The power of horses Let a horse lead you to better management with equine-assisted coaching By: Martin Cash Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Aug. 19, 2022

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/08/2022 (858 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

About a year ago, Trina Huntley was going through some changes in her role at Payworks where she is the manager of learning and development, and she wanted to get some clarity about who she managed and how she led.

She had worked with an executive coach named Shannon Leppky about a year prior when Leppky had told her she was purchasing a property in Cook’s Creek and that she was going to be working with horses in her practice.

“I was intrigued,” Huntley said. “I didn’t know what to expect.”

She was on a self-discovery mission and after several one-on-one sessions with Leppky and a couple of horses in particular, Huntley said she’s now able to be a leader who can share humility, empathy, courage and empowerment.

“Horses sense your energy and force you to be self-aware which is a really important leadership behaviour.” – Trina Huntley

“Horses sense your energy and force you to be self-aware which is a really important leadership behaviour,” she said. “I used to think of vulnerability as a weakness. Now I look at it as a strength. People you work with appreciate the authenticity you provide when you are being true.”

Huntley swears by the experience she’s had at Leppky’s Red Chair Ranch and with Jack and Annie, a couple of members of Leppky’s team.

“I feel the coaching with Shannon and her herd has been immensely rewarding for me as a human being and as a leader in my profession,” Huntley said.

Leppky, who has a masters degree in education and had a successful and lengthy career as a change agent in the school system and then a nine-year stint at MPI where she helped manage a system-wide change in corporate culture and eventually rose to become vice-president of human resources.

But she left that position after she noticed she had a physical reaction walking into her office one day in March of 2017.

“I felt something weird and I got curious about it,” she said. ”Over the next few weeks it was telling me I did what I needed to do at MPI and it was time to leave. So I listened.”

After starting a coaching practice not long after that Leppky had heard about the use of horses in helping people release predispositions that prevent them from reaching their full potential as leaders.

She had a horse for a couple of years and she said she had a very strong gut sensation watching the relationship that one of her daughters had with the horse.

“I knew about therapy with horses, but I was going down the coaching route,” she said. “Long story short, I did my research.”

She enrolled in a year-long certification program at The Academy for Coaching With Horses in Colorado and started assembling her four horse herd.

One recent rainy morning standing beside the horses pen as they took their morning hay with ears perked up listening to Leppky talk about them behind her modest Cook’s Creek home, Leppky spoke about the horse’s ability to detect incongruities in the people around them and how they can help people to overcome those barriers.

“A lot of the work we do is about understanding ourselves and those tapes we play that hold us back that we need to replace,” she said. “There is an energy in the property and the horses are absolutely part of it.”

The Red Chair brand came to her as she was doing her certification in Colorado. Her coaching is all done outside with the horse pen several metres from a circular grouping of red Adirondack chairs.

“Some people come here and get quite emotional,” she said. “On several occasions people have said to me, ‘I don’t know what is happening to me right now’.”

Kathy Pike, who runs the Colorado certification program, has written several books about the emotional and social intelligence of horses and has certified more than 150 people over the last 18 years in the use of horses for professional coaching.

In an interview with the Free Press, she said she does not spend time trying to convince those who are dismissive of the concept of horse therapy.

“I figure if people have that kind of resistance then it really is not for them,” she said. “It is the people with the curiosity, a love of nature, who love animals or who are just willing to be open and experiment… those are the individuals who get great things from the work.”

Pike does corporate work as well, and recently for the first time in 20 years, she encountered a few individuals who refused to believe that the horses were “truly sensitive, feeling, perceptive, intelligent beings.”

“It is the people with the curiosity, a love of nature, who love animals or who are just willing to be open and experiment… those are the individuals who get great things from the work.” – Kathy Pike

“Those individuals only saw the horse as an object and they never ended up having any success with them,” she said.

“It was very fascinating to me,” she said. “It really highlighted the reality that you can bring the people to the horse but unless they are open they are not going to learn.”

Leppky offers a number of different types of coaching experiences with her horses, Blaze, Annie, Jack and Kiante.

She does group events and one-on-one coaching sessions with the horse that start at about $350 for two hours. Leppky said people who seek out professional coaching are for the most part in professional and/or leadership roles.

“I would say they either know something is missing or they are not having the impact they want to be having or they have made a change or feel like a change is coming,” she said. “They often experience some kind of release.”

“I would say they either know something is missing or they are not having the impact they want to be having or they have made a change or feel like a change is coming,” – Shannon Leppky

Leppky does a fair bit of prepping with her clients before they interact with the horses. (There is no riding of the horses, by the way.)

One of the exercises involves taking the horse into a lightly fenced round pen and to have Leppky’s clients make the horse move and run around the pen with a carrot stick.

Huntley said the first time she did this she was worried about how things were going to go.

“My energy was a little off. I was in my head, thinking. ‘Oh my gosh. How is this day going to go’,” she said.

“At that time Annie (the horse) was as far away as she could possibly get at the other end of the pen,” she said. “We did a grounding exercise and by the end, Annie was as close as she could be. it is such an incredible experience. It is hard to articulate it until you experience it.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

Martin Cash
Reporter

Martin Cash has been writing a column and business news at the Free Press since 1989. Over those years he’s written through a number of business cycles and the rise and fall (and rise) in fortunes of many local businesses.

   Read full biography