Kelly Wendorf is a leadership teacher, coach, and author of Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Leading and Living. Drawing on indigenous teachings, neuroscience, and the wisdom of horses, she offers a nature-based approach to leadership that fosters connection, care, and resilience. Wendorf guides leaders—whether in workplaces, families, or communities—to “lead from behind,” creating safety, presence, and […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #21: Support and Manage
The final exercise of Leadership Step By Step! For this last exercise, we had to support and manage a person that we lead to doing a task for us. The steps were: I decided to do this exercise with someone whom I had a lot of contact with so I could give myself the highest chances of success: my daughter […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #20: Inspire
8/16/25 Update: I totally forgot that I didn’t post all my leadership exercises! Just a couple left to go! This week, the exercise was to do the exact same exercise as last week, but now with confidence! In short, get more practice leading more people. If you need a reminder, the process is: I was able to do the exercise […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #19: Lead With Empathy
For this week in Leadership, the exercise of the week was to lead others using empathy. The process was as follows (modified slightly for how I did it): I found this exercise to be REALLY challenging to start doing. I spent a lot of time thinking about the implications of doing the exercise: is it manipulative? Is there a reason […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #18: Make People Feel Understood
Exercise 18 of Leadership Step By Step was to have another 10 conversations with a goal of making people feel understood. Again, a script was provided and the short version is: The idea with this script is that you ask someone about their passion, then give them the space to delve into their passion and really explore what it is […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #17: Meaningful Connection
For exercise 17 of Leadership Step By Step, I had to have 10 conversations using a script designed to encourage meaningful connection with others. In short, the conversation goes as follows: I found the formula to be simple and yet very effective! Asking someone about what they enjoy doing is great, but often the conversation just ends there with a […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #16: The Method, More Challenging
Exercise 16 of Leadership Step By Step was probably the most challenging one I’ve had so far. For this exercise, I had to do the exact same thing as in exercise 15, but now with something more difficult. Going through The Model and The Method itself was easy enough, but I found the actual new behaviors to be really difficult, […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #15: The Method
This week’s exercise from Leadership Step By Step was to build on the previous exercise (“The Model”) and to try to influence your own environment, beliefs, and emotions in order to elicit a rewarding feeling from something that you’d like to improve at, but haven’t been able to. For this exercise, Josh asked us to form groups to brainstorm new […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #14: The Model
This week’s exercise from Josh’s Leadership Step By Step was called The Model, and the assignment was to watch a few of Josh’s videos on The Model, which showed me a system to begin to analyze my own emotional processes surrounding something I’d like to improve at, then try to do the analysis for a couple things I want to […]
TSL:SFN – The Insect Epiphany w/ Barrett Klein
Barrett Klein investigates mysteries of sleep in societies of insects, creates entomo-art, and is ever on the search for curious connections that bind our lives with our six-legged allies. Barrett studied entomology at Cornell University and the University of Arizona, fabricated natural history exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, worked with honeybees for his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, […]