Episode 94

full
Published on:

3rd Aug 2025

Horses Leading Change - Dialogue with Kelly Wnedorf CEO of EQUUS

Anyone who listens to this episode can enjoy Kelly's course, How to Lead a Transformative Life, for free!

Here are the details:

100% off of How to Lead a Transformative Life - worth $457

Use EQUUS100KW

Two consecutive Saturdays for two hours (four hours total)

Here is a link to the course:

https://www.theequusacademy.org/courses/how-to-lead-a-transformative-life-2025

How can horses lead transformations in human souls and in human cultures? They do this by presencing an ancient wisdom that always appears vibrantly alive and alove.

A “flying lead change” allows a running horse to respond with breathtaking grace to changing conditions. “Collectively, we need a similar physics-defying maneuver,” Wendorf writes in her book, Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Leading and Living.

Kelly and I discuss her book, which offers an essential guide to nature-based leadership inspired by the wisdom of indigenous teachings and horses.

Kelly locates a common element to the challenges and crises of our modern age in disconnection―from each other, our planet, and the sense that our lives have purpose and meaning. Kelly's work offers a new approach to leading and living inspired by two profound sources of ancient wisdom: original peoples and Equus (the horse), grounded in evidence-based principles of neuroscience.

Her book discusses the key elements to a horse-inspired approach, including:

• Listening―the starting point for all leadership, in which we suspend our biases and preferences

• Care―explore the ancient, indigenous understanding of care that is reciprocal, empathic, and beneficial to all

• Presence―meeting the here and now with vulnerability, openness, and a stable foundation

• Safety―how a masterful leader creates a sense of group resilience and strength by “leading from behind” for the welfare of all

• Connection―ways to move away from coercion and force to promote genuine communication and belonging

• Peace―creating group harmony right now through the surprising concepts of “congruence” and “tempo”

• Freedom―returning to our wild nature that is inherently free, unbridled, and unbroken

• Joy―moving beyond temporary happiness to a state of wholehearted engagement of life, whatever the circumstances

Kelly Wendorf, MCC, MECD

Founder and CEO of EQUUS

Kelly Wendorf is an ICF (International Coach Federation) Master Certified Coach, published author, spiritual mentor, disruptor, and socially responsible entrepreneur.

Her early experiences were vitally and deeply shaped by the natural and ancient world around her where she learned a way of listening to forces within people, nature and moments. This unconventional education grants her a gift of perception that liberates untapped potential and hidden gifts within individuals and organizations, helping them to solve problems differently through a wisdom-informed and wholeness approach.

Throughout her life she has lived and worked around the world, studying with many spiritual and Indigenous leaders in India, Africa, Indonesia and Australia. Such immersion in multi-cultural perspectives has honed a passion for creating a new narrative in the human condition, empowering high-performing individuals, organizations, and their leaders to wield meaningful change in their families, communities, and in the world through servant leadership and innovative business development. She has worked inside a spectrum of clientele – from Amazon, to Microsoft to some of the most underserved communities. She has been called a ‘corporate shaman’ and a ‘CEO whisperer’. She is known for being a trustworthy translator of ancient cosmologies to contemporary relevance.

Kelly founded, edited and published Kindred magazine (Australia), an evidence-based publication that explores the social, cultural and biological underpinnings of a compassionate society. Here she spent 15 years immersed in the field of neuroscience and neuropsychology and its relationship to social justice and transformative cultural change. Kelly also authored and edited Stories of Belonging (Finch), an anthology from authors around the world, including the often excluded Indigenous voices. Her book, Flying Lead Change - 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Leadership and Living (Sounds True) was released in December 2020.

As founder of EQUUS she specializes in the liberation of robust leadership capacities in those who are most qualified — the empathetic, the conscientious, the accountable, the wise, the generous, and the kind.

As a gifted educator and facilitator, Kelly developed Wisdom Circles®, a peer-learning and group coaching model. An intuitive lifelong horsewoman, she also developed The EQUUS Experience® — an award-winning equine-assisted transformational learning process. Wisdom Circles and The EQUUS Experience are recognized as powerful differentiators in organizational change movement.

Together with her uniquely skilled team of professionals, Kelly continues to develop and grow The EQUUS Experience, Wisdom Circles, and EQUUS’s other complimentary processes that curate various awareness-based frameworks that create breakthrough learning and discovery.

https://www.equusinspired.com/

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About the Podcast

Dangerous Wisdom
Journey into Mystery
A podcast for wild souls who want to live with open eyes and an enlivened heart. The world needs dangerous wisdom, and our education system functions primarily to keep us away from it—to stop us from taking the journey into the mystery and magic of the world. Because of this, we have achieved a catastrophic level of confusion, anxiety, and ignorance—with boatloads of tame wisdom, false wisdom, and self-help nonsense that only adds to the challenges we face. The path of wisdom—the path of wonder—deals with how things really work, and how we can become skillful and successful. Following it leads beyond concepts to a wonderstanding that can heal us, and empower us to help the world, realize our hidden potential, and experience the profound meaningfulness of life. In this podcast, we turn toward the dangerous stuff, the wild stuff, and confront the need to handle authentic wisdom with skill and grace, making sure the medicine doesn’t become another poison. If you want an inspiring space to explore the big and sometimes scary questions, a space that opens up into insights that can change your life and the world we share, join us. Find out more at https://dangerouswisdom.org/

About your host

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nikos patedakis

“Vain is the word of the philosopher that heals no suffering.” ~ Epicurus

Following in the footsteps of Epicurus, nikos patedakis works with individuals, groups, and organizations, bringing to bear the most powerful and holistic teachings of the wisdom traditions in relation to our most daunting personal and global challenges. nikos works with the unity of Nature and Culture, drawing from the sciences, the arts, and the wisdom traditions.

His educational and consulting practice offers a genuinely holistic approach to creativity and critical thinking, ecoliteracy and true sustainability, achievement and excellence, mindfulness and attention, wellness and stress reduction, burnout prevention and recovery, and more.

This work encompasses the traditional areas of ethics, knowledge, meditation, creativity, beauty, being, and metaphysics, remaining rooted in the ancient Greek orientation of philosophy as a way of life, in which philosophy is seen as therapy for the soul and fundamental to the healthy transformation of self and society. This is the tradition of Western philosophy that influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the approach of world philosophies that have shaped our world.

The philosophical traditions serve as a sacred storehouse of practical wisdom, trainable compassion, and effortless beauty that can help us resolve complex personal and global challenges, uncover our hidden potentials, and realize our highest ideals. Wisdom is what works.