Flying Lead Change

Book excerpt: A guide to living and leading through the wisdom of nature, indigenous knowledge, neuroscience, and an uncommon teacher. Underneath the challenges of our modern age, we find a common cause of disconnection—from each other, the earth, and lives of purpose and meaning. How do we turn it around? In Flying Lead Change, Kelly Wendorf offers a guide for a new approach to leading and living, grounded in evidence-based principles of neuroscience and inspired by two profound sources of ancient wisdom: Original Peoples and Equus (the horse). Wendorf presents the wisdom of a 56-million-year-old system—the horse herd—that overcame threats we now face, such as climate change and mass extinction. Here, she shares the five pillars of their success: safety, peace, connection, joy, and freedom. She reveals how true leaders in both human and equine society use these principles to benefit the whole—a model of servant leadership based on presence and care, not dominance, force, exploitation, or coercion. 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.”