The Power of the Herd (8 page)

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.

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.

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.”