Emotional Resilience: Finding Strength from the Herd During Life Transitions

When asked what I do, here in the deepest rural southwest of France, I usually reply that I host retreats, onsite but also online, for those who can’t escape to the south of France at the moment, to help my guests deal effectively with stress, specifically the stress that is caused by going through a life transition. My retreats are different from other similar retreats because I have two unique “aids:” a small herd of Friesian horses and the Camino de Santiago de Compostela on my doorstep.

Life transitions can be challenging and overwhelming, as they often involve significant change, uncertainty, insecurity and a range of complex emotions. Whether it’s starting a new job, getting married or divorced, becoming a parent for the first time or coping with an empty nest, moving to a new city or country, retiring from work or dealing with the loss of a loved one, managing a chronic illness, recovering from surgery, a significant inheritance or bankruptcy or starting a new business, navigating these transitions requires resilience and inner strength. In this blog post, we will explore the powerful role that interacting with horses can play in helping us find strength and build resilience during life transitions.

Emotionally, life transitions can have a profound impact on us. They often stir up a mixture of emotions, such as excitement, anticipation, joy, fear, anxiety, confusion, sadness, frustration, impatience, anger and even grief. The process of transitioning from one phase of life to another can be daunting, as it involves navigating unfamiliar territory, letting go of what we know and trust, and embracing (sometimes major) change. The inherent stress and uncertainty associated with these transitions can sometimes feel overwhelming, leaving us feeling vulnerable, uncertain, and lacking security and stability. It is during these times that horses can make an enormous difference.

Horses, as highly perceptive and sensitive prey animals, possess a remarkable ability to offer non-judgmental support that fosters deep emotional connection and trust. Their innate sensitivity allows them to sense and respond to subtle cues from us, offering us a soundboard to bounce our emotions off.

As always, my horses support me during my life transitions, but it was only when I realised that my most recent life change is a tremendous opportunity to become more emotionally resilient that I stopped feeling as if I was trying to ride a bucking horse.

What a liberating feeling! I got off the horse and got on with my life.

When my retreat guests interact with my Friesian horses during life transitions, they often experience a similar positive impact on their emotional well-being.

The bonding process with horses is a transformative journey in itself, much like walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Horses have an uncanny ability to tune into human emotions and reflect them back without prejudice. This creates a safe and supportive space for us to express and explore our feelings. Horses provide immediate feedback through body language and behaviour so that my guests can gain valuable insights into the complex emotions that arise during life transitions.

Horses offer a safe space for my guests to practice emotional regulation. When we are able to regulate our emotions, communicate calmly, and remain present in the moment, horses respond positively. This interaction provides a tangible experience of emotional regulation, helping my guests develop coping strategies to manage stress, anxiety, and other challenging emotions that arise during life transitions.

Additionally, horses can help us to develop coping strategies that also promote emotional resilience. As we engage in various activities with horses, we are challenged to adapt, problem-solve, and find effective ways to communicate with the herd. The process of overcoming challenges and establishing connections with horses instils a sense of accomplishment and builds confidence, strengthening clients’ ability to navigate emotional hurdles in life transitions.

Emotional resilience is not about suppressing emotions or denying the difficulties we may encounter. It is about acknowledging, understanding, and effectively managing emotions in order to navigate life’s challenges in a life-enhancing manner. By cultivating emotional resilience, we are better equipped to cope with the emotions life transitions generate, ultimately leading to greater well-being and a more impactful, rewarding, meaningful and fulfilling life.

This is why I do what I do, during both my online courses and onsite retreats, I empower my guests to become more emotionally resilient, so that they can live more impactful, meaningful and fulfilling lives.

Five Key Takeaways

1. Emotional resilience flourishes in connection, not isolation – The myth of the self-sufficient leader overlooks our fundamental need for a supportive herd during transitions.
2. Transitions are biologically designed to destabilise us – Understanding this removes shame and opens the door to authentic strength-building.
3. Nature’s herd animals model resilience strategies – From horses to elephants, collective wisdom offers profound insights for navigating uncertainty.
4. Vulnerability is an executive skill, not a weakness – The most resilient leaders know when to lower their guard and accept support.
5. Mindful presence transforms transition from threat to opportunity – Grounding practices borrowed from herd dynamics can recalibrate your nervous system during upheaval.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Leader

The view might be spectacular, but the company is often sparse.

Executives and entrepreneurs spend years cultivating an image of unshakeable confidence—someone who makes the tough calls, who doesn’t flinch when markets tumble or ventures fail. We’re conditioned to believe that emotional resilience means having a titanium exterior, bouncing back from setbacks with barely a dent to show for it.

But what happens when life’s transitions arrive—not the ones you planned for, but the ones that ambush you? The divorce you didn’t see coming. The business failure that questions your identity. The health diagnosis that rewrites your priorities. The sudden loss that cracks your carefully constructed world wide open.

That’s when you discover something remarkable: true emotional resilience has nothing to do with invincibility. It has everything to do with knowing when to stop pretending you’re fine and finding your herd.

This isn’t another article telling you to journal more or develop better coping mechanisms (though those have their place). This is about fundamentally rethinking what strength looks like during life’s seismic shifts—and why the wisdom might come from some unexpected, four-legged teachers.

Leo Martin’s Horse Story

Leo Martin had perfected the art of looking unshakeable.

At fifty-two, he’d built a software company from his garage into a multinational entity, navigated three recessions, and earned a reputation for being the steadiest hand in a volatile industry. His calendar was colour-coded perfection, his morning routine featured in productivity podcasts, his LinkedIn profile gleamed with endorsements about his “inspiring leadership.”

Then his wife of twenty-six years said she was leaving, his senior management team was poached by a competitor, and his GP found something concerning in his annual check-up—all within the same month.

Leo did what successful men do: he doubled down on control. Longer hours. More aggressive strategy. A new relationship with a woman half his age who required nothing from him emotionally. He white-knuckled his way through board meetings, his jaw perpetually clenched, his shoulders creeping towards his ears like they were attempting escape.

Nobody saw the cracks. Nobody was meant to.

The breaking point came during a quarterly review when he stood to present and simply… couldn’t. The words evaporated. His chest tightened. The boardroom’s air conditioning felt like it was pumping in anxiety instead of cool air. The smell of stale coffee and leather chairs turned his stomach. He excused himself, made it to his corner office, and sat there for two hours staring at the city below, tasting copper fear in his mouth, his hands trembling against the cool glass of the window.

His PA, Margaret—who’d known him since the garage days—knocked gently and said: “A friend runs walking retreats in France. Horse wisdom retreats, actually. I know it sounds barmy, but you need to do something.”

Three weeks later, Leo found himself on the Camino de Santiago, backpack heavy on his shoulders, surrounded by strangers and, bizarrely, horses. The facilitator—a woman whose presence felt both fierce and gentle—gathered the group in a field where several horses grazed peacefully, their tails swishing rhythmically in the warm breeze.

“Emotional resilience,” she began, “isn’t what you think it is.”

Leo almost laughed. Here he was, a man who’d built empires, about to take life advice from someone who worked with horses. The irony wasn’t lost on him. The field smelled of wild herbs and sun-warmed grass, so different from his sterile office tower.

Then she introduced a black mare called Twiss.

“Horses are prey animals,” the facilitator explained. “They’ve survived millions of years not by being the strongest or fastest alone, but by being part of a herd. Watch.”

She walked confidently towards Twiss, her energy purposeful but relaxed. The mare barely glanced up, continued grazing. Then the facilitator’s posture changed—shoulders tensed, breathing shortened, energy scattered—and Twiss immediately lifted her head, ears swivelling, muscles coiled for flight.

“She feels everything,” the facilitator said. “Horses survive by being honest about threat, and by staying connected to their herd.”

Over the next hour, Leo learned something extraordinary. When he approached Twiss wearing his CEO armour—chest puffed, energy projecting control—she walked away. Every time. But when he stood there, simply breathing, acknowledging the tight knot of fear in his chest, the exhaustion pressing on his bones, the grief he’d been swallowing for months—Twiss walked straight to him. Pressed her warm, velvet nose against his chest. Exhaled a long, slow breath that vibrated through his ribcage.

He felt the tears then. Hot, unexpected, rolling down his face onto Twiss’s black coat. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t judge. Just stood there, solid and present, one ear cocked back towards him as if to say: I’ve got you.

During our storytelling circles that evening—sitting in a rustic stone barn, candles flickering, the smell of wood smoke and red wine mingling—Leo finally spoke. His voice cracked as he described feeling like he was drowning whilst everyone watched him swim laps. A woman named Patricia, going through a similar corporate collapse, reached over and squeezed his hand. A man named James, whose son had died two years prior, nodded with the particular understanding that only comes from shared suffering.

This was Leo’s herd. Not people he’d hired or impressed. People who’d simply shown up to the same field, carrying their own backpacks of transition and loss.

By the end of the week, something fundamental had shifted. Not fixed—shifted. Leo still had the same problems waiting at home. But he’d discovered that emotional resilience wasn’t about returning to his old self. It was about allowing himself to be transformed by being truly seen, truly felt, by both humans and horses who refused to let him hide.

The morning we gathered for our final storytelling circle, Leo shared this: “I spent my whole life thinking resilience meant bouncing back to the same shape. Luna taught me it means allowing yourself to be reshaped. And you can’t do that alone.”

Understanding Emotional Resilience: Beyond the Bounce-Back Myth

The traditional narrative around emotional resilience is fundamentally flawed. We’ve been sold a story that resilience means returning to baseline after stress—like a rubber band snapping back to its original form. But anyone who’s lived through genuine transition knows this: you don’t return to who you were. You can’t. The question isn’t how to bounce back; it’s how to grow forward.

Neuroscience reveals something fascinating about transitions: they’re meant to destabilise us. When life’s certainties crumble, our brains enter a state of heightened neuroplasticity—we become more malleable, more capable of forming new neural pathways, but also more vulnerable. It’s simultaneously our greatest opportunity for growth and our most precarious state.

This is where the herd model becomes revolutionary.

Research into herd animals—horses, elephants, even dolphins—shows they navigate transition through what scientists call “collective emotional regulation.” When a herd member experiences threat or stress, the group responds by creating a container of calm. They position themselves physically close. They synchronise their breathing. They offer touch, presence, and the biological reassurance that says: you’re not alone in this.

For humans, particularly those in leadership positions, this represents a radical shift. We’ve been trained to isolate during difficulty, to “handle it” privately, to emerge only when we’ve regained composure. But isolation is where emotional resilience goes to die.

Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory explains why: our nervous systems are fundamentally social. We co-regulate. A calm, present person can literally change another person’s physiological state through proximity, eye contact, and authentic connection. This isn’t metaphorical—it’s measurable in heart rate variability, cortisol levels, and neural activity.

Mindfulness practices become exponentially more powerful when we understand them through this lens. It’s not just about individual meditation—though that has value. It’s about cultivating what I call “herd awareness”: the ability to sense both your own internal state and the collective emotional field around you.

In my work facilitating walking retreats on the Camino de Santiago, I’ve witnessed this transformation repeatedly. Executives arrive armoured, operating from what psychologists call the “false self”—the persona they’ve constructed to navigate professional demands. Then they walk. Day after day. Bodies tired. Defences lowered. And in that vulnerability, surrounded by others in transition, something ancient and wise emerges: the knowledge that we were never meant to carry our burdens alone.

The horses simply make this visible. They won’t engage with your performance. They respond only to your authentic state. It’s wonderfully humiliating for high-achievers—and absolutely necessary.

True emotional resilience during life transitions requires three essential elements:

First, acknowledgment: You must stop pretending the transition isn’t affecting you. The body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk famously noted. Unacknowledged stress doesn’t disappear—it lodges in your tissues, manifests in your relationships, sabotages your decisions.

Second, connection: You must find your herd. Not your board, not your networking group, not your social media followers. Your real herd—people who’ve earned the right to hear your story, who show up without agenda, who can hold space for your unravelling without trying to fix you.

Third, presence: You must develop the capacity to stay with discomfort rather than immediately problem-solving your way out of it. This is where mindfulness and meditation become invaluable. Not as escape mechanisms, but as practices that build your tolerance for transition’s inherent uncertainty.

The gift of major life transitions is this: they force authenticity. You simply don’t have the energy to maintain the façade anymore. And when the façade crumbles, you discover something remarkable—you’re more likeable, more effective, more genuinely powerful without it.

Further Reading: Three Unconventional Books on Emotional Resilience

1. “The Wild Edge of Sorrow” by Francis Weller

This isn’t your typical resilience book because Weller argues that our avoidance of genuine grief is precisely what makes us fragile. He explores how indigenous cultures approach collective mourning and why modern society’s “get over it” mentality creates chronic emotional brittleness. I chose this because executives rarely give themselves permission to grieve their losses—failed ventures, dissolved partnerships, the person they were before diagnosis or divorce. Weller offers a roadmap for metabolising sorrow rather than bypassing it.

2. “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawanda Nation, Kimmerer weaves scientific knowledge with indigenous wisdom about reciprocity and interdependence. The book fundamentally challenges Western individualism by exploring how resilience in nature is always collective. I include this because entrepreneurs and executives need a complete paradigm shift away from the “self-made” mythology towards understanding strength as something that flows through relationships, not despite them.

3. “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk

Whilst more widely known, this book remains criminally underutilised by the business community. Van der Kolk’s research into trauma and the nervous system reveals why talk therapy alone often fails during major transitions—because the body holds memory and stress in ways our conscious minds cannot access. His work on somatic experiencing, rhythmic movement, and collective trauma healing directly informs why approaches like walking retreats and horse work create transformative shifts that boardrooms never could.

Guest Testimonial

“I arrived at the Camino walking retreat certain I could think my way through my company’s collapse. I’d built elaborate plans, consulted experts, maintained the appearance that I had everything under control. Then I spent an afternoon with a chestnut gelding who simply walked away every time I approached with that energy. The facilitator asked: ‘What would happen if you stopped managing this moment and just let yourself be in it?’ I broke. Properly broke. And my walking companions—strangers three days prior—simply sat with me. No fixing. No advice. Just presence. That’s when I understood: emotional resilience isn’t about being strong enough to handle things alone. It’s about being brave enough to let others in. My business still failed, but I didn’t. And that distinction saved my life.”

— Patricia M., Former Technology CEO, London

Five Razor-Sharp FAQs

Q: Isn’t emotional resilience about being mentally tough and pushing through difficulties?

A: That’s emotional endurance, not resilience. Endurance gets you through; resilience allows you to grow through. Pushing through without processing creates emotional debt that compounds with interest. True resilience involves the courage to pause, feel, connect, and recalibrate—which is far more demanding than simply muscling through.

Q: I’m responsible for hundreds of employees. Don’t I need to project strength during transitions?

A: Your team doesn’t need your performance of strength—they need your authentic leadership. Research consistently shows that leaders who acknowledge challenges whilst maintaining genuine confidence (not false positivity) create more resilient organisations. Vulnerability isn’t weakness; performing invincibility whilst crumbling internally is.

Q: How can horses possibly help with executive-level life transitions?

A: Horses are biofeedback mechanisms with legs. They respond to your nervous system state, not your words or professional status. When you’re operating from stress whilst pretending you’re fine, they’ll disengage. When you’re authentically present, even if you’re struggling, they’ll connect. This immediate, honest feedback bypasses your cognitive defences and creates genuine shifts in how you regulate emotion.

Q: I don’t have time for retreats or lengthy programmes. Can I build emotional resilience quickly?

A: You can develop practices quickly; transformation takes time. Start with ten minutes daily of mindful breathing, schedule regular connection with your “herd” (people who know the real you), and commit to one somatic practice—walking, yoga, or conscious movement. But understand: building genuine resilience is like strengthening a muscle. Consistency matters more than intensity.

Q: What if acknowledging my struggles during transition makes things worse?

A: Acknowledgement doesn’t create vulnerability; it reveals what’s already there. You’re not making things worse—you’re making them conscious, which is the only way they can transform. Unacknowledged struggle leaks out in irritability, poor decisions, health problems, and damaged relationships. Acknowledged struggle can be worked with, shared, and ultimately integrated.

Conclusion: Find Your Herd

Here’s the truth we don’t say often enough in professional circles: life’s transitions will humble you. The question isn’t whether you’ll face moments where your carefully constructed identity crumbles—you will. The question is whether you’ll face them alone or surrounded by your herd.

Emotional resilience isn’t a personal achievement; it’s a relational practice. It’s built in the moments when you let someone see you struggling and they don’t look away. It’s strengthened when you offer that same steady presence to another. It’s forged in the recognition that our greatest strength lies not in our independence, but in our willingness to be interdependent.

The executives and entrepreneurs I work with often arrive believing they need to learn better stress management techniques. What they discover instead is that they need to fundamentally reimagine what strength looks like. They need to learn what Luna and her herd have always known: true resilience is collective.

Your next transition—whether it’s in front of you or behind you—contains an invitation. Not to become harder, but to become more permeable. Not to build higher walls, but to find your herd and lower your guard.

The field is waiting. The herd is gathering. And somewhere, there’s a wise horse who’ll refuse to engage with your performance and instead invite you into something more real, more raw, and infinitely more resilient than anything you could construct alone.

Ready to Discover Your Herd?

If Leo’s story resonates, if you’re navigating transition and tired of doing it alone, explore my Horse-Inspired Stress Relief Online Courses. These programmes combine guided mindfulness practices, meditation exercises for stress management, and the collective wisdom of the herd to help you build genuine emotional resilience. No performance required—just show up as you are.

Conclusion

Life transitions may present formidable challenges, but they also offer the opportunity to increase your emotional resilience. Interacting with horses can enable you to find strength, build resilience, and embark on a journey of personal empowerment during a life transition.

© Dr Margaretha Montagu