I have been around horses since I was about three years old. I rode, rodeoed, rode in parades, and learned to stay on bareback before I had much language for what horses were teaching me. At the time, I thought I simply loved them, and I did, but that was not the whole truth. What I did not understand yet, could not have understood at that age, is that horses gave me a place where I did not have to explain myself before I was allowed to belong.
I was adopted at ten months old and raised by my grandparents as their daughter. Their love was unconditional. That part has never been in question. The wound came from the people around us who never accepted me as the daughter I was. I was forever the outsider, and no amount of being good, helpful, or successful changed that position.
The horses were different. They did not require a family history, an explanation, or proof that I deserved to be there. They responded to what was actually happening in front of them. Over time, my lifelong obsession with horses became more than a refuge. It became the fight that gave me my own worth: the fight to prove that horses have value beyond what they can carry, produce, or perform.
That fight eventually became part of my work in leadership development, although I did not understand the connection at first, and honestly I am not sure I could have explained it to you back then either. I just knew the same rules seemed to be running underneath both worlds.
A Horse Does Not Respond to the Story You Tell About Yourself
A horse does not care what title you hold. It does not care how successful you are, how persuasive you can be in a meeting, or how carefully you have arranged your public image. It notices whether your body, intention, and behavior agree.
That is what makes horses such exacting teachers. You can say you are calm while holding your breath. You can say you are confident while bracing every muscle in your body. You can ask for trust while communicating fear through your hands, shoulders, or movement, and the horse will respond to the information underneath the words anyway. That is congruence: the alignment between what you feel, what you intend, what you communicate, and what you actually do.
Leadership requires the same alignment. People may not always be able to name the inconsistency they sense in a leader, but they feel it. They notice when an organization speaks about trust while rewarding fear. They notice when a leader asks for honesty but punishes disagreement. They notice when someone talks about purpose while making every decision from anxiety or ego.
Horses do not make that gap easy to ignore, and they will show it to you without the benefit of a performance review.
I have spent decades in rooms where decisions were made, teams were built, and professionals and business owners were coached. I have been licensed in real estate since 1989 and remain active in the field. I have been in a leadership role since 2010 and served as a MAPS Mastery Coach. Those experiences have taught me a great deal about systems, responsibility, and the visible mechanics of leadership.
The horses taught me about the part that cannot be managed from the outside.
Presence Comes Before Direction
Most people think leadership begins with knowing what to say. Horses have taught me that leadership begins earlier than that. It begins with whether I am actually present.
I learned the difference between planning and presence the winter we were given about sixty days to find somewhere for roughly sixty horses to go. There was no obvious solution, no sensible plan B, and certainly no giant bank account waiting to solve it. What I had instead was a barn full of animals who needed me to be steady, right now, whether I felt steady or not. Our story reached the media, people stepped forward, and doors opened that should not have opened, and we eventually landed on what is now Raison d'Être Ranch in Elizabeth, Colorado. The name means reason for being, and that is not accidental. But the lesson I carry most from those sixty days is not about miracles or media or even about landing on this ground. It is about faith, having it even when you cannot see the how. There was no visible path from day one to day sixty. I had to keep walking anyway, and somewhere in that walking I learned what it actually means to trust what you cannot yet see.
Presence is not a polished version of calm, and it is definitely not pretending to be unbothered. It means I am aware of what is happening in me while remaining available to what is happening around me. It means I am not trying to force the moment to become something else just because I am uncomfortable with what it actually is.
A distracted person can give a clear instruction and still create confusion. A frightened person can use a confident voice and still communicate danger. A person who is divided internally may ask for cooperation while sending the opposite message through every other part of their body.
The horse receives the whole message, and so does a workplace, a family, or any other place where people are expected to follow direction. Leadership presence is not a decorative quality. It affects whether people feel safe enough to tell the truth, whether they understand what is being asked of them, and whether they believe the person making the request will remain steady when conditions change.
I am still learning this, and honestly some days go better than others. Some days I walk into the arena carrying something I have not acknowledged, and the horses notice before I do. They do not shame me for it. They simply stop cooperating with the version of me I am trying to present, and that interruption is useful even when it is inconvenient.
The Question Is Not What Can This Horse Do?
In 2015, I founded Liberty's Legacy Inc., doing business as Journey With Equus, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The sanctuary at Raison d'Être Ranch in Elizabeth, Colorado, is now home to roughly 100 equines, including more than 30 off-track Thoroughbreds, along with horses, donkeys, and mules. I will be honest with you, I never planned any of that. It grew out of the fight, one horse at a time.
The horses I work with are often old, injured, unrideable, or carrying behavioral issues. Many of those issues were made by people.
Our first question is not, “What can this animal do?” The first question is, “Who is this animal?”
That question has changed me more than I expected, and it is also a leadership question.
Organizations often reduce people to function. We ask what someone can produce, how quickly they can solve a problem, whether they are useful in the current structure, or whether they fit the expectations of the role. We use performance to decide who deserves investment and failure to decide who is no longer worth the effort.
The horse does not become more worthy because it can be ridden. A person does not become more worthy because they can lead a team, close a deal, carry responsibility, or perform well under pressure.
This does not mean capability is irrelevant, only that capability is not identity.
There is a difference between helping someone develop their capacity and requiring them to earn the right to exist through constant usefulness. I have had to learn that difference in my own life. The fact that others did not accept me did not mean I had failed to become acceptable. Their refusal was not evidence against my worth.
The horses helped me understand that because I had to keep making the same argument for them, year after year. An old horse still has a self. An injured horse still has a self. A horse that cannot be ridden still has a self. The work is not to force the animal back into some old definition of value, it is to see what is true now.
Leaders are responsible for asking whether the people around them are being developed, or merely used.
Leading Yourself First
Leadership is often discussed as if it begins when someone receives a title. It does not. A title may give you authority, but it does not give you self-awareness, courage, or integrity.
Those have to be practiced before anyone is following you, because the people around you always respond to what you do, never what you say. I learned that one in both rooms, the boardroom and the barn.
Leading yourself first means examining the stories that govern your decisions. It means noticing where you are seeking approval, avoiding conflict, performing competence, or using control to manage your own fear. It means accepting that your intentions do not erase your impact.
A horse will not allow me to hide behind a good intention. If I am asking for connection while acting from control, the horse will respond to control. If I am asking for movement while I am uncertain about my own direction, the horse will experience that uncertainty. I cannot outsource the work of becoming clear.
The same principle applies to transformational leadership strategies, although I have never found the most useful leadership lessons in a list of strategies. The deeper work is more uncomfortable. It asks whether the leader is willing to become congruent enough that people do not have to spend their energy interpreting mixed signals.
Sometimes that means telling the truth sooner, or admitting a decision was wrong, or finally stopping the habit of calling exhaustion commitment and calling avoidance patience. Sometimes it means releasing the need to be accepted by people who have already decided not to see you accurately, which I have had to do more than once.
A horse does not need me to be perfect. It needs me to be real enough to respond to what is actually happening.
What the Heart Knows
Being with horses is healing in itself. Their heartbeat co-regulates ours, and science has measured heart rate alignment between horse and human. Some people need proof before they will let themselves feel something, so there it is.
But the measurement is not the whole experience, not by a long shot.
Sometimes healing looks like standing beside a horse in the quiet and realizing nothing is being demanded from you in that moment, which is rarer than it should be in any of our lives. Sometimes it is the warmth of a muzzle near your shoulder, the sound of a horse shifting its weight in the dirt, or the slow release of a breath you did not know you were holding. Those small moments add up to something, and I have watched them change people who arrived at the ranch convinced nothing could reach them anymore.
Horses have helped me return to myself without requiring me to become more impressive first.
That is part of what I carry into my leadership and keynote work. I am not interested in handing people a manufactured version of courage or giving them a script for sounding authentic. I am interested in the questions that remain after the script stops working.
Who are you when no one is applauding the role you have been performing? What are you asking other people to trust while refusing to trust yourself? Where have you confused being accepted with being aligned? Those are not rhetorical questions. Sit with them for a minute and something will probably sting.
I do not ask those questions from a mountaintop. I ask them while I am still answering them myself, sometimes badly, sometimes slowly, and often with a horse standing close enough to expose what I would rather avoid.
The Work Continues
That sixty-day chapter could fill a book, and maybe it will someday. But the central work has stayed quieter than the story of it ever got. Every morning it comes down to the same thing: seeing the animal in front of me instead of the category attached to it, and doing the same for myself. Some days I get it right. Some days the horses have to remind me.
Journey With Equus is where that work lives now, alongside the horses. The horses are not props for a lesson, and they are not tools for producing a particular outcome. They are partners in a process that asks for attention, honesty, and respect. If you want to follow the behind-the-scenes reality of it, the raw and the beautiful, that is where you will find me.
The center is still the question the horses keep giving back to me, the same one they have been asking since I was a little girl on a horse in an open field with a flag in my hand. Who are you when you stop trying to convince anyone that you are worthy? I am still learning to answer that without reaching for evidence, and I suspect the horses will keep asking until I get it right.