possess from birth.
You can develop horse sense at any age, most efficiently through actually working with horses. In fact, it was that first spirited mare who taught me to stand up for myself and read the true intentions of others. I was in my thirties at the time, dealing with an aggressive yet secretive supervisor at the radio station. As I learned to motivate and set boundaries with a thousand-pound being, my two-hundred-pound boss suddenly seemed less intimidating. I not only found that I could effectively challenge unreasonable demands, I gained greater cooperation and respect as a result.
The practical applications were useful, of course. But something even more exciting began to happen. The training my horses provided encouraged me to gaze ever more deeply into the limitations of my own socially conditioned mind, allowing me to glimpse “civilized” human behavior through a wider lens. Staring at historical and current events from this new perspective, I realized that whether I was a left-wing Democrat, a right-wing Republican, a fundamentalist Christian, a radical feminist, a gay-rights advocate, a communist, fascist, creationist, or scientist, my effectiveness in the world was likely to be impaired by the same unconscious habits. Our ancestors had sailed across a potentially hostile ocean to escape the ravages of persecution and tyranny, hoping for a fresh start in the land of the free and the home of the brave, only to build the wildly hopeful structures of democracy on the same faulty foundation of long-buried, largely nonverbal assumptions and behaviors. For this reason, I doubted technology would save us; neither would liberal or conservative agendas based on the same worn-out neural pathways meandering through our fearful, body-phobic, increasingly dissociative, egotistical, machine-worshipping heads.
Pioneering Spirit
For thousands of years, people explored the world on horseback, charting territory they would have struggled to traverse on foot, reveling in a primal experience of freedom, strength, and speed so exhilarating that we still measure our most sophisticated engines in units of horsepower. But there was something much more profound happening in those interspecies associations. Learning to form effective, working partnerships with horses provided the most elusive yet important education a human leader could acquire — that “other 90 percent” exercised at a wholly nonverbal level. Now that the entire planet has been mapped, consciousness itself is the new frontier. Twenty-first-century pioneers are looking for ways to tap the vast resources of all three of their brains — those interconnected sensory and intelligence centers in the head, the heart, and the gut. In this respect, horses, once again, provide the ultimate shortcut.
I’m not talking only about developing balance, will, timing, focus, courage, and assertiveness. I’m talking about exercising intersubjective awareness. The fact that few people truly understand what intersubjectivity is explains why we have such a hard time understanding the “mechanics” of relationship and, ultimately, training innovative leaders of all kinds, whether they be CEOs, parents, teachers, or politicians.
In our culture, we prize and overdevelop objectivity, the ability to stand back and observe without affecting, or being affected by, what we are observing. Subjectivity is considered the artist’s prerogative. We appreciate people who communicate their feelings, dreams, and views to us in evocative ways. Yet it’s really intersubjectivity that we value in a fine work of art, the ability of the artist to depict a truth that we, too, feel deeply but may not have found the right poetry, visual symbol, or music to express. Artists in our culture are worshipped more widely than mystics, because no matter how practical we think we are, we’re willing to pay good money for songs, films, photographs, books, and paintings that reflect what we crave to understand about deeper layers of nonverbal awareness and experience.
Intersubjectivity has an immensely more practical purpose as well, in daily relationships, in business, and most certainly in cultivating the skills associated with leadership and team building. Basically, intersubjective awareness involves paying attention to your own nonverbal experiences and body language cues and those of the people you’re interacting with at the same time. It’s easier said than done. Most adults, in fact, just aren’t very good at this, because the skills associated with intersubjectivity have been seriously neglected in our culture. But when we become conscious of what we’re communicating to others nonverbally, and what they’re communicating to us nonverbally, a whole new universe of information is suddenly available to us. This information virtually demands that we develop the ability to improvise as we respond and adapt to these subtle cues on our way to achieving any goal.
With modern education overemphasizing intellectual and verbal arts, people who somehow manage to train all three of their “brains” become more influential in, even irresistible to, populations who lack this full-bodied charisma. Take Ronald Reagan, whose firm yet congenial, focused, larger-than-life presence was, in fact, the mark of a rider capable of harnessing power and intelligence without repressing the spirit that brings it to life. He so swayed public opinion that the phenomenon of “Democrats for Reagan” was cited by Barack Obama as an inspiration for cultivating cross-party support.
Photos of Reagan on horseback — heading across the range in any number of old Western movies, mounted on his regal gray Arabian at the ranch, and later, riding English-style with Queen Elizabeth — are plentiful on the Internet. Most people would consider this a colorful, perhaps elitist, pastime. Yet the fact that Reagan loved to ride speaks volumes about what kind of intricate, nonverbal training he received that led him to become the noteworthy leader history has since proven him to be.
During the election of 2000, I couldn’t help contrasting the former president’s engaging presence with the stiff, tentative, overintellectual style of Al Gore, a candidate whose ideas and policies I did, in fact, support in several key areas. While he has since gone on to win the Nobel prize, Gore’s demeanor was unduly skewed toward the brain in the head. The “other 90 percent” was missing, at least during his public appearances. Whether or not the election was rigged, the race itself was close. George W. Bush’s style of engaging with the public involved a bit more heart and gut, and that gave him a palpable edge in the nonverbal communication department.
Over time, however, the winner of that controversial vote did not demonstrate the level of horse sense that Reagan possessed. The most telling example was Bush’s response to the news that New York City’s Twin Towers were falling — a response caught on film while he was reading a story to some blissfully unaware schoolchildren. George W. had that deer-in-the-headlights look, which means he wasn’t actively creating a calming presence; he was dissociating. Had he slipped into a similarly disconnected state on the back of a panicking horse, he would have ended up on the ground, temporarily unable to remember that he was the president of the United States.
What Would George Washington Do?
At this point it’s important, enlightening actually, to appreciate the sophisticated combination of intellectual ability and horse sense possessed by our country’s first president. George Washington was a prolific letter writer with progressive views on education and leadership even by today’s standards. It wasn’t nearly so easy to document his considerable nonverbal talents, of course, but many of his soldiers and colleagues wrote home about him, capturing intriguing anecdotes and observations of his particularly striking effect on others. Washington not only commanded respect, he moved people deeply, inspiring loyalty during periods of extreme hardship, mind-boggling uncertainty, and dramatic change. And he accomplished all of this with a reputation for being a man of few words, at least in public.
When I began studying Washington’s career in earnest at the end of 2009, the country he fought so long and hard for was struggling with Wall Street betrayals, record unemployment, fear-mongering pundits, and hostile relations between, sometimes even within, the two political parties. Scared, angry people were burning the current president in effigy over health-care reform, shouting racial slurs, bemoaning the end of civilization itself. Uncompromising red-faced fanatics on both sides of the issue were threatening to move to Canada or Costa Rica if they didn’t get their way. Like many people caught in the middle, I was disgusted with the greed, egotism, irresponsibility, manipulation, and extremism running amok in the name of patriotism. To say I was becoming jaded would be an understatement.
And then the spirit of George Washington rode up on his powerful steed.