City Girl Takes the Ranch: 3 Leadership Lessons from a Horse with Stephanie Simpson

How Do You Become a Great Leader?

I bet you didn’t think you could learn about leadership from a horse! Leadership isn’t something generally taught in school or at orientation when you start a new job. It is usually something you might pick up along the way, or read about in books. If we want to become a great leader, we generally need a great coach or mentor. I just didn’t expect my mentor to have 4 hooves and a mane.

So when my client, leadership coach Kat Rippy, told me that she has a fantastic and out-of-the-box methodology for training leaders that involved horses, I was skeptical. Having grown up in New York City, and never having been to summer camp, I am not a horse person. What on earth could a horse teach people about leadership? She invited me along to see what it was all about.

I arrived at a picturesque ranch in the hills surrounding San Diego. The location was exactly what you hope a ranch will look like, complete with red barn, farmhouse, paddocks and horse stalls. Only about an hour from both Los Angeles and San Diego, it felt more like a million miles away. When I go to a retreat, I want it to feel like I’m AWAY, not just at The Holiday Inn down the road.

After meeting everyone over coffee and bagels in a rustic meeting room in the barn’s loft space, I was surprised to find I was not the only non-horse person in attendance. In fact, many people there were fellow city folk who had never been anywhere near a horse.

The morning started off with an orientation of sorts about horses. We covered what not to do, how to be safe, and then moved on to learn about what motivates a horse, and in turn, what motivates a team.

So what does that have to do with horses? We were shown these 3 leadership principles by leading horses, who will only respond to those 3 ingredients.

“The Horse Wants to Know That YOU Know Who You Are.”

A horse can sense confusion, distraction, and indecision. It will literally stop in its tracks if it senses any of these three negative qualities coming from you. If you don’t know what you want it to do, it will simply stop.

If you want a horse to run fast around the ring, you have to exude a matching energy. If you are quiet and subdued, the horse will be too. If you are energetic, your horse will match your energy. In a team environment, can you imagine getting big energy from your staff if you are quiet and moody? If you want your team to calm the heck down, being loud and angry probably isn’t the right way to go.

To learn these lessons from horses, we were given a few exercises to do. Individually, we were put in a ring with a horse and a trainer. The trainer asked us to get the horse to walk around the ring. With little additional advice, we had to figure out how to get a horse to do what we wanted it to do. The usual result was a whole lot of nothing happening.

With a little coaching, we were told to be present with the horse and not let any thoughts distract us. Then we were told to have clarity in our minds about what we wanted the horse to do. The horse, a highly sensitive creature, sensed what we wanted it to do, and did it, as if by magic (from my city girl perspective). Then the trainer asked us to get the horse to run faster around the ring. If we boosted our energy significantly, trotting around a bit with it, sure enough, the horse started to run.

Transformative Moments at the Ranch

It was fascinating. I saw leaders learn so much about themselves, and saw one woman overcome her genuine fear of horses. For another participant, presence of mind was the challenge. She was able to get the horse to walk with her, but as soon as negative thoughts entered her mind about work and home, the horse came to a standstill. The coach gave her an exercise to clear her mind, and sure enough, the horse started walking again.

The takeaway from this exercise was that your team is sensitive to your energy and can only follow your lead if you are present with them and have clarity about where you are taking the company. It was also illuminating that others around us can sense what we are thinking and feeling. If we are unhappy or distracted, or super stressed, our team will feel the impact of our emotions.

We can all be taught three principles of leadership by reading them here. But will we LEARN it? Will we believe it because we have experienced it? The cool thing is that Kat and her team have built their entire suite of leadership development offerings around these three principles and I’m ALL IN on putting them into practice! It may have started on the ranch, but now, I’m bringing it to the city!

Now…for the Exciting News!

We are going to be offering a horse experience Thursday, February 7th in Ramona, California to a very small group of individuals that we will record for marketing purposes.

Does a horse retreat sound like an experience you would like to have (to clarify, you do not actually ride the horse but you do get into a round pen with him/her)?

To maximize the experience, horse retreats are very small groups – which means we have very limited space The event will be Thursday, February 7, from 9:30am-4pm in beautiful Ramona, CA.

To learn more about our horse retreat, click here or send us an email and we will contact you to get to know more about your goals!

Meet Our Guest Writer, Stephanie Simpson

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Stephanie Simpson, Owner of Simpson Portraits, is a Los Angeles, California personal branding photographer and strategist. Originally from New York City, she has worked as a filmmaker and video producer for Warner Bros. Television Marketing, and as a marketing specialist for The WB TV Network. She combines image-making, marketing strategy and her intuition about people to create beautiful branded photography, bringing entrepreneurs and executives up to the next level.

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