Together with Anette Haug, Equinox Coaching at their Oakhurst Farm in East Sussex / South of England, we assisted the London management team of an international film production company to optimize their leadership skills. They had booked the team coaching with horses in order to improve internal communication, to develop new strategies and to take on more responsibility as a team.

Start-ups today are committed to socially and ecologically sustainable intentions besides their economic goals quite naturally. The familiar image of business people is changing.

The new motto for coaching, training and seminars by HORSE & SOUL Natural Leaders is "Growing for the Sake of All". It means that our mission is to activate the potentials from the very essence of people and organizations to provide integral growth and sustainable development: People + Planet + Profit are enabled to grow at the same rate.

We send our newsletter at irregular intervals, about 4-6 times a year, always when there are very interesting news to report from our point of view. You can subscribe to it in the orange coloured box on the left.

To stay up to date also in between on the latest news from HORSE & SOUL Natural Leaders, we recommend you to generate a bookmark to our RSS page (shortcut cmd + D for Mac or Ctrl + D for Windows) that shows you all future updates or new entries on our news page at once.

At the turn of the year the HORSE & SOUL horses Nikita and Tanea moved to the Quellentalhof (www.quellentalhof.de) of Rita Schodder and Klaus Pfetzing, the No. 1 address for livestock-friendly horse breeding, natural horsemanship, trail and therapeutic riding in the center of Germany ( Kassel - Göttingen area ). They live there in an open stable with 13 Fjord / Norwegian / Highland and draft horses, are in contact with goats, ducks, chickens and dogs and enjoy the unspoiled nature in the Meissner-Kaufunger-Woodland area.

For the numerous clients, who had booked an entrepreneurial coaching with HORSE & SOUL in very different stages of their business growth, 2010 has been a good year. New business ideas have been launched successfully, outdated concepts could be adopted and new customers are welcomed. Some of the clients had extended their management skills face-to-face with the horses, others had fucused their energies in coaching conversations and made important decisions.

From January 2011 HORSE & SOUL provides exclusively individually designed coachings and trainings with horses as a mirror and a catalyst for individuals, groups and open teams. This represents a further logical step towards premium quality, which can, from the perspective of the owner Stephan Gerd Meyer, not be provided in standard seminars and large-scale partner networks, but primarily in a precise custom work, in personal fine-tuning, in the cooperation with selected partners and in a warm and open communication with customers.

It took us some time to come to this decision - we simply are true to our core values in the centre of our projects and contracts. Integrity, open and straightforward communication, quality, synergy and cordiality with our clients and partners are the basics of all HORSE & SOUL coachings, trainings and seminars with horses as mirrors and catalysts.

Economy these days is affected more and more by the desire for responsibility in freedom, balance with passion and the quality of being instead of doing. „Growth for the sake of all“ is the primal intend of the entrepreneurs who book our integral coachings for start-ups, growth or change situations in their businesses.

In our latest seminar „The Art of Leading“ an entrepreneur was first irritated and then fascinated by the horses´feedback to his powerful impact in leadership situations that take place in confined spaces: Our Irish Tinker mare Shannon was so put off by his appearance that she broke through the fences twice to seek shelter.

No. Coaching is a process of clarification, help to help yourself, that anticipates future professional or personal tasks notionally and emotionally.

Two women participated in our latest seminar „The Art of Leading“, both are responsible for teams in several management levels in a medium-sized enterprise respectively in a corporate group. They demonstrated natural leadership skills, extended souvereignty and great boldness already in the first practical exercise with the horses where they had to handle new and challenging situations. They never had made an application for professional advancement, but had been approached by others if they wouldn´t have liked to step up into a new position in the company.

Thomas Terhaar spoke at the 5th. EAHAE conference in Klein Nienhagen about the realization and the results of the 30 seminars for all 240 employees of the building and loan association of a big German bank. Together with Stephan Gerd Meyer as the representative for 13 trainers who conducted the seminars in July and August 2009 collectively as a HorseDream-Partner project, he illustrated how the series of seminars had been enabled in spite of completely cancelled training budgets within the whole bank.

For our rover vehicle with plenty of horsepower and cubic inches, which we need to transport the horses from their pasture to the seminar arena, we bought an offset for the annual CO 2 emission: The website of ClimateCare helped us to calculate the amount that we donated for the verified international projects boosting the environmentally friendly generation of energy and optimising energy efficiency run by ClimateCare, specialised on climate protection projects (www.jpmorganclimatecare.com).

The hands-on exercise for 80 participants was moderated by Stephan Gerd Meyer and 7 more trainers at the 5th. International EAHAE Conference ( European Association for Horse Assited Education ). For their common topic, the Horse Assisted Education, they passed through four milestones of an integral change management process according to David Cooperriders concept of „Appreciative Inquiry“:

With clear expression, consequent in leadership and very relaxed in the face-to-face-communication with horses an entrepreneur from the design branch experienced his people skills in a Top Executive Coaching with our horses.

The managing board of the building and loan association of a big German bank decided to set up horse assited seminars for the whole staff to experience the new developped value-orientation within the corporate culture instead of discussing it intellectually.

For the management team of a university from the netherlands we arranged an edutainment programme with the topics leadership, team, change and future. Thirteen participants could boost their leadership skills, intensify the team communication and develop new perspectives for the future of their university. Common activities, lively discussions and challenging exercises with the horses have been passed by the whole team with lots of fun and spirit. The programme has been moderated bilingually in german and english and was topped-off with culinary snacks.

In march and in may we tested and experienced the application of the basic exercises within our horse assisted team and leadership trainings in a new developped character assessment. For this purpose we held two seminars, each with 8 participants: women and men in job-related reorientation, some of them with the intent of becoming entrepreneurs and starting up their own business. The seminars were part of a potential analysis which was conducted to find out the participants` personality traits, individual strengths and talents that are relevant for professional development.

As a part of a multilevel potential analysis HORSE & SOUL developped and conducted a character-assessment with the focus on "leadership for your own sake". Our horse assisted leadership coaching analyses and visualizes entrepreneurial skills and several aspects of self-guidance in this assessment.

At our booth for the Congress of Christian Leaders in Düsseldorf we had numerous wothwile conversations with the participants about value orientation in leadership. Especially the aspects of natural, honest and souvereign leadership out of one´s own center generated a big positive response.

Private coaching for individuals enjoys rising popularity:

Some of our clients have been utilising the straightforward and sustainable impulses that our horses deliver during an intensive coaching day, in order to get clarity and use the momentum to make difficult decisions, plan the next steps in their career, check new vocational prospects, resolve personal issues and use it as an inspiration to move onwards in life.

The advantage of private coaching for individuals, is the intensity, the privacy and the individual design the participant enjoy, enabling them to work through current and important, personal and professional issues in their lives.