The Box Every Leader Climbs Into
- 20 hours ago
- 8 min read
Danielle McKinon, founder of Eat Sleep Ride, a rural-based charity in Scotland, and a certified Equine Leadership Coach. Part of the global TeachingHorse network, Danielle applies the Diamond Model of Shared Leadership to help individuals and teams lead with confidence through uncertainty.
How many of us, to get into the rooms that matter, have had to climb into a box? A box that says, “Be professional. Be certain. Don’t be too much. Show them the part of you that fits the role, and keep the rest out of sight.” Leaders do it more than anyone. We perform composure we don’t feel. We lead by the spreadsheet because numbers feel safer than people. We hide the parts of ourselves that don’t match the job title. I’ve spent most of my life being put in boxes and the last few years learning that the best leadership begins the moment you climb out of them.
The boxes I was handed
I grew up in care. I’m neurodivergent. When I started out, I didn’t understand finance or strategy at all, and for a long time, I believed those were boxes I was stuck inside, too different, too far behind, not the kind of person who leads anything.
I had it the wrong way round. Those boxes weren’t my cage, they were the source of everything I now bring as a leader. The empathy, the pattern-spotting, the refusal to accept that broken systems have to stay broken, none of that came in spite of my history. It came because of it. Lived experience isn’t the thing you apologise for in leadership. Increasingly, it’s the thing that sets a leader apart.
What I built
It started in 2017 with one pony I rescued online for fifty pounds a pony, the world had written off as worthless. I founded Eat Sleep Ride around that single act of refusing to accept what something was “worth,” and for the next seven years, I built it, piece by piece, mostly learning as I went.
Over those years, it grew into something far bigger than I had first imagined. We outgrew our first home and, just a week before the pandemic, moved to Quarry Farm, twenty-four acres of old landfill that nobody else wanted.
Ninety local volunteers gave more than two thousand four hundred hours to turn a rubbish tip into a living place that runs entirely on the sun. We became an accredited riding school, teaching as well as rescuing, and took on horses of every kind: rescue, rehabilitation, working, and livery.
In 2024, we became a registered charity after seven years of proving the work first. Out of all of it grew Herd Dynamics, my leadership and development work, born the day I realised that what the horses were teaching our young people, they could just as powerfully teach leaders.
The systems meant to support people like us were broken, so we built our own. Building something from nothing over seven years teaches you more about leadership than any course. But the deepest lessons didn’t come from the spreadsheets or the strategy. They came from the horses.
What horses teach about leadership
Here is the thing about a horse: it cannot be fooled. It doesn’t care about your title, your diagnosis, or whether your numbers balance. It reads your nervous system, not your CV. Walk into a paddock pretending to be calm while your insides are in knots, and the horse will know before you’ve taken three steps and it will respond to the truth, not to the performance. That is the most honest feedback a leader will ever receive.
Horses are prey animals, which makes them exquisitely attuned to the emotional state of everyone around them. They co-regulate. When you are genuinely calm and present, they settle. When you are braced and tense, they brace too.
We understand the science of this now. Our nervous systems are wired to sense safety or threat in one another, well below conscious thought, which the neuroscientist Stephen Porges named neuroception. It runs both ways between species. Studies tracking heart rate variability have shown that the heart rhythms of a human and a horse can genuinely synchronise as they interact.
Leaders do this to their teams every single day without realising it. Your people are reading your regulation, not your words. A horse simply makes it impossible to ignore.
So horses teach the things leadership courses struggle to. Presence over performance. Influence without force, because you cannot bully a half-tonne animal into trusting you. You can only earn it. Reading a room before a single word is spoken. The humbling truth is that real authority starts with regulating yourself first.
Lead like the lead mare
Spend time with a herd and you notice something that quietly dismantles most of what we’re taught about authority. The horse the others choose to follow is rarely the biggest, the loudest, or the most forceful. Force creates movement a panicked, scattering kind of movement but it doesn’t create followers. The horse the herd actually trusts to lead them to water, to safety, to rest, tends to be the steady one. The consistent one. The one whose calm the others can borrow.
We see the same thing in every organisation. There’s the leader who drives from behind with pressure and fear, and gets compliance and churn. And there’s the leader the team genuinely follows, not because of the org chart, but because being near them feels safe enough to do good work. One commands. The other is chosen. Horses have known the difference for millions of years, we’re only now catching up.
Why do leaders come to the herd
This is exactly why, through my leadership practice, Herd Dynamics, I bring leaders and teams to the herd. Not to ride for sport, but to learn through intuitive, ground-based and ridden work what it feels like to lead a being that responds only to who you actually are.
Picture it. An executive who can hold a boardroom of forty people steps into the arena, asked to do nothing more than walk a pony a few paces beside her. She squares up, takes the lead rope, gives the instruction in her boardroom voice and the pony plants its feet and refuses to move. She tries again, firmer. Nothing. You can watch the frustration rise, the old reflex to push harder. Then, usually, something gives. She exhales. Her shoulders drop. She stops performing leadership and simply becomes present. The pony, without a word, falls into step beside her.
People feel that shift in their own body in a way no slide deck could ever teach them. They carry it back to their teams, their negotiations, their kitchen tables. The horse becomes the most truthful coach in the room.
The proof
If you doubt how powerful this is, let me give you the smallest example. A girl came to us when she was ten years old. She wouldn’t speak a word to anyone at school. But she would talk to a horse. Years on, she is thriving, full of voice and purpose.
If the herd can reach the most guarded, shut-down ten-year-old, imagine what it can unlock in a guarded executive who has spent twenty years in the box. The mechanism is the same. So is the result.
Regeneration: Leadership as creating the conditions
There’s a reason our sanctuary sits on an old landfill site. We took ground that had been written off as poisoned and useless, and we didn’t force anything to grow. We created the conditions, we cleared what was toxic, we planted, we waited, we trusted the process. Today, there are a thousand trees, ponds full of frogs, and birdsong where there used to be seagulls and waste.
People are no different. Teams are no different. You cannot force a person to flourish any more than you can shout at a field and demand a harvest. What a leader can do, the only thing a leader can really do, is create the conditions in which growth becomes possible. Safety. Time. Belief. Then get out of the way and let it happen. The best leadership I know isn’t extraction. It’s regeneration.
Leading without emptying yourself
There’s a leadership lesson I learned the hard way, too. For years, I was the one who absorbed every shortfall, every tight month, every gap, every job nobody else would do. Capacity was just me, stretched thin across everything.
But you cannot pour into other people from an empty cup. A leader who never regulates their own nervous system, who treats themselves as the shock absorber for the whole organisation, eventually has nothing left to give. The horses taught me that self-regulation isn’t self-indulgence. It is the precondition for leading anyone else well.
Redefining what leadership is for
We talk a great deal about building wealth and success. Here is what those words have come to mean to me: they’re shared. Leadership at its best isn’t command from the top of a hierarchy. It’s every voice being taken into account, and decisions being made with people, not done to them. That isn’t soft. That’s shared leadership, and in my experience, it’s the only kind that builds anything that lasts.
I didn’t get here alone, either. People believed in me long before the numbers did, and that belief may be the truest form of wealth there is. Good leaders create that same belief in others.
For the leader reading this
So, if you’ve been climbing into a box to lead, and most of us have, here is what the horses would tell you.
Regulate before you direct, because your team is reading your nervous system, not your strategy. Calm is contagious, and so is panic. Lead like the lead mare, remembering that authority isn’t the loudest voice, it’s the steadiest presence. Be the calm others can borrow.
Create the conditions, don’t force the growth. You can’t command a person to flourish, but you can make it safe enough that they do. Seek the honest feedback you’ve been avoiding, and find the people, or the animals, who respond to who you are, not to who you’re performing to be.
Lead as your whole self, because the parts of you that don’t fit the box are usually the very parts your people most need to see.
Being human isn’t a box
Someone asked me recently what box I’m in today. For once, I don’t mind the answer. I’m in a box of grace. I’m steadier than I used to be, and I can even make people laugh.
But here is how I’d like to be remembered, as a leader and as a person, as someone who got up every single day to bring value, and who refused to leave any part of herself in the box. Nature never puts anyone in a box. Neither should leadership.
Read more from Danielle McKinnon
Danielle McKinnon, Equine Leadership Facilitator, Social Entrepreneur
Danielle McKinnon is the founder of Eat Sleep Ride | Rural-Based Charity in Scotland, a rural charity using horses, nature, and coaching to support disadvantaged and neurodiverse young people. She is a qualified equine-facilitated learning practitioner, coach, and licensed facilitator of shared leadership, working locally and globally to build brave spaces for change. Her work is rooted in lived experience, community care, and the wisdom of the herd. To explore Danielle's leadership programmes, visit the Leadership at Eat Sleep Ride page at Herd Dynamics | Equine Leadership and Personal Development. These programs support Eat Sleep Ride.
References:
Porges, S. W. (2022). ‘Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety.’ Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16 – on neuroception and co-regulation.
Marchant-Forde, J. et al. (2024). ‘Unveiling directional physiological coupling in human–horse interactions.’ Scientific Reports – on heart rate variability synchronisation between humans and horses.
