Team-building activities

with Ioana Nechifor

Ioana Nechifor is Horse Trainer & Riding Instructor in our resort, and she is responsible for organizing team-building activities for companies.

Why team-building?

It builds trust, mitigates conflict, encourages communication, and increases collaboration. In addition, effective team building means more engaged employees, which is good for company culture and boosts the bottom line.

But why with HORSES?

We look so often in mirrors to make sure that we look good… but how often do we get the chance to mirror our true selves? When we sincerely and openly look at how we behave with ourselves, then with others – in stressful and peaceful moments – we generate the context in which we have more than sufficient information for personal, professional, and spiritual growth.

Horses give instant, accurate and honest feedback 100% of the time – mirroring the participant during exercises and providing clients with an opportunity to raise their awareness and practice congruence between feelings and behaviors.

Not impressible by titles or functions, horses will be authentic team members who will always let you know if things are working and give you plenty of chances to get it.

Anchoring us into an honest and committed present. Without judgment.

The use of horses, in particular, provides a metaphor to elicit a range of emotions and behaviors in humans, which can be used as a catalyst for personal awareness and growth – putting into an experiential learning context the valuable emotional intelligence.

Program Overview

Sessions include activities in the company of the horses (no riding involved) in an indoor arena.

Client(s) work directly with horses face-to-face on the same footing. Customized activities are designed based on desired outcomes expressed by the client(s). This ground-level work enables the client(s) to perceive better the horse’s actions and reactions as they work through activities to process and solve their life challenges. Under our eye, horses offer client(s) instant and honest feedback by mirroring emotions. This valuable feedback provides information that helps them understand how their emotional disposition and actions affect others and impact their lives outside of the arena.

Each session begins with a discussion of the activity (ex., move the horse around a barrel without the use of equipment and with limited touching). The client(s) can discuss a plan to achieve the activity before it begins, but only limited discussion (or no discussion) is permitted once the training starts. In this positive, non-threatening environment, clients are given a unique opportunity to practice vital life skills, including relationship building, respect, empathy, responsibility, establishing boundaries, the impact of choices, and consequences while performing the assigned tasks with the horses. Once the session is complete, we discuss metaphors based on the activities and how they apply to real-life situations.