Our Approach and Process
The 5 Pillars for Thriving
56 Million Years of Wisdom
5 synergistic core pillars held masterfully with the imperatives of care and presence.
A co-designed, safe, non-linear, custom process that impacts each individual in a way that’s just right.
Custom-Curated Approach to Breakthrough Learning
EQUUS is a personal and organizational change platform where clients are supported in reshaping their neural landscape to support a life of meaning and resilience. Our unique process is custom designed and personal for each individual. We work remotely, onsite at organizational locations, and at our Experiential Discovery and Learning Campus, Thunderbird Ridge.
Buffalo Spirit Ranch, located at the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Santa Fe New Mexico, is a safe and sacred place — created with intention and truth and great care — honoring the original caregivers of the land, nature, our clients and the world around us.
Our Work
EQUUS is a leadership / personal development and culture-change organization. We specialize in custom-creating conditions and environments to support transformative learning, leadership mastery, and organizational innovative culture creation. We use various evidence-based experiential approaches to ignite powerful lasting change and breakthrough learning in individuals, teams, and companies.
Our work has been validated by thought leaders of the business community around the world and recognized as a key differentiator in the art of teaching essential yet elusive organizational and personal growth concepts.
EQUUS strives to be part of the new narrative emerging that recognizes a need for not just intelligence, but wisdom, in order that we succeed. We live in rapidly changing times. Our lives and our organizations need to be highly adaptive in order to thrive. Conventional approaches to living and leading are no longer effective for today’s challenges. New capacities of awareness, wisdom, and presence are now required, yet these cannot be learned in the same way other skill sets are learned. Instead, conditions need to be created for such capacities to emerge.
EQUUS creates those conditions.
We custom-create our processes to serve the needs of our clients, whether they be short-term sessions and workshops, or long-term retainer engagements. Our clients include influential thought leaders, engaged individuals, organizations, and families.
One of our flagship processes is The EQUUS Experience® which works alongside horses to facilitate insight and sustained change.
We Explore How To:
EQUUS is a personal and organizational change platform where clients are supported to reshape their neural landscape to support a life of meaning and resilience. We explore how to:
Develop inner resourcefulness in the face of challenges
Develop and master non-verbal skills
Work through a power-with dynamic vs. a power-over dynamic
Diversify one’s leadership skills and styles
Be present, and know its impact
Create trust and safety
Develop the ability to self-regulate, and regulate others
Have sane, safe, mutually supportive relationships
Gain clarity of intention
Stay calm in a crisis
Sense ’emergent’ futures, and engage in ’emergent’ learning
Practice the art of collaborative leadership
Access wisdom
… and much more.
Why Horses?
For over 55 million years equus ferus, the horse, has roamed in herds across the earth. Long before their fated partnership with mankind 6,000 years ago, horses became one of the most successful mammals due to their agility, sensitivity, sociability, and resilience.
Contrary to the myth of the aggressive solitary stallion, the herd is governed by a sophisticated lateral ‘moveable’ shared hierarchy that serves the whole. Horses use invisible cues and non-verbal communication to elude predators, retain order and safety, regulate each other’s nervous system, and maintain peace, so that they can thrive. They engage in a power-with rather than power-over dynamic that liberates effective and appropriate responses. They value connection, clarity and authenticity, and trust those who are congruent with their intentions. Their leaders are those who demonstrate care, responsiveness, clarity, presence and charisma.
No other animal has captured the human imagination quite like the horse. From the first depictions scratched onto stone by our ancestors to photography and film, horses are ubiquitous in myth and folklore. They’ve accompanied us on the front lines of battlefields, helped us conquer lands, and tame landscapes into agricultural abundance. Now they emerge as partners on new frontline—the human heart.
This latest partnership is translated by The EQUUS Experience® through 40 years of fine horsemanship experience, equine physiology and behavior, as well as decades of academic and practical experience in systems theory, group dynamics, neuro-psychology, bio-mimicry, attachment theory, and awareness-based social technologies. These disciplines are combined to translate horse and herd dynamics through the lens of awareness-based, organizational learning and systems thinking. Our approach allows individuals and organizations to suspend habitual ways of paying attention and connect to deeper sources of knowing, resulting in practical ‘non predatory’ applications towards innovative approaches in organizational change, leadership and self-mastery.
The non-predator approach to living contrasts conventional tendencies to emphasize thought over emotion, logic over intuition, territory over relationship, goal over process, manipulation over inspiration, intimidation over cooperation, and coercion over collaboration. This approach both instructs our clients and informs all our other processes (that do not include horses). Hence EQUUS, its organizational structure, its faculty, and its offerings are horse-informed through the biomimicry of the horse and herd.
*No horse experience is necessary; no riding is involved.
The 21 Wisdoms of EQUUS
The 21 Wisdoms of EQUUS – the theories, disciplines, frameworks and sub-frameworks that inform our work
When you work with EQUUS, you are not engaging just any leadership and personal development organization. You are engaging with a movement, informed by decades of research and experience, regarding creating conditions for breakthrough learning. Founder and CEO Kelly Wendorf is a world citizen, writer and visionary who embarked on a powerful journey towards awakening and freedom in her early twenties, and emerged decades later with initiations, teachings, alliances, and a profoundly unconventional education. At EQUUS you receive the benefit of those years spent inside numerous disciplines and circumstances. Kelly, and those who work at EQUUS – be they Faculty or Staff, hold a space of uncommon depth and presence that support a client’s process from beginning to end. Woven into every EQUUS offering, be it coaching, online courses, retreats, workshops or equine assisted programs, are the disciplines, theories, frameworks and sub-frameworks that distinguishes EQUUS as a leader in truly transformational change.