Horses Taught Me to Read People
- Jun 18
- 6 min read
Danielle McKinon, founder of Eat Sleep Ride, a rural-based charity in Scotland, and a certified Equine Leadership Coach. Part of the global TeachingHorse network, Danielle applies the Diamond Model of Shared Leadership to help individuals and teams lead with confidence through uncertainty.
For most of my life, I struggled to read people. The deeper level, what someone was really feeling under their words, the energy they walked in with, never came naturally to me. This is the story of how I finally learned it, and of the unlikely teacher who showed me how.
I could always manage the surface. What I couldn’t do was sense what was going on underneath, the thing people weren’t saying, the state they were actually in. I missed it again and again, and I couldn’t work out why everyone else seemed to just know. It took me years to understand that part of this is simply how my brain is wired. I’m ADHD, and the signals other people seemed to read automatically often slipped straight past me.
Horses, though, were always there. They were part of my school curriculum, and when the care system and everything that came with it got to be too much, the yard was where I went. I trained the traditional way, riding school, the equestrian pathway, the coaching route, all of it about technique and getting it right. For years that was the lens. What changed everything wasn’t the riding. It was a whole career spent quietly watching people and behaviour, and slowly realising the horses had been teaching me something else the entire time.
Because a horse doesn’t care what you say, it reads what you bring. You can’t talk your way past it, and you can’t fake calm. For the first time, something was showing me, honestly and immediately, what I’d been missing my whole life.
What a horse taught me to notice
Horses don’t read words. They read everything underneath them. To work with one, I had to learn to notice the things I’d always skated over, and over the years, that became a way of seeing I’ve come to trust.
The body: So much of what looks like behaviour is physical first, tension, discomfort, something not quite right. The body speaks before anything else does.
The environment: What’s happening around them right now, who’s near, what’s changed, and whether they feel safe. The state is shaped by its surroundings.
The history: What they’ve carried in from before, the experiences that taught them what to expect from people.
The energy: The hardest one to put into words, and the one horses are most honest about. The state a being is actually in, underneath whatever they’re showing you.
I didn’t learn these as a checklist. I learned them because a horse will not let you skip them.
But first, it made me accountable
Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Before a horse would let me read it, it made me honest about myself. You can’t bluff a horse, you can’t blame it, and you can’t hide the state you walked in with. It holds you accountable for what you bring every single time. Learning to read other people started with being made to own myself first.
And it taught me boundaries. Reading someone deeply doesn’t mean having no line, it means knowing exactly where the clear, kind line sits, and holding it. A horse needs that to feel safe, and so do people. The boundary isn’t the opposite of care. Done well, it is care.
I see it on the yard all the time. A client tries to set a boundary with a horse, quietly asking it for some space. But the ask isn’t clear enough, because they don’t really feel safe asking, and the horse reads that instantly. So it either ignores them or keeps moving into their space. I’ve watched the same pattern in how people live. We struggle to know when to stop, how to ask for room, how to hold a line without apologising for it. The horse just makes it visible.
This isn’t just a feeling. It’s measurable. For a long time I assumed what I was learning to sense was unprovable, intuition, nothing you could point to. The science says otherwise.
Researchers at the University of Sussex found that horses can read human facial expressions and that the response is physical. When shown an angry face, a horse’s heart rate climbs faster, and it shows more signs of stress. A later study from Sussex and Portsmouth went further. Horses shown a photograph of an angry or happy face recognised that same person hours later and changed how they behaved towards them. They hold a memory of your emotional state.
Other research has tracked how a horse’s heart rate can shift in time with the person handling it, our nervous systems quietly influencing theirs. A 2025 study measured this heart rate synchronisation between children and horses in equine-assisted sessions. Experienced riders showed the strongest synchronisation, and strikingly, the children with ADHD synchronised at above-average levels too.
None of this is fully settled. The findings are still emerging, and they don’t all agree. But the direction is clear, and it matches what I see in the yard every day. A horse responds to the state you are actually in, not the one you are performing. That is precisely why it can teach you to notice that state, first in yourself, and then in everyone around you.
Then I started seeing it in people
Once I could read it in a horse, I couldn’t unsee it in people. The young person who’d gone quiet wasn’t being rude, their body was braced and their energy had dropped. The one who arrived “difficult” was carrying something from long before they reached me. I was finally reading the level I’d always struggled to reach, and the horses had handed me the key to it.
I think of a TeachingHorse leadership session I ran for a room full of senior CEOs, people who’d come from all over, used to being the most powerful presence in any room they walked into. We began the way I always do, not by talking, but by greeting the horses the way horses greet one another. You stand quietly, you share breath, and you let the animal decide whether to meet you.
One of the women, a leader at the very top of her field, chose to do exactly that. What she hadn’t counted on was that the horse could read her body completely, and that standing so close to such a large animal, without her team around her and without a herd to disappear into, would strip away every bit of armour she’d walked in with. Because what none of them knew was that she was blind in one eye. She had never told them. She was frightened that if they saw it, they’d see her as less, that she’d lose something in their eyes.
But the horse didn’t read her title, and it didn’t read the armour. It read her, and it stayed. In its own quiet way, it let her know she was safe. And there, with nothing left to hide behind, in front of the very people she’d been hiding from, she finally let herself be seen. Her team didn’t step back. They moved closer. They held her and supported her for the rest of the day.
This is what built Eat Sleep Ride (ESR)
Eat Sleep Ride is a place, 24 acres, the horses, the people who come through the gate. But it’s more than a place. It came from this. Once I could read what someone actually needed, not what they said, not how they behaved, but what sat underneath, I knew what kind of world I had to build. Somewhere, people could be met at that deeper level by someone who’d learned to see it.
Everything we do rests on that one skill. The horses didn’t just teach me about horses. They taught me to read people, and that is the whole foundation this place is built on.
Read what’s underneath
If reading people has never come easily to you, you’re not broken, and you’re not alone. So much of what we mistake for instinct is really just noticing, the body, the environment, the history, the energy, and noticing is a skill. It can be learned. Whether you’re leading a team, raising a child, or simply trying to understand the person in front of you, it begins the same way the horses taught me, get honest about what you’re bringing, then pay attention to what sits underneath everyone else. And if you’re lucky, the right teacher will show up to help you learn it. Mine had four legs.
Read more from Danielle McKinnon
Danielle McKinnon, Equine Leadership Facilitator, Social Entrepreneur
Danielle McKinnon is the founder of Eat Sleep Ride | Rural-Based Charity in Scotland, a rural charity using horses, nature, and coaching to support disadvantaged and neurodiverse young people. She is a qualified equine-facilitated learning practitioner, coach, and licensed facilitator of shared leadership, working locally and globally to build brave spaces for change. Her work is rooted in lived experience, community care, and the wisdom of the herd. To explore Danielle's leadership programmes, visit the Leadership at Eat Sleep Ride page at Herd Dynamics | Equine Leadership and Personal Development. These programs support Eat Sleep Ride.
