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,
