We are excited to announce that the Southern California Equestrian Directory has selected Challenge U as the September Featured Business of the Month! Below is Challenge U’s Featured Business article as it will appear on socalequine.com this September.

Challenge U, LLC is an experiential education based company that has been in business in Southern California since 1996.   Challenge U specializes in personal and professional team and leadership development programs via experiential formats. The experiential formats include The Extraordinary Team using the ropes course, The Samurai Game® and the DiSC® Learning Instrument, as well as customized programs.  Founder/Owner Andi Burgis is excited to announce the addition of Equine Experiential Learning, or EEL.

Andi started her horse career with Morgan horses in Pennsylvania then moved to Scottsdale, Arizona and began working for Lasma Arabians. She continued her horse focus in a variety of roles for several other large Arabian horse operations until 1986. In 1986 her second son came along and it was time for a change, so she left the horse world behind to raise a family.  When Andi recognized the importance of the horses as another component of the learning formats she wanted to bring to clients, she found the Epona approach to be the right fit to her already existing philosophy.  The Epona Approach was developed by Linda Kohanov, Author of “The Tao of Equus”, and Kathleen Barry-Ingram, therapist.  These women were pioneers in the development of EEL as we know it today.

Sampson and Andi

The Epona Approach focuses on the horses as equal facilitators in the education based process of EEL.  The horses, because of their innate ability to sense emotion and incongruence at extremely high levels, utilize emotions simply as information. They then model the ability to be present in the moment, making them living, breathing, sentient “biofeedback machines”.

Andi, who is an Epona Approved Facilitator, has assembled a skilled and intuitive EEL team by bringing in Cathy Huddleston and Wendy LeRoy. Cathy is an advanced Epona Approved Facilitator who taught at the Epona Center and has been a professional horse trainer, riding instructor, relationship coach and lifelong horse lover. Wendy is an Epona Approved Facilitator who is also a life-long horse enthusiast and licensed counselor.  These three women, who bring over 80 years of combined horse experience, are a part of a much larger team that includes 12 horses who are trained in this field of work and bring to the table a diverse background in experiences, genders and breeds.

One question often asked is “Why Horses?”  Domesticated horses retain the thought and behavior patterns of their nomadic ancestors.  Interacting with these animals on their own terms encourages a fluidity of human thought, emotion, and behavior that sedentary twenty-first-century life makes difficult.  Horses also model the strengths of what are often referred to as “feminine values”; cooperation over competition, relationship over territory, responsiveness over strategy, emotion and intuition over logic, process over goal, and the creative approach to life that these qualities engender. The result of all of this is amazing formats designed to benefit humans through the teachings of the horses.

The basic EEL format is available in one day to five day workshops that consist of ground activities with horses.  These formats do not include any horseback riding and are appropriate for people with or without horse experience.  There are also formats available for equestrians, beginner through advanced, that help riders better understand and grow their relationships with their own horses through EEL.  These focuses include, but are not limited to, better communication and understanding of the horse-human relationship, learning how to create a like language on the horse’s terms, and learning how to understand and embrace fear simply as information after experiencing any kind of fear based experience with one’s horse.  The facilities provide the ability for equestrians to bring their horses with them. Or, one of Challenge-U’s highly qualified facilitators can travel to you and your horse at your location.

Challenge U would like to invite you to come and check out one of their programs at their new 12 acre retreat site in beautiful Fallbrook, CA.  Please go to the website at www.Challenge-U.com or call Andi Burgis in the Challenge U office at (760) 535-3052 for more information on any of these programs.  Please mention you heard about Challenge U on the So Cal Equestrian Directory and receive 10% off of your first workshop in EEL at Challenge U.

Last friday we had the opportunity to serve Quattro University on one of our ropes course programs. Their team was composed of the leadership personnel of their 6-month old company. So not only was this the first time most of us got to meet and interact with them, it was the first time for most of them too, which always adds something fun to the equation. However, as they requested we challenged them in both the team and individual leadership dimensions.

I was surprised and excited at the beginning of the day as they shared their goals and challenges in life. What a committed and vulnerable group of people! In some ways this is the dream group for a facilitator, and in other ways this was still talk and we needed to see what would happen when they actually had to walk-the-talk. So we went through our range of low ropes activities and by lunch time there had been enough laughter, frustration, excitement, introspection and most importantly learning and growth to exceed all expectations of the transformations that would happen during one of our ropes course programs. There was an interesting energy while they ate as many of them had real, life changing experiences with each other while they still were looking for each other’s name badges.

Catwalk

The afternoon on the high ropes course provided them a chance to take their new learnings to another level, one that happened to be 40 feet off the ground. Again they had to transfer their committed mindsets to their shaking bodies as they faced their fears inlife. The cool thing was I got to watch the Catwalk and Heebie-Jeebie elements from the top of the tower. It was such a cool opportunity to meet them as they finished their climb and then get a bird’s eye view of their walk across the element.

Heebie Jeebie

The best part was watching the founders of the company become brother and sister again and to watch co-workers become co-supporters in life doing whatever it took to help their partner to succeed.

The final high ropes element of the day was the Power Pole. It seemed like with every climb, new fears were being conquered, new benchmarks were being set in life and everyone was opening up to all the possibilities this life has to offer them. I think it might be best to hear this straight from one of the participants mouths…

How do I sum up the day? Transformational! I continue to be deeply encouraged by the committment and enthusiasm surrounding Quattro University. I acknowledge the leaders for the direction and the insight they had to bring in these key leaders for their company and I acknowledge these leaders for understanding that in order to support the world, they first have to be able to be supported by each other.

Thanks for the awesome day!

Keith Boone(facilitator), son of Andi Burgis(owner of Challenge U)

I just returned from a 4 day Leadership workshop using horses to support people in understanding the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace and how horses can support in teaching us how to be consensual leaders. The program I attended was at The Epona Center in Tucson, under the expert guidance of Linda Kohanov, founder of the Epona Center.

Linda says:

“The true pioneers of the 21st Century are those who figure out how to tap the vast resources of all three brains—those interconnected sensory/ intelligence centers in the head, the heart and the gut. In this respect, horses provide the ultimate shortcut– as they always have. For thousands of years these sensitive yet powerful beings carried our bodies around the world, allowing us to explore terrain we would have struggled to traverse on foot. But there was something more profound happening in these interspecies associations. Learning to form effective, working partnerships with those horses provided the most elusive yet important education a human leader could acquire—- that “other 90 percent” exercised at a wholly non verbal level”

As I practiced the nonverbal skills of leadership with the horses, I tapped into a whole new way of being that would have me be a much better leader. This cutting edge format will be the way of developing leaders in the future as I see it.