The charity Ride High, based in Milton Keynes, has unveiled three new training and wellbeing programmes focusing in leadership and team dynamics, community social responsibility and wellbeing and engagement.
The programmes aim to help businesses and employees improve leadership skills, get teams working together, increase employee engagement and wellbeing, and offer opportunities for important CSR projects at the centre, set in 37 acres of countryside at Loughton.
Ride High works to improve the lives of Milton Keynes’ most disadvantaged children by providing the opportunity to learn to ride and look after horses and ponies.
Equine assisted learning has been proven over 16 years, with the programmes exploring team dynamics, aiming to increase self-awareness and to understand the power and impact of non-verbal communication.
Persuading a horse to follow someone with no rope or rein provides powerful insights into different communication methods and styles, insight which can be taken back into the working environment, says Ride High chief executive Rachel Medill.
“Horses are highly sensitive, intuitive creatures,” adds Ride High Training Centre managing director Joanna Fay. “They provide immediate, unique and compelling insights into the ways we behave and how this affects others.”
The courses are tailor-made for each business, combining practical learning with horses alongside lecture room workshops resulting in action plans for delegates to take back into their business.
Bankie Williams, Chairman of the Black Country Chamber of Commerce, was one of the first to try the new programmes. He said:
“The interaction of horse and business leader was a real eye opener, creating insights and some profound challenges to conventional wisdoms and paradigms about the nature, art and science of leadership."
