It was an exciting time. Still, the pieces needed to explain what people could learn from horses hadn’t fully developed by the late 1990s. There was no widely accepted term for horse-related programs that proposed to teach personal and professional development skills in nontherapeutic settings — modalities that now proliferate under the umbrella of equine-facilitated learning (EFL). Back then, equine-facilitated psychotherapy was just emerging from the field of therapeutic riding, and mainstream equestrians were only beginning to accept the idea that horses were sentient beings with a dignity and wisdom all their own.
So you can imagine how hard it was to explain to people that while I was intrigued and most certainly inspired by the potential of equine-facilitated therapy, I was most interested in partnering with horses to help so-called “well-adjusted” people learn to how to excel in life and work.
Stretching. . .Again
In 2001, my first book, The Tao of Equus, was published, and I was stunned by the response. Suddenly, I was meeting kindred spirits from around North America and across both oceans who wanted to study the techniques my colleagues and I had been developing since the mid-1990s. This sudden burst of international interest made it necessary to streamline these skills and teach them in two-, three-, or four-day workshops because our out-of-town clients wanted to have efficient, concentrated, life-changing experiences they could fit into a long weekend.
It was a tall order. Still, the formats and activities created in the wake of this new demand were an instant success: Participants not only came back for more, they urged us to start a facilitator-training program so that they could take this model back to their own communities. And so our regional collective Epona Equestrian Services became Eponaquest Worldwide.
A whole new set of challenges soon confronted me, however. The business grew fast. In 2005, I signed a contract to write my third book in the midst of leading four-day personal development programs, week-long facilitator trainings, and daylong corporate leadership workshops. At the same time, I was negotiating with an investor and moving to a large historic ranch that we were turning into an equestrian-based conference center. With a host of programs scheduled a year in advance, we had to construct that new facility in the midst of nonstop seminars as I worked on my new manuscript at night.
I invited a group of adventurous horse trainers, counselors, and educators to help with this multidisciplinary project, but it was like building a plane while trying to fly it. There were so many variables, so many areas where experts in different fields had to join forces to create something new. Once again, talented, technically accomplished people had to collaborate with peers in innovative settings, and it wasn’t always pretty. This time, we had enough information on emotional and social intelligence to benefit in certain areas. Still, some essential piece remained hidden — and frustratingly, painfully, unspoken.
Over the next four years, I stretched in all sorts of contorted ways, feeling not so much inspired as kneaded, parboiled, and thoroughly baked by some mad chef trying to create new recipes from the same list of ingredients. My fourth book, The Power of the Herd: A Nonpredatory Approach to Social Intelligence, Leadership, and Innovation, grew out of the tools my colleagues and I developed as a result of stewing in that cauldron of advanced experiential learning.
In this effort, the horses were key. Because what we ultimately needed was an understanding of something long forgotten, something our ancestors had dropped beside the dusty road to civilization. Our four-legged colleagues were the only ones who knew the way back.
Unexpected Wisdom
The Power of the Herd featured some of the principles that foreshadowed this discovery. In the six months between submitting the final manuscript and its hardcover publication, I developed what I eventually called “the Five Roles of a Master Herder,” and I experimented with its effectiveness on clients and staff. This became the most popular feature of presentations and workshops I offered during my US and European tours supporting the book. In collaboration with my colleague Juli Lynch, PhD, I also created a self-assessment to help clients evaluate which roles they showed proficiency or talent in and which roles they were avoiding or abdicating. (See the Master Herder Professional Assessment, page 207.)
In doing research for The Power of the Herd, I found that for thousands of years, “Master Herders” in nomadic pastoral cultures had developed a multifaceted, socially intelligent form of leadership that combined five roles, which I call the Dominant, the Leader, the Nurturer/Companion, the Sentinel, and the Predator. This fluid vocabulary of interventions allowed Master Herders to move interspecies communities across vast landscapes, dealing with predators and changing climates and protecting and nurturing the herd while keeping these massive, gregarious, sometimes-aggressive animals together — without the benefit of fences and with very little reliance on restraints.
And I realized, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this same nuanced approach to leadership and social organization must be resurrected if we hope to motivate modern tribes of empowered, mobile, innovative, and adaptable people to support one another through the inevitable droughts and doubts of life as we move ever more faithfully and confidently toward the greener pastures of humanity’s own untapped potential.
The Challenge
Employing these roles, consciously and fluidly, might seem like an overwhelming task at first glance, but I promise you, they’re easy to recognize, even among citified humans. The average adult is already good at wielding more than one. But the idea of individuals developing and balancing all five of these roles for the good of one’s family, business, and ever-widening local — and global — community promises something even more ambitious: a leap in the social evolution of humanity itself, helping large numbers of people to become empowered, fully actualized adults.
In this effort, we must consciously harness wisdom that nature has been promoting for millennia. In our sedentary culture, few people — even accomplished equestrians — realize that in herds of freely roaming herbivores, the Leader and the Dominant animals are often two different individuals, that they perform specific functions essential to the group’s well-being, and that the other three roles also contribute to the healthy functioning of the social system — even when humans are not involved.
Still, most animals, Homo sapiens included, are drawn toward a couple of roles, while ignoring, avoiding, or outright rejecting the others. This tendency not only keeps everyone in a state of arrested development; it has a tendency to wreak havoc in challenging situations — unless the herd or tribe is managed by an exceptional leader who, like a Master Herder in a traditional pastoral culture, is capable of employing the various roles as tools, rather than identifying with only one or two.
The simple, eternally irritating truth of the matter is that each role has a shadow side that results in dysfunctional behavior when it is overemphasized. We’re well aware, for instance, that people who cling to the role of Dominant or the role of Predator can become highly destructive in businesses, in families, and most certainly in politics. Your average dictator takes it one step further, combining the roles of Dominant and Predator and enslaving and victimizing people in order to thrive at their expense. But many people don’t realize that these two roles are useful, necessary in fact, when separated and employed sparingly, for very specific purposes, by people who are well-versed in nonpredatory forms of power: people who know when and how to employ all five roles for the good of the tribe. For many people, it’s also counterintuitive, yet ultimately enlightening, to realize that even the Nurturer/Companion role can have toxic effects in organizations and families when this function is overemphasized in an individual.