I built a business partly out of spite.
That's not how I described it at the time. At the time. I said all the right things about market gaps and helping women make their own money, and both of those were true. But underneath it all, somebody had underestimated me and I wanted to prove a point. So I built the thing I already knew I could win at.
And I won at it. I was confident every single day. I could get on the phone with anyone. I could teach someone else to do it. It totally worked.
But it also wasn't the business I wanted.
I knew that the whole time. I just didn't trust myself enough to build the other one. The one with horses in it. The one I couldn't explain in a single sentence at a networking event without somebody tilting their head at me like “wtf is she talking about..?”. I was confident about what I was already doing (sales). But I wasn't sure anyone would take me seriously if I started talking about what horses show us about ourselves. So I stayed where the confidence was… for years.
Confidence will haul you in the wrong direction for a very long time and feel good the whole way there. But nobody talks about that part..
What self-trust actually is
Self-trust is believing you'll figure it out way before you have any proof that you will.
Confidence is about skill. It says “I've done this before, so I can do it again”. I can write the paper. I can drive in the snow. I can get on the horse. Confidence is learnable which is the good news. You go get the skill, you do it badly for a while, and then you have it. Viola!
Self-trust is so much deeper than that… and it's quieter. It says “I don't have this skill yet. I don't know how this ends, and I still think I'll be okay”. It's betting on yourself with no receipts that it will work or not.
You can have one without the other, or both! Most of the capable women I know have a shit ton of confidence and almost zero self-trust. I'm confident I can teach a workshop, ride a horse, record a podcast. Those are skills. Trusting that I actually know what I'm talking about, that people will take me seriously, that I don't need everyone to nod their head in agreement with me before I make a move? That one's a hell of a lot harder.
Confidence answers “Can I do this?” Self-trust answers “Do I believe myself?”
What it feels like when you actually trust yourself
Years before any of that, I quit my corporate job without a plan. No soft landing, no side income already coming in, nothing lined up. I just couldn't do it anymore which is a story for another day. What I had instead of a plan was this one belief.. “I've figured out everything up to this point, so I can figure out what comes next.”
A few years later, we sold our house in Iowa, the cars, and almost everything else we owned, and decided to move across the country in an RV without knowing where we'd land. I had a 2 week old baby, 2 year old and 4 year old at the time. Oh and 2 big dogs. One with epilepsy.
I was scared the whole time. I questioned it constantly. My brain had plenty to say about it, most of it delivered at 3am in the morning. Underneath all that negative self-talk and doubt, there was something steady that wouldn't move, and it kept saying “Everything is always working out for me”.
That's what self-trust feels like from the inside. Something that won't budge while the rest of you panics.
The decisions I regret were the ‘confident’ ones, not the ones where I deeply trusted myself.
Where we learn to stop trusting ourselves
Most of us learn to stop trusting ourselves early on, in childhood. And school did an absolute thorough job at getting us to tune out our inner guide.
Raise your hand to speak. Raise your hand to use the bathroom. Ask permission to move, to talk, to eat. Wait for the grade to see how “smart” you are ranked amongst everyone else. Follow the rules, trust the adults, trust the system, trust the “experts”. And for a while that works because you're seven and the adults do know more than you at that time.
Then one day you're thirty-eight years old with four kids, a barn full of horses, all the bills that come with both, and a decision nobody can make for you. You've got twenty-some years of practice looking outside yourself for the answer and almost none looking in. So you do what you were trained to do. You go find somebody to ask… friends, family, coaches, or even ChatGPT these days.
Women get an extra layer of it. Most of us were told early who to be, when to be it, and who to be it for. Be nice. Be agreeable. Sit down and shut up. Don't take up more room than you were given. Always check first.
So then we hand our decisions to "experts," which sounds like the responsible thing to do. But the trouble with that is that an "expert" can know a lot about a subject and almost nothing about you. The nutritionist, the doctor, the podcast host, your mother in law, the algorithm. Every one of them can be right in general and wrong about your particular life.
What it looks like on a normal Tuesday
If you’ve ever done these things, then you are likely outsourcing your self-trust…
You Google the same question four different ways, hoping one of the results will say the thing you already decided.
You ask five people, and then you ask a another, because the first five didn't agree with each other.
You make a decision on Sunday and quietly unmake it or change your mind on Wednesday.
You research something for over six months instead of just doing it the first week you wanted to.
You paste your whole situation into ChatGPT or some other AI and ask it what you should do.
You feel the answer somewhere in your chest, and then you talk yourself out of it because you can't explain it in a way that would hold up in an argument or that would make sense to everyone else.
This is a (bad) habit, not a character flaw. You've been practicing it since kindergarten but now it’s time to un-learn it.
Three ways to tell how much you trust yourself
1. How often you ask other people what to do. Everybody asks. The question is whether you can move before somebody signs off, and whether one person disagreeing stops you cold.
2. How long you sit in a decision. Stalling, remaking the same choice, avoiding it because you're scared of picking wrong. That's circling, and circling feels like thinking.
3. Whether you override what you already know. You feel the pull in your chest or your gut. Then you either follow it or spend three weeks building a case against it.
If you read those and thought "well, all three," welcome. That's most of the women I meet, and most of them are smart, competent, and running something.
How a horse knows your truth before you say a word
You can look confident. You can talk yourself into feeling confident, at least on the surface. But if the inside doesn't match the outside, a horse reads it immediately.
You already know how this works, because you do it too. You've walked into a room and known something was off before anybody opened their mouth. You've sat across from a friend who said she was fine and felt in your body that she wasn't. You've had somebody walk up behind you and known who it was. That's energy. You read it all day long and you don't even count it as information.
A horse was born to do that, and does it better than any of us. Their survival depends on it. A prey animal that can't tell the difference between calm and danger, in the herd or in the person walking up with a halter, doesn't live long. So they read what's underneath, constantly, without deciding to.
That means they respond to what's actually happening, not to what you announced. You can walk in with a plan and a firm voice and a good outfit, and the horse will respond to the part of you that isn't sure. They have no reason to be polite about it and no social incentive to play along.
The research keeps catching up to what horse people have always known. Show a horse a photograph of an angry human face and its heart rate climbs faster than it does for a happy one (Smith et al., Biology Letters, 2016). Their hearts sync with ours. In one study, riders were told an umbrella was about to open in front of them, and their horses' heart rates went up right along with theirs, even though the horses had no idea an umbrella was coming (Keeling et al., The Veterinary Journal, 2009). They can also smell it. Horses sniffed sweat collected from people watching a horror movie differently than sweat from people watching a comedy (Jardat et al., Scientific Reports, 2023), and a follow-up found that the fear odor made horses more reactive and less willing to engage with the person in front of them (PLOS One, 2026).
Call it energy. Call it congruence. Call it the nervous system. The horse doesn't care what you name it and responds to it either way.
It's honest energetic feedback from something with no stake in your reputation. I've watched women learn more about themselves in five minutes with a horse than they learned in two years of asking their friends.
Do we build self-trust or remember it?
Both. We remember it first, then build from there.
Watch a two year old decide she doesn't want the applesauce. She doesn't hesitate and she doesn't take a poll. She knows exactly what she wants and she's fully prepared to make it everyone's problem. Same kid will refuse to hug the neighbor she just met, or tell you the shirt is itchy ten seconds after you've assured her it isn't. She's reporting what's true from the inside, and it has never once occurred to her that somebody else might have a better read on her own body than she does.
Then it starts getting trained out. Hug your aunt, she came all this way. You're fine, you're not even hurt. Are you sure that's what you want? Don't be so sensitive. Wait for the grade. Wait for the review. Wait for the likes. Every one of those is small, and most of them come from people who love us. Stacked up, they turn into twenty years of practice at checking with somebody before we're allowed to know something.
That's how you end up running a company and still needing three opinions before you can pick a paint color.
The cost shows up in ordinary places. Two more years in the job. A friendship you keep alive long after it started to feel like homework. The thing you didn't say at dinner. You want the horse, the trip, the empty Saturday, the different life, and you talk yourself out of it because you can't build a case for it that would hold up in front of somebody else.
So the remembering is subtraction. You already have more information than you need. What you need is fewer voices in the room and enough quiet to hear which one is yours. Fewer podcasts, fewer opinions, fewer midnight searches for permission. The answer tends to show up about ten minutes after you stop asking everybody else for it.
Then you build, the same way you'd build trust with anyone. You keep your word to yourself. Start small enough that it's boring. Pick the restaurant without asking what everyone else feels like. Say no on Tuesday and let it be uncomfortable. Make the call you've been researching for a year. It's evidence, and after enough of it you stop needing a vote.
The first thing that changes is your speed. You hear yourself sooner. Then decisions stop taking three weeks. Then you find out you can disappoint somebody and survive it. Then one day you look around at your work, your calendar, your people, your horses, and all of it is there because you chose it, and none of it is there because somebody talked you into it.
When women work with me, if they only keep one sentence, I want it to be this one.
Stop outsourcing your trust. Believe yourself the first time.
If any of this sounds like your life, there are two ways to work with me.
Workshops and retreats: See what's coming up
Private mentorship: Apply here
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