this birth required much more than watching, nurturing, and supporting our four-legged companions. Shelley and I also had to engage two much more active roles that night, those of the Leader and the Dominant. We had to be quick about it, too. Taking the leadership position, I walked toward our first goal, drawing little Indigo forward, gaining his interest and cooperation without the benefit of restraints or training, compelling him to follow me around the corral to his mother as Shelley gently herded him from behind, taking the position of Dominant. When the feel and sweet smell of Indi’s soft muzzle wasn’t enough to inspire Rasa to face the pain of standing up, Shelley and I increased the intensity of these roles, simultaneously pulling and pushing, coaching, encouraging, and then demanding that the mare get on her feet.
Finally, if the situation had become dire, both Shelley and I would have had to accept — with deep courage and compassion — the role of Predator. We would have had to make the decision to euthanize Rasa. This would have been difficult enough, but if the vet could not arrive in time to humanely end our beloved companion’s suffering, we would have had to use a gun normally kept on hand for protection in the desert outback and perform this most grievous and sacred act ourselves.
To this day, I thank our lucky stars we didn’t have to engage all five roles that night. But our ability to incorporate and exchange the other four as needed offered me the first, most visceral glimpse of an ancient form of wisdom, one that has been all but lost in humanity’s increasingly insulated, highly specialized, city-based, sedentary lifestyle.
Power Struggles
Fall flowed into winter as Indigo Moon grew stronger and bolder with each passing day. His older brother, Spirit, was navigating the fretful challenges of adolescence, testing boundaries and finding ever-more-clever ways to amuse himself at others’ expense. Luckily, I had some experience with disorganized male aggression. Both Indi and Spirit were sons of Midnight Merlin, a proud, at one time dangerous Arabian stallion who refused to submit to simplistic dominance-submission training methods.
Everything I feared and abhorred about the misuse of power was embodied in the patriarch of my growing herd. Merlin had been abused, in large part because he was defiant. Several trainers had tried to tame him with all kinds of techniques and tricks and intimidations — efforts that most often ended with some stunned, humiliated human scrambling to safety.
By the time I met Merlin, he’d been abandoned at a Tucson boarding stable and confined to an isolated corral. Though lonely and even depressed as a result, he was unable to control his own traumatized nervous system in the presence of horses or humans. A vicious cycle of terror and destruction swirled around him like a monsoon storm gathering force in foreboding yet unpredictable ways. Merely taking him for a walk was an ordeal few people were willing to face more than once. You could actually feel the thunder rumbling under the surface of his sometimes-calm demeanor. You just knew that lightning was bound to strike at any moment.
Thankfully, Merlin’s tendency to rear up and attack without provocation lessened over the years of our association, and at times he was quite sweet. In the process of forging a partnership with him, however, I was forced to delve into the instinctual subtleties of dominance and leadership — and reflect on the ways in which both could be used to either build or destroy trust and cooperation.
This was initially a huge paradox for me. I was taught that power led to tyranny or, in women especially, ostracism. I spent years honing the tenuous combination of courage, compassion, mindfulness, and assertiveness that Merlin needed from me in order to find balance. It absolutely boggled my mind to realize that I was unable to tap the stallion’s latent gentleness unless I could enter his corral with a strong yet caring presence, one that simultaneously didn’t suffer fools, didn’t hold grudges, and didn’t take tantrums personally.
Yet just when I thought I had a handle on these issues, Merlin’s sons came along and showed me that his tantrums were not, at their root, a reaction to abuse. These violent outbursts were more specifically an age-old call for skillful elders capable of helping younger generations socialize their own vast, untapped, all-too-often-misunderstood resources of personal and collective power.
Like their father, Spirit and Indigo were highly sensitive, naturally dominant, and extremely intelligent. For a time, they were even scarier than Merlin precisely because they had been raised in a secure environment. They had no fear of humans and were actually attracted to new things and experiences that would send the average horse running. Consequently, they would rear and kick and bite for fun, testing their strength and mine, but without the surge of anger I was able to sense in Merlin right before he would attack.
And so, it seemed, I reentered the school of hard knocks and scary stallions. Practicing various ways of channeling this tremendous energy and intelligence in productive ways — without lapsing into the negative, intimidation-based techniques that made Merlin such a troubled character — opened my eyes to a sophisticated, highly effective way of working with free, empowered humans.
Over time, I was able to translate the skills I had learned from my most challenging herd members into safe, efficient, yet exciting ground activities with gentler horses. I began teaching these tools to the executive teams, entrepreneurs, students, teachers, parents, clergy, and counselors who came to study leadership at my ranch in Arizona. In the process, I developed a nature-based model that helped people relate what they learned at the barn back to their offices, homes, churches, and schools.
As Spirit and Indigo Moon grew to adulthood, the once-aggressive colts became exceptional teachers of advanced students who wanted to tap the wisdom of these large nonpredatory power animals. All of us, the horses included, became more adventurous and collaborative as we learned to juggle the Master Herder’s five roles. My clients were especially intrigued to discover that this innovative “new” approach was actually very old — as ancient as the human-animal bond itself.
The Fittest to Lead
Charles Darwin’s work suggests that it’s not the strongest or the most intelligent of the species that survive, but the ones most responsive to change.
That means us, now, in this crucial, promising, yet precarious stage of our own species’ development.
The sedentary, hierarchical, dominance-submission models of leadership the “civilized” world has relied on for the last few thousand years have outlived their usefulness. Ironically, the very technological advances this system once nurtured have given birth to an increasingly nomadic lifestyle where freedom, autonomy, and constant adaptation challenge all the previous rules of social engagement.
In the January 2015 article “20/20 Visions,” Entrepreneur magazine asked leading futurists and cultural anthropologists to predict “how the next five years will revolutionize business.” Brian Solis joined other members of the panel in emphasizing that “things are not only changing, but are so radically different that the business models we have today cannot support a much more dynamic approach to the market.”
Shifting value systems demand innovation, not only in technology, but also in leadership as network-based organizational structures emerge. Younger generations are “very entrepreneurial and tend to have a lot of global connectivity,” Bob Johansen observed. “They’re very interested in environmental issues and sustainability.” They also “want authenticity, they want transparency.”
It makes sense. These are the people who will endure the effects of climate change and raise children in the face of dwindling resources. At the same time, their fluency in social media calls for collaborative business models that take advantage of “mutual benefit partnering on a global scale,” or what Johansen calls (in his book by the same title) “the reciprocity advantage.” For anyone born after 1990, hierarchical, highly competitive, slash-and-burn styles of corporate conquest
