As some of you might have noticed, it’s been quite a while since my last blog post. After the emotional roller coaster ride of last year with my dad’s battle and subsequent passing from cancer—which I previously wrote about in “Where We’re Going And Where We’ve Been” Part 1 and Part 2—this year has been all about a re-boot for myself and my family.

My last two blog posts were so deeply personal and emotionally charged that writing them figuratively knocked the wind out of my sails as a fledgling writer.

While dealing with my first bout of writer’s block, my family and I were regrouping and moving forward with our lives after a tumultuous 2015. My wife Kendra, whose strength and sense of self amazes me every day as the rock of our family, has taken the opportunity to reinvent herself. Somehow through the tumult of last year, she was able to get her degree and license to become a human and equine physio and massage therapist.

She accomplished this while pregnant and mother to newborn daughter Madison. Since achieving her license in December of last year, Kendra has steadily built up her business to become quite the successful entrepreneur and an inspiration to me.

Still, almost a year later, I don’t know how she did it. Even taking out the fact she did this with Madison both pre- and post-birth, it’s amazing her accomplishment with what was happening in our lives. In less then 10 months, we moved twice, dramatically changed our business at McQuillan Equestrian and the financial instability that comes from such a change, helped care for my ailing father and console my mom and I with his passing, all the while being a nurturing loving mother to our oldest daughter Payton, who as a 4-almost 5-year-old was struggling with the upheaval in her life from the moves, and the loss of her grandfather.

Words can’t do justice to how incredible of a feat this was, but this was not the most amazing part to me. What really inspired me was her philosophy on life that started her down this journey that led her to where she is.

My resolve to reapply focus to my goals is thanks in part to my wife Kendra and our two daughters, Payton and Madison.

Life is not meant to be something you settle on. Life is meant to be lived and lived to the fullest. It’s never too late to reinvent yourself. It’s never too late to not only chase your dreams, but also to change them.

By focusing on the challenges and potential roadblocks that are in your way, you sabotage yourself before you even get started. Kendra would not let those limitations get in her way. As the saying goes, “No pressure, no diamonds.” Once she set her mind to it and began the journey, every experience whether good or bad became an opportunity for growth. If you view every hurdle as a challenge to conquer, your possibilities are limitless.

I’ve tried to take her inspiring resolve to heart and accomplish the same reinvention. I can’t claim to be as strong as my wife, so I admit I’ve struggled with the bumps in the road, but I’m committed. Reinvention is probably not the most apt description for myself. It’s more like a re-application or focus of my goals.

Throughout my 20s my life with horses revolved around my competitive career. While the pinque coat, a dream of mine along with countless other riders, remained elusive I was able to achieve a fair amount of success producing five horses to the advanced level, several of which were named to the High Performance list. Life, however, does not always go to script.

As I’ve mentioned in some of my earlier blogs, I hit a spell in my late 20s where it seemed to be a never-ending series of injuries and setbacks to my horses and myself. As they say, “When one door closes, another one opens.”

While my career as a competitor on the international stage was somewhat in a lull, my life as an adult started to take shape. Kendra and I married, started a boarding and training operation with McQuillan Equestrian, and eventually started a family with our two beautiful daughters, Payton and Madison.

As the years went by and our business and family grew, I was able to maintain my competitive career to a degree, producing several horses through the two-star level, but my career for the most part had morphed into the managing of the barn with teaching and the training of young horses as my main areas of focus.

The fall of 2014 was a turning point in Kendra’s life and mine where we both decided to reflect on where our lives were going and what we envisioned for ourselves in the future. By this point we were up to 30 horses that were in our care and we were both working the jobs of five or six people. While our business was doing extremely well, which in the horse world is not always an easy accomplishment, at the end of the day neither one of us felt totally fulfilled.

There was little time for much else other than the barn. Were we able to better ourselves as individuals with personal goals still out there to be conquered and as a family meeting the emotional needs for each other as a married couple and as parents? The answer was no.

Change however is much easier said than done. It’s one thing as a kid in your 20s to go out and chase your dreams with stars in your eyes. It’s a whole different thing to move away from a relatively successful path as an adult with bills to pay and mouths to feed. Simply put, it’s scary. What if you fail? What if you completely made the wrong decision with others counting on you?

The thing is, I had two great role models to help lead me to my decision. My incredibly strong wife who dove in head first in her new direction in life and never looked back and my hero, my dad. While 2015 was the toughest year of my life, helping my dad as his health failed, the year did reaffirm to me the importance of living your life to the fullest without regrets. Not only did he never give in on chasing his dreams of becoming a White House correspondent, but my dad never settled for being anything other than his personal best as a human being. While he passed away way too young, his life was a full one, being well lived and well intended.

I didn’t want to look back at the end of my riding career and wonder what I could have accomplished as a competitor if I only had put my mind to it. So I took my wife’s lead and took the plunge of downsizing and reconfiguring the business to build up a string of competition horses to reach the top levels of the sport again.

I’ve reorganized my business to help focus on getting back to riding at the upper levels competitively and have some nice young horses like Bastiaan moving up the levels. Photo by Brant Gamma Photography

This year has not been without its hurdles. I am a naturally competitive person, but I spent so many years focusing more on the day-to-day process with the horses developing and nurturing a partnership with them and passing this on to their owners that I needed to relearn how to be in a competitive mindset again. As Karen O’Connor said to me earlier this year in an exasperated way, “Sean! What are you doing!? Stop being so nice! He doesn’t need a hug, he needs a kick in the butt!” She was right.

If I was to do this I needed to rebalance my mindset of the long-term process of training and being in the moment and just getting it done when it’s needed. I feel one of my greatest strengths as a rider is my sense of empathy towards the horses, as I feel I understand their perspective. They are not machines but rather living things with thoughts and emotions that give us their heart and soul.

I cherish that bond and never want to lose that quality to my riding. But I have to make sure during this process I don’t lose sight of the objective, to keep challenging myself and the horses to fulfill our potential. Growth is not always comfortable just as life is not always comfortable, but if you do your best and not shrink from the challenges, it’s always rewarding.

As the year has gone on and my confidence has grown in my commitment to this path it has shown in my competitive results. This transformation won’t happen over night but I couldn’t be happier with the place I’m in. I feel extremely fortunate to have two incredibly nice young horses in Bastiaan and Fulham who are quickly rising up the ranks of the sport as well as several exciting prospects.

I’m looking forward to bringing up my young prospects up the levels.

I know there will be bumps in the road as there always are, but I love the decision I’ve made and where I’m going, How lucky I am to have such an incredible family and group of owners and supporters who believe in me enough to allow me to believe in myself to chase my dreams. It’s never too late to have a life well lived.

Eventer Sean McQuillan started riding in Maryland at age 12 and by the time he was 20 he was eventing at the advanced level. He worked as an assistant trainer for the O’Connor Eventing Team (Va.), but also has a wide breadth of experience. He has hunted professionally with the Orange County Hounds (Va.), trained steeplechase horses and competed in the jumpers. His wife, Kendra, is an experienced eventer, groom, barn manager and saddle fitter. Together, they run McQuillan Equestrian & Kilfinnan Stables.