THE DANGER OF STANDING STILL

“We have to keep moving. A horse will fall off the edge if we stand still!”  This was repeated many times on last week’s pack trip to Idaho’s Sawtooth Wilderness. When faced with danger or uncertainty, the natural response is to stop, regroup and take stock of the situation, but great leaders find a way to keep moving forward. If you are riding a horse on a narrow trail that falls off hundreds of feet below, stopping is the last thing you should do. Once the horse halts, it realizes the danger and can start shuffling its feet, often backing up. This dramatically increases the chance of a misstep and fall.

As this short video shows, one of the pack horses named Pepsi suddenly stopped on the trial, ripping her lead rope out of my hand. I froze and called for one of the other riders to come to my rescue and retrieve the rope. No one moved. We were all in precarious positions and didn’t feel safe enough to get off our horses. Finally, my nine-year-old son Eli saved the day by jumping off his pony and scrambling over to Pepsi to hand me the rope.

I love Albert Einstein’s quote, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.“  A successful organization must be filled with courageous employees willing to step into the unknown and keep their teams moving forward. They will have to wait about ten years before hiring Eli😊