Step Softly: A Note to Those Just Starting Out
The horse doesn’t care how many letters are after your name. She’s more interested in whether you’ve slept, whether you’re carrying something unresolved, whether you’re present or just going through the motions. Start there. Everything else builds on this…
If you’re reading something like this before your first solo session, you’re already doing something right. This field is growing fast, is genuinely exciting, and a little worrying. Growth brings people jumping in before they’re ready.
This is a note from someone who has been in the arena long enough to know what we got wrong early on. Use what’s useful and leave the rest.
Mindful · Authentic · Purposeful · Ethical · Take It Slow
Know What You’re Actually Trained For
EAL and EAT are not the same thing. People still conflate them. It is one of the first things worth getting clear on. Equine Assisted Learning sits in the coaching, educational, and personal development space. Equine Assisted Therapy involves licensed mental health or health professionals working clinically, with the horse as part of the team.
Know which one you’re trained for and stay in your lane. Rules do not matter more than people, but your clients deserve someone who is genuinely qualified to hold what they bring.
What Holds This Work Together
The practitioners who last are the ones whose clients come back, whose horses stay willing, whose practice deepens rather than just grows, share these four things:
Mindfulness
The nervous system, in the actual present moment. Horses, as we all know, read you faster than any client ever will. If you’re dysregulated and you don’t know it, they know it. Your own practice isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the prerequisite.
Authenticity
Horses don’t perform. They’re not impressed by your facilitator voice or your carefully crafted framing. Show up as yourself. The clients who need this work most will feel the difference immediately.
Purpose
Every activity needs a reason that goes beyond “horses are therapeutic.” What are you working toward with this person, in this session, today? If you can’t answer that before you open the gate, pause and think it through first. And yes, sometimes it goes a little differently than expected…
Ethics
Two sets of welfare. The client and the horses. Neither is more important than the other. Any session design that compromises either one needs to go back to the drawing board. This isn’t a guideline, it’s a line.
“I’ve never once looked back on a session and thought ‘I moved through that too carefully.’ But I have wished, more than once, that I’d slowed down before I thought I needed to.”
On the Actual Meaning of Going Slowly
Paying attention. In this work, moving slowly is often the most competent thing you can do. Here’s what it looks like:
Complete proper, accredited training and be honest with yourself about whether your training has prepared you for the client group you’re planning to work with. One weekend intensive does not make you ready for trauma-informed equine work.
Shadow before you lead, watch experienced practitioners work. Not just to pick up techniques, but to see how they handle the unexpected moments, the stuck sessions, the ones that go sideways.
Know your horses as individuals, their history, what settles them, and what stresses them. Be clear on the signs of burnout in them, in you, and in your team,
Be clear on your scope
EAL and EAT have different boundaries for good reason. Know yours and hold them, especially when a client brings something that sits outside your training.
Do your own inner work; this field will bring things up in you. If you haven’t worked through your own material, it will show up in the arena. Therapy, supervision, and honest reflection and self-regulation.
Keep proper records and reflect on them not as paperwork, but as part of how you understand your own practice over time. The patterns you notice six months in will surprise you.
Ask for Help
Some of the best practitioners I know are also the most regular users of supervision and consultation. The complexity of what happens in the arena, the intersecting needs of the client, the horse’s responses, your own reactions, and the framework you’re holding is a lot to carry alone, and don’t even try.
Build your consultation network before you need it. Someone with deep equine expertise. Someone who can speak to the mental health or educational frameworks you’re using. A clinical supervisor if you’re doing therapeutic work. It’s a sign that you know what you’re doing.
| Talk to your equine specialists. Talk to your vet. Talk to whoever manages and knows your horses best. A horse who appears “fine” to a new practitioner may be showing early signs of stress that an experienced eye catches immediately. Consult on equine welfare the same way you consult on client welfare regularly, not only when something goes wrong. |
Build a referral list, too. Know your local mental health services, counsellors, and support organizations. When someone comes to you with needs outside your scope, refer them out, but first always find out if the client has supports in place.
This Work Is Remarkable
Because this work is genuinely remarkable. I’ve sat with people who spent years in traditional therapy and made more movement in three sessions in a paddock than in all of it. I’ve seen teenagers who wouldn’t make eye contact with any adult stand square and confident next to a horse twice their size. The horses bring something we simply cannot replicate in a consulting room.
The field is becoming more structured, more evidence-informed, more respected. Be part of raising the standard, not just riding the wave of interest in it.
Ethics isn’t a Form You Sign
It’s a set of decisions you make every single day, sometimes in the middle of a session when something unexpected happens, and you have about two seconds to respond. The clearer your ethical grounding before those moments, the better your decisions will be inside them.
Informed consent is not optional clients need to genuinely understand what EAL/EAT involves, what the horse’s role is, and that they can stop at any point. This includes young people and their families.
Horse welfare ends the session. If your horse is showing stress or shutdown, you stop. That’s not a disruption to the work. That is the work.
Practice within your qualifications especially the EAL/EAT distinction. If someone discloses trauma or mental health difficulties requiring clinical support, that’s a referral conversation, not an opportunity to stretch your scope.
Confidentiality is easy to break accidentally on social media, in peer conversations, and even in the way you describe your work publicly. Your clients trust you with things they haven’t told many people.
Keep your CPD current guidance updates, research, builds, frameworks evolve. If you qualified two years ago and haven’t done anything since, ask yourself some honest questions.
“Slow is smooth. Smooth is safe.”
It applies to working with horses, and it applies to building a practice in this field.
You’re not behind. You’re not too cautious. You’re building something that holds for your clients, for your horses, and for you. Keep going, keep consulting, and keep asking the hard questions of yourself. That’s exactly what this work asks of all of us.
For further learning check out our webinar BUILDING AND NURTURING EQUINE-ASSISTED VENTURES available as a digital download.
Dr. Bailey
