Anjellica was born loving horses and spent her childhood dreaming of having a horse of her own. Her wish came true when she was 10 and her family got their first horse. The mare was a been-there-done-that dependable partner and proved to be a great teacher and confidence builder.
Eventually, the family bought several yearlings, and while their 20-something mare was easy to work with, the yearlings were a challenge. “We had no idea what we were doing, and when the time came to ride them, we got bucked off them,” Anjellica remembers. “I was the only one that ended up sticking with the horses.”
One of the fillies was more forgiving than the others, and thanks to trial and error and Anjellica’s natural ability, she got the filly to a stage where she could safely ride her. When she was a senior in high school, Anjellica bred the mare and got a filly out of her.
“I started the filly myself, and although she wasn’t giving me any trouble, I wasn’t happy with where she was at in her training, either,” Anjellica says. “People at the barn where I boarded my horses offered help, but it wasn’t consistent. I wanted to find a training program that I could follow myself.”
In 2017, when she learned that Clinton was bringing his Walkabout Tour to Lake St. Louis, Missouri, near her hometown, she attended. “I’d heard of Clinton before and had even been to a tour when I was a teenager, but I had never been in a position to seriously get into the Method. Watching the tour, I was blown away with the results he and his clinicians were getting and how easy his training approach was to understand,” Anjellica says.
She left the event motivated and with a Colt Starting Kit. “When I got home, I restarted all of my horses with the Method and haven’t looked back since,” she says. “I like how well laid out the program is. You don’t have to guess your way through it, and when you run into an issue, the answers are there for you.”
Anjellica became a dedicated student and continued to train her personal horses and took on a few project horses. She eventually got involved with cowboy mounted shooting and began competing with the filly she started herself.
While participating in the last 10-day Colt Starting Clinic held at the Texas ranch, Anjellica was encouraged to attend the Academy. That support combined with her passion for training horses and helping people led her to her career as a Method Ambassador.
“I enjoy seeing people’s relationships change with their horses. I had a horse that behaved badly because of how people interacted with her. That bothered me because she would never have gotten to that point if she’d been handled correctly. She just needed a leader. I meet a lot of people who are in a similar situation with their horses. Their horses need a leader, and they don’t know how to be one,” Anjellica says. “When I help people understand how to communicate with their horses, they see that there’s life on the other side of the frustration they’re experiencing and can build a safe partnership with their horses and start having fun.”