The Adaptable Leadership Experience with Horses

As Featured in Austin Monthly's Top 4 Animal Adventures in Texas This Summer

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As Featured in Austin Monthly's Top 4 Animal Adventures in Texas This Summer 〰️

The Adaptability Advantage

Let’s face it, the pace of change isn’t slowing — it’s accelerating. New technologies, shifting policy changes, and cultural transformation are wreaking havoc on productivity and morale.

What worked even a few years ago no longer does. And while we can’t predict what’s next, we can prepare our teams to meet this challenge.

Adaptable teams know how to:

  • Stay composed and make clear decisions under stress

  • Read relational dynamics in real time

  • Adjust quickly without wasting time and money

  • Model steadiness that others naturally follow

The Workshop Experience:

Adaptability can’t be taught in a classroom — it has to be experienced.

To develop it, leaders must practice staying grounded and flexible when things don’t go as planned, reading subtle feedback, and adjusting in the moment.

That’s why experiential learning is so powerful: it moves concepts from the head into the body. Leaders don’t just understand adaptability — they embody it. And that’s exactly what happens when they work with horses.

Why Horses?

Horses are masters of adaptability.

Their survival depends on sensing change, regulating stress, and recalibrating instantly. When leaders engage with horses, they experience these same dynamics — not in theory, but in real time.

Horses respond only to authentic presence and congruent energy. They reflect exactly what we bring — confidence, tension, clarity, or confusion — offering immediate, honest feedback that no classroom can replicate.

This creates a powerful environment for leaders to practice the essential elements of adaptability:

  • Self-awareness — noticing internal states and how they impact others

  • Emotional regulation — calming the nervous system to stay effective under pressure

  • Cognitive flexibility — experimenting, adjusting, and trying new approaches

  • Authentic connection — leading through trust, not control

Powerful, profound breakthroughs in one day.

Master Group Facilitator

Gretchen Fox Palmer is a Culture Change Strategist, high-stakes communications expert and published author who helps leaders and teams deliver transformational change. With two decades guiding Fortune 10 companies, Silicon Valley startups, and global brands, she combines deep EQ expertise, crisis navigation, and experiential learning — including equine-facilitated coaching.

Read more on FastCompany

Professional Curriculum

In guided, on-the-ground sessions, participants:

  • Confront real-time feedback without words or judgment

  • Practice staying grounded through uncertainty

  • Experience how presence and intention impact results

  • Leave with embodied understanding — not just insight, but integration

Casual Environment

Participants are able to learn individually while connecting with their peers in a casual, tranquil, nature-based setting.

You can’t learn adaptability from a book. You have to feel it, practice it, and live it.

Working with horses develops leaders who stay steady through change, communicate with clarity, and create psychological safety in any environment.

Adaptability isn’t learned in theory — it’s lived on the ground.

Date: Week Day & Weekend Options

Time: 10 AM - 4 PM Central

Lunch options available

Investment: $1,200 per person

Location: Kenshō Stables

FAQ’s

  • The purpose of equine facilitated learning (EFL) is to expand our personal awareness through a series of equine guided experiences.

    These experiences allow us to enhance our abilities to notice and learn from our emotions and feelings as well as those of other sentient beings (animals and humans).

    The EFL exercises are designed as building blocks to open new neural pathways in our mind and our body by stretching our ability to feel the presence and intention of others through using our entire bodies as a sensory device.

  • Yes! Equine facilitated learning exercises are done on the ground guided by a trained coach and horse professional. Horses are always in controlled environments (behind a fence or in a halter with a lead rope). These are non-riding experiences.

  • All horses will be under control in a fenced paddock or on a lead rope in every horse experience. In addition, you may refrain from being around a horse as much as you choose. We encourage everyone to explore fears like fear of horses, safely with professional guidance.

  • Absolutely not, you may choose to do whichever sessions you want; however, sessions build upon each other and so it is advantageous to complete them all.

  • Our workshops are intimate experience with group size capped at a maximum of 8 participants.

Still not sure if our workshops are right for you?

We want to ensure a positive and vibrant group experience for each participant at each event. You can schedule a 1:1 call with Master Facilitator Gretchen Fox Palmer to see if this event is a good fit for you.