Leadership development initiatives lean on a familiar catalog of offerings: off-sites, team bonding experiences, experiential learning events, feedback sessions, executive coaching, leadership development programs, training workshops, and so on.
For years we designed and delivered scores of high quality learning engagements as above, with routinely high praise from Fortune 500 clients for exceeding their expectations and providing actionable best-in-class learning.
Even so, when we would check in six to twelve months later about whether the leaders who attended underwent sustained change for the better, often people around them would say: “Yeah, things got better for a little while… but now they’re kind of back to their old habits,” or, “Yeah, I guess they’re a little bit better.”
There are lots of reasons why learning might not stick.
Here’s one of them: professional development leans on mainly cognitive and language-based learning modalities.
Leaders are asked to discuss / reflect / think /imagine / ask / read / write / describe / brainstorm /answer / experiment using a suggested framework.
This seems like a good idea for smart, highly educated people, but eventually it becomes a self-limiting trap…
…because our brains and bodies are connected and continually in communication.
Our thinking, actions, emotions, beliefs, histories, and habits live in our tissues, not just our brains.
“Brain-forward” learning alone rarely creates long-term change: eventually, and especially under stress, we revert to the old behaviors that have long been embedded in our bodies over new skills that were cognitively gained.
Our integrated approach develops embodied leaders who achieve tangible, sustainable, even life changing results.
Somatics
Somatic learning is at the heart of our approach, and it is what makes rapid individual transformation and team synergy possible.
Somatics is grounded in the idea that our thinking, actions, emotions, beliefs, histories, and habits live in our tissues, not just our brain. We all have a “bio-behavioral shape” that has memorized a set of automatic responses to our environment in order to protect our needs around dignity, belonging, and safety.
Indeed, our body is our first informant and responder, pre-emptively initiating a response that influences the story our language-based brain then tells about what’s happening.
Somatic learning engages these conditioned tendencies directly, making new embodied responses possible even under the same old pressures.
Equine guided education
Horses – prey animals who are both social creatures and exceptionally sensitive to their surroundings for survival reasons – respond immediately and visibly to how we as humans show up in the moment.
Horses are unburdened by the biases, projections, and histories that cloud human perception, so even the most experienced leader can gain new and nuanced insights about their quality of presence, energy, blind spots, and impacts on others through our curated experiences with horses.
Our team-based horse activities also shine a light on ingrained patterns that may be hindering team results.
Competency development
As leaders become grounded in somatic practices and equine experiences, we provide best-in-class skills training and coaching in critical teaming competencies:
Giving and receiving feedback
Managing difficult conversations
Conflict resolution
Collaborative problem-solving
Influencing across a matrix
Strategic negotiation
We draw from leading academic and field-tested approaches, informed by almost thirty years of experience.
We can help.
Settle your nervous system
Learning is hard when you’re stressed. Somatics can help your body re-member its way to a more relaxed and open state of being.
Learn to listen
Your body talks to you all the time. We help you learn how to listen to its messages, and thus access your somatic wisdom.
Expand your potential
We help you leverage somatic intelligence to achieve your maximum potential, whether it’s thriving in a new leadership role, prioritizing your own needs, or striking out in a new direction.