What Do You Offer the Herd?

Another way to look at personal legend or value proposition

It has been three weeks since I wrote a horse-centric installment of my memoir. One essay and one quiet Sunday in between.

Where we left off, I was reflecting in hindsight on my struggle to ride the rescued mare Zara. That post was mostly about how we shoehorn our individual relationships into an expectation of how they should look or be. My plan was to write next about how we define ourselves within our larger networks of relationships - what my mentor Ariana Strozzi Mazzucchi calls “finding your place in the herd.” I had even decided on a title “What do you offer the herd?”

And then coincidentally Matthew Ferrera, the colleague who referred so many of you to my writing, wrote a parallel post this week about “how to offer a valuable proposition.” Better! I should have asked how to make an offer of value to the herd. The process he suggests for discovering how to create value with your offer is first to ask questions about what the intended recipients value. How obvious is that?

I have learned the hard way that our offers fall on deaf ears if the offer is not something the herd needs or values. Creating value, becoming a valuable member of the herd, begins with listening, not with assuming or designing and surely not with unidirectional speaking alone.¹ Here is how Zara and I began to learn about offering something of value to the herd.

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In early 2005, we moved from Litchfield County Connecticut to Hawaiʻi. “We” being myself and The Swiss Guy, our dog Krishna, my horse Zara, my parents, and their cat. It required some sequencing. The Swiss Guy flew over first with the dog. He would be dog-goat-coffee farm sitting for some new friends while locating a rental for us until we figured out our long term living situation - we took this leap without jobs or housing secured. My elderly parents, on the other hand, were already set to live at the Regency at Hualalai. So a week later, after loading their belongings into our shared shipping container, I drove them to the airport at Hartford. On the other end, the Swiss Guy would collect his parents-in-law at Kona airport and get them settled in their new apartment.

A week later I watched Zara walk up a ramp onto the upper level of a double decker horse trailer. I entrusted her to a coast-to-coast service that mostly moved race horses between tracks, counting that she would arrive in California in time for her voyage by cargo ship to Honolulu, then a barge to Kawaihae. I had no idea where she would be boarding once we were in Hawaiʻi, but I had a couple of weeks to figure it out as I prepared for my own flight.

Zara enjoyed running through the snow but she has never complained to me about missing winters - meaning she has never again grown a full fluffy winter coat

Our destination, Hawaiʻi Island, is frequently referred to as “the Big Island.” Almost as frequently, people who live here jokingly comment “Small Big Island” because it seems like everyone is so connected. One day a woman dropped by the coffee farm where the Swiss Guy was staying. She was looking for her neighbors, the couple who owned the place, but as people do here, she happily sat down to talk story with a stranger. And happily for me, she was pretty certain her lifelong friend Barbara Nobriga still offered pasture boarding at her nearby ranch.

A few weeks later I found myself seated with Barbara in her big white pickup truck, a stock trailer hitched behind, headed to Kawaihae to retrieve Zara and bring her to Mahealani Ranch. During the hour-long drive I received my first education in the culture and history of this island, along with a dose of stern guidance on how to be a responsible and contributing member of my new community. It is the story of my life. Once again, “coincidence” brought me an impeccably credentialed teacher - in this case a legendary horsewoman and keeper of paniolo traditions.²

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Zara did not have an easy time finding her place in the ranch herd. As many newcomers to Hawaiʻi do, she thought that being a smart and accomplished lead mare elsewhere gave her skills that would be seen and valued in her new location. The big tough Hawaiian-bred ranch mares did not agree. They knew she did not even know what she did not know and put her in her place with firmness. Fortunately, seeing the tiny mare was not fitting in with the larger herd, after a few weeks Barbara allowed Zara to stay in a lower paddock with a motley collection of misfit companions: a handsome mule who was starry eyed over this fine-boned Arab mare despite her rejection of his devotion, a double-wide pregnant miniature horse. Finally Zara made one friend, the granddaughterʻs competition horse who lived in an open air stall to keep her accessible for after-school practice and safe from the endless lead mare scrapping for position. Zara kept this mare company from outside the stallʻs fencing, and in return her friend would push over her bucket of alfalfa cubes to share a treat.

Over time, both Zara and I came to understand our new environments. Over time, connecting within different smaller herds, making mistakes, listening to feedback, observing, persisting, and finally finding acceptance, today we find ourselves in that magic space where we have the joy of contributing to a larger herd that truly values what we bring to the collective.

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As I began to write this from my home on the morning of Saturday May 11, 2024, the road out of town was closed. Strong overnight rain storms caused flooding in rivers that run from upcountry Waimea towards the coast, sweeping floodwaters over highways from south of the Mauna Kea Resort, north through Kawaihae where I went to retrieve Zara from the barge nineteen years ago. The same roads had been closed due to fires on August 8th of last year, the day that across the channel on Maui, Lahaina burned. This is not a recent phenomenon. Being cut off without warning has happened pretty regularly since we settled in this far north district of the Small Big Island in 2005 - first and notably with the big earthquake of 2006. It is a defining part of life at the end of the road.

As you might imagine, I find myself in a tight knit community that takes care of itself. A community that believes no one can individually thrive unless we all thrive. A community that functions like a herd, by which I mean I see leadership that moves fluidly to be exercised by the herd member with the skill or knowledge that is needed at that moment. Every herd member matters. Every herd member contributes.

I am blessed. We are blessed.

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So how did I find my place in this herd? Coming back to what I asserted at the beginning: Creating value, being a valuable member of the herd, begins with listening, not with thinking or assuming and surely not with unidirectional speaking alone.

I did a lot of listening. I was fortunate to arrive in town at a moment when I could contribute as a volunteer to a project that required me to simply listen and record community membersʻ thoughts in meetings large and small, for almost a year. That luck largely prevented me from messing up by offering too many of the wrong things.

So how do we listen like that when we are not given a script? How do we ask the right questions in any situation so we can listen deeply, honestly, to the answers? How do we move from listening to begin to dialogue, to make tentative offers and get feedback, in order to find out which offers have value and will be accepted by the herd as our commitments to them?

How do we recognize it when we finally find our place and purpose? I believe it shows up in the joy we feel contributing to our herd and being cared for in return.

I have a few more questions and answers on this topic, more lessons I mostly learned from my horses as teachers. Feel free to subscribe if you are not subscribed already, and feel free to share this post.

1. If you have been reading in sequence you will recognize that I wrote at least three times about how horses helped me be a better listener - something that is still among my top two or three personal growth challenges.

2. A short video The Paniola on ranching in Hawaiʻi featuring Barbara Nobriga. It shows the ranch where Zara lived for a while and the herd she wanted to join.