A suggestion from the proprietors of Wisdom Horse Coaching: It’s better to take care of a horse’s patoot than to be one.
Lynn Baskfield and Ann Romberg, who own the Minneapolis-based business- and personal-coaching firm (wisdomhorsecoaching.com), say that horses are excellent teachers of human behavior. First, horses have no personal agenda. Second, their responses are intuitive. And third, they have 333-degree vision, so nothing slips past them.
Those attributes are what Baskfield and Romberg use to teach “authentic leadership, trust, and adaptability” to their clients in exercises hosted at Hawk’s Ridge Ranch in Hudson, Wisconsin. All the work is done from the ground—no horseback-riding necessary. Brushing the horse, getting it to follow without using lead ropes, and getting the horse to perform low jumps are some of the exercises that they say can give insight into a client’s own behavior.
Baskfield remembers one man who was launching a new business and felt he was held back by a lack of confidence around his business partner. By guiding a horse, Tamarindo, through the pasture “at liberty” (no tack or ropes), the client realized confidence wasn’t the issue. The horse followed him through two-thirds of the exercise, but on the last leg, lost interest, stopped walking, and started eating. Baskfield discerned from the horse’s behavior that there was something else inhibiting her client, and when she asked him what he was afraid of, he admitted that he was shying away from risk taking in his business because he feared losing his family if the venture didn’t succeed. She says at that point, Tamarindo walked straight over to the man and stood next to him, still at liberty.
Another man realized that he tended to freeze up when dealing with big clients, this while he was brushing Big Rusty. “Rusty indicated so much annoyance”—the man was brushing the same spot over and over again—“that I asked the participant to stop for a while, breathe, and feel his body,” Baskfield says. When he started brushing again, “his strokes became long and smooth, and within minutes, Rusty’s head dropped in contentment.” The man learned to step back when he felt overwhelmed by big-company projects, reassess what was needed, and “go back with confidence and success,” she adds.
Besides offering corporate workshops and individual coaching, this summer Wisdom Horse Coaching launched a new Natural Leadership Program for executives. “Even in domesticated horse herds,” Baskfield says, there’s “magnetic leadership and desire to follow.” Maybe the best way to run the C-suite is by horsing around.
