HorseTouch -drumul spre performanță trece câteodată prin manejul de la Potcoava

HorseTouch -drumul spre performanță trece câteodată prin manejul de la Potcoava

Activitățile #HorseTouch sunt cu adevărat oportunități de conectare cu sine și cu ceilalți din echipă. Iar din conectare poți să ai acces la calea către cea mai bună opțiune pentru un anumit context de business, profesional sau personal.

Drumul optim se deschide prin prezență și, ideal, vizibilitate 360 de grade asupra unui context specific. Calul oferă experiența unei vizibilități a spațiului fizic de 320 de grade și a unei percepții senzoriale de 360. De aceea el reușește să faciliteze experiențe similare de conștientizare a contextului pentru oameni. Cum avem rezultate, sunt soluțiile alese cele mai bune date fiind circumstanțele, se simt toți membrii echipei văzuți, auziți și în siguranță?

Atunci când găzduim grupuri de antreprenori, întrebările se schimbă semnificativ – Cum ies din rolul de salvator? Cum transmit viziunea pe termen lung unei echipe care nu vede încă pe termen lung? Dar, indiferent dacă participanții sunt angajați în multinaționale, companii cu capital 100% românesc sau antreprenori, aceștia primesc vizibilitate asupra unghiurilor “moarte”, acele circumstanțe care provoacă întârzieri sau devin obstacole în calea către rezultatul optim, pentru că nu sunt vizibile – de multe ori procese, proceduri, comportamente, judecăți puternice, de mult clasificate ca fiind nenegociabile în subconștient, pe care nu le-am mai revizuit de mult, iar acum cer atenție ca să se realinieze și să susțină un nou obiectiv decât cel pentru care au luat naștere.

Vrei să afli cum se simte o experiență Horse Touch în manejul acoperit de la Potcoava?

Ascultă-l pe Andy Szekely, trainer, autor și speaker de dezvoltare personală personală,care ne-a vizitat împreună cu o echipă de antreprenori, participanți într-unul din cunoscutele sale programe de coaching pe termen lung.

Echipa HorseDream este formata dintr-un mix de profesioniști cu experiență de training dar și de management și antreprenoriat și de aceea sunt partenerii perfecți pentru a genera contexte de învățare care să dea naștere la performanță accelerată în echipe de top management

HorseTouch este un produs educațional Horse Dream Romania, proprietara licenței de țară pentru metoda de educație ghidată de cai #HorseDream Germania.

Provocări corporate – concepte de eveniment de 1 zi

Provocări corporate – concepte de eveniment de 1 zi

Ne plac conceptele de eveniment îndrăznețe, făcute cu sens și mesaj. Și evident ne plac provocările. Așa că atunci când ni s-a cerut să ne implicăm în organizarea unui eveniment corporate cu 120 de participanți, răspunsul a fost DA, fără ezitare.

Am propus un concept de festival câmpenesc, potrivit locului și specificului nostru. Cei 120 de participanți au avut posibilitatea să trăiască o serie de experiențe cu și fără cai, precum olăritul sau teatrul de improvizație, decorarea potcoavelor, plimbarea cu căruța, un concurs de aruncat cu potcoave la țintă fixă sau alte experiențe alături de cai. A fost o zi plină de energie, dedicată celor mai performanți din domeniul lor de activitate.

În parteneriatul Potcoava – Horse Dream Romania, am legat toate elementele, de la masa de prânz până la activități cu și fără cai, într-un spațiu care a inclus Potcoava, dar și dealurile dimprejur, pentru a declina conceptul ales de client, utilizând competențele noastre.

Având ceva inclinații spre perfecționism, mărturisim că am trait evenimentul cu intensitate și bucurie văzând cât de bine s-au simțit participanții.

Ne-au emoționat toți cei care, dintr-un grup atât de mare, au venit să ne salute pentru că ne cunoșteau deja din alte activități de teambuilding și training marca Horse Dream organizate în anii anteriori la Potcoava.

#corporatehappening #teambuildinglapotcoava #corporatevents

Horse Talk with Ionuț Popescu

Horse Talk with Ionuț Popescu

Horse Talk with Ionuț Popescu

Hi Ionuț, welcome to our new set of articles under the title Horse Talk. We intend to cover subjects from leadership to horse-guided education and other topics that pop up during Horse Touch events.

These are your five questions:

1. What is the most important lesson you have learned while being around horses? What do the horses teach us, humans, the best?

Presence. Grounding. Clear emotions. Clear mind. Clear vision.

In the world of horses, there is no place for clouded murky thinking. They are prey animals. Clarity is vital for their survival. Just as clarity is essential for human success. Around horses, usually, emotions are heightened, and your mind can’t travel to other places or issues. You are there 100% percent, body, mind, and soul. And this is the beauty of being around horses; you get to be whole again.

2. Are people comfortable with being whole again in a working setup? We were encouraged to believe that the workplace is for the rational mind and home is for emotions. So, what benefit is to becoming whole again within your team?

First, you gain authenticity. When you disjoint your emotions from your rational mind, it is not natural; you do it as a social mask, a learned behavior. And when you are authentic, people and horses trust and follow you.

Then there is the comfort and ease of being whomever you are. This gives people charisma, an energy that is hard to be described, but we see it in the HorseTouch modules at the people acting like magnets for the other team members.

On the other hand, you can always spot disengagement. Silent quitting. Discomfort when working within the team. HorseTouch is an activity with emotions in sight. So, you cannot hide if you are not well within yourself. But! Everybody can USE the moment to increase awareness. It is Ok to be emotionally tired in your working endeavors. What is not Ok is to ignore it. The colleagues around a disengaged person need to SEE the signs, SEE the person, not the employee, and make sure to guide him to emotional safety.

3. There is a metaphor about leading that you frequently use in HT modules – how should you lead with a short leash or a long leash?

A short or long leash depends on the type of exercise and the result you intend to have, just like in business – hands-on management versus helicopter management. It depends on the task, the people involved, their experience, etc.

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HorseTouch is about acknowledging that there is a mix of tools that you can use in solving tasks and leading people. It is about management flexibility that is quite trainable. Everybody deserves the quality of direct management comparable and aligned with their own experience, knowledge, etc. Any discordance will create discomfort.

4. How do the participants at the HT modules decide what the horse stands for in their exercises – client, boss, external environment, etc.?

We always do a pre-training/team-building discussion to understand the team’s objectives. What are the perceived areas where they could benefit from HT. The exercises are designed specifically to put light on the unconscious behavior, context, processes, and procedures that could stop a team from having the best results possible. And this is where the metaphor comes into play.

Say, the horse stands for the client. You unconsciously activate the patterns you usually work with when interacting with the client. We had fully aligned teams – physically and in action – but the customer got lost (literally) because the focus was on the process.

Team members get to become aware of this. And they are also the ones that can change (to an extent) the processes and the procedures so that they can focus on the customer instead. Alignment for the sake of alignment doesn’t produce results, even if it does look good in the arena.

5. What do you recommend teams do with the insights they get from the HT modules?

As I said, the exercises offer new perspectives on processes, procedures, ways of working, behaviors, and emotions. When possible, we recommend that the team comes with an in-house trainer or HR specialist to help them internalize their findings. We do a full debrief – or better said – the team does a complete debrief with the facilitators’ support. From that moment, it is their responsibility to use them to improve. We are always here for a follow-up activity if needed.

We say that Horse Touch enlarges the visibility of the consequences of our actions/decisions to almost 360 degrees – just as the horses have a 320 degrees vision. What you train is not the sight but the instinct that can help you make better decisions quicker using all the information from your environment and circumstances. Imagine what you can do with such a superpower if you continue to train it!

Ionut Popescu is an entrepreneur, owner of Potcoava Mountain Hideaway, president of the Romanian Equestrian Tourism Federation, riding instructor, scuba diving instructor, trainer, and HorseTouch partner who – in his own words – loves to build businesses from scratch like legos; to prospect, to plan, to change the plan, to test, to fail, to win, to build teams, to achieve excellency. His involvement brings a high understanding of the business needs and structure and the horses’ natural reactions to human interactions. He believes that the only reason a business exists is to offer value to the community, and he is 100% sure that Horse Touch brings incredible value to any team or individual interested in becoming the best version of itself.

Horse Talk with Mădălina Vîntu Popa

Horse Talk with Mădălina Vîntu Popa

Horse Talk with Mădălina Vîntu Popa

Hi Mădălina, welcome to our new set of articles under the expressive title – horse talk – they do neigh loudly about what they care about, so we’ll try to do the same.

We’ll have a set of 5 quick questions. Please use all your experience as a trainer and an educational designer to answer. Anecdotes from the training activities you designed and delivered are more than welcome.

  1. Why is leadership important?
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Funny thing, this is the first question and I chose to answer it last because it’s so encompassing. I believe Leadership is important because it’s an expression of how we relate to ourselves, the others and the world at large. Someone or something (ie. our emotions) always lead. All of us are in a perpetual dynamic – we are going somewhere. Sometimes it’s a deliberate journey, we are in the lead, other times it’s not, we are there for the ride, enjoying it or holding on like it’s the end of the world. We can look at leadership like a paradigm – a filter through which we see items inside or outside. It’s what I just proposed.

In this approach, it’s something you can see (detect) in yourself and others if you are curious enough. Working with horses is a fast track to your own paradigms. Please do not read “shortcut” because the only way is through – you have to live through the experience to get the benefits. There is no app and no shortcut to learning how to lead yourself and then others.

2. All people can be leaders, not just the CEO or the members of the board. Is this true? Could you see in the horse-guided education events people from all departments and management levels act like real leaders?

To your first question, the shortest answer I can offer is Yes, depending on the context! The reason why I find this answer both true and relevant is because in any given situation, someone leads.

There is no neutral.

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In the arena, this becomes incredibly visible, to the point that, up to date, every time we have asked the participants “Who led?” they took less than a second to answer. And the answer is either a person from the group or “the Horse”. I have yet to hear the answer “no-oTo the second question the answer is also “Yes” – I’ve seen leadership behaviors regardless of age and role. I’ve seen very young people lead in very creative ways, I’ve seen older people lead from a distance and with very little control. I’ve seen official leaders (meaning the highest corporate role present in the event) be the role model and I’ve seen them be the source of confusion for the team. I’ve seen people from all type of roles (both management and non management) be elected into activity-specific-leadership roles, based on the competencies they displayed in previous exercises. I’ve also seen the opposite – people deliberately choosing to have “invisible roles”, meaning they were never there when we asked for volunteers for another exercise or, when they were there, they chose the roles where “doing nothing” was an option. And they used that option, in the most practical way you can imagine.

The most interesting point in what I’m trying to say here is that I was not the only one to see. Everyone present can see these things. Horse guided education is as visible as it gets.

3. What may a senior manager expect from horse-guided team building or training?

At Horse Touch we propose the training approach to those who are courageous enough and ready to look deep inside their own beliefs about themselves, others and the world at large.

We propose a team building approach to the clients who either don’t have the time or mental/emotional availability to go deep on their experience but they are open to it and want it.

They may expect customization on both of the approaches, at a different level, of course: the training is a blank page, the team building has a predetermined structure.

Expect questions from us, before, during and after the experience.

Expect something way more different and challenging than what you imagine beforehand. Expect to be rewarded for your involvement in the activities – by the Horse and also by your colleagues.

Expect lessons delivered in a very straightforward way as this is the Horse way. Expect to be challenged on your paradigms as the Horse is a prey and you are the predator. Will you drag the horse into your world or will you go visit his? On what terms? With what expectations? Following which rules?

Expect to have fun. Expect to recharge your batteries.

4. You said at some point that Horse Touch and horse-guided activities in general help you see your blind spot. The thing that you don’t really know but is an obstacle to BETTER or even GREATNESS. How does this happen?

The Horse (capital letter intended!) is an active contributor. When he leads you will learn about your followership approach, when he follows you, you will learn about your leadership approach.

Either way, because his active or reactive input is a result of your actions and not your words, you will get to see what “socially acceptable” or “political correctness” or low trusting relationships usually do not allow you to see. “See” is a fact here, not a metaphor. You get to see. It’s so visible that even blind people (visually impaired as a biological condition) see it. We work with such beneficiaries, and this is a direct quote.

Then, there is us, the facilitators, who input some questions based on what happened and what we know the “usual” approach of the Horse is. This way, we bring light to those elements which otherwise would remain in the background and are actually key. We also propose individual or team challenges, meaning some specific tasks which will help you test whether what you’ve just observed is what you think it is.

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Here is where the expertise of the facilitators is important and why this should be a major decision factor when you choose a Horse Guided Experience for your team. HGE is always about the individual or the team, never about the Horse.

5. Why are people smiling and laughing so much at the Horse Touch activities?

What a great point you’ve just made through this question! Horse Touch learning is fun! People are smiling and laughing because it’s joyful in the most basic and authentic way. We explicitly discourage “making fun” or “joking” around horses because it creates safety issues. Still, our participants live such strong emotions that come straight out. Laughter is one of the most frequent manifestations, because at the end of day, real business does not happen in the arena so here we can see the funny part, whilst in the office we would probably see the potential downsides.

Then, there is that strong feeling of self-confidence/ pride for being able to lead a 400kg partner (because pulling or pushing it is not possible, nor recommended! ), which comes out as that really wide smile we all recognize.

It’s a profoundly honest experience filled with the joy of simply being!

Madalina Vintu Popa is an educational designer with 15 years of experience in designing and delivering top level learning experiences to Romanian and international teams. Accelerated learning and development of her clients is what makes her enthusiastic and happy. We always see her offering 100% precent of her energy to delivering on the promises and meeting clients expectations. You can read more about her at https://madalinavintu.ro/ and about HorseTouch at https://horsetouch.ro/. For all questions about learning and leadership through horse guided education, you can reach her at madalina@horsetouch.ro .

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