide To Equine Assisted Coaching

Equine-assisted coaching is a therapeutic strategy and healing modality for people looking to improve their mental wellbeing. Unlike psychotherapy, where the focus is on treating mental health conditions and healing past experiences — especially where trauma is involved — coaching is future-oriented and focuses on moving forward.

Coaching is indicated for those individuals who are dealing with milder forms of anxiety, feeling stuck in a rut, feeling disoriented about future direction in their personal or professional lives, or dealing with mid-life issues and the normal identity crises that come up during major life transitions.

Coaching, when combined with equine assisted interventions, can help a person to go deeper into their personal development journey. Horses are very intuitive coaches — they are highly social, non-judgmental, and compassionate. Horses are extremely intuitive creatures that can reflect and react to nonverbal cues and human emotions.

Horses pick up on our inner emotional states even when we're not aware of them ourselves. We can lie to ourselves, but we can never fool the horse's detection systems. Horses are prey animals and are wired by evolution to detect subtle emotional states that can be hidden deep in our unconscious. They reflect those emotional states and behaviors back to us, making them an almost perfect biofeedback mechanism — a living mirror that can enrich our awareness of how we relate to ourselves and to the world.

Introduction To Equine-Assisted Coaching

This therapeutic coaching model includes the use of horses. During the coaching session, the horse is an assistant that can help the client dig deeper for answers to their questions. During group workshops, participants come together to address the issues they are facing on their personal development journey, in a community of like-minded people looking to reframe and transform their lives.

The human coach — also an equine expert — is the facilitator of these transformative experiences by setting up bonding activities between client and horse.

How The Equine Coaching Works

Horse activities require no prior experience with horses and are all performed on the ground. They can include:

• Grooming the horse.
• Creative activities such as horse painting and horse dancing.
• Reflective activities focused on developing the relationship with the horse and deeply reflecting on that "being" state — helping the client explore inner states and tune into their bodies and feelings.
• Goal-oriented activities, such as moving the horse in a round-pen, which helps the client understand how they express themselves when they encounter situations outside their comfort zone. These activities develop non-verbal communication skills, emotional regulation in the face of uncertainty, healthy boundary-setting, and problem-solving skills.

Equine-Assisted Coaching: Top Benefits