Empowering Change Through Awareness

Leadership and organisational development consultant, coach and expert facilitator who works in a holistic way with individuals and organisations based on 20 years experience and education in management and leadership, organisational psychology, group dynamics and mindfulness. Jackie is passionate about getting people out of their heads, to be present and lift the conscious leadership of both individuals and teams.
 

 
 
Organisational Change – People in an underground subway

Organisational
Change

People and Culture

Leadershio and team development – A person leads a discussion from a stage

Leadership and
Team Development

Design and Facilitation

 
 
 
A perons at a Coaching session

Coaching

Executive, Personal and Career Development

Equine Assisted learning facilitator Jackie Smith feeding a horse

EXPERIENTIAL Learning PROGRAMS

Innovative immersive learning solutions

 

People and Culture

 

Is the capability and focus of your people aligned with your business strategy? 
Is your workplace culture congruent with your stated values? 

Jackie has depth in her understanding of both human behaviour and organisational behaviour and how one impacts the other. With a focus on empowering individuals to understand and develop the behaviour, mindset and skills required, her change programs facilitate personal and organisational growth and with sustainable results.

Areas of specialisation include: 

Vision and Values

Change Management

People/HR Strategy

Employee Engagement

Performance Management

As her past experience includes a role leading a national retail business undergoing significant change and growth her advice and programs are based on the understanding of what works in practice to support real results. 

If you are looking for business productivity improvement, increased employee satisfaction, reduced turnover and higher levels of staff engagement and motivation then contact Jackie to discuss.

“Having leveraged off Jackie’s unique skills earlier on, we invited Jackie once again to take on the challenging task of assisting us around a complex piece of work to help create best in class engagement amongst our people, build solid operational ethos and help drive a culture of continuous improvement through transparency in measuring individuals against our collective goals. Jackie has impressed me/us once again, by helping us go a long way re the above pursuit. I am very grateful to Jackie for her help and professional partnership and recommend her to anyone who is considering radical transformational change, especially around conduct and culture.”
— Pat Banerjee, Head of Client Services, Australia, ANZ Bank
 

Design and Facilitation

 

Are you looking for professional development solutions that have impact and facilitate transformational change at individual and organisational level? 

Jackie designs learning solutions with impact for experienced and emerging leaders and their teams. Custom design of practical, educational and experiential learning workshops and programs including:  

Leadership Impact

Effective Team Development

Authentic Communication & Interpersonal Skills

Conflict Resolution

Emotional Intelligence

Mindfulness

Building Performance Cultures

Managing Change

“Jackie is an extremely skilled facilitator who is able to combine an empathy, intellectual depth and willingness to go with both the tough stuff and the humour of the moment to facilitate in a way that creates the context for change of the heart and mind.”
— Carmel Pelunsky, Managing Director, YSC Australia and NZ, Hong Kong and Singapore
 

Virtual Coaching Programs

 

Career Development

Personal Development

Executive/Leadership Coaching

Feeling stuck in a rut, unfulfilled or stressed out and overwhelmed?
Looking for practical techniques that support your wellbeing and your personal and professional goals?  

Coaching is all about helping you get from where you are now to where you want to be. Jackie’s transformative coaching programs include coaching and mindfulness to give you practical tools, knowledge and resources to help you start mastering your mindset, your emotions and stress levels and your innate ability to listen to and be guided by your inner wisdom and knowledge.

Jackie’s approach is to support people to move towards a desired state of authenticity – that is being true to self and true to others. She supports her clients to become clear about the goals or outcomes required by asking challenging questions and listening deeply to what is (and is not) being said. This leads people to a place of greater awareness, self-accountability and enhanced skills and capability to make the personal or professional changes they desire.

“I would highly recommend Jackie as a professional coach. Her personal and forthcoming nature helps to create environment where individuals feel comfortable and understood. In addition, her ability to ask thought-provoking questions encourages people to rethink their patterns of behavior and connect with the cause and effect of their actions. Lastly, her insightful, caring and compassionate coaching is able to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, but even more, she is able to teach others how to see and achieve it as well.”
— Jeanette Fenske, General Manager eCom Operations & logistics, Woolworths Supermarkets
“Jackie has worked with us to help us transform our business practices in HR and also provided close executive coaching to help the principals of our business lead these changes effectively. We have seen enormous positive change and can credit much of it directly to Jackie’s work”
— Tristan Harris, Co-CEO Harris Farm Markets
 

Immersive Learning: Horses teaching leadership and life skills

 

Custom designed programs.

The EAL program can be delivered either as a stand alone workshop or as an experiential part of a leadership development program. I partner with business schools, consulting forms and organisations to create a course design to meet the target audience learning goals. 

Unique, memorable and deeply powerful personal and professional development workshops for individuals and organisations that can benefit from learning more about themselves and those around them.  

Team Building 

Leadership Development

Executive Coaching

Workplace Wellbeing

Conferences and Retreats

Jackie Smith is an international facilitator of Equine Assisted Leadership Development programs. All programs are custom designed based on over 20 years of leadership development and change experience to support a wide range of learning goals.

Recently Jackie was invited as a guest of the Leadership Moments Podcast to have a conversation about conscious leadership and how the EAL program support us to be more aware of ourselves and how we impact others, to be more present and make more conscious choices and decisions rather than reacting from old patterns of behaviour.

https://murraywright.com.au/leadership-moments-podcast/jackie-smith/

PROGRAM DETAILS

Full or half day workshops, and can be embedded in an in-house leadership program or designed in partnership with consultancy firms, business schools and universities. 

Our programs are suitable for in-tact teams, emerging leaders, senior managers, executives and boards.

Programs are delivered at beautiful locations close to Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Canberra and in regional areas including the Scenic Rim, Hunter Valley and Byron Bay.

Other Australian and International locations can be sourced on request.

There is no riding involved. No horse experience required. All experiences and activities with the horses will be from the ground and with safety always in mind.

Our programs are suitable for groups between 5 - 40 participants.

Why Horses?

We know that communication, relationship and leadership skills are critical for successful and productive businesses. It is the same when working with horses. Horses respond best to good connection, clear communication and consistent, calm leadership.  The horse requires us to be present and aware, a good listener, and to show up authentically so that they can trust you and your intentions

Our Equine Assisted Leadership Development programs are impactful for the following reasons. 

Nature Based

Spending the day outside in nature, away from office distractions helps participants to ground, relax, be focused and therefore more open to learning.

The Way of The Horse

Horses are sentient beings with innate emotional intelligence and leadership skills that have supported them to live effectively in social groups (herds) for millions of years.   Horses also live entirely in the present moment and use their whole of body/senses and we can learn energetic presence and awareness skills. And, when happy and healthy, horses have a very effective ability to self-regulate (deal effectively with stress) - something most of us need support with.

Authentic Feedback

Horses are highly sensitive beings. They pick up intention and emotions by reading non -verbal body language and personal energy. They will react to you authentically without consideration of your title or position. Horse can help bring clarity to the question “How does my state of being influence those around me.”

 Experimenting/Change

The horses offer a safe way to experiment with changes in behaviour such as setting clearer boundaries, practicing deep listening skills or noticing the impact of shifting our emotional state.

In Equine Assisted Learning participants learn by doing and through being in relationship with the horses. The horses response will provide authentic feedback in a non-judgmental way about how the participants are showing up, mentally, emotionally and physically.  The facilitators encourage participants to observe and reflect on the impact in real time, and make subtle changes noticing any shifts.  This unique aspect of Equine Assisted Learning is where the power lies in this process.

Jackie outlines the business benefits of Equine Assisted Learning, Equine Assisted Leadership Development and Equine Assisted Team Building in an article which you can find here.

Contact Jackie Smith to discuss your organisation’s goals or request a brochure.  

““As innovative leadership development practitioners at Suntory, we are always looking for new and unique ways to impact leaders through learning simulations and experiences. We were kindly introduced to Jackie Smith through a very global community of connected EAL experts, and from the very first conversation with Jackie, we knew we’d struck learning gold! Jackie brings a wealth of experience and expertise in the structure, design and facilitation of the Equine Assisted Learning process. Our day with Jackie and her team was the fourth day in a 5 day leadership program for senior global leaders from across our company. Jackie carefully designed an Equine Assisted Leadership Development program that would enhance and build on the content of our program – authentic leadership, emotional intelligent and creating follow-ship in others – and the experience was incredibly impactful, emotional and ultimately one that pressed participants to put their learning into action.”


”
— Sue Gannon Division COO Global Development, Diversity and Strategic Advisor SUNTORY HOLDINGS LIMITED
“A big thank you for yesterday’s Equine Assisted Learning session with the NSW Health Senior Executive Development Program participants.

The session achieved everything we had hoped for and so much more. The participants left buzzing, mystified and gratified from the experience with you all (human and horse!) – the richness and depth of the individual and collective learning, the gentleness and grace with which you facilitated and challenged the groups, the depth and knowledge of your craft to provide seamless links to both our program content and their workplace contexts and, of course, the wisdom of our horse partners to show up to exactly what each participant needed.

We are all deeply grateful for our partnership and the joy it has been to work with you from the outset. Looking forward to many more magical experiences in the future.
”
— Sean Clemmit, Principal Consultant, Bendelta
“Brilliant. Having experienced Jackie’s Equine Assisted Leadership Coaching first hand I came away with a stronger understanding of leadership without voice and constantly adapting to the environment around you. The effect on me was inspirational. (Yes I managed the whole time without my mobile phone as well!)... highly recommend this to anyone considering effective outcome driven leadership development.”
— Gordon Jenkins, CEO, Adaptive Innovation and The Visible Guy
 
“We used Equine Assisted learning on the last day of a three day program that focused on leadership and team behaviours, understanding the system, relationships and communication.

Participants were able to receive immediate feedback from the horses about how they were showing up and the impact that they were having both positive and not so positive. Participants could not rely on their ‘technical’ competence and so observable behaviour both as individuals and in their teams, generated lots of responses, insights and great discussion…comments such as ’the horses never lie’ – ‘listen to the horse’…’the horse is always right’ were just some of the phrases that were used during the reviews.

For many, it was a very powerful and meaningful experience. Highly recommend it as a wonderful experience in a great setting, away from the office.
”
— Francesca Talevi Senior Consultant, Learning Centre| Executive Education Melbourne Business School
 
“I’ve done a few team building things in the past with different teams and there seems to always be a level of disconnectedness or trust with the actual process so they will hang back or not actually contribute as much as they are supposed to be contributing.

This equine assisted learning process we did today with our entire team, I am sure that it has something to do with the horses and the facilitators being just a natural environment, not all built for play, that everyone was comfortable to start with. Once we realise we are interacting with the natural environment rather than blocks, toys and notepads etc, everyone is involved, everyone is putting themselves forward and trying to be part of it and so we got a lot out of it. Really really enjoyed it.
”
— Steve Durkin , Managing Director SafeScape
 
“Last week the team took 2 days out in the beautiful Hunter Valley to connect and develop our strategy for the year ahead. We were extremely excited to have Jackie Smith facilitate an Equine Assisted Team Building experience. Jackie challenged us to observe and interact with horses as a way of understanding how we as a team communicate and engage with each other. We were able to learn and reflect on how our energy, body language, thoughts and intentions impact and influence everyone around us. We walked away from the day feeling connected as a team, energised and incredibly grateful for the meaningful learning experience with the horses. If you’re looking for an insightful team experience I would highly recommend Jackie’s unique approach. ”
— Samantha Mueller, Head of Learning and Development at Fantastic Furniture
“To say as a team we gained a whole new level of self-awareness would be an understatement. Our expectations were exceeded, and we as a management group have certainly focused on the importance of communication in order to successfully achieve together as a team. We highly recommend this form of leadership , the corporate knowledge and experience of Jackie and her team was evident in their delivery.”
— Lynn Butler, General Manager Xypex Australia

Contact Jackie Smith to discuss a custom designed program, workshop or event for your business.

You'll also find case studies and client testimonials on her facebook page Jackie Smith Equine Assisted Learning or click on the link below to visit The Wisdom of The Horse website.