Success once meant structure and certainty. Today, for Harriet Goudard, it means alignment, honesty, and listening to what the body knows. Horses became her teachers, reshaping not just her work but her understanding of leadership itself.
As Harriet puts it in her own words, “On paper, I’d done everything right… The LinkedIn version of my life looked fine. Inside, I was exhausted.”
Harriet Goudard is a coach for female founders and creatives, working at the intersection of lineage, leadership, and legacy. Based in South West England, she supports women globally through online work and intimate, in-person masterminds held alongside herds of horses in open, natural landscapes.
But her work didn’t begin as a calling.
It began as a quiet collapse inside a life that looked perfect from the outside.
In her twenties, Harriet built a respected career in the City of London, working with multinational firms, private banks, and high-net-worth clients. She understood markets and risk, moved confidently through boardrooms, and earned a salary that sounded impressive. She had the relationship, the baby, the home in France.
Yet beneath the surface, something wasn’t right. Harriet had always been deeply intuitive and sensitive the child who felt what was happening under the surface, who soothed others without being asked. In a world that rewarded performance, that sensitivity slowly became something to suppress.
Her body began to speak for her.
Migraines that lasted for days. Overwhelmed even in calm moments. A constant sense of being braced. As Harriet describes it, “On the outside, I was functioning. On the inside, I was burning out.”
She wasn’t failing, she was living inside a version of success her nervous system didn’t believe in.
What changed everything wasn’t a promotion or a new plan.
It was a horse.
Living in rural France, Harriet returned to horses, a lifelong love she had never imagined centring her work around. Watching them closely, she noticed something she had never seen in boardrooms or strategy meetings: horses responded only to truth.
During a simple paddock exercise, a woman entered calm and composed. Later, she admitted she was carrying heartbreak and anger. The horse wouldn’t approach her. He circled quietly, holding distance. No amount of smiling or positive thinking changed it. Only when she named what she was truly feeling did the horse walk over and stand beside her.
Harriet recalls the moment clearly: “Here was a being strong enough not to be impressed by our act and gentle enough not to punish the truth when it finally arrived.”
Something in her body exhaled.
When Harriet eventually left corporate life, she imagined she was choosing simplicity. Instead, she discovered that patterns don’t disappear just because the scenery changes. She was still the emotional anchor. Still absorbing tension. Still holding everything together.
At her retreats and workshops, she began to recognise the same pattern in other women founders, CEOs, creatives, and leaders. Their lives were full and impressive. Yet their bodies told a quieter story of exhaustion, pressure, and inherited responsibility.
The horses sensed it immediately.
Some nudged women who had learned to stay small. Some refused to move for women who never stopped moving for others. Some stood beside invisible figures, parents, expectations, and entire lineages still being carried.
“This wasn’t about mindset,” Harriet explains. “We weren’t just dealing with stress; we were dealing with inheritance.”
Many of the women she works with are the first in their lineage to hold this much freedom and responsibility. Their lives look successful, but their nervous systems don’t yet feel safe. Horses meet that truth without judgment, no performance, no pretending, just presence.
Through her work today, Harriet helps women reconnect with clarity, coherence, and collaboration not by teaching them to do more, but by helping them put down what was never theirs to carry.
She reflects, “I allowed myself to unlearn the version of success that was burning me out. We are not here to hold everything together forever — we are here to remember that we are part of a herd that can hold us, too.”
The horses remain her quiet teachers.
Unimpressed by status.
Unmoved by masks.
Always listening.
