The Power of the Herd (6 page)

Reagan, who started his military career in the U.S. Cavalry, no doubt felt history come to life on the back of El Alamein. He would ride for three or four hours at a time, rarely speaking to Barletta on the trail, totally immersed in the experience. Still, the president's favorite mount was a constant source of anxiety for those charged with the task of protecting their fearless leader.
El Alamein was so intense and flighty
that at one point Barletta had veterinarian Doug Herthel assess whether the horse was suffering from back pain or some other hidden injury. In a treadmill test, the stallion proved stronger than the average racehorse, reaching optimal respiratory levels in two minutes when it took most Thoroughbreds five minutes to hit the same threshold. Herthel, a seasoned equestrian himself, had some trouble controlling El Alamein in a subsequent ride. “I don't feel anything wrong with him,” the doctor concluded after a good twenty minutes in the saddle, “but I can't believe you let the president of the United States ride this dingbat.”

“Still, President Reagan loved that horse,” Barletta observed. “It was almost as if this strong man and this strong horse really understood each other.” Not
that there weren't some close calls during the nearly ten years the president rode El Alamein. But Reagan's poise and athleticism, combined with his love of a challenge, saved him on more than one occasion. Nonverbally, he could conjure up a calming presence under pressure that was simultaneously firm and reassuring, focused yet agile. It's a skill that anyone who likes to ride a spirited horse develops through experience — or dies trying.

If Reagan had simply wanted to relax, he wouldn't have chosen a horse like El Alamein. The president was accessing something in that relationship, something elusive yet essential. Trotting off into the desert on a horse ready to bolt at the drop of a hat or the rattle of a snake, gaining the animal's trust and cooperation along the way, Reagan wasn't just clearing his mind; he was literally exercising abilities that would prove useful in the international political arena.

Detractors insisted the former actor and radio announcer was a figurehead, a charlatan launched into office through his extensive film and public-speaking experience, a political amateur controlled by more intelligent, covert, perhaps malevolent forces. As a skeptical college student at the time he was elected, I too was willing to believe this rumor, ready to dissect his every false move — and confounded by his increasing popularity. After all, what Reagan said wasn't so impressive. It wasn't even how he said it. Whatever “it” was, there was no logical explanation for it whatsoever in my mind, at least not until I bought my first horse at age thirty-two. Only then did I realize that what Reagan learned in the saddle was crucial to his success.

Contrary to popular belief, riding a horse does not come naturally — for one infuriating reason: the most basic skills are counterintuitive to the flight-or-fight response in both species. Even mildly challenging situations cause the blood pressure to rise. Guts clench and muscles tighten as breathing becomes fast and shallow. Horses and other large prey animals evolved to sense these nonverbal danger signals in herd members
at a distance.
When you're sitting on the spine of such a powerful creature, his sudden, overwhelming urge to bolt, in concert with your body's involuntary alarm system, becomes a serious threat to your immediate survival. Within seconds, a deadly interspecies feedback loop of escalating arousal spirals out of control, creating a tornado of disorganized responses guaranteed to leave dust and destruction in its wake.

Take the classic amateur rider's initiation: managing a startled horse. If you could watch what happens to the nervous systems of both species in slow motion, ejection from the saddle stands out as the most logical conclusion.
However, seasoned equestrians learn to modify their own instinctual responses, causing their mounts to experience the
opposite
of fear. It's a nonverbal skill that comes in handy with humans too, as so many of my clients have discovered over the years.

“Stephanie Argento” runs a highly successful East Coast marketing firm. Tall, confident, effusive, the forty-nine-year-old mother of two teenage boys booked a last-minute New Year's Eve appointment with me through a mutual friend, hoping, as she put it, “to make sense of an unfortunate riding incident” that occurred during her family's Christmas vacation.

Stephanie's sister, Marie, had recently moved to Tucson and was inspired to buy a horse, which she kept at a small private facility near the Saguaro National Monument East, a scenic desert preserve with miles of trails. “Marie and I took riding lessons when we were little,” Stephanie told me during our initial conversation. “Actually, we were so horse crazy, it was like we'd taken the postal service oath. You know, ‘neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail shall keep us from our appointed rounds.' And we were fearless, willing to ride any horse, anywhere, anytime. But then I went to college, got married, got practical. So I was really looking forward to visiting my sister over the holidays, doing some mindless touristy things, and maybe getting back into the saddle myself.”

The opportunity presented itself the Saturday after Christmas. A group of Marie's fellow horse boarders planned to hit the trails, and one of them offered Stephanie the use of his daughter's horse. The lanky Thoroughbred gelding, an ex-racehorse, seemed a little feisty, but Marie had ridden with the family a number of times and had never seen Charger spook. Considering Stephanie's background, a fourteen-year-old girl's favorite horse “seemed like a no-brainer” to her and everyone else involved. The group headed toward the monument around noon, looking forward to a relaxing ride and a subsequent barbecue.

“So here it's this beautiful, sunny day in December, and I'm not even wearing a coat,” Stephanie continued. “Charger's owner made me put a helmet on, which I resisted at first. I had these romantic visions of galloping through the desert with my hair blowing free under the big blue sky. I sure am glad he insisted, or I might be a drooling vegetable at this very moment.”

The adventure started calmly enough. “The scenery was like something out of a John Wayne movie, all these gigantic cactuses, massive rock outcroppings, scruffy little trees, and majestic mountains. I was in heaven, seriously considering how to make the move to Tucson myself, when this huge jackrabbit ran out of the brush and sort of spooked the horse in front of me. Charger shied, and my heart skipped a beat. It actually felt like someone had kicked me in the
gut for a moment. Then Marie shouted ‘Night of the Lepus!' and we both burst into laughter.”

Quizzical looks from the other riders prompted the sisters to explain as they headed on down the trail: “We'd been out to Colossal Cave the day before, and they had this little museum with, among other things, a display of some of the old Westerns that had been shot in the area. There was this poster for what looked like a really bad B movie called
Night of the Lepus
with Janet Leigh. That guy from Star Trek, the doctor [DeForest Kelley] was in it too. My husband had seen it at the drive-in years ago, and we were pretty much in hysterics as he described it, to the point where my sons looked it up on the Internet later that night.”

The 1972 film depicts an ill-fated attempt at rodent birth control. When an Arizona rancher complains of rabbits overrunning his grazing lands, a local university professor injects some test subjects with hormones and genetically altered blood to curb their rampant reproduction. The whole thing backfires, of course. One of the lab rabbits escapes, creating a race of giant bloodthirsty, man-, cow-, and horse-eating bunnies.

As Stephanie and Marie related the details of this ridiculous tale, their mounts relaxed, and the trail ride continued without incident — that is, until their little posse turned back toward the stable and several of the horses seemed overanxious to get home. “Charger started jigging, pulling at the bit,” Stephanie remembers, “but he wasn't the only one. It was exhausting trying to hold the horses back, so we all started trotting — but, my God, Charger had a rough trot. I was bouncing all over the place, trying to rein him in at the same time. Then we rounded the next bend, and this herd of deer came out of nowhere. Charger shot forward. I grabbed his mane and held on as best I could.

“The next thing I remember I'm on the ground and my sister's asking me if I know who the president of the United States is. Apparently, my horse ran all the way home before any of the other riders could catch up with him. Marie and I walked back because I refused to get on her mare, or anyone else's horse, for that matter.”

Stephanie's helmet was cracked. She was bruised and confused. But the fact that she couldn't bring herself to get right back on a horse that day was, in her mind, “the most demoralizing part of all.”

At the barbecue later that afternoon, Stephanie heard all kinds of gracious, ego-mending explanations for her fall, the most common theme involving the “fact” that, as prey animals, horses exist in a perpetual state of fearful anticipation. In their pea-sized brains, plastic bags blowing in the breeze are cackling,
soul-stealing ghosts. Deer are fleet-footed, flesh-eating zombies. And jackrabbits, well, they're just plain mutant. Rider beware!

This all-too-common explanation gives way too much credit to the horse's imagination, a bizarre attribute to afford an animal you've just cited as mentally deficient. In truth, there's no scientific evidence for sinister B-movie plots rolling around in the equine brain — not that I would consider this mutant feature of the human storytelling instinct a sign of advanced intelligence. There is, however, a much better case for observing a finely tuned, empathic nervous system in action. When a horse spooks, he shows us something remarkable, and the latest research points to some surprising conclusions about our own hidden potential.

Having seen, and experienced, numerous close calls over the years, I can tell you exactly what set Charger off. Stephanie's tension, posture, and breathing (or her lack of breathing), her inexperience with the landscape, her rusty riding skills — and her own natural, unrecognized empathic talents — all conspired to catapult her off that horse, leaving her wincing in the dust and walking into the sunset on her own two feet. At the same time, I suspect her early equestrian experiences contributed to her success in business. Reawakening this nonverbal wisdom, bringing it to full consciousness, would give her an even more significant edge. Stephanie was thrilled to learn that the nonverbal fear-management skills she practiced with me that day would be useful in calming and focusing staff, clients, and family members once she returned home. (See Guiding Principle 7,
chapter 19
.)

Italian neuroscientists, studying the effects of movement on the brain, stumbled upon a strange and unexpected feature of the mammalian nervous system, one that quickly led to all kinds of research into the physiology of empathy. Not only are we hardwired to
share
experience; it turns out that sensations and emotions are more contagious than the common cold!

In the 1980s, researchers at the University of Parma
placed electrodes in the premotor cortex of a macaque, hoping to figure out which neurons were activated by hand and mouth actions. They soon isolated a particular cell that fired only when the monkey lifted his arm. Apparently they did this over and over again just to make sure, as scientists are prone to do. But I would love to have seen the looks on their faces when a lab assistant lifted an ice cream cone to his own mouth during one of those sessions and
triggered a reaction in the monkey's cell.
Subsequent studies suggest that our brains are peppered with tiny
mirror neurons
that mimic what another being does, ultimately allowing us to detect someone else's emotions through his or her actions.

In their September 2008
Harvard Business Review
article, “Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership,” Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis summarize the implications for those of us hired to motivate, inspire and basically move large numbers of people around in a coordinated fashion:
“Mirror neurons have a particular importance
in organizations, because leaders' emotions and actions prompt followers to mirror those feelings and deeds. The effects of activating neural circuitry in followers' brains can be very powerful.”

In one intriguing study cited by Goleman and Boyatzis, researcher Marie Dasborough observed the effects of two management approaches. The first group of employees received negative performance feedback supported by positive emotional signals — ample smiles and nods. The other group experienced positive feedback couched in negative body language — frowns and narrowed eyes. As it turns out, those who emerged from good-natured
negative
feedback sessions felt more optimistic than those who received praise from cranky supervisors. “In effect,” Goleman and Boyatzis conclude,
“the delivery was more important than the message
itself. And everybody knows that when people feel better, they perform better. So if leaders hope to get the best out of their people, they should continue to be demanding but in ways that foster a positive mood in their teams. The old carrot-and-stick approach alone doesn't make neural sense.”

Like horses, who are keenly aware of nonverbal cues, people respond to the emotional atmosphere behind our words more profoundly than they do to the actual content and meaning. But vocal tone, body language, and mirror neurons are just the tip of the iceberg. Research into the human-equine relationship continues to uncover even more subtle interpersonal dynamics, and while no one understands the mechanism yet, it turns out that horses and riders don't have to
see
any evidence of movement or gesture to affect each other physiologically. While this may seem obvious when you're riding a horse — you can feel what's going on in his body and vice versa — emotions and sensations are contagious even when you appear to be walking calmly beside each other.