Twenty-seven corporate leaders in a circle. Eyes closed. Standing in a pasture with horses moving freely around them.

No agenda. No metrics. No performance.

Just presence; just breath…and earth…and the soft sound of hooves on grass. 

This is how Day Two begins in one of the leadership programs I facilitate: with a practice called Arriving Where We Are. There is no arriving at a destination, no arriving prepared or polished or ready. Just our body, mind and heart arriving together in the same moment for once.

Most of these leaders haven’t done anything like this before. They’ve done the assessments, the off-sites, the team-building, etc. They are smart, capable, driven people. And most are exhausted from trying to hold it all together.

What the horses teach us gently, without a single word, is that holding it all together isn’t actually leadership. It’s armor. And armor is heavy. Horses, on the other hand, carry nothing they don’t need. 

Horses are fully present at all times. They read the environment with all five senses simultaneously. As such, they sense your heart rate, adrenaline rate, respiration rate. When something shifts in you, they feel it before you’ve even named it. And they only require one thing from you: congruence. You cannot fake your way through a session with a horse. And that’s exactly the point.

The previous day, Sean, a senior leader was terrified to have a 1:1 session with a horse, especially in front of his peers. Sean accepted my offer to join him in the round pen. I stood between him and Bear, a rather large horse who had no interest in pretending. We just stood there and talked about fear. Not horse fear. Rather the kind that shows up in the hard conversations he avoided, in the decisions he delayed, in the gap between who he was and who he thought he was supposed to be.

Sean’s heart rate quickened, but he didn’t try to hide that fact. And, because he didn’t hide it…because he was finally, genuinely himself, Bear stayed. This once imposing presence became an exemplar for calm. 

Eventually Sean walked to Bear himself and placed his hand on the horse’s neck. The fear didn’t vanish. But something shifted. He understood, in his body, that he could be afraid and present at the same time. We tend to think of vulnerability as weakness and do everything we can to avoid it. The reality is that when we are willing to acknowledge the truth of what emotions we are experiencing, that is the bravest kind of leadership there is. And it builds trust. 

That’s what this work with the horses is: mindfulness in motion. Conscious leadership that emanates from the inside out. It starts with the courage to show up exactly as you are…and the discovery that when you finally do, you get to put the armor down. Turns out, you were never meant to carry it in the first place.

Bear already knew that. He was just waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

For more information about Sheppard and her work on Conscious Leadership, visit her website here. You can also watch her recent interview on our YouTube Channel.