Exponentially Increase Your ROI on Development
Today’s corporate and non-profit leaders must set strategy, sustain their performance, learn to read clues in their environment, maintain trusting communications throughout the organization, form cohesive teams, and course-correct in uncertain, stressful times. Equus coaching teaches these skills and more.
What is Equus Coaching?
Equus Coaching is a facilitated experience with you in a round pen with a horse, that has no halter or rein. The horse provides you with sensitive biofeedback allowing you to understand your impact in a deeper more nuanced way. This allows you to access more ability to influence the horse, and your people back at the office, from a congruent and empowered place.
It may seem like a big jump to sign up for an Equus Leadership program or to consider having your next team off-site take place at a ranch.
You may be thinking - it’s hard enough to justify taking time away from the office. It’s crazy to think of asking people to not just step away from their workload but to head to a ranch? Really? How is that going to help us?
Here’s How
These days emotional intelligence, social intelligence, empathy, relational skills, are all the buzz in leadership development. There are plenty of books and trainings to support leaders getting up to speed on the importance of developing their soft skills.
However, the challenge comes in getting the learning out of the head and into the body.
Taking a day at the ranch or even an hour in a round pen getting real-time feedback from a horse (with some translation from an Equus coach) will exponentially enhance and deepen any cognitive training or team-building experience.
Here’s Why
It’s one thing to have the knowledge. Most leaders already know that they need to be congruent. You know your message needs to be clear and consistent. When you are calm, clear and centered, your people are much more likely to be as well. I think we’ve moved beyond the days where leaders actually believe that yelling, commanding and dominating the workforce is effective. But still, knowing this does not always translate into inspired, embodied leading.
Leadership is much more of an energy game than just a mindset. Sure, mindset is important because it plays so heavily into our energetic state. But we humans tend to like to put all our eggs into the cognitive side of learning and development. Wanting to find the right words, the right formula, the right book, the right teacher or mentor. All that intellectual effort to get it “right” may make us super smart, but probably not effective, congruent, empathetic or inspiring. Living, breathing and relating are about energetics, not words or smart skills!
Let’s talk about communication, no doubt one of the most critical aspect of leading.
Interpersonal communication is 70% body language, 20% tone of voice. and 10% words. No amount of picking the right words is ever going to outweigh tone and body language - both much more energetic than intellectual.
Here’s the deal - horses have a major jump on us in terms of emotional intelligence and they totally get the energy game.
Most non-domesticated animals do. Nature has resilience and energy, with the importance of relational skills dialed in. We humans - not so much! But what makes horses the best feedback machines is simply that they are quite willing to keep relating to us! Think about it. We do crazy things with horses. Many of the things we ask them to do go totally against their nature. Yet, they will learn and do most anything. In return, we rarely give back the same degree of respect. However, that hasn’t stopped their willingness to engage.
What Does An Equus Session Look Like?
An Equus session is not about riding a horse or training a horse. In an Equus session, you are working with a horse in exercises from the ground that will help you learn to set a clear intention and share honest two-way communication. A horse is a 1,500-pound biofeedback machine that can provide you immediate insight into hidden patterns that may be blocking congruent communication. Horses will provide you great feedback on how your energy is impacting you in effectively communicating your message.
There’s a lot of talk about being an authentic leader and most of us don’t have a clue how to live and lead more authentically. Because it isn’t an intellectual pursuit.
Authenticity is an inside to outside job that involves a deep knowing in the moment of what you are thinking, feeling and wanting. It involves tracking sensations, breath, your own nervous system reactions to triggers and events around you. This requires much, much more than thinking. Our minds are wired to think ahead and learn from the past - it’s our heartbeats, our sensations, and our feelings that bring us to the present. Horses are great at providing compassionate, clear feedback about when you are and when you aren’t embodied and present. Plus, you’ll have a human Equus coach (me, Susan) along to help you translate what you are seeing and how to take the learning back into the workplace.
Intrigued? Give us a call or just sign up for one of our Mojo programs. We’d love to bring the wisdom of horses to your office, boardroom or next team off-site.