One Horse, Twelve Humans

But it looked like twelve different horses

Welcome back! Or welcome if it is your first time here. Here is another post about horses as my (and maybe your) teachers. If you need to catch up on last weekʻs post, here is a link: What Falling Can Teach Us.

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Those readers who faithfully read my all stories from the years 1992 - 1997 will recall there was barely a horse in there…I think I may have mentioned a riding lesson as part of my Portuguese immersion program doing all my favorite activities. Then after a year or so in New York City, the Swiss Guy, being no fan of the energetic pace of city life, declared “Either vee leaf the City or I leaf the City.” I agreed that we could leave the City and bought a map showing a 90-mile radius around Manhattan.

First we ruled out the neighborhoods that were essentially bedroom communities for well-paid commuters. He wanted a rural lifestyle, and I only needed to be in the City a couple of times a week, so I was happy to be in that environment as well despite the longer commute. The Hamptons seemed like a stretch. A bit further upstate New York? Litchfield County? The Catskills? Each of these places have a very different feel, I explained. We decided to spend a few weekends visiting friends at their summer homes before making a decision.

As autumn approached we found our way to a low key second home community near the border between Litchfield County in Connecticut and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. The subdivision was next to a state park with a lake, there were two large clubhouses with indoor and outdoor pools, tennis courts, a tiny ski lift, and even (drum roll please) a stable offering boarding, pony rides, summer camp, and trail rides into the adjacent state forest. I was pleased. I knew this stable was operating on a shoe string budget and eventually when I felt I had the time for it, I could surely trade my services for all the riding I could possibly want.

Meanwhile, in addition to the projects that had drawn me back from Hawaiʻi, a friend and I had a start up we were pitching, expanding our consulting and coaching skills into a version of the work I was doing for Carman: talent management and agency, but for executives. I had a seed investor lined up, but his requirement was clear. I had no track record as an entrepreneur, and it was a different skill set than corporate leadership. His condition was that I agree to participate in a two-year management and leadership course along with others to whom heʻd recommended the program.

Much as I chafed at studying the very topics I was already teaching my own clients, I am an obsessive learner and this was a very different framework, combining research on the mechanics of coordinating action through language, with somatics - meaning how leadership shows up in our bodies. Words plus body language. I was particularly intrigued to hear that at the midpoint, the summer between the first year devoted to management skills and the second year devoted to leadership, we would have an experiential learning experience with horses. That made sense to me given my own experience of horses as our mirrors.

An Equine Guided Education exercise in progress - thatʻs me coaching on the right.

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The dozen learners in the Action in Management program had been meeting monthly at a home near Boston. One of the participants had a farm in the countryside, and his teenaged daughter owned and showed two horses. For our special session we met at their farm. The instructor was a woman about my age who had flown in from Sonoma County California. Ariana Strozzi Mazzucchi is a lifelong horsewoman and sheep rancher with a degree in zoology and work experience in rehabilitation of raptors. She is an intuitive horsewoman who was one of the pioneers in the emerging field of horse assisted or horse guided personal growth and healing work.

In the morning Ariana explained how horses, dogs, and humans all share the same social system, one of only five in the animal kingdom. (As any of you who own cats will recognize, the feline system is entirely different.) This biologically based mutual understanding of how to work together is why humans partner well with dogs and horses, whether for transportation (dog sleds and carriages), obtaining food (hunting or plowing), and pure companionship. Next we did an observation exercise in an arena with the two horses, and collectively chose one of the two geldings for an individual exercise we would get to try after lunch.

Ariana demonstrated first. We were to each declare what was going on in our business and what leadership challenge this moment was a metaphor for, then lead the horse into the center of the ring and send it out into a wide circle around us on a long "lunge" line. We had no whip, and the horse does not respond to voice commands. Ariana, using no more than her posture and energy, circled the horse at a walk, trot and canter, all without missing a beat in her lecture to us.

Then each of us took our turn. The first to step up to the challenge was a successful serial entrepreneur. He walked into the center; the horse followed. Then, no matter what he did, how he moved, it was as though the horse had his nose glued to the entrepreneur's right shoulder. We could not help but giggle as we watched. After a couple of minutes, the man turned to Ariana and said, "Help! I declare myself a dignified beginner." The story playing out in this man's business life was that he had recently hired a CEO for the company he started, and several members of his Board were questioning whether he'd truly "handed her the reins." He was sure that there was no ambiguity, but the horse was telling him his energy demanded that he be the center of attention. The horse did not feel he was being encouraged to go out and do his job independently. Probably the new CEO didn't either.

That could have been coincidence, right?

The next person up was a woman leading the technology function at a large state university. Her ongoing management challenge, she told us, was that her employees are bureaucrats who just do the minimum and count their days to retirement. Sure enough, the horse went out onto its circle... then every few steps would stop and look back to her for direction. Had this woman's energy pattern as a leader had mirrored itself to the habits of her employees? Her leadership challenge would be to create new practices and habits for her teams to move forward with energy and confidence. The horse's message was that this would involve changing herself first, rather than being resigned to her employees' mood and current practices.

Finally it was my turn. The horse moved out into a good-sized circle at a smart walk. After a few minutes, Ariana instructed me to ask the horse for a trot. I somehow thought and felt the horse on the end of that loose line into an energetic trot. I was exhilarated. "See what a great leader I am!" ran my mental dialogue. After a few steady circles, Ariana asked me to return the horse to a walk. Nothing doing. I could see the gelding look at me out of the corner of his eye and toss his head slightly in a way I was sure said, "I understand you're asking me to slow down, but I also sense you really love it when I move fast. It's a mixed message so I'll do what pleases you. Is this okay?"

My difficulty slowing down a horse that others could barely get to move is hysterically funny if you know that as a leader I've had highly competent people practically burst into tears complaining that I'm always two steps in front of them and no matter how fast they run to keep up they feel stupid and incompetent. In three minutes, the horse shown me something people had been trying to tell me for decades.

By the way, the entrepreneur quickly let go of the company he'd founded and directed his energies to new initiatives, and a year later the I.T. manager reported that her department had turned completely around, and that she was beginning to exercise new power and enjoyment of the political wrangling within the state university system. I want to emphasize that none of this happened only because of the insights gained in a weekend horse seminar; all of us were in a program with daily and weekly commitments to learning, observation, and reflection designed to support converting our insights into new practices and competencies.

But it began with the horse. Instead of a single horse and twelve humans, it looked like twelve different horses. None of us could deny the feedback was real.

At the end of the daylong program I told Ariana that if she ever decided to teach people to do what she did, I wanted to learn. Combining my love of horses with coaching humans and teams seemed like a dream. It was another decade before she began offering to train facilitators - and 21 years later when I finally completed my certification with her in Skyhorse Equine Guided Education.

Iʻll be back with more next week. And please feel free to like, comment and share!