In February, I sat under an old oak tree while a woman who’s trained horses for fifty years taught me to ask one of them what it needed.
It’s June. I’m only now telling you about it… anddd I’m a little embarrassed it took me this long.
It is not that the morning wasn’t worth writing about. It’s that I got so knotted up in what my business was supposed to become that I quietly stopped doing the thing I love most, which is, of all things, exactly this. Sitting down and telling you about the wonderful people and experiences I’m learning from in this unique little corner of the world I get to call home. I have a whole queue of these stories I’ve been sitting on for the same dumb reason.
So let me tell you what I got knotted in, because I suspect a few of you are knotted up in your own version of it. Maybe yours isn’t a business. Maybe it’s the job, the title, the house, something health related or the whole thing that looks good on paper, and the quiet wait, is this it? that shows up around 11pm. And if that’s not you today, maybe next week.
You see, I’m living my dream life today. I am. I moved to the woods, I write, create, and connect with people for a living, and half the time I’m “at a work thing” thinking, wait, THIS is my work? I’m just hanging out with people who inspire me. It’s the best. And underneath all of it hums one quiet fear: what if I built the exact life I wanted and can’t figure out how to make it pay?
I’ll come back to that. Because this time the thing that loosened it wasn’t a spreadsheet or a strategy. It was a horse. And a horse trainer named Karen Jones, who I met one chilly February morning. Let me tell you about her.
First, where I live (in case you’re new here)
I live in a unique community called Serenbe just south of Atlanta, created by . And the horses are frickin’ everywhere. You cannot walk, drive, or golf cart through this place without passing one. And I do take advantage, in the small ways. I pause and observe them. I walk up, catcall, and pet a nose, steal a kiss. I’ll pull a little grass off the ground and offer it up. But have I ever spent real time with one of them, in five-plus years? No. Gah. How did I let that happen?
(Quick note if you visit: please don’t feed the horses. Special diets, choking, a whole thing. A little grass off the ground is one matter, your apple, a carrot, oh god a granola bar is another. I’ve heard some nightmare stories. Just sharing because I would have assumed a carrot was fine.)
I’d also been hearing for years that we have this trainer. Someone very special. People say her name with a kind of respect, a little bit of awe.
So back in February I signed up for the Equine Experience. Which, full disclosure, I spent a solid while calling the eh-kwee-an experience, until I showed up that morning and everyone laughed me into correcting it. It’s ee-kwine. In non-horse-people words: an intro to horses. You get to be with them, learn about and from them, brush them, walk them around etc. Not a riding thing.
We sat under the giant oak behind the stables, the one Soul Barn calls “the Guardian,” which sounds like a lot until you sit under her and go, oh, yep, she’s the Guardian. It was me and my friend Meagan Myrick, who does the sound baths around here.
The trainer who unlearned her old way
She’s been doing this over fifty years. She’s a member of the IAABC (the animal behavior consultants, very real, very credentialed), she built her own method called Motivational Horsemanship, and the whole approach is evidence-based, the literal science of how a horse learns, sitting right next to a pile of stuff most people would file under woo (which you know I love!). If you know Sheri Salata, who I wrote about this summer, Sheri trains with Karen and calls her a “real-life horse whisperer.” So in short, we’re not dealing with an amateur.
But the credentials and blue ribbons are not what got me.
What got me is that Karen sat under that tree and told us that she used to be a completely different kind of trainer. The pushing kind. The kind who was going to make these horses the best, get the most out of them. And she did. She won the ribbons, for years. But at some point she changed. She asked herself what kind of life that was for the horse, and she went and built a whole different way of doing it.
The question she carries into every interaction with a horse now is this:
What can I do for you today?
Not what can you do for me. What can I do for you. She calls it her mantra, every single time she walks out to a horse.
The part where I see myself in a horse trainer
And I sat there under that tree with my fingers going numb in the cold, recognizing something.
Because I’m wired one way. Fifteen years in corporate software set the wiring: push, do more, be as productive as possible, get the most out of the day, the team, myself. And building this thing (Life at Play), I’ve been trying so hard to do it differently, to lead with different questions. How do I want to spend my days? What do I want to build? How can I help others? How can I share what I’ve learned? But I keep sliding back into the old wiring without noticing. How do I make this work for me? What do I get out of it? How do I make real money?
And that, it turns out, is Karen’s whole story too. She pushed the horses because that’s what she knew. That’s how you make champions, how you win the races. Until one day, what if there’s another way. And the other way meant trusting, serving, handing over some power, putting down the ego of being the best and making the most.
I catch myself slipping into the fifteen-years autopilot all the time. I imagine she still does too. But when I build it the other way, it feels more like me, and it feels better.
I spent fifteen years asking what I could get. A horse taught me what I could give.
A few things Karen taught me, because I can’t let them slip through the cracks
Brushing a horse is a moving meditation, and I did not see it coming. I thought we were going to comb mud off a large animal. Instead, Karen had us slow all the way down, get quiet, match our breath to the horse, just breathe there, and ask them, silently, what can I do for you today. Then she explained why it works.
“Our heart is maybe three quarters of a pound. A horse’s is eight to ten pounds, and the field it gives off reaches eight, ten, twelve feet. So any time you’re standing next to a horse, you can be in their heart coherence. Play with your breath, and they’ll sync to you, or you’ll sync to them.”
Science can measure some of this and is still arguing about the rest, and I am not going to pretend I know what happened in my chest. I’ll only tell you I closed my eyes, brushed my horse Harley, breathed with him, and the loud thing I usually haul around in there went quiet.
A good no is the whole game. Karen’s foundation is three words: autonomy, choice, voice. She lets a horse say no. She wants it to. Because the more a horse learns it’s allowed to refuse you, the more it chooses, on its own, to say yes. She calls it permission, not submission. I have read a hundred business and self-help books and not one of them put it that cleanly. (I’ve been trying it on my kids too, letting the no be a real no, handing them actual choice. And wouldn’t you know it, the same thing happens. Horses and small children, it turns out, are a lot more alike than I ever thought.)
The leader of the herd is never the loud one. The lead mare, the horse the whole herd follows, is not the bossy one or the pushy one. She’s the one with the wisdom, who knows where the water is and where the shelter is, and the herd opens space for her and lets her lead because she earned it, not because she demanded it. The pushy horse is just loud. The lead mare is trusted. I want to be the lead mare. Not the loud one (which, god I hope I’ve always led this way… but I’m not sure it’s the case), not the tyrant with the title, not the CEO barking from the front of the room. People see through that anyway. I’d take quietly trusted over technically in charge any day.
The day I needed it
A few weeks ago I was having one of those off days err weeks, the kind where nothing is wrong and everything feels wrong anyway. So I got up before the sun and walked into the woods to shake it loose. A white horse came over and just stood there. And instead of glancing and moving on like I always do, I stayed. I closed my eyes, I breathed with her, I felt that big old heart. And… well I cried. I dropped into a squat in the wet grass and wailed up at this gorgeous animal for a good ten minutes. Then a gust of wind tore through and shook every tree around us, and I stood and raised my hands and let it in.
I would not have known how to do that before Karen. Thank you, Karen.
(I wrote the whole story the week it happened, here, if you want the rest.)
The fear that accidentally redirected my business plan
Im going to let you in on a little something… For all of April and half of May, I got lost in what I was building. Is it a media company that does a little coaching on the side, or a coaching business with a newsletter attached? It sounds like a tiny distinction. But as the person running it, it is not. It quietly drives every decision behind the scenes.
Here’s what had happened. I’d turned on a little coaching and a couple of events, just to experiment, to see how I added value and what I could learn. And somewhere in there, without ever deciding to, I started acting like I was running a coaching business. Funnels, lead gen, the whole fifteen years in software marketing playbook switched back on. Ten steps ahead of myself before I knew it.
The whole time, something felt off, and I couldn’t tell you why. I hadn’t registered yet that I’d quietly changed my entire business model. (Writing that, I’m like, geeze, how did that happen?)
It took Greg (my husband). I was spiraling, and spiraling, and he sat me down and made me pick my head up, the thing I’m forever telling you to do, and look. There it was. Somewhere in there I’d gotten confused about what I was even building. And then he went one deeper.
“I think you’ve changed your business model out of fear. You’re realizing it’s going to take longer to build a media company that pays you what you want, and with a coaching or services business you can see exactly where the money comes from now… But that’s not what you set out to do.”
yes. I am scared shitless! Now that I’m in it, I can see the whole thing. The slow media road is the longer way to real income, and a lot freaking scarier than a tidy services business. That’s exactly why I flinched toward the safer one.
The second he said it, I knew in my gut. I want to build a lifestyle media company. And a few days later, after letting it settle in my chest, the rest came clear. The media company is the thing. The newsletter, for now, is the show. The one-on-one support and the small gatherings stay, I love them, they just live underneath, for when someone wants to go deeper with me. And they stay intimate and limited, so I can keep my focus where it belongs.
(You probably didn’t notice. There is no reason you should have. I barely did! The ship had quietly swung, and we’ve turned it back.)
And I’ll let you in on the money, because I’m always curious how other people are running theirs. Success can look a hundred different ways, and most people never show you the number, and I love that stuff. So here’s mine today. The year-end number I picked for myself in 2026 was $60k in profit, and it ticks at me as the months slide by. Here we are halfway through June and I’m sitting at $2.5k. Which is right on track. Most of it was always going to land in the back half of the year. The front half was launching and getting organized, but still, it ticks. And I’m only at $2.5k because I’m reinvesting everything I make, because the way I want to build this is with the best people, tools, and resources I can imagine. (Like the $9k AI Class I signed up for. By the way, zero regrets.)
And then I remember, and I love this, that I made the whole number up. It would be completely fine, for everyone but my ego, if I paid myself a big fat zero this year. It’s a build year, and I’m pouring everything back in. 2027 is a different conversation, but we’re not there yet, so I’m keeping my head on the present moment today. Or at least trying to.
This whole unsure season taught me more than a smooth one would have. It showed me, clear as anything, what I don’t want. I’ll probably spiral again in a few months. Building a business, it turns out, is its own quiet kind of soul learning if you do it with your eyes wide open.
And the question underneath it all flipped, the same way hers had. Away from what can I squeeze out of this, fast, and back toward what I can give. The more I lead with that, and put that energy into the world in service of someone else, the more it comes back. When I push and chase instead, I hit a wall, or it comes but it doesn’t feel good, and it just keeps attracting more of the same.
Two things before I go
First, you. Thank you for being here. It feels like a privilege to have you reading the unraveling and the rebuilding in real time. So, in the spirit of the only question worth asking: what can I do for you? If you’re stuck, or in a transition, or you just need a hand picking your head up, I’m around. If you’ve got something you’re building, or a business here you want this community to know about, tell me. Reach out. I mean it.
Second, go meet the horses. You don’t have to ride, own one, or know a single thing (see: me). The Equine Experience at Soul Barn is $150 per person, in small groups of two to six, and Karen runs it. They do it for couples, families, even corporate teams, so if you’ve got a group that needs something better than another trust-fall retreat, this could be it. While you’re there, Soul Barn also does sound baths, meditation, loft concerts, and a whole sanctuary mission for rescued horses. And Karen has a newsletter I’ve been getting for months, full of quiet, useful wisdom. Report back if you go. I want to hear what cracks open.
If you want to go deeper with me
A couple of ways, and the always-current list of everything I’m running, and what’s in the works, lives right here.
The one with a date on it: I’m hosting my first full-day event here in Serenbe at Soul Barn. The rough plan is four a year, each one a little different, each with a different guest. This first one is The Reset, June 26. One day, a small group of women, to step out of your life, build awareness and figure out what’s next. The special guest is Christina Trifero. A few seats left. When the seats are gone, they’re gone.
And yes, I’m still supporting people one-on-one. Four at a time, because four is apparently my lucky number, and because more than that and I stop writing and creating. One spot is open now, two more open in August. It starts with a free consult so we can make sure we’re a fit for each other.
Because here’s where I’ve landed. I’m stealing Karen’s mantra. It’s mine now too. Whatever I build, however the formats shift, the question underneath all of it is the same one she asks every horse. What can I do for you. So if there is ever anything, reach out and make the ask.
in your corner,
xx, Gina
And tell me in the comments, or hit reply: when did a foggy, unsure season end up handing you something you needed? I read every single one.
P.S. A quick personal update, for those of you who read my last piece and reached out: I finally booked myself an appointment at STAT Wellness and got my blood drawn last week, so in a couple weeks I’ll know more. (Yay for doing the thing. I wish I’d done it six months ago, but here we are.) Although this month I’ve been feeling much more like myself. We will see how this next week goes (as i’ll be luteal). If you’re in a season like that and quietly avoiding the appointment, let this be your nudge. Go do the thing.
