Experiential Learning with Horses
and Nature

•  LEADERSHIP EXCELLENCE
•  TEAM PERFORMANCE
•  ORGANIZATIONAL SPIRIT
•  PERSONAL DISCOVERY

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Experiential Learning With Horses

Spirit of Leadership offers ”Experiential Learning with Horses” Professional Development Services and Personal Discovery Opportunities.

Engaging with horses in focused and reflective activity challenges us to learn how to think rather than what to think.

People partner with horses through learning experiences relevant to real time life issues and authentic work situations.

Partnering with horses offers the opportunity for you to clarify your vision, embody your commitment and expand your natural ability to design your life. In this time of complexity, rapid change and instability horses and nature helps us balance the vast technological resources and information from the outer world with the instinct, self awareness inner knowing and authentic relationship.

For generations horses have carried us physically upon their backs taking us farther and carrying us faster than we could travel alone. Today in unique partnership with humans, horses can guide you to find your way of being, relating and leading within the challenging terrain of your personal life and work world.

Horses respond to our behavioral patterns, providing us with honest and clear feedback about our current strengths and areas for positive change.

Interactions with horses provide learning opportunities with immediate direct feedback relevant to skills critical to success in everyday life and work.

Horses lead us into new insights and reveal to us new ways of interacting with others and ourselves.

What you can expect for your business or organization

Customized training, consulting and coaching focusing on present and potential competencies by integrating experiential learning with horses with relational awareness and cutting edge leadership theory.

An ideal opportunity for coaches and consultants to expand their
services to their clients by providing an experiential action learning
opportunity for you with your clients. You are encouraged to bring your clients to further enhance and embody the work you are currently doing with them. Observing their work with the horses will give you a deeper and expanded perception of their process and will enhance your ability to support their work.

What you can expect for yourself or your family

Personalized coaching, healing or therapy sessions from a generative strength based approach builds on existing abilities and co-creates positive change. As you experience a relationship with a horse you can transfer that learning to your relationship with others and with yourself in an expanded way. You can partner with horses and work with our herd for personal discovery through workshops, groups or individual sessions.

Why Horses? ...What Horses Reveal

Horses are remarkable teachers of relationship and facilitators of human development. They have an amazing ability to resonate to our true emotions and reflect back to us our authentic self.

Horses can bring a high degree of chaos, endangerment and frustration. We learn to summon moment to moment calm, strength, focus, respect, and trust to maintain a mutually safe and beneficial working relationship with the horse, all skills essential for l personal relationships and leadership. Horses are inherently teachers of awareness and facilitators of change. They offer immediate feedback about our presence, emotional intelligence, and body language.

Horses are natural teachers of family and group dynamics and leadership and team work. They are social animals with a strong instinct to bond and herd together. Being left out of the herd is a core survival issue and belonging is essential. As members of the herd they do not blindly follow but manifest their unique positions and individuality and fulfill their special position in the herd. Horses like humans are social animals, like us, they learn from each other and learn together in pursuit of success, survival and well being.

Activities with horses provide wonderful metaphors and experiences when dealing with intimidating and challenging real life and work situations. Horses enable us to explore and move beyond our previous limitations into freedom of choice.

Horses are gifted with innate emotional intelligence and wisdom. As prey animals, horses have developed a fine tune survival response to sense and be aware of the present moment. Meeting life’s unpredictable challenges with moment to moment awareness and presence.

The language of horses is body In their presence we can sense more of the world outside of us and, feel more of our inner world of authentic.

Horses register incongruence, it is one of the skills they have to stay safe. When we are not congruent with ourselves or them they become uneasy and often will walk away from us. When we remove the mask of incongruity and be who we say we are and do what we say we will do, they visible calm and release and often move towards us. In this way they mirror us and provide in the moment feedback about our thoughts and actions.

The awesome beauty and inherent power of horses influence people in incredible ways. Horses are large and powerful, their presence creates a natural opportunity to face fear and develop confidence.

Much of what challenges us in our human relationships and in organizations is beyond words and rational thought. Horses provide access to direct perception of reality independent of rational process.

It is not about horsemanship, nor do you ride the horse, it's about working with the horses to strengthen your capacity to meet your life and work goals.

See Also:

 

Quotes from people in positions of leadership who have participated in Spirit of Leadership “Experiential Learning” coaching, retreats, seminars or training programs:

Working with a 2000 pound horse who questioned my every leadership direction gave me insight about my leadership ability and enhanced my skill to lead.

From the herd of horses I learned what it really means and feels like to be a team.

Maybe I need more time in the pasture and less time in the Board room to be aware of power more effective in my leadership.

Working with the horses I really began to understand how a misunderstood feeling, intention or direction can make the difference between failure and success with a horse or with a person.

The horse seemed to ask me again and again .”So who are you?”
It is the very question I have been afraid to ask myself.

 

 

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