Experiential Learning With Horses

Experience your impact as a Leader during our leadership development retreat with horses on a beautiful farm in Sonoma County, San Francisco Bay Area, California. Intentional Leaders offers unique leadership development programs that give business owners, executives, managers and work teams the opportunity to uncover and strengthen leadership and team building skills through interaction with horses (on the ground).

Executive Retreat participants will learn how to interact with horses with clarity and focus, expressing strong and inviting leadership that attracts the interest of a horse at liberty (free of equipment.)

The core leadership skills experienced by participants in the arena with the horses are directly transferable to all business and personal relationships.

This Executive Retreat offers a high impact leadership learning experience as you engage with horses in core leadership concepts including:

• Magnetic leadership that inspires others
• Clear intention and communication
• An environment of collaboration
• Enhanced creativity

Identify Potential Leaders in Your Company

The Executive Retreat is also a risk-free environment for business owners and executives, through observing the interaction of their employees with horses, to identify the managers and employees with leadership potential for:

• Expanded contribution by current employees and managers
• Successful transition from manager to leader
• Succession Planning

Executive Retreat Format

Our Executive Retreats are offered to groups of up to eight in a single event or series ranging in duration from 1 to 5 days. Retreat attendees have the option to engage directly with the horses or observe in an auditor role. Participants join in group discussions and session debriefs. Auditor participants are invited to ask questions during designated portions of the retreat. Each Executive Retreat is customized to the needs of the group and business.

What’s this Really all About?

Why horses?
In the presence of a horse, using experiential learning techniques, you quickly know where you stand as a leader. Horses recognize leaders by how a horse or a person occupies their physical space. If you occupy the space around you with clear intention and focus in a way that emanates from your core like waves of energy emanating from an engine, the horse will acknowledge your presence, respect the space as yours, show interest, and likely join you in the execution of your “ideas.”

What does this have to do with business owners, executives and leadership?
If you lack clarity in your overall vision, your specific ideas and your ability to focus, horses won’t find you interesting as leader and won’t pay much attention to you. In fact, they will “run over” the space you are in as if you’re not there. Same with people.

Business owners and executives don’t often think of themselves as leaders. This causes their employees to “run over them” in the same way a horse would if they don’t recognize that person as the one in charge. This Executive Retreat offers the opportunity for business owners and executives to experience what it takes to be recognized as the leader of their organization, attract the interest of their staff, and encourage their employees to express leadership as well. This kind of "intentional" leadership creates forward motion toward the fulfillment of the leader's vision.

How does it actually work?
Through exercises with the horses (on the ground, not riding the horses) and other participants, you gain new understanding and experience a greater capacity for leadership. You find out if your ideas are clear and speak loudly enough to attract the interest of others. You also find out if your leadership style scatters those around you or unifies them in a focused vision. As you gain clarity about yourself as a leader, you have the opportunity to make choices that shift your inner experience of yourself to one that is more inspiring to you and those around you. This is a very personal journey that can reveal answers to long-held questions about relationships and one’s well being.

Call now to schedule your retreat at 877.998.8488 (toll free) or 707.887.8488.