New website!

I'm excited to announce a brand new website, and thus some changes in this blog.

Here is the latest entry on my blog, which is now located on my website (rather than the blogspot address). www.threerivershorsetraining.com   Please make sure that you head over there, and to facebook, to receive my updates from now on!

----------www.threerivershorsetraining.com

Welcome to the new 3R website! I'm so happy to have celebrated my fifth anniversary with Three Rivers Horse Training and all of the wonderful horses and humans that have joined my 3R family in this time. I decided that as an anniversary gift to myself and to the business, a new website was in order!

When I was writing a business plan and designing a website for Three Rivers Horse Training in 2008 and and 2009, I was just hoping to create a business where I could ride horses all day and make enough money to feed myself. I knew that my aspirations as a horse person were high enough that I needed to be working horses all day, every day, to begin to make a dent in my goals. The best way I knew how to do this was to start working horses for the public. So I took a leap of faith and started a business. I created a website that felt like me, felt like the beautiful Grey Cliffs Ranch, felt like Montana, and hopefully felt like something everyone with a horse might like!

Well I have been so lucky, because it worked. Five years later I have ridden A LOT of horses. I have learned more than I ever could have imagined I could learn in just five years. My aspirations are only greater now, and I know I better keep doing this!

But a couple things happened that I wasn't expecting. The first, was I got to know myself in ways I didn't see coming. I have been so inspired by the horses and the humans around me, that I have really begun to learn who I am, both in and out of the round pen. In doing so, I learned what I have to offer this world and the horses in it, and I also learned what I am not. That is one reason why I felt so strongly I needed a new "look" for my business. One that wasn't that of me five years ago, just wanting to convince people to hire me. But of me now, a person who is truly and utterly in love with the horse (I thought I was five years ago! I was wrong, because THIS is love. Hopefully five years from now I can say the same). I know that I am not the trainer for everyone, because with hiring me you get a passion and a love that is a little bit...intense. I now know I am incapable of compromise when it comes to this love and so I need the right clients around me that love their horses as much as I do.

And this leads me to the second magical thing that has happened. Three Rivers Horse Training became something separate from me. It became not just a business, but a feeling. I love when I'm traveling at a clinic and a group of us are chatting and someone talks about the 3R page on Facebook and what is happening there. Or how they heard Alex in their ear when they were working a horse or talking to their husband or playing with their kids. As if somehow I, the person who writes this blog, and Alex and 3R are not all the same thing! But we aren't. Because this has taken on a life of its own. This business, this life, this philosophy, is alive and well at my barn in Three Forks living with my boarders while I am in Arizona. It is alive in Billings where there is a huge contingent of 3R riders who love and support each other in ways I find remarkable, even when I haven't had a clinic there in a while. It lives in the workplaces of all of my clients who tell me stories about how they have changed how they deal with co-workers after they reflected on their horsemanship. It is in relationships between friends and spouses that are reconsidering how they treat each other based on their work with the horses. It is in the parenting I hear people talk about, and how they are considering how to raise their children in a thoughtful and engaged manner after becoming so committed to that with their horses.

It is truly remarkable and such an honor to see this thing become something separate from me. I can't begin to express how thankful I am to have heard the stories I've heard, to have been a part of relationships, both human and equine, as they grow, and in turn to have been shaped and inspired myself.

So I hope that this website, and the changes I am making to structure my business, can reflect all of these moments and blessings. I hope that business can reflect life and life can reflect learning and learning can reflect horses. Because there seems to me nothing more pure and flawed and lovely than working with a horse!

Thank you all for making the last five years the best five years of my life. I'm so excited to see what is next.