The experience makes leadership visible. The debrief makes it practical. Our partnership makes it last.
Capacity-Building Experiences for Leaders and Teams
How It Works
Every Saddle Sojourns workshop is a non-riding experience. Participants work with horses from the ground through carefully facilitated exercises that reveal how they communicate, make decisions, collaborate, resolve conflict, build trust, and adapt when things don’t go as planned.
Horses respond in the moment to presence, clarity, pressure, hesitation, and connection. Their feedback is honest, nonverbal, and immediate. That helps leaders see what is often hard to see in everyday work. Skilled facilitators then help participants translate those moments into practical behavior change.
Workshops can be designed as half-day, full-day, multi-day, or senior team retreat experiences, and may be paired with follow-on coaching or team sessions to help sustain the learning over time.
Grounded Leadership
Custom Workshops for Leaders
For individual leaders, executive teams, managers, and emerging leaders, Grounded Leadership builds the three capacities that keep leaders steady and effective when the stakes are high. Working with horses on the ground, leaders discover how they regulate themselves under pressure, where their attention goes, and how they build or lose trust, and then they practice doing it differently.
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Presence: Am I responding or reacting? What am I noticing in myself and in the room, including what isn’t being said?
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Focus: Where is my attention going? Am I clear enough about what matters that others know where to put their energy?
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Connection: Am I building trust so that people willing to speak up, take risks, collaborate, and follow me?
Horses respond to all three in real time. A leader who is tense, scattered, or disconnected gets an immediate, honest answer, and so does one who is calm, clear, and engaged. That makes the arena a living mirror for what happens back at work.
Why It Works
Under pressure, the brain’s threat response narrows attention and pulls people toward reactive habits. Grounded leaders learn to notice that shift and steady themselves, so they can respond rather than react. Horses are uniquely suited to teach this. As prey animals, they are finely tuned to the nervous systems of those around them, and they respond immediately to tension, incongruence, and calm. And because the learning is experiential and emotionally engaging, it sticks. Leaders remember what they felt and did long after they would have forgotten a slide.
Outcomes for Your Organization
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Leaders who stay steady and make sound decisions under pressure
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Clearer communication of priorities, so teams know where to focus
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Stronger trust and engagement on the teams they lead
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Greater adaptability and readiness to lead through change
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Faster development for new managers and emerging leaders
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A shared language for leadership across a cohort or organization
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What an Engagement Looks Like
Every Grounded Leadership program is designed around your goals. A typical engagement includes:
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Discovery and assessment: we learn about your leaders, culture, and objectives before designing the experience.
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The workshop: one to three days combining arena work with horses and classroom sessions that connect insights to your organization’s challenges.
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Follow-through: optional individual coaching and team sessions that turn insight into sustained behavior change.
I highly recommend this training to organizations interested in improving team performance...The leadership skills I learned at Saddle Sojourns have been immediately useful in my work.
Charlie Zieky, President, GLT Wealth Advisors
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Connected Teams
Building Trust That Holds Under Pressure
For intact teams at any level, project teams, leadership cohorts, and organizations navigating change, Connected Teams builds the shared capacities that help groups perform when the stakes are high. Small groups and full teams take on a series of facilitated, non-riding challenges with horses that require communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and trust, and then they practice working together differently.
The same three capacities apply, now at the level of the team:
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Presence: Do we notice what’s happening in the group, including tension and what isn’t being said? Do we respond together under pressure, or react?
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Focus: Are we clear on what we’re trying to accomplish, and are we pulling in the same direction?
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Connection: Do we trust each other enough to disagree openly, share leadership, and recover together when things go wrong?
Because a horse responds to the whole group, team dynamics surface quickly: who takes charge and who holds back, how decisions get made, whether disagreements are resolved, and how well the team recovers when the first plan doesn’t work. Participants learn to influence without force, a skill that matters as much with colleagues as it does with a 1,000-pound animal.
Our facilitators then help the team connect what happened in the arena to how they work together every day, and turn those insights into concrete agreements and actions.
Outcomes for Your Organization
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Faster alignment on priorities, roles, and decisions
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Healthier conflict: disagreements surfaced and resolved instead of avoided
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Better, more creative decisions: when people feel safe to speak up and push back, more ideas surface and no single voice dominates
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Stronger resilience and adaptability through change
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Faster integration of new teams, new leaders, and merged groups
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A team action plan with clear agreements to carry back to work
What an Engagement Looks Like
Every Connected Teams program is designed around your team’s work, roles, and goals. A typical engagement includes:
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Discovery and assessment: conversations with the team leader and a team assessment to understand current dynamics and objectives.
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The workshop: one to three days combining arena challenges with classroom sessions focused on your team’s real work.
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Action planning and follow-through: team agreements, follow-up sessions, and optional coaching for the leader to help new patterns stick.
I inherited a team that was cordial on the surface, with mistrust just below it. A day of groundwork with Saddle Sojourns immediately changed the conversation. They have a masterful way of engaging a team. I would absolutely partner with them again.
-Wally Kuhns, Vice President, Global Human Resources, Dexcom
Rooted Change
Coaching & Organization Development
Rooted Change
From the Arena to the Organization
Our workshops create real shifts in how leaders and teams see themselves and work together. Rooted Change builds on that momentum, deepening new habits through coaching and practice, and aligning the systems people work within so change can take hold across the organization.
We stay alongside you as a partner: helping leaders keep practicing Presence, Focus, and Connection, helping teams live by the agreements they made in the arena, and helping your organization support the change you're asking people to make.
Making It Stick
Follow-on support for leaders and teams, tailored to what you need:
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Executive and leader coaching: one-on-one support, in person or virtually, as leaders apply new behaviors to real challenges
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Team coaching and integration sessions: helping teams live by the agreements they made in the arena
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Observation and feedback: seeing new skills in action in meetings, decisions, and day-to-day collaboration
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Follow-up workshops: returning to the arena to build on progress and tackle new challenges
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Pre- and post-assessments: measuring growth and keeping development on track
Aligning the System
When people return to work, they return to systems that may pull them back toward old patterns. A team may commit to collaborating more, while the rewards system still incentivizes competition. An organization may invest in innovation, while its culture still punishes the mistakes that risk-taking produces.
When what's holding people back is bigger than one team, our organization development expertise helps address it. We diagnose the systems that shape behavior, from decision-making and communication to rewards and business processes, and help align people, process, and technology so new ways of working can take hold.
Outcomes for Your Organization
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A higher return on your leadership development investment
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New behaviors that last beyond the workshop
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Team agreements that translate into everyday practice
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Clear evidence of growth through pre- and post-assessment
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Systems and practices that support the change you're asking people to make
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A trusted partner who already knows your people and your goals
What an Engagement Looks Like
Rooted Change is shaped around what emerges from your workshop and what your organization needs next. It might be a few months of coaching for key leaders, a series of team integration sessions, or a focused effort to align a system that's working against your goals. We'll recommend a path based on what we observe, and you decide what fits.