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    Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Leading and Living
    Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Leading and Living
    Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Leading and Living
    Ebook315 pages4 hours

    Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Leading and Living

    By Kelly Wendorf

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    About this ebook

    For leaders at work, at home, and in our communities—an essential guide to nature-based leadership inspired by the wisdom of indigenous teachings and horses.
     
    Is there a common element to the challenges and crises of our modern age? If so, it must be disconnection—from each other, our planet, and the sense that our lives have purpose and meaning. Where can we turn for answers? In Flying Lead Change, leadership teacher Kelly Wendorf offers a new approach to leading and living inspired by two profound sources of ancient wisdom: original peoples and Equus (the horse), grounded in evidence-based principles of neuroscience.
     
    In her groundbreaking EQUUS training program, Wendorf teaches a way of leadership modeled on a 56 million-year-old system of the horse herd––a path that has allowed humans and horses alike to survive the kinds of global and societal threats we now face, such as climate change and mass extinction. Here she takes you step by step through this powerful approach, including:
     
    • Listening—the starting point for all leadership, in which we suspend our biases and preferences
    • Care—explore the ancient, indigenous understanding of care that is reciprocal, empathic, and beneficial to all
    • Presence—meeting the here and now with vulnerability, openness, and a stable foundation
    • Safety—how a masterful leader creates a sense of group resilience and strength by “leading from behind” for the welfare of all
    • Connection—ways to move away from coercion and force to promote genuine communication and belonging
    • Peace—creating group harmony right now through the surprising concepts of “congruence” and “tempo”
    • Freedom—returning to our wild nature that is inherently free, unbridled, and unbroken
    • Joy—moving beyond temporary happiness to a state of wholehearted engagement of life, whatever the circumstances
     
    In horsemanship, a “flying lead change” allows a running horse to respond with breathtaking grace to changing conditions. “Collectively, we need a similar physics-defying maneuver,” Wendorf writes. “This book is for the called—thought leaders, visionaries, parents, creatives, and all those who sense we are being asked to participate in humanity’s ‘flying change’ through the way we live, love, and lead.”
     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 13, 2020
    ISBN9781683645740

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      Book preview

      Flying Lead Change - Kelly Wendorf

      Introduction

      Our Boeing 720 landed at the Addis Ababa International Airport. It was 1972 and Ethiopia, though on the verge of civil war, beckoned to those in search of the earliest record of humankind — scientists, academics, and explorers. My father was all three. Impatiently he waved at us from across the chain-link arrivals gate on the tarmac. His khaki-clad figure looked odd among the throngs of tall, dark, colorfully decorated bodies. My mother waved anxiously back and closely navigated my little brother and me down the airstairs, our small arms squeezed tightly in each hand.

      A celebrated archaeologist, yet a complicated, tormented loner with narcissistic tendencies, my father was accustomed to spending most of his time in the preferred company of three-million-year-old stone tools, artifacts, and bones. One year, he decided we should spend some time with him in his world — the excavations on the side of a collapsed volcano known as Gademotta, in central Ethiopia.

      Without much fanfare, he briskly ushered us through the large open concrete hall that was the airport. All around us was chaos and noise. Our rectangular Samsonite bags stood incongruously amongst burlap sacks, chickens and goats in wooden cages, and overstuffed baskets bound by rope and string. The hot air smelled of leather, smoke, sweat, and earth — a smell I recognized from the brightly beaded jewelry my father used to bring home from his travels.

      All eyes stared at the two small, very blond white children amongst them — an extremely rare sight in that region of Africa in the early 1970s. People gathered around us, laughed, and exclaimed loudly as they touched our hair, felt the skin of our arms, and cradled our faces with their hands without thought of personal boundary.

      I was an unusually observant seven-year-old. Too thin-skinned, my father would say, to societal norms. I was sensitive to the jagged undercurrent between my mother and father. I was distraught by a felled tree, a homeless animal, or a racist remark. When Time magazine featured that terrifying image of nine-year-old Kim Phuc running for her life from a napalm attack, my mother had to console me for countless nights. Serious and melancholic, I took on the gravity of my troubled family and a troubled world — perhaps in response to my father’s self-absorption.

      My only refuge was on the back of a horse. At age five I was placed atop my first — a magnificent chestnut thoroughbred named Pilgrim. Jane, my godmother and a seasoned horsewoman, walked him to our front yard on Saturday morning. Still in my pajamas, I bolted out the front door only to be scolded. No running! Jane commanded sternly as she hoisted me to settle into the soft, warm sway of Pilgrim’s back. From that moment on I was inexorably consumed by anything to do with horses. In another culture, I might have been considered possessed by horse spirits.

      My drawings of horses plastered my bedroom walls. A herd of plastic Breyer model horses of all shapes, colors, and breeds galloped across my bookshelves. My best friend Kayanne and I would prance around the front yards, tossing our manes — I the black stallion, she the fierce and sleek Arabian. My mother succumbed to years of driving me to riding lessons and finally purchased my first horse.

      Our environment shapes us. Throughout my childhood, mine was a juxtaposition of two ancient worlds — that of my father’s (the numerous archaeological digs and dwelling sites of various early indigenous peoples around the world) and that of my equine companions (their fields, forests, and mountains). Between those two settings I was intimately informed about life. Parented in the seventies in the Southwest by what I refer to warmly (and gratefully) as benign neglect — the style in those days — I was free to roam the outdoors on foot or on horseback until sundown. This meant I was either hunting for pottery shards and arrowheads inside a collapsed kiva (an ancient underground ceremonial chamber) or trotting bareback and barefooted down a stretch of dirt road. It was my secret domain, this ancient, earthen, animal way of being that I thought was uniquely my own. Until we went to Ethiopia.

      We were driven into the heart of the drought-stricken country, although Ethiopia had not yet seen the full human tragedy destined to come with her looming famine. Children raced after our military jeeps as we passed villages — mud and straw huts surrounded by erect, colorfully beaded women. We drove on one of the few roads stretching between Addis Ababa and Nairobi to a small town called Ziway. The countryside was barren, ornamented with the occasional bent acacia tree — a scribble of green above a single crooked trunk amidst a sea of red clay.

      Finally we arrived at a small, rectangular cinder-block building of about eight rooms, painted a bright blue and surrounded by an occasional tormented rosebush struggling through the hard, sunbaked earth. Named the Bekele Molla Hotel after its owner, it would be our home for the next few weeks. From there we would take our daily journeys with our father to the 235,000-year-old excavation sites in the Ethiopian Rift Valley.

      To me, Ethiopia was beautiful. And the people were even more so. I remembered my cheeks hurting from smiling so much in their presence, how they made my heart tickle inside when they spoke to me in Cushitic, and how they made me laugh when they laughed at me good-naturedly. And that was even before I met Kabada.

      Kabada walked with long, graceful strides behind my father, dwarfing my father’s six-foot-four build. A white blanket slung elegantly over his right shoulder made him look like an emperor. A single dangling earring accentuated his jawline, his chin held high, his shoulders back. His wide feet met the earth with the snugness of belonging. In one hand was a spear, and in the other, a small metal lunch box.

      My father hired Kabada, an Oromo warrior, to guard my brother and me at all times. Apparently two American children playing in the African bush were a kidnapping target in the local growing unrest. It’s for the baboons, Dad said, noticing me staring at Kabada’s spear. He swept his arm along the landscape, indicating their probable whereabouts. He will wedge the base into the sand, like this, he said, gesturing how the spear would be secured to the earth, angled toward the attacker, and the sharp point will lodge into its chest when it pounces. My father completed the horrifying pantomime with a hand arching toward its death by finger-point. I of course was not so worried about myself as the poor unsuspecting baboon, simply wanting his dinner.

      The Oromo are one of the indigenous peoples of East Africa and the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia. As is the fate of so many of the world’s traditional peoples, the Oromo were (and continue to be) among the most persecuted during Ethiopia’s political struggles, and they suffered severely during the two recent famines that claimed millions of lives, most of them Oromo. Today, thousands of Oromos are kept in secret concentration camps and jails just for being Oromo.¹

      Kabada watched over my brother and me with complete concern, as if we were the most important things on earth. He was gentle, with kind, quiet eyes. He stood by as we played in the dust of the excavation sites, propped against his spear — a silent sentinel — while archaeologists crouched busily nearby. At night as we slept, he stood alert outside our door under the porch light, moths flying around his head in zigzagging spirals.

      In time, I convinced him that protection was only just part of his job description; the rest was to play with me. Obligingly he swung me around in circles and tossed me in the air. He drank tea alongside my teddy bear; he chased goats on my imaginary horse ranch. I grew warmly accustomed to Kabada, though not a single word was spoken between us, and I blended myself into the daily, colorful, laughter-infused clamor that was Oromo life.

      One day my father took his team to a remote village and invited us along. The community was comprised of eight circular huts with thatched roofs, some white zebu cows, goats, and a number of smiling men, women, and children. The sanacha (elder or chieftain) of the village generously welcomed us. After exchanges of gifts and some conversation translated by my father’s colleague, Bahai, the sanacha presented his treasured horse — a small grey decorated for the occasion with orange-red tassels and matching rope. In such communities, a horse is a symbol not only of noted leadership status, but of the owner’s rarefied capacity to see between realms. It is believed among traditional peoples around the world that horses are messengers from the gods, and therefore they should be handled only by those worthy of such a sacred

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