You may have heard Equestrian Movement referring to Emotional Agility often. But exactly what are we talking about?

When we are talking about emotional agility we are talking about the unique individuals biological response to their environment or outside world. Our internal environment or our inside world is shaped by our personality, who we are and our experiences and conditioning, how we have interpreted our outside world. There are a couple of key factors we pay attention to:

•  Our nervous system state (tension holding, tension releasing)

•  Our hormonal and neurotransmitter responses

•  Our internal dialogue. How we talk to ourselves and what we are thinking

How these factors play out in our internal environment is responsible for our body language which is our horses native or first language. The cuing and communication we teach them is for our benefit. We will find that our horses will be responding to this internal environmental state even if we aren’t consciously aware of it and becomes an integral part of how we are in relationship to our horses and how well we work together.

Emotional agility in action:

•  Body awareness, what are you feeling, are you holding tension in your body, where is the tension, why are you holding it, what are you thinking about

•  Emotional agility is recognising we have the potential to shape how we feel (even though it can feel incredibly hard) we can reshape our internal environment

•  Our horses like us in a place of relaxation and love (don’t we all)

•  How can you create an internal environment of relaxation and love

•  Being able to catch yourself when you are starting to get frustrated, anxious, angry, scared, overwhelmed, stressed etc., which will result in the horse becoming more emotional reactive to you and shifting back in to a place of relaxation and love with our relaxation and connection exercises.

Emotional Agility With Our Horses

When we are working with our horses they can have an emotional and nervous system reaction to our ask. They can be frustrated when learning something new and they don’t know the answer. Being flight animals, they have a strong fear and flight response and can be reactive to change of environment, changes in the environment, changes in herd dynamic, just change in general really. They can be stubborn and resistant if they don’t have trust or confidence in our ask. They can become mentally, physically and emotionally tired which leads to further emotional dysregulation and resistance.

We have identified some key emotional and behavioural responses we get from our horses and put together training and shaping plans to help navigate to positive outcome so that we can finish on a positive note feeling like we could have done more and will set us up for our next training session to further enthusiastic willingness.

• Confidence through Curiousity

• Positive Work Ethic

• Learning through Play

• Relaxation Cues

• Manners at Feed Time

When layered upon other pillars inside the Holistic Horse Handling Methodology, we continue to build out a rounded team of the horse and handler, where each can work together in a safe place of relaxation, trust and confidence.

Interested to learn more?