Meet Christa Rosenkranz

We recently connected with Christa Rosenkranz and have shared our conversation below.

Christa, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I grew up attending and later working at an all girls’ horseback riding summer camp, led by strong women. We were taught the skills of what it meant to truly take care of animals, ourselves and each other. Ranch work is hard work. The well being of the animals always came first. If you can do something yourself that needs doing, you do it. If you can’t or don’t know, you ask for help and you learn. You are dependent on your team because no one person can do everything on a ranch. And your teammates and the animals all depend on you too, and that responsibility is important. It is good work that feels good at the end of the day. Some days are fun. Some days are hard. Some days are exhausting. There were days full of tears, days full of laughter, other days you fall off your horse but you get back up when you are able, keep going, and I learned that life just keeps going no matter what happens,

I think one of the most important things I learned there was how to work as a team with other people, regardless of who they were or any differences you had. There was an unconditional love throughout the sisterhood of everyone who spent meaningful time at the ranch, and many of us had very different backgrounds. I try to approach the rest of the world this way. Life just seems to work better when you do the right thing and surround yourself with other people who are too. Not everything has gone my way in life but I just expect things will change as they always do, because there is no sense in sitting in the mud the rest of your life just because something bad happened. Get back on your horse. Keep going. You’ll find your way if you get up and try again.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I am a woman of many trades, but it all comes down to appreciating the beauty of the world and wanting to make it better.

My main business is massage therapy, specializing in helping people find relief from chronic pain, and I am currently branching out into equine massage therapy. I have gone to great lengths to educate myself on functional neurology and applied kinesiology techniques and have built a practice helping people with tough pain cases.

I also have a degree in Illustration and I paint watercolor pet portraits. Animals have always been such a big part of my life and the love that they bring other people so much joy as well!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

A willingness to ask for help when you need it is so important. If you’re surrounded by people who don’t help you, they aren’t on your team. Pay attention to who is actually there for you. You’ll all need each other someday. I have a few friends who really have supported me through difficult times and I don’t know what I would’ve done without them.

Gratitude is important. Its really easy to look at all the bad things in the world. But there is so much good too. Being present with that really can take you step by step though hard times.

Curiosity and a love of learning has also very much fed my career. I find that when people think they know everything is when they start to fail at what they do, because there isn’t room for growth when you think there is nothing else beyond where you are. Every time I think I am getting close to knowing as much as I can about anything I am doing, I find some other rabbit hole to go down. The world is vast and nothing is black and white. Frolic in it!

The best advice I have is to follow your dreams. YOURS. Not anyone else’s. When i was younger I was constantly compromising what I wanted with what I thought other people wanted me to do and I feel like it led me down a lot of stray paths that didn’t work out for me when I was younger and trying to find the right work environments and employment. People discouraged my dreams because they seemed impractical or not lucrative and I believed them. Now that I am in my late 30s and gave up on caring about other people’s opinions a good while back, I am largely doing what I have been talking about doing since I was a kid. I was discouraged from being an artist because it doesn’t pay well- and I have figured out how to make it work for me. I was also discouraged from working with horses because I wasn’t a great rider and they’re expensive- and I have also found a niche in equine massage. I found ways to make my life work around the things that I love. It is possible. I wish I had figured it out earlier in life but its never too late!

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

My challenge is that my life feels scattered right now. I am in a long distance relationship, I have a business I built that I can’t pick up and move, I would like to be closer to my parents, and I would also like to live in the mountains. As much as I love where I live, there are many other important things in my life that are between two and six hours away from me. So I am trying to figure out how to make my businesses more mobile. I am not sure entirely what that looks like right now, but I have figured out how to make a lot of other seemingly impossible things in my life work so I’ll just keep figuring it out as I go!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.christarosenkranz.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christarosenkranzart/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/formandfreedom
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF6WqntT-KmD7KXaXvQdFTA
• Other: https://www.formandfreedom.com/