The Long Road Home

Recovery is an individual journey

Are you happy and content? Have you found new, profound meaning in your life? Sobriety Road may be a long one, but it really is a chance to experience the joy you would not have dreamed possible. If this sounds exaggerated, talk to a few friends who have made it. Stable Environment is offering you an opportunity to completely turn your life around.

That’s not to say that everything is rainbows and unicorns for those in recovery. Trials and hardships are a part of every life. If you need some extra support to help you through a tough time, call us today.

FAQ’s

Ask Michael Keenan About Addiction Counseling

We are approved providers of addiction counseling to the Department of Transportation as Sophisticated Addiction Professionals.  If you are a pilot, truck driver, or any other employee regulated by the Department of Transportation, we are approved for your benefit plan.

There is a learning curve when individuals or teams are brought together with a horse, a process that helps you understand the nature of the horse. Subtle body language, hidden emotions, confidence, and clarity of thought all play a role in developing trust. The horse is hyper-vigilant and extremely sensitive to unspoken communication. Gaining trust comes first, then communicating your objectives guides you through a unique self-discovery process that provides instant feedback with immediate and lasting results. Soon, you learn how to approach building relationships and collaborating effectively with others. In all of our horse-related activities, clients are on the ground with a large 1,000-pound animal where success can be a truly rewarding experience.

Horsing around can be a complex activity in itself. There is value in focusing on the quality of interaction whether it is conscious or unconscious during horseplay if results are produced. But we take the concept of play beyond the surface and dive more deeply with the intent to expose clients to higher levels of self-awareness to engaging new, more positive behaviors. Clients will experience self-observation while interacting with a horse which may reveal a blind spot in leadership and relationship building skills.

We take this work very seriously and our horses are excellent, seasoned teachers. Clients will feel stretched to new perspectives and learn to practice new ways of interacting, communicating, and building trust. We make sure that all participants know and understand the dynamics of their interactions with horses and how they can immediately apply this learning to their work environment.

Some clients come to us with apprehension because of a previous incident with horses. Some have anxiety or fear because they have never been around horses before. Others just see a thousand pounds of scary standing in front of them that makes them very uncomfortable. Often times, it is these individuals that grow the most during the experience. Facing our fears can be a powerful stretch in the leadership journey. We guide our clients through the process, helping them make sense of the whole experience, showing them how to gain personal power and choice in the face of fear and anxiety.

Clients do not require any prior horse experience. We take every safety precaution before each learning session. We always make sure that clients understand horses and how to stay out of harm’s way while engaging with them. We follow a strict code of ethics. We respect both human and horse and strive to create a setting that brings out the best in both. Our clients always have a choice, no participation is forced.

Equine learning at Stable Environment can help your business in many ways. Let me just mention two.

  • Trust – Time is money and so much time can be spent repairing or supporting relationships. Trust is the currency of the workplace. It’s all about the relationship, and what it takes to create, build, and maintain mutually beneficial working relationships with team members, with customers, with superiors, and partners. Instead of repairing and supporting, time could be spent creating more successful results. Clients at Stable Environment learn skills to help them develop trusting relationships so they can spend their time pursuing more profitable results.
  • Self-awareness – “Know thyself”. Socrates felt that self-awareness is so valuable that other pursuits are “laughable” in comparison. Studies show that those adept at self-awareness understand themselves and know who they are. They tend to evaluate others more accurately and therefore make more allowances for others’ shortcomings, and they are better at acknowledging their own limitations, all of which are critical business skills. Those endowed with this reasoning power are better forecasters, they make better guesses about how people are likely to behave. And they have a generally good idea about how their acquaintances, colleagues, and friends perceive them—they know their own reputation making them better team players. At still deeper levels, these individuals recognize that their perceptions of the people around them might require revision at times. At Stable Environment, clients learn how to become more self-observant, aware of their strengths and weaknesses – a real bonus in the workplace.

The first step is to use this link to contact our team and let us help you identify your needs and discuss how our horses can help you achieve new behaviors and approaches to leadership and relationships. You can also call us directly at (435) 429-1269 to set up a time to talk about how Stable Environment programs can provide you and your team powerful new ways to develop business skills.

Equine Assisted Learning (EAL) is a supportive approach to teach high-level competencies. If you can manage those impulsive, unpleasant, and disruptive emotions that lead to unwanted results, and tap instead into those motivating emotions of confidence, passion, enthusiasm, desire, and anticipation you begin to learn how to understand others, how to influence them, how to lead them through times of change, how to handle conflict, and how to build high-performance teams.

If we fail to stay engaged, the horse will usually just walk away. If we manage to stay present and connected, we get powerful opportunities to investigate ourselves in relation to others, transforming those who lack self-awareness and repeat the same mistakes into someone who takes responsibility for their actions, or those who are demanding, lack empathy and are therefore hard to work with, into a collaborator, a rapport builder, an influencer.

Activities with Stable Environment horses place clients in a state of active problem-solving. A natural process of learning ensues. As in life, events are open and shaped by the horse and the client in the moment and the learning arising from this is profound and revealing. In a lifelong journey of improvement, EFL is a memorable component designed to help clients better understand themselves and others so they can build rapport, lead, handle conflict, and collaborate effectively.

Why Choose Stable Environment

Ally and Michael Keenan have unique gifts both with their horses and their clients

“We are a group of working professionals that truly care about helping people be the best version of themselves possible whether in your personal life, work, etc. We absolutely love what we do and we have years and years of training between us. We all feel it is our life calling to work with horse and humans and we have been brought together to do just that! This provides a great alternative to talk therapy. Studies show that Horses can help people gain awareness at a much quicker rate than talk therapy.” — Aubrey Clay

“With the Stable Environment team, you’re getting exactly that. A skilled team comprised of four passionate individuals coming together with the client’s best interest at heart. Our team uses our diverse years of horse experience, life experience, and education combined to create the ideal space for any client to work on their goals.” — Nicole Barnson

My recovery must come first so that everything I love in life does not have to come last.

Anonymous

You don’t get over addiction by stopping using.  You recover by creating a new life where it is easier to not use.  If you don’t create a new life, then all the factors that brought you to your addiction with catch up with you again.

Anonymous

I would rather go through life sober, believing I am an alcoholic, than go through life drunk, trying to convince myself that I am not.

Anonymous

I think scars are like battle wounds – beautiful in a way.  They show what you’ve been through and how strong you are for coming out of it.

Demi Lovato