Horsemanship for Health

For years, I worked in male-dominated professions where the atmosphere was often punishing. My Saturday nights were spent staring at a screen in an office with no windows. In between bursts of keyboard activity, I made trips to the nurse for paracetamol. One night she refused to give me my dose, saying I had taken enough. Snippily, I asked her how I was supposed to get through my shift. I had seven stories to write before the paper went to press. She sent me away without pills or pity.

I was in my element: a young journalist with a notebook filled with interviews, which I simply needed to work into acceptable news stories for a national newspaper. I worked hard, had little social life, but I was paid well and worked with incredibly committed and talented colleagues. Anxiety, stress-headaches and exhaustion were simply the price for working in a profession I knew was going to push me to the very limits of my capacity.

Two images from that intense time have stayed with me: the first is of a young man, one of the most talented of the team, counselling me on my anxiety by sharing that when he first started in this news-room, he regularly threw up before conferences. The second: another young man, lifting his head from his keyboard to share that he had been too exhausted to go home, and so had decided to sleep at his desk.

At the time I thought there had to be another way to get the best from people, but I was too junior to do anything about it. Nevertheless, those scenes burned into my mind when I began to think about creating a different kind of professional culture. What I longed for was a working environment where everyone had an opportunity to thrive; where work itself was the way to flourish. I carried this vision in my mind, and continued working at jobs where competitiveness, shaming and rigid thinking were the norm.

Today, my working life is enriched by colleagues, both men and women, but the core of our organisation just happens to be a group of wonderful women. Jo, Lindsey and Wendy are talented, wise and so wholly committed to making our social enterprise a success, it warms my heart. The energy from our connection with each other and with the horses is the solid fuel that fires us to keep working from the heart.

A visitor remarked not long ago that he was impressed at the professionalism of our team. On that day, we just happened to have had a morning melt-down, a late finish and an early arrival, but we worked around it. His observation made me appreciate how everyone on the team responds so intuitively when events don’t go to plan. We are nimble when we need to rebalance. We don’t have heavy meetings. We drink a lot of tea, check in when we need to and focus on doing our best possible work.

From our light-touch approach something wonderful has emerged. On days when we fully and wholeheartedly show up without worrying about the car that won’t start, the torrential rain, the last-minute change in participants, the work flows and seems to find its own level without us having to push ourselves to exhaustion.

On International Women’s Day, I want to wholeheartedly and proudly thank Jo, Lindsey, Wendy and all our wonderful women colleagues and partners in the NHS and other organisations (you know who you are!) for working in a way that honours the human spirit. Heart-felt actions are not always appreciated, and many women long to do more work that inspires them rather than enslaves their souls. We undoubtedly face more challenges ahead, but we know how we want to face them. We know that when women look out for each other we are all stronger for it.