Welcome! To all of you who feel that living life is experiential learning!

This blog is about the intersection of business development, coaching, experiential learning and horses, (although over the years, experiential learning at MetaSystem Consulting Group has taken many forms, Face The Music for example...

I have often felt a powerful connection between my own learning, supporting clients and results in both areas. From that intuitive place came the formal role of experiential learning in my consulting and coaching work. This gave the opportunity for my clients to develop a similar awareness.

For my inaugural blog, I want to share with you one of the main intersections I have encountered: the main assumption we address in using experiential learning to develop systems, organizations, teams and individuals. Oh yeah, this includes self-development as well.

It begins with this...
Assumption: Our minds hold the answer, if only we can find it.

Experiential learning questions this assumption by creating the opportunity for people to get out of their heads. What if the mind isn't the only place we have to find the answers? What if the body's senses and our emotions are a rich source of perception and intelligence?

Research at the Institute of HeartMath tells us that the heart can act as a "mind" or an organ of perception because approximately 60 percent of heart cells are neural cells, which function similarly to those in the brain. Furthermore, the heart, is hard-wired into the amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus and cortex — brain centers involved with emotional memories, sensory experience, the extraction of meaning from sensory inputs, problem solving, reasoning and learning. The heart also has an electromagnetic field 5,000 times greater than our brain.

What does all this mean? In simple terms, that our first interaction with our environment is felt, literally with our heart, the interaction is then experienced as emotions, and these emotions travel along a neural pathway to the brain where they are finally analyzed and meaning extracted.

Cognitive neuroscience supports this. This science tells us that emotionally-relevant input is pre-conscious and drives what we pay attention to. Their research shows that information from our environment is processed 'emotionally', through our limbic systems, first. Only then does it go on to the cortical or rational part of our brain.


HeartMath has explored this concept of the heart as an organ of perception with horses...A pilot study with horses indicates that a horse's inner state is reflected in it's heart rhythm patterns, similar to what HeartMath has found in humans and other animals. Additionally, the evidence supported that horses respond to a change in human emotional states. Acting as mirrors to our emotions positions horses as a powerful way to experience ourselves completely — body and mind. Experiential work with horses for personal and leadership growth is based upon this concept — and is gaining in popularity because of it's impact on both. (Much more on this in future blogs!)

HearthMath and cognitive neuroscience research both tell us that:

• We feel before we think
  
• What we feel determines what we pay attention to and therefore informs our actions
  
• Learning that begins with engaging the emotions results in longer retention
  
• Experiential work with horses in particular can teach us a great deal about how to put this into action into our lives and work
  
• (Check out Linda Kohanov's work and her books The Tao of Equus and Riding Between the Worlds)
  

In other words, our minds have to catch up with our hearts! This research takes emotional intelligence to a new level!

New Assmption: We can use our entire bodies to inform our actions through using our senses and emotions as information.

As a result of operating from this new assumption, we can understand what happens in experiential learning. The patterns of behavior in these situations are much less constrained by what our minds say is the 'right' thing to do.

Therefore the experiential activity becomes two-fold: (1) an opportunity for the participants to experience themselves entirely as an organ of perception and intelligence creating a different and more powerful learning paradigm, and (2) a very clear and authentic diagnostic tool for looking at the entire system; organizationally or individually. (More on this later, too)

Living my life, really experiencing it, is becoming a rarity these days. I feel that the more I can be fully present in mine and share that possibility with others, like when I am sharing experiential learning with clients and friends, then I am on the right path.

I have wanted to create an electronic venue for information sharing and exchange, learning and expression for some time now. I have been creating that with clients for 15 years! Now it's time to expand this experiencing, learning and sharing. This is where you come in. Please join me in generating a powerful dialogue from which we can all benefit.

It is Monday morning and I am struck yet again by my thoughts of why I am not thrilled to go to work. Could it be that I don't like the work, or I don't like the person I think I have to be when I am at work? Maybe a bit of both...

I hosted another experiential Way of the Horse workshop this weekend. The people and the work were both such a joy, which is interesting, because we were working, emotions were revealed and validated, concrete actions and behaviors observed and decided upon, AND all of us were 'giving up' our weekend, yet I felt completely rejuvenated. Where does this energy come from? Why is it so different than what I felt during the week with all of my corporate consulting and coaching?

A hauntingly familiar answer came to me when I asked one of the participants at the end of the day yesterday, a professional woman from a big pharma, what she found the most valuable from her experience with the horses. She stated simply that it was the quiet peacefulness. She wanted to feel like this more often, what she felt was her authentic way of being, while she transitioned into her 'real' work during the week. Her assumption is that she can't be the same person in both places.

I share the same assumption. As I travel through life, one transition to the next--from day to day, decade to decade, job to job, I realize that I think the transition is bigger and more extreme than it has to be. That I have to be someone completely different to match the situation. Some people may find this creative, I find it exhausting.

Each time I work with the horses, I realize that the art of living in the present is so subtle, it is almost a whisper. When I am with them, I don't need to yell and push my weight around, it doesn't get me what I want or it is fruitless. I begin to whisper and practice living in subtlies....and this takes so much less energy for such an enormous return.

So, as I once again transition from weekend to Monday morning, I will see how long it takes me to go from subtle to heavy handed as I watch myself spin from the me I enjoy to the me I see as as the necessary stranger. I'll let you know if I am making any progress. How long does it take for you?