Artio Leadership Academy
Innovative Leadership Training for a Beautiful Future.
Authentic Leadership
Founded in 2024, Artio Leadership Academy is a leadership and executive coaching business dedicated to the training of the leaders of the future. From the evidence-based neuroscience of leadership, to the authentic practicum of honing leadership with others and with self, we approach every student as a unique and powerful woman ready to refine her capacities to lead with more ease, grace and impact, while replenishing her energy and wisdom.
The Artio Leadership Program guides you to become a leader with greater adaptive intelligence - a natural intelligence that is part of your wild nature, that we aim to unearth.
The Program is named after Artio, the Celtic Goddess of Wildlife, Transformation and Abundance. She is a shapeshifting goddess, which mirrors the Artio Leadership Program’s aim to help you shapeshift in an adaptive response. Artio Academy provides you with the tools, skills, capacities and range with which to lead self, and others, with a capacity to adapt and shift with the dynamic and organic change present in others, yourself and the world.
The Program
Self Leadership
Source Leadership
Purpose Leadership
Authentic Leadership
Adaptive Intelligence
Masculine & Feminine Edges in Leadership
Centred Leadership
Intuitive Leadership
Collective Leadership
Integration
For women leaders interested in refining their skills in a new way.
The Artio Leadership Program is a ten month space held for you that includes two meetings a month, pre-reading, assignments, collected feedback, and a leadership project. You can add on retreats specific to the program. During the program, you learn skills for greater leadership capacity, receive feedback from peers, your team and those in your personal life, and complete a leadership project with measurable outcome. The program is innovative with a focus on the neuroscience of leadership, and training in leadership with horses.
Founder & Director
Maia Love MD
Maia is an executive leadership coach and physician specialized in neuroscience and consciousness. She founded and directed BrainTalks at UBC, and has led retreats and spoken internationally at conferences over the last 20 plus years.
Maia’s love of neuroscience includes a university degree on electromagnetism in animals and humans, and advanced neuroscience training through medical studies and research.
Maia guides you to experience your potential, your authentic truths, your personal neuroscience, and sense how to live your unique intelligence in the world, while also grasping the applied neuroscience of how to live your dreams. She works with horses to powerfully magnify and accelerate your personal, professional and leadership growth, in both mysterious and practical ways.
Credentials • Bachelor of General Studies, Simon Fraser University • Bachelor of Integrated Science in Biology & Physics, University of British Columbia • Medical Degree, University of British Columbia • Mindfulness Certification • MiCBT Foundations Certification • Yoga Teacher Certifications • Horse Medicine Leadership Neuroscience Faculty Member • Coaching Certification, International Coaching Federation • Founder and Director of Diamond MD Physician Leadership Program
Artio Leadership Academy Guides
Artio Leadership Academy was founded to be a space where women leaders hone adaptive intelligence while reconnecting to a wild authentic inner nature to give an abundant well spring of energy for the challenges that leaders face. As such, Artio Leadership Academy collaborates with powerful women in the leadership space, who blend authentic leadership coaching with an intelligence in wild nature. Women collaborators are guides who contribute material to the curriculum, co-host lectures and retreats, and bring their gifts to the Artio Space.
Your Artio Guides
Hillary Schneider
Hillary is the founder and lead facilitator of the Epona Rise Retreat Center and Horse Medicine Leadership Academy; she has been leading and teaching retreats and trainings with her herd for the last 12 years.
Passionate about bringing the teachings of the horses to impact the lives of humans, she has been devoted to her own vision and purpose of creating a space in nature where people can come and receive the wisdom of horses, the land and their own inner guidance.
Hillary has, over the last 12 years, had the privilege of hosting and leading retreats with horses for a range of people who are seeking to become more masterful in their experience of being a human with their own passion of personal and professional growth and development.
Credentials • Equine Science Production and Breeding Diploma, Olds College • Coaching Training and Leadership Development, Coach Training Institute • Certified Facilitated Equine Experiential Learning Practitioner, FEEL, Horse Spirit Connections • Certified Equine Assisted Personal Development, Chris Irwin • Equine Guided Coaching, Wisdom Horse Coaching • Intuitive Development Certification, Hannelore • Coach and Equine Guided Facilitator • Retreat Owner and Entrepreneur
“I was born with a fascination for the animal kingdom.” - Güliz Ünlü
Your Artio Guides
Güliz Ünlü
Guliz is the founder and lead facilitator of Equuarius, through which she offers the Equine Facilitated Applied Modality Program. She is an Aminal Communicator and Horse Medicine Guide, and has been leading and teaching retreats, events and trainings with her herd and animals for many years.
Fascinated by the Animal Kingdom, she finds that the depth to which horses have awakened wisdom within her, to be profound. Through her learnings with horses, and all creatures, she has created offerings that honour the Way and Wisdom of all Animals.
Güliz has trained in Body Talk Systems, Equine Bowen Therapy, Animal Communication, Equi-bow levels and more, studying with mentors from a wide range of disciplines to further her wisdom with horses, and bringing this wisdom to humans.
Wisdom Areas • Animal Communication • Equine Bowen Therapy • Horse Medicine Leadership • Equi-bow Canada Level 3 Training• Equine Guided Coaching • Linking Awareness Intuitive Training with Loesje Jacob • Coach and Equine Guided Facilitator • Retreat Owner and Entrepreneur
Why Horses?
-
Horses provide the perfect mirror to show you when you are being authentic, and when you are not. During the program, you will learn how horses teach you to discern your authentic leadership style in retreats and coaching seminars. You will also review the evidence based science of how working with horses guides emotional intelligence in leadership, including how to better “read the room.”
-
Horses teach us effective, healthy and natural boundaries so that we can better tend to our own energy and and our own nervous system, while leading others. As non-verbal guides to boundary cues, horses can be a fun and playful way to understand the boundaries necessary for impactful and sustainable leadership.
-
Horses can show us how to access true sources of energy for sustainable lifelong leadership based in your authentic purpose. Sometimes, our energy and repletion comes from something more mysterious and ethereal, and horses can help us tap into realms of deep support, inspiration and replenishment.
Why Horses support Leadership Development
-
Working with horses allows you to shift your personal neuroscience in a beautiful and powerful way that changes your leadership capacity. You engage with the intelligence of the horses, to guide an inner transformation that leads to lasting change on personal and leadership levels. As the physics of the more sophisticated area of intelligence of the Horse, shifts the physics of the less intelligent areas of imbalance in the Human, the Horse Human Connection allows for you to learn how to lead yourself and others, with greater integrity based in a shift in the neuroscience and neurophysics of your being.
From changes in the three part brain, to the autonomic nervous system, to the electromagnetic heart field, to brainwave patterns and HRV, to the gut brain, the fascia, and deeper structures linked to intuition such as the thalamus, the neuroscience based changes that occur as you reveal hidden truths with horses, allow for you to develop skills proven by science to create effective leadership.
-
As you understand the power of insights into the unconscious and archetypal layer of consciousness as led with the horses and your human guides, paralleled with the teachings on the neuroanatomy and neurophysics that explain this level of profound transformation, you understand leadership on a whole new level, and this empowers you to step forward with greater adaptive intelligence as to how to lead yourself, and your organization, towards your most beautiful vision of the future.
-
How horses support leadership development is an emerging field of scientific study with preliminary studies and over 88 peer-reviewed evidence-based scientific articles supporting the transformational power of learning with horses on the ground to empower authentic embodied leadership. In a field called Equine Assisted Learning, studies show that working with horses improves self-awareness, emotional intelligence, nonverbal communication, empathy, trust building, adaptability, and problem solving, with a recent 2025 study synthesizing 88 articles to the innovative paradigm emerging with how horses ignite leadership development (1). Horses have been proven to help leaders and innovators develop relational and embodied leadership skills, including building genuine trust, adaptive intelligence, and emotional intelligence, which significantly contribute to organizational resilience and sustainable growth (2). Working with horses in a specific way, provides an embodied, experiential learning that leverages nonverbal communication, emotional regulation, and relational awareness, which are skills that are often neglected in conventional and cognitive based, top down programs (1,2). By engaging a full bodied learning on the level of neurophysics, horses provide an optimal space for a genuine deepening of integrity and understanding of collective neuroscience, which has the lasting impact of deepening your skills as a leader to read the room, show up with a capacity to build trust and connection, and grow a sense of belonging and awareness in your time, that clears up more space for creativity, innovation and aligning with your organization’s vision for a better future (3,4,5,6,7,8).
-
2025. Sivagurunathan, R., S Senathirajah, A. R. b., Sivagurunathan, L., Qazi, S., & Haque, R. Equine-Assisted Experiential Learning: A Literature Review of Embodied Leadership Development in Organizational Behavior. Administrative Sciences, 15(8), 298. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci15080298
2025. Sivagurunathan R, Senathirajah ARBS, Sivagurunathan L, Arokiasamy L, Qazi S, Haque R, Su Y. Equine-assisted learning and leadership transformation: an exploratory qualitative study of workplace behavior. Front Vet Sci. 2025 Nov 25;12:1700029. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1700029. PMID: 41378260; PMCID: PMC12685683.
2023. Shine, J.M., Lewis, L.D., Garrett, D.D. et al. The impact of the human thalamus on brain-wide information processing. Nat Rev Neurosci 24, 416–430 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00701-0
2023. Geibel HV, Otto K. Commitment is the key: A moderated mediation model linking leaders' resources, work engagement, and transformational leadership behavior. Psychol Rep. 2023 Aug;126(4):1977-2002. doi: 10.1177/00332941221074256. Epub 2022 Mar 1. PMID: 35084267.
2024. Fletcher KA, Friedman A, Wongworawat MD. Understanding Emotional Intelligence to Enhance Leadership and Individualized Well-Being. Hand Clin. 2024 Nov;40(4):531-542. doi: 10.1016/j.hcl.2024.06.003. Epub 2024 Aug 6. PMID: 39396332.
2015 Pohl, L. The Effectiveness of Equine Guided Leadership Education to Develop Emotional Intelligence in Expert Nurses: A Pilot Research Study. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.1303.6248
2025. Pohl, L. The Effectiveness of Equine-Assisted Learning to Develop Presenting Mastery. International Journal of Presenting Leadership and Coaching. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:279631303
2021. Duarte AP, Ribeiro N, Semedo AS, Gomes DR. Authentic Leadership and Improved Individual Performance: Affective Commitment and Individual Creativity's Sequential Mediation. Front Psychol. 2021 May 7;12:675749. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.675749. PMID: 34025537; PMCID: PMC8139621.
Women Physician Leaders
As a women physician leader, you approach your practice with a style of leadership based in the concepts, value and principles that you have - based in the what you believe to be the valuable approach of yourself as a woman who is a leader, healer and doctor. Unfortunately, that often means that paradigms of self sacrifice, especially as a woman, and as a physician, lead to burnout and a loss of your natural, wild, radiant, brilliance and glow. The Artio Physician Leadership Program aims to guide you away from self sacrifice, and into true leadership, by teaching you the guiding principles of the authentic leader who balances self care with guiding others to impact positive change in the world, and guide humanity towards greater stewardship of the earth, it’s creatures and each other.
Artio Women Physician Leadership Program
-
The dream of the Artio Women Physician Leadership Program is to teach women physicians how to become truly resilient. I am not only a female physician, I am also the daughter of two parents who are physicians. I grew up seeing first hand the stresses and strains on a medical professional, and was curious over the years to identify specific practices to help my parents and their colleagues maintain resilient well being on all levels while engaged in an impactful medical practice.
-
The goal of the program is to provide a foundation and structure for you to develop authentic leadership as a woman physician. The Artio Women Physician Leadership Program is designed to help you re-define what it means to be a female physician - a woman healer, a woman leader and a woman doctor. The program improves your capacity and skills to lead with an authentic leadership style, while identifying and dissolving toxic traits inherited from an old paradigm.
-
The Artio Approach guides you to be an authentic leader, who models the vibrant abundant wild natural self, who has glowing well being on all levels. When you become unaligned or are approaching burnout, you need an approach to maintain your leadership style, your impact and your team, while you use adaptive intelligence to get back on track. During the Artio Women Physician Leadership Program, you will design a Leadership Project in alignment with the values and principles of authentic leadership, and measure the outcome and impact of the program on your own life, and in your role as a woman physician leader.
-
The Artio Physician Leadership Program is strongly influenced by the LEADS Framework. During the program, you will develop skills to Lead Self, Engage Others, Achieve Results, Develop Coalitions and transform Systems.
Women Physician Leadership Retreat
To deepen in an understanding of what it means to be an authentic leader, as a woman physician, immerse in a transformative process during an in person retreat, with horses.
What is authentic feminine leadership, as a physician? We know that, as a physician, we want to balance the act of caring for our patients and the skill of the medicine that we offer - with the brilliance, vitality and glow of being healthy ourselves, with well being on all levels. We know that the balance between our practice and our self care, prevents burnout, and supports resilience.
However, the act of balancing self leadership with offering medicine to others, can be confused and difficult when we continue to embody toxic traits of old paradigms that interrupt our ability to show up with integrity.
During the Women Physicians Retreat with Horses, review the power of authentic feminine leadership and how to fuel the practices that enable you to navigate towards integrity in your lifestyle balance.
Discover, in the presence of horses, how leadership as a woman physician can be guided by your authentic self, rather than the precepts of the false self, and the false leader.
Explore how you personally, with your own unique medicine, move towards greater balance between self care and providing medicine to others, with an approach that allows you to to have an impact and move humanity towards a positive future, with integrity for yourself, your body, and nurturing the areas of your personal life that bring you joy.
Inquire
Apply below to find out more.