team building

 by Nancy

Leadership is NOT a Wardrobe Issue

Leadership is NOT a Wardrobe Issue. Considering starting a business with horses? or Perhaps you have been building a business over the years and need some inspiration?

This book was a delightful surprise for me. Nancy’s knowledge and approach to horses and horsemanship is complete and thoughtful. She then applies this awareness and understanding to her leadership programs. Her explanations and exercises are concise and creative. She caused me to think about these parallels in my own non-verbal horse/human communications. I definitely learned something, and hope that Nancy will not mind if I occasionally borrow some of her words in my clinics. Highly recommended.
Ellen Eckstein, CA, USA – Bringing it Together


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Leadership is NOT a Wardrobe Issue covers 4 areas

• The Business of offering Leadership with Horses,
• how an indepth knowledge of Horses & Horsemanship has influenced the work of The Natural Leader;
• Activities to complement your programs with lesson plans, coaching conversations and the lessons learned along the way;
• Coachable Moments – this section applies to those one-on-one conversations with horsemanship concepts. Coachable Moments draws from the experience Nancy has gained starting horses over the years connecting the two through questions.

What you will find in more than 100 pages of
Leadership is NOT a Wardrobe Issue?

Why Does it take a Lifetime to Learn?
• The Idea for this book
• It’s not a One Size Fits All Deal
• How Did you Get Here?
• What is the one thing you want participants to walk away with?
• An Invitation

Applying Horsemanship Principles to Leadership
• What is Horsemanship?
• Interpreting Behavior
• A Horse’s Perspective

Benefits of Leadership through Experiential Learning
• Experiential Learning
• What is a better Question?
• The Awareness Wheel
• Critical thinking
• Feeling vs Acting
• Emotional Intelligence
• W.A.I.T.
• Safety first

The Business of Creating Great Programs 
• Why Leadership Development programs fail
• Barriers to Success
• Providing Value
• What TED can offer
• Things Learned Along the Way
• How can this book help you?

Activities
In lesson plan format with Notes from the Arena – lessons learned along the way delivering leadership work

Coachable Moments
Whether you are doing one-on-one work or working with an individual within a group. Sometimes you need to pull out a specific concept or idea that will resonate for that individual.

Biography
Appendix
Endnotes
Bibliography

Leadership is NOT a Wardrobe Issue Nancy will provide any additional supporting materials to help you get to the next step.

eBook – digital download

prices are in Canadian dollars; Canadian clients GST will apply.

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 by Nancy

Nice vs. Effective

My work is focused on being effective. Whether I am starting a colt, coaching a student of horsemanship or facilitating a corporate retreat I try to be effective with my communication so I see a demonstrated change in a behaviour. Effective ranges from saying something in a different way to nothing at all. I hope throughout the experience the horse, the human or the team also see me as someone they wouldn’t mind spending time with.

The single greatest challenge I have encountered with people working to either improve their horsemanship or leadership capacity is helping them develop a clear understanding of the difference between natural and effective, nice versus respected and assertive instead of aggressive. All basically the same thing from three different perspectives.

Many adherents to natural horsemanship have difficulty discerning between nice and effective methods of applying that philosophy. Natural for some reason has been translated into nice, soft and quiet and their horse literally loves them to death. When the human begins to recognize what they are doing doesn’t appear to be working they continue to think in the same way so seek out a “natural gentle” gimmick of which there are thousands. The end result: yet another way to not be clear on what you are asking nor getting the respect required.

In horsemanship an intention has to translate through our body language for a single clear result. Sometimes we just need to speak, non-verbally, a little louder in order for our cues to be perfectly clear and then we can go back to a whisper. While we may talk about partnerships with our horse in reality we are looking at a benevolent dictatorship at best – we want the horse to want to excel and want to be with us, but sometimes our leadership style requires that we stand firm until we see the intended result.

Which is why for me there is such a direct correlation between the qualities required for both a good horseman and a good leader. There are few, if any, shortcuts to the ideal image of you and your horse or you and your team. I’ve listened to so many people talk about how well they get along with everyone at work, in one breath and then express complete exhaustion in the next. Sometimes being plain nice isn’t enough, it requires that you be effective.

For leadership to be effective it may mean changing how you approach a situation, employing a different leadership style. Being nice about a difficult conversation is rarely effective as chances are you won’t say what needs to be said. What I continue to marvel at is as a person realizes the horses behaviour will adapt to what they present, as they become more effective, they begin to see they are the source of the solution. To use a well worn phrase, they feel empowered to make a change in their own leadership style in order to be more effective in what they do.

There are many great reference tools out there books, programs, coaches find what helps get you unstuck so you can see a change in your habits and the behaviours of others – so you don’t feel that people too are loving you to death

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 by Nancy

The Motivation to Change

“Make the right thing easy.”

A simple statement made to thousands of people over fifty years. A lifelong student of horse behaviour, Ray Hunt was looking for a way to help people better understand how to motivate a horse. He simply wanted the horse to end up with a better deal.

Ray Hunt believed that a horse had no concept of winning or losing so a bigger reward for a better performance held no meaning. He spent his life trying to convince people they could overcome their own functional fixedness, of making a horse do something, by understanding the power of their horse’s desire to perform, producing a more rewarding experience for both. Hunt’s goal, was to help people see the motivation for the horse must be intrinsic.

A student of motivating people, Daniel Pink, puts some compelling thoughts forward on intrinsic and extrinsic reward in his book Drive. Pink explores how the carrot and stick method, built into our behaviour from time out at age two, to grades in school, to how much we earn at work–no longer applies. He argues that extrinsic reward is an outdated notion from a time when mechanical tasks were more important than cognitive abilities. A functional fixedness the business environment suffers from, unable to see the problem of workplace motivation from a different perspective. A belief that behavioural scientists and horsemen like Hunt have known for years.

We use the carrot and stick metaphor in working with horses, it is also a tool we offer participants. The tool is stick with a string on the end. To some it immediately represents a whip. Depending on how it is wielded, it quickly becomes that to the horse and rarely produces better results. To others, it becomes an extension of their arm and they soon see how effective a support tool can be to communicate. A few choose to abandon the defined parameters and the narrow focus the tool sets up for them to see what they can achieve without it. When that happens these individuals have to reframe how they might define and communicate their expectations where the relationship with the horse becomes more important than their own success. This simple act puts into place a behaviour of intrinsic value versus extrinsic reward.

Paying attention to what motivates the horse allows participants the opportunity to see where their own perspectives or functional fixedness may be getting in their way of recognizing those who work with them. As the notion of reward is changing, how we build teams and produce results also must change – managing others no longer carries the same meaning it had in a production line environment, leading others to be successful does.

In summary, what Pink takes an entire book to express is exactly what Ray Hunt put in a single sentence. “Make the right thing easy.”

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 by Nancy

A Decade for Puzzles

puzzlepieces“Horses are only afraid of two things, things that move and things that don’t.” wisdom imparted by Tom Dorrance when asked why horses are afraid of everything. Good horsemen are great at simplifying ideas, a horse fears what he might see, hear or feel. Whether it moves or not, what a horse perceives as scary, is tangible.

Humans on the other hand can fear everything, we fear what we see, hear, feel, imagine and believe. When it comes to something scary if it isn’t there we are quite capable of creating it. If we aren’t the creator, then we certainly feed a fear with what we listen to, read and who we hang out with. Humans, are a pretty tough act to follow.

In his New Year essay, Michael Enright of the CBC Sunday Edition referred to the decade as one of “adding and subtracting, of lost purpose fogged by confusion”. Ten years that seemed to capture our worst fears beginning with worldwide chaos the result of computer failure to uncontrolled viral contagions. From Y2K to H1N1, it is a decade exhausted.

When we learn from the past, live in the moment and plan for the future we not only do well, we excel. 2010 holds promise for a decade of optimism, hope and opportunity. Let’s take advantage of our ability to reason when something is outside of our comfort zone and manage our emotion when we sense, feel, think, want or act fearful, then figure out what to do with the information.

AwarenessWheelsiteThe Awareness Wheel is a tool we use to help people through a perceived fear of horses, injury or failure1. The wheel provides a guide to question the source of the emotion we feel welling up, to take stock of the moment and determine whether our emotions are working for us… or against us.

The rock that doesn’t move or the plastic that blows in the wind may not be what scares us. But the what if’s, could be’s or might happen’s can paralyze us and the reasonable is quickly clouded by the irrational.

It is funny how we stumble upon what we have learned. I was busy matching the shapes, colours and textures, of a Christmas puzzle, when Mom remarked that I have always been so good with puzzles. The comment made me stop and think as I do enjoy puzzles, I guess that is why I stuck with Rhys. I have had a few people “suggest” I find another horse, but Rhys has been my puzzle. Even his name reflects the chocolate covered peanut candies that come many to a box and I have often described our progress as having discovered another piece.

I worried so much about the what might happens with Rhys, that I missed what was going on. When I let go of the what if’s my whole perspective on him changed. I can honestly say I lifted the fog of my own confusion so I could see the potential Rhys held for me.

2009 may have been a tough year – but don’t let that hold you back. Treat this next decade as a whole new puzzle, one with many pieces, new textures and a rainbow of opportunity. It is simply a case of fitting them together based on what shows up.

1 – adapted by Fred Jacques from the work of Miller, Wackman, Nunnally, and Saline.アコーデオンドア！トーソー アコーデオンドア クローザ エクセル TD-5040/TD-5041 レーベル
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