In which I ponder the nature of the good leader, and the power of words.

There’s a good old barney brewing on the horse section of the internet, about Being a Leader. There’s an old school idea, and a matching natural horsemanship notion, that you must be your equine’s leader. That is what the animal needs. How you achieve that is obviously the bone of some contention.

Bullshit, cries a voice from the back row. All this being a leader balderdash is just a horrid human excuse to exert dominance. It’s merely revolting ego.

The voice from the back row has art. It is a short video of a French instructor being not very nice to a head-shy horse. It is quite demoralising to watch, and the message boards are howling.

What it really made me think about is the power of words.

Words are important. I love them and use them daily in my work and give them the respect they deserve. They are miracle things. A black mark on a page or a screen can provoke intense emotion, change mood, invite you into another world, transport you through time. A word can break a relationship, or soothe a battered heart. There is something perfectly extraordinary in that.

I have thought about the leader thing quite a lot. At first, I merely accepted it as sense. Horses, and dogs too, being herd and pack animals, need a good honest boss to follow. It makes them feel safe. It’s also excellent for the humans involved. An untrained dog is a bore; an unsettled, dominant horse can be a serious half-ton danger.

But lately, I’ve been wondering whether it is the wrong word. Leader can mean lots of different things to different people. It might mean the swaggery, take no prisoners, strike fear into the heart, my way or the highway autocrat. It could mean the diametrical opposite: someone quiet and confident, who does not need to shout or intimidate, but facilitates the desired result with calm and ease.

When I watched one of the HorseBack leadership courses, the ex-military officers talked of concepts I would not necessarily have expected, about leading people. Sense of humour was high on the list, as was moral courage, and having the bravery to say the unpopular thing. They also talked of being bold enough to admit the things you did not know. Humility was right up there.

I think perhaps that leader, such a bald, plain word, can mean twenty different things to twenty different people. With my own horse, my new word is partner. (When I am being a bit flaky, it is: howdy, pardner.)

Out on some of the equine sites I follow, there are a lot of serious goals. What are your goals for 2013? they ask, and people give lists of dressage tests, and jumping four foot fences, and doing cross country, and teaching the perfect half-pass. My own goals are amazingly homespun and humble. I was making a bit of a joke about it to the Horse Talker the other day.

‘There are all these people wanting to do an immaculate flying change, and I just would like to lead the mare twenty feet into the scary woods,’ I said, ruefully.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said. (She is a woman of action.)

So we led the horses over the bridge and up into the alarming woods. The trees are very dense and there is hardly any light. The place is quite sinister for a human, let alone a flight animal.

Up she went, my dear girl, by my side, snorting and widening her eyes, on high predator alert. And then she relaxed and realised we were fine and I let her graze for a bit, and then we went back. I was as filled with triumph as if we had won Hickstead. The serious competitive people with their proper goals would be laughing their heads off. But it was championship material for us.

‘Of course,’ I say to the Horse Talker, ‘when I say partner, I mean senior partner.’

That’s my idea of leadership. The horse and I are in it together. Everything I do with her must come with her consent. But she needs confidence, and that is in my gift. My word is the last word, but it does not mean she does not have her say. I read her carefully every day like a book, work with her moods rather than against them, ask her only what she is capable of giving. I never punish her, merely persist gently until my aim is met. And then she is covered in congratulation until she smiles her horsey smile, and looks vastly pleased with herself.

(This happened today, as she let me run a plastic container filled with alarming sloshing water all over her body. She was braced and uncertain, this being a new article, but she stood like a rock, her head coming down in increments, as she realised that she was in my safe hands, and in the end she calmly sniffed and lipped at the terrifying object. I rewarded her as if she had just jumped round Cheltenham.)

My goal is a very small, simple thing. It is trust. I don’t want a brilliant, prize-winning horse; I want a happy horse. If we build that bond of trust between us, there shall be joy, for human and equine both. It is a sort of leadership, I suppose. But the good word for it is Love.

 

Today’s pictures:

Bit of a blah day, here in Scotland. But lovely and mild, despite apocalyptic warnings of crashing mercury:

These are the dear dozy faces that greet me each morning:

Posing PONY:

Autumn the Filly:

Red the Mare:

Stanley the Dog with his stick:

And doing most excellent sit and stay. Ha, I AM the Dear Leader in this shot:

Where the hill should be:

I realise, as I read this through, that I really have entirely given in to my most hippy-ish tendencies, as I advance through middle age. It’s all love and trees, in my house. There is a part of me that thinks, oh come on, be sharp and cynical and funny, instead of dippy and hokey.

But it really is the thing I do believe. When we lie on our deathbeds, our defining mark shall be: did we love well? And were we loved well in our turn?

It’s all that matters, in the end. Even such a curmudgeon as Philip Larkin said that all that is left of us is love. And he was right.

A remarkable day

It’s Sunday, so this is going to be a nice long post. Have a cup of tea and put your feet up and slowly read.

The sun is shining, the horses are happy, the dog is settled, so I finally have time to tell you about my day with HorseBack UK.

I’m looking for the right way of expressing my relationship with them. Working for them sounds far too grand and official; volunteering a bit holy and pious; affiliated just awful. I think you could say I am writer in residence.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer in residence. In the old days, when I was swanky and on the hunt for glamour, I used to long and long to be asked to be writer in residence at the Savoy, as Fay Weldon was. Oh, how I yearned to lounge about in my own art deco suite, dashing off a polished sentence from the hurly burly of the chaise longue. Now, all I want is mud and authenticity, so this is really much, much better. Savoy, Schmavoy.

Actually, writer in residence may even be too posh. The idea is, apart from other forms of writing they need, I shall set up a blog for their website. I will go and see them once a week, and give a little behind the scenes glimpse of their work. As they say to me, smiling: I can become part of the furniture. I shall not be lying on the chaise longue; I am the chaise longue.

Their very clever new notion is to bring extra revenue into the organisation by applying all the techniques they use with returning veterans to the corporate sphere. They have ex-soldiers working there; they have the brilliant Quarter Horses. These two invaluable resources can be used to inspire leadership, to show business people how to run a team.

I was fascinated to see how this would work. So up I went to watch.

I could sort of see the army bit. Military ethos must surely be brilliant for leadership. Although even that surprised me. Listening to two ex-soldiers give their talks, I was struck by how broad and philosophical and even, at times, poetical their view of good leadership was. All human life was there. They did not use the dead words of jargon or management-speak; they used lovely existential words, of the heart and the spirit. They talked of courage and humility and character and integrity. They were funny and self-deprecating, but at the same time, I was conscious that they had seen life and death, and they knew of what they spoke. I was so interested my ears practically fell off.

Then, they took all this, and moved it into the equine sphere. Although I bang on practically every day about how my horse teaches me life lessons, I was not quite sure how an equine could teach a corporate honcho anything. Of course, the moment I saw the course in action, it all became clear as day.

You can’t fool a horse; swagger and bombast mean nothing to it. An equine responds most happily and willingly to a good, kind, firm, consistent person, someone who is confident but not arrogant, determined but not aggressive. Possibly the most important thing when working with a horse is to build up trust, a capacity which must be very valuable if you are a boss.

With horses, you can see immediately and in very simple ways how this sort of confidence works. For instance, if you walk on smoothly and with sureness, not looking back, a horse will follow you. If you take ragged, uncertain steps, constantly turning for reassurance, chances are it will not. They also show you the profound value of things like patience, and perseverance, and clarity, and kindness.

There was an old school of horsemanship which maintained that the only way to deal with a horse was to show it who was boss, using sound and fury. You had to break its spirit, went the thinking, and then it would never dare defy you. There were certain disciplines where all kinds of aggressive methods were employed: tying up with ropes, whipping, yelling, spurring, driving the animal through fear and pain. It was a horrible sort of dominance, and sometimes the horses did give in, through sheer terror and exhaustion. But that way, no partnership was ever developed.

I imagine that there was an old school of human management which maintained the same sort of thing. Yell at the underlings; keep them in line by striking terror into their hearts. The new school of horsemanship is much more about empathy, and attention, and working with the grain, rather than against it. By being gentle but not wimpish, kind but not a pushover, you may persuade rather than hector. My suspicion is, just as this gets the best out of equines, it will bring the best out of humans too.

So it was a revelatory day, and I loved it. There is so much thought and cleverness there, and so much that is good and true. I start to think it should not be confined to wounded servicemen and women, or business leaders; everyone should go, and learn something about life.

 

Pictures:

Here they all are, teaching and learning, under the gaze of the wooded hills:

The views beyond the sand arena:

Team-building exercise, involving an entirely idiosyncratic and very, very fast Shetland pony:

I wonder how many leadership courses involve a Shetland pony. Watching the thing in action, I grow convinced that anyone who does not use this faintly unexpected tool is missing an absolutely enormous trick.

The professors, in this wonderful University of Everything:

 

And my own little professors, who teach me something good every single day:

Reading back over this now, I think: I have not quite captured it. There is something missing, but I am not quite sure what. This happens in writing, sometimes. You find yourself almost there, but without a cigar. You circle around the point, rather than nailing it.

If this were professional writing, rather than the amateur sort, done for love, I should go back and whack away at it, with a second, third, fourth draft. I should reframe and rewrite; I should, as I almost always do, slash away the first three paragraphs. (Huge writing rule: if in doubt, cut the beginning, especially if you have, as I do, a fatal tendency for what my friend the Man of Letters calls throat-clearing.)

As it is, this is an amateur enterprise, in its most true sense. It is the place I can come not to be perfect. It is where I can be a bit baggy and shaggy and goofy and blah. It is where I can have a bad day, and it’s not the end of the world. This thought in itself feels like some kind of life lesson, although I’m not strictly sure what it is.

Maybe it comes back to something that is true with horses. You can learn much more from a ragged day, when everything does not go quite right, than when the work is immaculate. It is not the shining ideal that teaches us; it is the shuffly, muddly, faintly farcical screw-up that leaves a lesson in the mind.

 

Link to HorseBack UK here: http://www.horseback.org.uk/

They really are a tremendous outfit, and if you have, as I have, recently won some money on the ponies and are feeling generous, there is a donation button on their website. Even a fiver makes a huge difference. But most of all, I want them to become better known. Apart from anything else, what they do is so interesting. So if the spirit moves you, do tell your friends.