In this special episode, we turn the microphone around and Julianne Neal of Whinny Tales interviews Lynn Carnes, executive coach and Bruce Anderson of Natures View and founder of Natural Humanship TM. Real change only happens with pressure and discomfort. It’s a natural human reaction to turn away from both. In this episode, we break down the steps to turn into the sensations of pressure and discomfort so that we build a new personal foundation of inner strength. Using the horse as a mirror and a teacher, we recount Lynn’s experience of building her mental tools (which she calls the Invisible Tools) over two years of practice, training, failing, recovering, and doing it all over again. The is the first episode in a series of three.
Bruce Anderson grew up on the West Indian islands of Trinidad and Tobago and it was there on the family cocoa and coffee estate that he began his relationship with horses. He learned to ride on the estate and then represented his country on the National Show Jumping Team. From there he moved on to breeding farms at home, in the U.K. and in the U.S. While in England, he earned an agricultural degree and in the U.S. worked with racehorses in Florida. He eventually moved into the hunter/jumper show circuit. Bruce and Julianne currently make their home in Camden, South Carolina, where Bruce started his present path, the evolution of Nature's View equine programs. They work in Camden, and around the southeastern U.S., with counselors and mental health professionals, law enforcement agencies, school and church groups. Bruce also enjoys working with horse owners and their horses to assist them in building better relationships.
Additional subjects
Key topics:
- Lynn’s journey to getting back on the horse
- On the first day we worked with Bruce, Jen really said we should never do that again
- Jen’s session with pony Zoey as she connected some critical dots in her thought patterns
- Understanding the relationship with mistakes and our journey to become who we really are
- What is Lynn known for: Bringing people back to who they really are
- The corporate world is not the problem; it’s the corporate mindset and tendency towards focusing too much on money and greed
- Twenty years ago, Lynn wrote “ride horses” as a favorite thing to do as a child
- Not knowing what you don’t know can be deadly
- The tools behind becoming master of anything can be translated across domains from work, athletics, art and so much more
- Proving vs the improving mindset
- Needing to prove yourself without getting stuck in the proving mindset
- In order to get what you want, you have to let go of wanting it for it to work
- The Homeless Sequence – if I make a mistake, I will fail and people won’t hire me any more and then I can’t feed my family and then I’m homeless
- The negative positive pole is the great gift of our survival mode
- Bruce thinks of the negative positive pole as a “spirit level”, much like the level a carpenter uses. The carpenter needs the tool so that all the building steps level as it goes
- Negative positive pole is like a car battery – it allows energy to flow
- In doing any type of work, we can allow the pressure to help us build our mental tools and become more of who we are
- The more pressure, the more we can build our tools. It’s less about performance and more about building ourselves
- Bruce describes tyrant mindset vs alpha mindset (conditioned self vs true self)
- New habits can rewire your brain – cannot think your way out of a habitual mindset “your mind will lie to you the whole way”
- Cultivating new neural pathways – starving old neural pathways
- Experience yourself into a new way of being
- Bruce’s method shares tools that empower us to build our inner world in an uplifting, natural way
- Lynn’s “helium concept of leadership” – hiring the smartest, most capable people you can to work for you and they will lift everybody up
- Alternative is to think you have to know everything, be smarter than everyone and have the answers to all the questions – which may lead to some form of success, but also leads to suffering
- Bruce calls this “giving up control to get control”
- The core of the core of the core of leadership is this: you are asking for help
- If you are going to be a significant leader, you are putting your career in the hands of others – and there is a parallel to the trust we must build when we get on a horse
- With a horse, we are asking them to get over their survival mode and take us places
- In the corporate world, we are asking people to get over their survival mode and give us their best thinking to take us places in the business
- How the tools learned in the round pen have helped save Lynn’s life
- Have a picture and then break it down to the steps and stay in the moment through each step
- Bruce has to slow Lynn down when riding the horse – and in the podcast
- Our story that shows the beauty of giving up control to get control
- Bruce breaks down so much of what is happening into the steps, balancing your poles and working on the mental tools
- “You’re building that foundation so that when you build that structure, (goals) there’s a foundation to put it on. We so work on the structure, that we don’t work on our foundation. Then the structure keeps collapsing, never reaching your full potential”
- Finding the middle and coiling the lariat – it’s not about the goal, it’s about building the invisible tools
- Instead of dodging the feelings, let them teach you
- “Let’s work on what to do with the feelings”
- Using pressure to break old habits
- The impact of our energy on our co-workers – how anxiety can be contagious
- The tools are the foundation; once we have them, we can build any structure
How To Find Bruce and Julianne
Website: http://www.naturesview.us/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/natures.view.7