The should be a corollary to "Physician, heal thyself" for guys who teach life lessons learned from horses, but don’t follow those lessons themselves.
Over the past months, I have been sharing the life lessons that horses have taught me. I try to apply the particular horse lessons to universal life lessons. This week, a couple of those lessons stepped up and whacked me on the side of the head.
1. In my e-book, 10 Leadership Lessons Whispered By Horses, one of my chapters is "If there is a problem, Fix it." I talk about how people accept mediocrity with their horses, and their lives. They do not strive for excellence.
2. In my recent teleseminar, I talked about expanding my comfort zone, because that it where the real learning happens.
3.I also talked about how it is OK to be in a fog and not know how things will work out. The confusion and frustration are all part of the process of learning.
4. I wrote an Ezine Article about a French and Saunders comedy video in which I chided the characters for giving up on their horses jumping the jumps and jumped them themselves on foot.
I had to apply all of these lessons to myself last week, not when I was playing with horses, but when my lawn mower broke. I pulled my lawmower out of the shed last weekend because the weeds are getting too long. We have very few places where the grass is too long, but the weeds are going crazy. Three pulls on the cord, and the mower started up.
Friday, May 15, 2009, 8:00 PM
Saturday, May 16, 6:00 PM
Sunday, May 7, 2:00 PM
This video is a clip from when we sang Carmina Burana with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the summer of 2008. I am the big guy about two people to the right of the percussionist.
Several hundred sandhill cranes spend the winter in our pasture and the fields around us. It’s one of the wonderful things about living in this part of New Mexico. These magnificent birds arrive in October and stay until early March, when they gather up in flocks of thousands and head north for the summer.
This year, the flocks stayed around until late March, with a good number of them still here in April. As late as last week, we still saw five in our pasture.
On Sunday, May 10, there was still one lone juvenile crane digging for food in our just irrigated pasture.
Will he stay here all summer? Can he stand our heat? Is it possible for him to fly north without the aid of his flock? Why didn’t he go with them?
I recently wrote a post about a French and Saunders comedy video called "Ponies". I talked about leadership lessons we could learn from the video.
Since then, I have written a series of articles that I published on EzineArticles.com about separate leadership lessons that can be learned from the video. Here a links to those articles
Please read any or all of these articles, and I would appreciate any comments. You can rate these articles on EzineArticles as well. Please do so, if you like them.
Ya just can’t be a nice guy anywhere. I have had to add a CAPTCHA plug-in to this blog. I hate to have to do it, but I have to stop the spam comments.
This evening, there were 85 spam comments that I needed to delete. First of all, I don’t understand why people do this. Can they really make money selling pills and other stuff using this technique? Or do they do it just to be mean? Do you think their mothers are proud of them?
So, I added a CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It seems like it should be CAPTTTTCaHA, but even computer nerds can have poetic license, I guess. It means that when you create a comment for a post on this blog, you have to read one of those squiggly lined, curvy, confusing sets of letters that you are seeing more and more often. The theory is that only a person can read those pictures and a computer can’t. As a result, the amount of spam allowed in that is created by bots should go down.
We’ll see.
In the middle part of the 20th century, Alan Turing proposed a test for artificial intelligence in computers. He proposed that a person sat down at a computer terminal and typed in questions. The terminal would then spit out an answer. The test was to figure out whether the responses were coming from the computer or from a human being. If the computer created the answers, and the person at the terminal believed he was talking to a person, then that computer would pass the Turing Test for artificial intelligence.
The Captcha is not exactly a Turing test. It works on the assumption that only a person could read through the squiggly lines, and a computer can’t. So, if a computer could figure out something that only a person could, then I suppose it could be considered intelligent. But the test is get one computer to fool another that it is a person, not a computer trying to fool a person.
And there are way too many T’s dropped out to make it a believable acronym. I wonder if the acronym was made by a computer trying to fool us it is human?
Please add a comment and tell me what you think of the Captcha. (If you have already added post to this blog, the Captcha does not appear, because we assume you are a person.)
Last week, I conducted a two part teleseminar "Leadership Secrets Whispered by Horses: How to Create Better Followers." Yesterday, I held a bonus session that I opened up to anyone who wanted to listen. In this short session, I discussed five lessons that a beginner should know. These are lessons that I learned from horses, and I am now applying to starting a new business.
When I was at the end of my last job as a computer nerd, I was dreaming of making a living working with horses. It seemed like in my job all that faced me each day were a string of problems. Some of them were problems I could not solve. The stress was making me ill.
I dreamed of spending my days with horses. When I am playing with a horse and trying to figure out how to get him to perform some task, my sense of time just falls away. The more difficult the task, the more interesting it is. It’s not a problem. It’s a puzzle.
In self-help books about business, they say, "Turn your problems into opportunities." If your customer is upset, take the problem and turn it around into an opportunity to make him happy. I thought it was just rah-rah, self-help empty encouragement that wore off as soon as you put down the book or left the seminar. It was all a bunch of empty promises.
One evening, though, while I was discussing with a friend all of my problems at work, I had a revelation. The realization was that if you are in a situation where all you see are problems, the issue is not that you have to turn them into opportunities.
The problem is that you are in the wrong job.
If something is not going exactly right, and you can throw yourself into the solution with gusto and joy without any effort, you’re in the right job. If you only see puzzles and not problems, you’re in the right job. If you have to make yourself face situations and see them as problems, you’re not doing what you love, and you are in the wrong job.
I quit my job within a month after that.
I used to be able to throw myself into computer problems. To me, they were puzzles. Frankly, I got tired of those issues, and they became problems. Conversely, my former boss tackles puzzles with financing deals that have millions of dollars attached to them. To him they are puzzles. To me, they would be huge problems. He’s in the right job, and I wouldn’t want to do what he does. When my tractor breaks, it’s a problem, but for my mechanic, it’s a puzzle. When my wife and I published a magazine, almost everything we were presented with was a problem. There were no puzzles. It only took us five years and a lot of money to figure out that we were in the wrong business.
Now that I am working to promote my business of teaching leadership through horsemanship, I have very few problems. Almost everything I do is a puzzle. I know I am in the right business.
The key to being happy in your job is not in turning problems into puzzles. The key is being in a job that you like so much that there are no problems. Only puzzles.
Terry Allison of Bright House publishing interviewed me this last week about my free e-book,
10 Leadership Secrets Whispered by Horses
(You can get a copy by clicking on the link in the left column.)
Please listen to this 36 minute interview in which we discuss some of the lessons described in the book. I go into more detail in the interview than I do in the book.
Here’s a chance to learn some leadership lessons while having some laughs.
This video is funny…
…but, then again, it’s not.
It’s funny because Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders are wonderful comediennes. I just discovered this comedy team when this video was sent to me, but I remember Saunders from "Absolutely Fabulous" a few years back.
It’s also funny because most of us who have ridden have experienced the issues these characters faced. We laugh because we see ourselves in them.
For me, it’s not funny because it is true. I feel sorry for those characters. They so desperately want to have fun with their horses, but they have no idea how to fix their problems. And, since I look at these issues from a leadership perspective, I see many examples of lack of leadership between riders and horses. At the risk of ruining the comedy of a great piece, I am going to point out some leadership lessons we could learn from this video. Continue reading Comedic Leadership Lessons
It looks like Danielle Herb is doing great things to help children with ADD and ADHD learn about horses and themselves.
Here’s what she says about "Hide Your Butt":
Hide Your Buttmeans to move the horse’s butt away from you. In other words get their respect. When we can get a horse’s trust it teaches us so much about our self and what we can do to fix our problems. Kids are very powerful when they believe in themselves and put their minds to accomplishing something and so are horses. When you put them together the outcomes are amazing. Just image what you will get. Synergy and Magic
