Leader - Trainer, Teacher - Therapist

The readings of this summer has brought me to think about the words leader, trainer, teacher and therapist.

Teacher - Therapist in relation to people
My job title is Teacher of the Alexander Technique. When I work I teach people a different, and sometimes new, approach towards themselves. Therapists provide treatments, sometimes these are targeted on a specific problem.

A session with me is a lesson in which I strive to impart knowledge that can be used by the students on their own. Nevertheless, it happens both during lessons and afterwards that physical concerns experienced by the student has been alleviated.

A doctor, and also an AT teacher, describes AT as a "learning process with therapeutic effects." Alexander Technique can provide an opportunity for relief but it's a bonus that comes from the knowledge that the student accuires about himself.

Leader - Trainer in relation to horses
Andrew McLean, President of ISES, spoke at last year's conference of the importance that we as horse owners/riders should make an effort to learn more about learning theory. We would, according to him, leave the concept of leader/leadership behind us and instead call ourselves trainers.

He feels that we have every opportunity to abandon the myths, the old truths, the wrong training methods and start working horses on a more scientific basis.

According to Andrew McLean, there is a believe in many riders that domestic horses have "innate buttons" corresponding to the rein and leg aids we give. This in turn means that a horse who does not obey the aids is considered to be disobedient or defiant instead of seeing the reactionss as sign of a training system that has failed.

Horses learn through trial and error and a system in which each signal is easy for the horse to distinguish, the animal will easier decipher, and this in turn makes it possible for the horse to give the right response.

One of the reasons that Andrew would prefer to call us trainers instead of leaders has to do with the horse. Everything the horse does for us it does after it has undergone training. A horse that shyes away from a flower pot does not reveal a bad leadership from the rider's side, only lack of training.

The concepts of 'partnership' and 'cooperation' that is often used today suggests, according to Andrew, that the horse in any way is responsible for its behavior during training and that it willingly participate in the process, when in fact the horse is the one who is completely blameless in the relationship between horse and human.

The horse will become what we make of it. The horse is a herd animal that can coexist with us and it can learn a lot when given clear and unambiguous signals.

According to Andrew horse needs no other leader than another horse. What it do need in order to succeed in its relationship with human is a trainer that follows a trainings system in which the horse is given the chance to do "the right thing" many times - by those means learning right is light.

"Behaviour practised is behaviour repeted."
Andrew McLean