Читать книгу The Power of the Herd - Linda Kohanov - Страница 12
ОглавлениеThe request for backup was unprecedented, especially so soon after the election — one Secret Service agent was injured, and the future president of the United States was taking care of him, waiting for assistance. Ronald Reagan hadn’t even taken the oath of office, and already he was a security risk.
“I have a big problem out here,” the detail supervisor reported during that subsequent, no doubt embarrassing, call to the White House. “I need someone who can ride a horse.”
Turns out that Reagan wanted to spend time at his California ranch after a grueling election campaign, but it was difficult for him to relax with members of the Presidential Protective Division acting like Keystone Cops on horseback. As John Barletta reveals in his insightful, occasionally hilarious book Riding with Reagan: From the White House to the Ranch, no one on the secret service staff even knew how to tie a horse that first week at Rancho del Cielo, so the president-elect ended up saddling all their mounts. Things only got worse when they started riding. At one point, Reagan took off at a gallop, jumping fences through the rugged Santa Ynez Mountains. Members of the security team were having trouble keeping up, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. Finally, one agent fell off his horse and broke his arm. The veteran of numerous cowboy movies dismounted and rushed to the man’s side until the rest of the crew arrived on the scene. No doubt Reagan also supervised the rescue mission as his novice rider-agents figured out how to get their wounded comrade back to ranch headquarters through a scenic yet confusing maze of trails where the deer and the antelope play alongside the scorpion, rattlesnake, and mountain lion.
“Our chief supervisor at the time rightly said that was not how things should work,” Barletta wrote with his characteristic gift for understatement. “The President was not supposed to be giving us aid and comfort. That was what we should be doing for him.” A quick, national search for the right agent to accompany the president on his rides produced the perfect combination — an army veteran, secret service agent, and experienced equestrian. Barletta spent the next decade accompanying Reagan on hundreds of rides spanning several continents.
Recreational Therapy
For Reagan, ranching was no publicity stunt. He built the fences in front of the rustic main house himself and was forever clearing his favorite riding trails of overgrown brush. When he’d head out to chop wood, he’d throw the saws into his old, beat-up red Jeep, even though his wife, Nancy, preferred he take the newer, safer blue Jeep she and some friends had bought for his birthday. In fact, the First Lady continually plotted with the secret service to rein in her husband’s penchant for good, old-fashioned, mind-clearing, body-renewing hard work. Over time, through careful diplomacy, the security team convinced Reagan to refrain from jumping his horse and running the wood chipper. Then, of course, there was the question of firearms. One false alarm involved a simple attempt to control algae taking over the Rancho del Cielo pond. Reagan bought some goldfish to keep the water clear, which he inadvertently ended up feeding to a magnificent blue heron who surely thought he had stumbled upon a fish lover’s paradise buffet.
Frustrated, Reagan marched out of the house one morning, pistol in hand, and started shooting, hoping to scare the bird away. “When the gunshots echoed through the air, the whole place went crazy,” Barletta remembers. The author, who could see all the action from his post near the tack room, tried to calm everyone down with a brief, unintentionally inflammatory radio message: “It’s OK. Reagan shot.”
“Reagan shot?!” they screamed back. Barletta quickly explained what had happened, looking back at the president, who was already assessing the commotion he had caused.
“I suppose I should have told you I was going to do that, huh?” Reagan said. And that, Barletta revealed, was how the leader of the free world decided to turn over all his firearms to the Secret Service for safekeeping.
Despite these early mishaps, protecting the president on horseback was by far the biggest challenge Barletta’s team encountered. When Reagan saddled his gray stallion, the security team had several hours of serious work ahead of them. It didn’t help that the horse, El Alamein, was an Anglo-Arab, a half-Thoroughbred, half-Arabian combining the speed of the former breed with the intensity and endurance of the latter. He was so feisty, Barletta reports, that “the more you worked him, the more excited he got.”
The stallion, a gift from the president of Mexico, had been taught to emerge from his stall, rear, and take several steps on his back legs, a spectacle designed to awe and intimidate even the most experienced equestrian. In fact, El Alamein’s notoriously flamboyant nature was likely enhanced by trainers enamored of their Spanish conquistador heritage, a tradition producing proud, powerful, fiery horses, in part to scare the living daylights out of enemies, serfs, and common folk.
From antiquity through the conquest of the New World, a meticulously trained war stallion could rear, strike, and kick out his back legs on command to injure foot soldiers. He could leap to the side, slide to a stop, spin, and take off running without hesitation; he would also stand at attention in the midst of a raging battle if his rider dismounted to engage in hand-to-hand combat. Advanced competitors in the Olympic Games continue to demonstrate such feats, and these peacetime pursuits, too, require significant courage, fortitude, and risk to develop. The horse, after all, is an astonishing enigma, a prey animal willing to endure the horrors of war and the uncertainty of the unknown, carrying generations of riders, around the world, for reasons that still boggle the mind, sometimes receiving medals for exceptional bravery along the way.
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.
Night of the Lepus
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.)
Emotions Are Contagious!
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.
In a 2009 article published in the Veterinary Journal, researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences performed a simple, elegant experiment designed to study the effect a nervous handler has on the heart rate of his or her mount. Twenty-seven horses of various breeds and ages were led or ridden at a walk by thirty-seven amateur equestrians. Wearing heart-rate monitors, each team traveled a thirty-meter distance between two cones a total of four times. Just before the final pass, however, the person was told that an assistant, who had been standing next to the path the whole time, would open an umbrella as the horse went by.
Now, as someone who’s worked with a number of flighty horses over the years, my own heart skipped a beat just reading about this minor institutionalized threat. I mean, even right now, sitting at my computer, I actually cringe at the thought of the sound an umbrella makes when it flies open, especially when I visualize this happening five feet away from my Arabian stallion. If mirror neurons are involved in these palpable physiological responses, they’re bouncing off a projection screen in my head. And the effect of imagination, interestingly enough, is what the researchers were ultimately measuring. Those scientific pranksters didn’t open the umbrella (as any equine-liability insurance company would be relieved to know). Even so, the heart rates of both human and horse rose significantly as they passed the now suspect, inclement-weather-savvy lab assistant. Even more remarkable, no behavioral differences were observed in either horse or handler when the animal was being led, though there was a tendency for riders to shorten their reins after the dreaded news was conveyed. So, especially in the case of people leading their equine companions, the mere human thought of the umbrella’s spooking power was enough to raise the arousal of the horse, who I’m pretty sure would not have understood the experimenter’s warning in Swedish or any other language.
Let’s not mince words here. What we’re talking about is a mild form of telepathy, which, I might add, comes from the same root as empathy and sympathy. Telepathy literally means “feeling at a distance.” Because we’re methodically and relentlessly taught to dissociate from the environment and our own bodies, modern humans downplay rather than develop this ability, but the information still manages to leak through now and then in the form of “gut feelings” and other forms of intuition. While culturally conditioned minds work overtime to discount insights that bypass rational thought, the brain itself can’t help but gather and process multifaceted somatic impressions with the split-second accuracy of a computer calculating a complex spreadsheet.
Logic, though useful at times, moves like a snail on quaaludes compared with the warp-speed conclusions coordinated by spindle cells. Four times larger than most brain cells, these neurons have an extralong branch allowing them to attach to other cells more easily, transmitting environmental impressions, memories, thoughts, and feelings at hyperspeed. “This ultrarapid connection of emotions, beliefs, and judgments creates what behavioral scientists call our social guidance system,” Goleman and Boyatzis emphasize. “Spindle cells trigger neural networks that come into play whenever we have to choose the best response among many — even for a task as routine as prioritizing a to-do list. These cells also help us gauge whether someone is trustworthy and right (or wrong) for a job. Within one-twentieth of a second, our spindle cells fire with information about how we feel about that person; such ‘thin-slice’ judgments can be very accurate, as follow-up metrics reveal. Therefore, leaders should not fear to act on those judgments, provided that they are also attuned to others’ moods.” (And, I must emphasize, provided these leaders are also aware of their own projections and prejudices, a topic I explore in chapter 12.)
It works both ways, of course. Spindle cells, mirror neurons, and horse heart-rate responses to threats imagined by humans add to growing scientific evidence that everyone — from your employees to your kids, your spouse, your mother-in-law, and your dog — is designed to read your mind. Kind of levels the playing field, doesn’t it?
Here’s an even more intriguing, or disturbing, bit of news, depending on whether or not you like to hide your emotions and intentions from others. In Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, emotional-intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman cites studies showing that not only does a person’s blood pressure escalate when he tries to suppress feeling but the blood pressure of those interacting with him also rises. Lie detector tests, of course, measure arousal fluctuations. However, you don’t have to be hooked up to a machine to reveal a hidden state of mind. Living beings are hardwired to transmit and receive this information at a distance. Our culturally induced emphasis on verbal communication lessens awareness of this valuable information over time, but anyone who retains or reclaims use of this natural ability appears downright psychic compared to the rest of the population.
The volume of this little-understood “sixth sense” is turned way up in prey animals such as horses, who become noticeably agitated in the presence of people who are incongruent, who try to cover anger, fear, or sadness with an appearance of well-being. This is not an equine judgment of our tendency to lie about what we’re really feeling; it appears to be a reflection of emotion’s physiology — and its contagious nature. In well over a decade of working with horses to teach human-development skills, I have regularly seen these animals mirror the precise emotion being suppressed, then calm down the moment the handler openly acknowledges that feeling — even if the emotion is still there. Let me say it again: The emotion doesn’t have to change in order for the horse to show some signs of relaxation. By making the fear or anger conscious, by becoming congruent, the handler effectively lowers his own blood pressure, even if only slightly. But it’s enough to drop the horse’s blood pressure in response, which the animal demonstrates by sighing, licking and chewing, and/or lowering his head.
Unless you’re a sociopath (which we’ll get to later in this chapter), your blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing intensify when you’re frightened or angry, even when you’re wearing your best poker face. It takes extra energy to hide these feelings, which adds to the anxiety radiating from your body through a complex process that scientists are only now beginning to uncover. (It’s important to emphasize that horses can detect hidden emotions that I cannot see in the client. Sometimes this person doesn’t realize what he or she is feeling until the horse acts it out, oddly enough. Yet sure enough, when the client acknowledges this previously suppressed emotion, the horse will relax, sigh, lick, and chew. Something operating beyond the scope of mirror neurons is at work in humans as well, or the blood pressure of someone who’s suppressing emotion would not affect the arousal of the people he or she is interacting with.)
The good news is that positive feelings are contagious too. A person who truly feels peaceful in situations that unnerve others can have a calming effect on everyone around her. This is a key skill in becoming a great rider or a great leader. In fact, with more time in the saddle, our Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, might have just as easily become an accomplished horse whisperer. His ability to reassure and focus others during challenging situations had much less to do with words than most people would suspect.
Breaking the Spell
In 1990, psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer introduced the term emotional intelligence, defining it as “a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions to discriminate among them and use this information to guide one’s thinking and action.” Five years later, Daniel Goleman’s influential book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ expanded on this concept, spawning widespread interest in the topic. Since that time, numerous studies have shown that, even among scientists, high “EQ” is more important than raw IQ and training in predicting career success, not to mention in building and sustaining strong personal relationships.
The most exciting research illuminates intricate biological processes at work in the simplest human interactions, prompting Goleman to recognize that leaders in particular must both manage their own somatic responses and learn to modulate these emotional-physiological cues and reactions in others. In the 2002 bestseller Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, Goleman teamed up with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee to unveil the neuroscientific links between organizational success or failure. The authors argued that “emotions are contagious,” a finding that “charges leaders with driving emotions in the right direction to have a positive impact on earnings or strategy.” As the authors emphasize,
Great leaders move us. They ignite our passion and inspire the best in us. When we try to explain why they’re so effective, we speak of strategy, vision, or powerful ideas. But the reality is much more primal: Great leadership works through the emotions. . . .
In the modern organization, this primordial emotional task — though by now largely invisible — remains foremost among the many jobs of leadership: driving the collective emotions in a positive direction and clearing the smog created by toxic emotions. . . . Quite simply, in any human group the leader has maximal power to sway everyone’s emotions. If people’s emotions are pushed toward the range of enthusiasm, performance can soar; if people are driven toward rancor and anxiety, they will be thrown off stride.
Goleman further elaborated on this phenomenon in his 2006 book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. In his subsequent Harvard Business Review collaboration with Boyatzis, he offered a brief history and definition of this groundbreaking concept: “The notion that effective leadership is about having powerful social circuits in the brain has prompted us to extend our concept of emotional intelligence, which we had previously grounded in theories of individual psychology. A more relationship-based construct for assessing leadership is social intelligence, which we define as a set of interpersonal competencies built on specific neural circuits (and related endocrine systems) that inspire others to be effective.”
Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, their own research and consulting endeavors, and studies associated with the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, Goleman and his colleagues continue to search for ways “to translate newly acquired knowledge about mirror neurons, spindle cells” and other physiological findings “into practical, socially intelligent behavior that can reinforce the neural links between you and your followers.”
Which brings me to the “PhD level” of emotional and social intelligence: managing empathic insights. Back when I wrote my first book, The Tao of Equus, in the late 1990s (published in 2001), the contagious nature of emotion was a controversial notion completely ignored by most people and vehemently challenged by skeptics, who saw it as some kind of psychic mumbo jumbo. Yet after repeatedly witnessing horses accurately mirroring the unconscious emotions of my clients, I began searching for scientific corroboration of what I called “shared emotion.” At that time, I could find only one term for the phenomenon outside mystical and New Age circles: anthropologist E. Richard Sorensen’s concept of “sociosensual awareness.” In many ways, I still prefer this term because of the lilting, almost musical way it rolls off the tongue. Sociosensual awareness also has a decidedly positive connotation compared to affect contagion, a term I came across in the 2001 book Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain by psychiatrist Elio Frattaroli. Not only did this phrase characterize how people sometimes feel victimized by others’ emotions, but it also carried more weight with skeptics because of its medical connotation. Frattaroli’s definition recognized that the hidden emotions of one person could infect another. While he framed this as something akin to a communicable disease, he recognized that it couldn’t be explained away by conventional counseling principles like transference and countertransference. He subsequently learned to use affect contagion in his practice — in one case to accurately sense a patient’s unspoken suicidal mood when standard psychological tests, and the opinions of respected colleagues, insisted the man had no self-destructive intent.
Frattaroli’s realization that he could use his own body to sense his clients’ emotions and Goleman’s interest in capitalizing on neurological processes for the purpose of “driving emotions” of others “in the right direction” are two sides of the same empathic coin, one that equestrians have been tossing for centuries. If you specialize in training flighty, abused, or simply inexperienced horses, it’s not just helpful to draw on these interrelated skills; it’s essential to your survival.
Here’s how it works. A second before your horse shies, bucks, or bolts, he sends what feels like an electrical charge pulsing through your body, causing your gut to clench and your heart rate to rise. Depending upon the severity of the situation, you might also feel your breath catching in your throat and the hair rising on the back of your neck as the information moves on up to your brain. When used effectively, this somatic alarm allows you to prepare for, and possibly avert, a troublesome spook. Remember, spindle cells can assess multiple inputs and choose the best response within one-twentieth of a second, giving you a brief window of time to modify the horse’s reaction by consciously altering your own nervous system’s response. Ultimately, how you handle this potent input determines whether you stay on his back (or in the case of leading a horse, whether or not he rears over you, kicks out, drags you to the ground, and/or leaves you with a painful case of rope burn as he breaks free and runs screaming around the farm working the rest of the herd into a frenzy, possibly setting in motion an even more unfortunate chain of events, including, but not limited to, unseating several unsuspecting riders in adjacent arenas).
An inexperienced rider can’t help but respond to this massive dose of affect contagion instinctually, usually by collapsing into a (supremely unbalanced) fetal position, grabbing hold of the horse’s mane, and wrapping her legs around his body. Leg pressure, being the cue to “go faster,” is like hitting the “turbocharge” control on a race car, catapulting the horse forward. Those who manage to hang on through this little rite of passage get to experience the next round of responses — namely, a series of increasingly frantic bucks, which the horse employs mostly to regain his balance as the frazzled human dangling around his neck becomes an unfocused blob of dead weight. Actually the effect is worse than dead weight: a frightened rider’s supercharged nervous system broadcasts its own breath-holding, gut-clenching, heart-racing alarm back into the horse’s body, which intensifies the flight-or-fight response.
Breaking the spell of this dangerous feedback loop is a nonverbal skill. The words whoa and relax mean nothing to a horse when the rest of your body is screaming, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” However, as Stephanie Argento discovered during that post-Christmas trail ride, hearing a companion shout “Night of the Lepus!” might make all the difference in the world.
The Opposite of Fear
Revisiting the details of that first rabbit-induced spook, Stephanie was intrigued to find that she’d experienced, viscerally, the dangers of affect contagion — and, accidentally, the power of its hidden potential. When a supersized bunny startled the horse in front of her, Charger too had shied, causing Stephanie’s gut to clench and her heart to skip a beat. Had this process continued unabated, she probably would have rolled over into a fetal position and grabbed hold of his body with her legs, heightening Charger’s impulse to turn tail and run. But quite unexpectedly, Marie had made her laugh, literally disarming a volatile physiological trend.
Fear, especially among social animals, is a sociosensual phenomenon, immensely efficient as an empathic alarm that shoots through the herd. Horses, after all, don’t have to turn around and shout, “There’s a lion in the grass; I think it would be prudent for all of us to flee in an easterly direction and reassess the situation on that hill over there.” A split second before the threat-sensing horse can move his thousand-pound body into a flight-or-fight pose, let alone turn around and run, a shock wave of heightened arousal blasts through his nervous system — and the nervous systems of every horse, bird, rabbit, deer, and human in the vicinity. This potentially lifesaving form of shared emotion, however, can create a destructive hall-of-mirrors effect: any rise in blood pressure or muscle tension from the rider amplifies the horse’s trepidation, needlessly inducing panic when, in the case of a jackrabbit, mild, momentary concern is the correct response.
Experienced riders learn, sometimes unconsciously, how to avert a spook by meeting the affect contagion of fear with the affect contagion of relaxation, focus, elation, and/or amusement. Physiologically, this means that when you feel that initial shock wave coursing through your body, you breathe into the tension, loosening your spine, unclenching your gut, releasing your jaw. Rather than bracing against the horse or grabbing his mane, you sit deeper in the saddle, maintaining an agile, balanced position. It actually helps to smile — if appropriate. Remember, incongruent emotion — such as covering fear with an appearance of well-being — causes your own blood pressure, and consequently that of the horse, to rise. However, the idea that a twenty-pound jackrabbit could pose a threat to the half-ton powerhouse of muscle underneath you is so ridiculous that the mere thought might produce an authentic chuckle or two.
It’s particularly dangerous to dissociate at this point, because if you go blank and numb, you leave the choice of what to do and where to go up to a frazzled horse. You avoid the haze of indecision not by trying to disconnect from sensation overload but by feeling what’s happening and using those feelings as information. This obviously takes courage and practice. To up the difficulty level, you must then modify your own physiological response to fear in order to drive the emotions and attention of your horse in the right direction. With mind and body fully engaged, breathing deeply, regaining balance if not total relaxation, you focus your mount toward the desired outcome — either away from a legitimate threat, like a royally pissed-off rattlesnake, or right on down the trail as that wild hare leaps across your path.
When it comes to consciously broadcasting the opposite of fear, you must be present to win. During that first spook, however, Stephanie’s hide was saved by a timely joke. And laughter, it turns out, is one of the most efficient ways to turn a destructive emotional trend around. As Goleman and Boyatzis reveal, humans actually have a special subset of mirror neurons “whose only job is to detect other people’s smiles and laughter, prompting smiles and laughter in return.” Horses can’t laugh, obviously, but the sudden mood shift that their handlers experience when amusement takes over is reliably contagious across species lines.
Whether you’re a rider, a parent, a teacher, or a manager, a good sense of humor may well be the ultimate secret weapon, useful not only for disarming an out-of-control flight-or-fight impulse but also for achieving higher performance overall. Goleman and Boyatzis cite the research of Fabio Sala, who found that top-performing leaders elicited laughter three times more often in staff members than did midperforming leaders. “Being in a good mood, other research finds, helps people take in information effectively and respond nimbly and creatively. In other words laughter is serious business.”
As with most forms of emotional intelligence, however, good judgment and sensitivity to nuance are essential in using laughter effectively. Sarcasm, for instance, is innately incongruent, allowing people to express contempt and anger in glib yet divisive ways, producing noxious by-products on both sides of a conflict. Those aligned with your perspective may be momentarily amused by your cutting remarks, but the end result is increased cynicism and scorn for the object of your derision, ultimately discouraging team work and negotiation. Those on the receiving end of your little joke experience a form of shame that quickly turns to rage. People who regularly use sarcasm inflame rather than defuse tense situations. And studies show that when blood pressure rises, intelligence and creativity drop.
Artful wit, on the other hand, packs a constructive contagious punch, disarming fear and anger with feelings of delight as well as amusement, encouraging people to work together more effectively. As Winston Churchill once said, “A joke is a very serious thing.” During the darkest hours of World War II, the British prime minister harnessed the power of laughter to release tension while communicating inspiring, sobering, sometimes even critical, opinions and observations. Here’s a sampling: “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” “[A politician needs] the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year — and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.” “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
And courage he had, in spades, exercised to a large extent on the back of a horse, I might add.
Extreme Sports
Throughout his career, Churchill repeatedly demonstrated the ability to lower his own arousal in volatile situations, meeting the affect contagion of fear with the affect contagion of humor, courage, intelligence, and inspiration — centering and focusing large numbers of people who had good reason to panic. Yet nothing in his later years could compare with the intensity of his early cavalry experiences.
In the 1957 book His Kingdom for a Horse, Wyatt Blassingame describes, with hair-raising precision, what twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Churchill faced during a cavalry charge in Egypt by the Twenty-First Lancers regiment. His horse, a gray Arabian he called Arab, was a former polo pony — polo was a game that Churchill himself played “extremely well. From a full run the little horse could whirl to the left or right or come to a sliding stop, keeping his balance like a ballet dancer.” Those skills would come in handy during a Dervish army attack in September of 1898.
Sword drawn, racing toward the enemy with the rest of his troop, Churchill suddenly realized that a recent shoulder injury would prevent him from using the heavy weapon effectively. “At a full gallop,” Blassingame marvels, “he managed to get the sword back into its scabbard and drew his pistol. This took time. When he looked toward the enemy again he was almost on them. The kneeling and crouching Dervishes in their blue robes were firing frantically, the smoke swirling over them.” And just behind the front line, Churchill soon discovered, was a dry wash filled with thousands of fearsomely armed warriors. Dodging bullets he as raced through a cluster of kneeling riflemen, Churchill pulled hard on the reins at the edge of that sunken watercourse. “Arab skidded, then dropped catlike into the depression. If he had stumbled there, if he had fallen, a dozen swords and spears would have struck at the lieutenant. Once unhorsed he would have had no chance. But Arab stayed on his feet; he kept running; he broke through the swordsmen and leaped into the clear on the far side of the dry waterbed.”
As horse and rider careened through the next wave of the khalifa’s brave and fanatical army, Churchill saw a Dervish fling himself on the ground. For an instant the British officer thought the soldier had been shot. Then, even as Arab raced forward, Churchill “realized the man planned to slash at the gray’s legs and bring him down, unhorsing the rider.” With seconds to spare, “Arab turned as if he were on a polo field. The slashing swords missed. Leaning from the saddle Churchill fired two shots into the man. He barely had time to straighten when he saw another Dervish directly ahead, sword raised. But again the gray whirled, so close this time that even as Churchill fired, his pistol touched the face of the Dervish.”
Not all of the Lancers were blessed with the same combination of skill and luck. When the charge ended, minutes after the attack was launched, they had lost almost one quarter of their force. Nearly ten thousand Dervishes had been killed or wounded by the time the rest of their ranks broke and ran. When the dust cleared, twenty thousand British and Egyptian soldiers had won the battle against sixty thousand of the khalifa’s men.
After facing such an extreme form of “natural selection” at such a young age, it’s no wonder that Churchill was able to remain centered and thoughtful in the conflicts to come. As Blassingame emphasized at the end of his breathtaking narrative, “without the leadership of Churchill, World War II might quite possibly have had a different ending.”
From a Darwinian perspective, Lieutenant Churchill not only won the right to breed by surviving that pivotal battle, he demonstrated all the right stuff to lead: during a single cavalry charge, he exhibited poise in the midst of chaos, the capacity to negotiate massive amounts of sensory input, split-second accuracy in reading the nonverbal intentions of others, and — most important when your survival depends on remaining glued to a charging, skidding, twirling, leaping polo-pony-turned-warhorse — an advanced aptitude for coordinating movements with other team members.
The latter ability has a neurological component — namely, oscillators, cells that attune two or more beings physically by regulating how and when their bodies move together. Researchers see oscillators in action when people are about to kiss. These special neurons also help the cello section of the New York Philharmonic play in unison: if you could peek inside the musicians’ heads, as scientists have figured out how to do, you’d see that the performers’ right brain hemispheres are more closely coordinated with each other than are the left and right sides of their individual brains.
Optimal use of mirror neurons, oscillators, and other social circuitry allows leaders to engage what Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee call resonance. Biologically speaking, a manager who worships objectivity, outlaws feeling, and hides in his office while handing down written policies and procedures, expecting followers to mirror his dissociative, stoic presence, is, at the very least, not using his brain properly — and preventing employees from reaching their potential as well. To activate the optimal team-building power of resonance, you have to actually care about others, sensing and coordinating with their feelings and motivations while, at the same time, turning destructive emotional feedback loops around by modulating your own empathic physical responses.
Two thousand years ago, people had no idea how many thousands of specialized neurons were firing during the complex social interactions of gifted leaders, but they recognized true talent when they saw it and even managed on occasion to write about it. The Greek historian Plutarch was particularly impressed with the exploits of a young prince named Alexander. Student of Aristotle, son of Philip of Macedon, the boy obviously had the opportunity to balance his rigorous intellectual studies with extensive equestrian training: at age ten, the future conqueror proved to be the only person in his father’s entourage capable of riding an unruly horse named Bucephalus.
No one could mount the black stallion, and even the grooms were afraid to lead him. In one of the first historical reports of “horse gentling,” Alexander noticed that Bucephalus seemed to be spooking at his own shadow. The young Macedonian prince took hold of the bridle and turned the quivering, snorting stallion into the sun. The boy spoke softly, stroking the horse for a while. Then, at the right moment, Alexander the Great leaped onto the stallion’s sturdy back and took off at a gallop, reveling in the horse’s phenomenal vitality rather than trying to rein it in. The connection between the two deepened over the years. Plutarch wrote that “in Uxia, once, Alexander lost him, and issued an edict that he would kill every man in the country unless he was brought back — as he promptly was.”
Bucephalus died at the age of thirty, a long life for a horse even by today’s standards. “During the final battle in India,” observed Lawrence Scanlan in Wild about Horses, “the horse took spears in his neck and flank but still managed to turn and bring the king to safety before dying. Alexander was overcome with grief, and later named a city after Bucephalus.” The legendary king relied on his mount’s sensitivity, vitality, quick wits, and subtle warnings to help him survive many a battle. And Bucephalus relied on Alexander’s ability to not only understand and respond to the horse’s concerns but also interrupt the debilitating effects of escalating arousal, transforming the energy of fear into a power that neither member of this legendary team could have tapped on his own.
The Sociopath’s Advantage
Arousal and relaxation — and the various emotions that arise from these autonomic nervous system cues — are the building blocks of a sophisticated, nonverbal language. Instantaneous, arguably telepathic, this feature of the “other 90 percent” (the nonverbal dimension of interpersonal communication) enhances relationships with coworkers and loved ones while offering protection from liars, thieves, and other malevolent characters. Yet there’s always a shadow side to remarkable powers of communication and influence. By design, our natural empathic abilities sometimes cause us to defer to a peculiar feature of the sociopathic nervous system, allowing charismatic leaders like Adolf Hitler and Jim Jones to wreak havoc, especially among desperate populations.
The American Psychiatric Association considers sociopathy and psychopathy obsolete synonyms for the official clinical term antisocial personality disorder. Even so, the Psychopathy Checklist, developed by Dr. Robert D. Hare in the early 1990s, remains the diagnostic tool most commonly used to assess this condition. Major symptoms of antisocial personality disorder include the tendency to be glib, superficial, deceitful, and manipulative while also showing a lack of empathy, lack of remorse or guilt, and shallow affect.
In sociopaths, it seems, key emotional- and social-intelligence circuits are missing, while cognitive abilities remain intact. This high IQ–low EQ combination is confusing for the individual and toxic for those in his or her social circle. Hare reports that “psychopaths are often witty and articulate. They can be amusing and entertaining conversationalists, ready with a quick and clever comeback, and can tell unlikely but convincing stories that cast themselves in a good light. They can be very effective in presenting themselves well and are quite likeable and charming.” However, they also “seem to suffer a kind of emotional poverty that limits the range and depth of their feelings. While at times they appear cold and unemotional, they are prone to dramatic, shallow and short-lived displays of feeling. Careful observers are left with the impression that they are play-acting and that little is going on below the surface.”
People with antisocial personality disorder exhibit a severely impaired capacity to feel, let alone use emotion as information. Laboratory experiments employing biomedical recorders have shown that sociopaths actually lack the physiological responses normally associated with fear. Yet psychologists studying this troublesome profile have grossly underestimated the significance of this strange anomaly, which becomes a particularly dangerous talent in those with leadership ambitions.
For most people, Hare explains, “the fear produced by threats of pain or punishment is an unpleasant emotion and a powerful motivator of behavior. Not so with psychopaths; they merrily plunge on, perhaps knowing what might happen but not really caring.”
From a personal-safety perspective, the disability is clear. But once you understand the importance of affection contagion in social interactions, the implications become downright disturbing. Cult leaders, for instance, prey on people who are easily overwhelmed by their feelings — from abuse survivors to highly sensitive adolescents to adults who’ve suffered a recent, debilitating loss. The ability to exude calmness, focus, and charisma in situations others find stressful — while telling them whatever they want to hear in a most charming, articulate, intelligent way — is matched by an equally ruthless impulse to whip followers into states of fear and anger whenever they show signs of regaining independent thought and will. With a bit of clever manipulation, a sociopath’s impaired autonomic nervous system can also be misinterpreted as evidence of an evolved spiritual presence, one whose love connection with the divine has completely expelled all trace of fear. Perhaps this is why some of the most successful and ultimately lethal members of this population manage to secure leadership positions with a religious theme.
Give an emotionally disabled genius enough time, public exposure, and responsibility, and he’ll eventually show his true colors by making a colossal mess of things. But how do you tell the difference between a Winston Churchill and an Adolf Hitler early enough to promote the talents of the former and avoid the mayhem of the latter? The answer lies in boosting your own emotional-and social-intelligence quotient as well as the EQ skills of everyone around you. This significant, multigenerational undertaking is the main supportive arch in all the cathedrals we are building. Without it, we’ll forever be wasting time, money, and lives on faulty construction and psychopathic acts of terrorism.
