From the podcast Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle, Social Wealth Strategist, a practitioner who designs connection at work.
Opening
I have sat in meetings where nobody said anything untrue, yet something felt wrong. I have also met a stranger and felt safe within a minute. Today's guest would say both of those readings are accurate, and that a horse could tell you the difference before you could.
The idea
Christina Marz is a holistic psychologist who grew up in Bavaria and now lives in Ecuador, where she founded an international school teaching healing and coaching with horses, with students in more than 30 countries.
Her work rests on a simple observation, that horses seek harmony and connection for their survival, and that being near a healthy herd changes us. She walked me through the physiology.
Our heart rhythm carries a pattern that shifts with our emotions, and that pattern broadcasts into an electromagnetic field the people around us can feel.
A horse has a heart five times larger than ours, so the field is stronger, and a horse living in harmony with its herd becomes a kind of tuning fork.
“horses in harmony with their herd are calm, connected and curious, and then you feel that way too”.
That calm is the ground layer on which any teaching, coaching or healing conversation can bloom, because people become calm, connected and curious, with real access to their own emotions. The second part of her work is intention.
She told me that in her practice she meets people who were victims of fraud, and almost all of them say the same thing, they knew before they knew. Something in them registered that the intention behind the friendly voice did not match the words.
Horses, she said, are masters in reading our intention, and time with them trains the same capacity in us.
In a world where a message may be written by a machine and a video may not show a real person, she believes this ability to feel intention is one of the most important traits of the years ahead.
She also shared her own story of moving countries and giving herself permission to build her method, which resonated deeply with my own experience of arriving in Canada and starting again.
What I took from it
I have moved a great deal in my life, and every move has asked me to read new rooms with no shared history to lean on. Listening to Christina, I recognised that skill and finally had language for it.
Her description of the fraud victims who knew before they knew also sat with me, because I have ignored that quiet signal in favour of being polite.
What I took most of all was the permission in her story, the way she gave herself the go ahead to build her school when nobody handed it to her.
Raising my children far from extended family, I have learned that belonging is something you practise, and horses apparently practise it their whole lives.
Three things to try this week
- Practise one clean read this week. In your next meeting or call, notice what you feel before anyone speaks, name it privately, and see whether the conversation confirms it.
- Check your own broadcast. Before one important conversation, decide the intention you want to carry into the room, then walk in with it, because the field around you changes with what you feel.
- Give yourself one permission slip. Write down the thing you have been waiting for approval to start, and take the first small step towards it this week, the way Christina did when she founded her school.
Watch and go deeper
The player below carries our full conversation, and watching it gives you her work in her own words. You can watch the conversation in the player below. To learn more about the guest, visit Christina Marz.
You can also find the guest on Christina Marz on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks.
Go deeper with the research
My research with more than 1,200 leaders keeps returning to one idea, that connection is a capacity you can build, not a personality trait you either have or lack. You can explore more of that in the research behind this work .
What is the quietest signal in your life telling you right now?