If you are a leader or manager looking for an accomplished coach to help with your personal and professional development, try a horse. Equine-assisted leadership sessions are a proven, highly effective and rewarding way to hone or discover the skills critical to being an influential leader.
Why horses?
Interacting with horses allows us to gain profound insights into ourselves, our resources and challenges, our alignment with our values and intentions, and the interference of old thinking and behavior habits.
As a prey species, a horse’s flight instinct becomes an uncanny, non-judgmental feedback tool for humans. Horses sense and respond to the intentions, thoughts, and emotions that our body language subconsciously reveals to them.
Through the experience of observing a horse’s response to our requests and directions, we can learn how to communicate more effectively, how to recognize our fears and control our emotions, and how to become more consistent with our values in our behavior. Our equine assisted leadership sessions reinforce relationship management skills through one-on-one interaction with individual horses, as well as exploration of herd dynamic.
Learning objectives for our sessions include:
- Enhanced learning through stepping out of one’s comfort zone
- Boosting executive functions
- Enhancing emotional intelligence skills and communication
- Making decisions quicker, based on confidence and awareness
- Balanced processing
- Increasing team cohesiveness and performance
- Trust-building
- Enhancing personal power and self-esteem
The focus of our sessions is not on learning horsemanship skills. It is about acknowledging and better understanding our own weaknesses and strengths, challenges and competencies through interaction with one of humankind’s oldest animal partnerships. The horse is an effective teacher of presence, intention, communication, and determination. For the seasoned or the emerging leader or manager, an equine assisted coaching session can be nothing short of transformational.
We offer our services in English, Spanish, and French to corporations, non-profit and learning organizations. We welcome co-facilitation with other coaches and training institutes.
Why Twin Oaks Farm?
In addition to Jean-Jacques’ personal leadership experience in international and challenging environments, Twin Oaks Farm Leadership Workshops offer a number of unique advantages, including:
- After a short didactic introduction, all activities are hands-on experientials, combining individual and group learning;
- Jean-Jacques facilitates a structured debriefing after each experiential, to tie the lessons learned to the specific themes and goals of the workshop;
- We work with a large group of horses and several qualified horse-handlers;
- Workshops are tailored to our clients’ needs: You define the workshops goals and themes (team-building; communication; emotionally-intelligent leadership; authentic communication; relational and motivational styles; etc.) and we create a transformative learning experience for your group;
- We have conducted workshops with groups from UCAR; Johns Manville; Women’sVision Leadership Institute; Leadership Ascent for Women and Men among others, and worked with executives from both the corporate and non-profit worlds, including from Covidien; First Data Corp.; Western Union; Mi Casa Resource Center; Key Equipment Finance; Centura Health at Home; CenturyLink; CSG International; Vail Valley Medical Center; IQ Navigator; Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children; Trizetto; Alexander Dawson School, etc.
- Located 20 minutes from Boulder, 10 from Gunbarrel, and 50 from downtown Denver, Twin Oaks Farm offers a beautiful infrastructure, historic buildings, wide open spaces, great views, and a quiet settings conducive to effective learning. Visit our website at www.twinoaksfarm.com;
