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/