Be The Wolf

She scaled to $9 million. Then watched it disappear in three months. And she spent six months trying to rebuild the exact same broken thing. Tara Stubbins didn't plan to be a CEO. She left high school at 15 to chase rock bands across Canada. Two decades later, after managing world tours with the Rolling Stones, Lady Gaga, and Drake, she fell backwards into entrepreneurship. And she built something...

There's a version of success that looks like you're winning and feels like you're drowning. This episode is about that. Genea Barnes just returned from hiking to Everest Base Camp. She trained. She paced herself. She chose slow and steady when everyone else was sprinting. And still, at altitude, her body said no. Her oxygen dropped to 62. She got helicoptered out. But here's what she came home kno...

She sat down at a piano at seven years old and played a song she had never learned. Both hands. First try. Every adult in the room went silent. That was the moment Debby Meadows discovered what she was made of. And it was the moment other people decided what that gift was for. In this episode, Genea sits down with artist, musician, and educator Debby Meadows for a conversation about what happens w...

She did everything right. Followed every rule. Protected every job. And it cost her her friends, her freedom, and her peace. Genea Barnes grew up in a home where the rules changed without warning. So she did what made sense … she became the best rule-follower she had ever seen.  And when something threatened the structure of the rules, she controlled the people breaking them. She reported coworker...

He walked out of that meeting and thought: this is a life sentence I never agreed to. Young Han was a CFO in Silicon Valley, building the kind of startups that made people nod with respect. He had the title, the funding, the accolades. And he was quietly, deeply depressed. He didn't recognize it as depression. It just looked like going through the motions, gaining weight, losing his spark, and pre...

You said the thing. You asked for what you needed. And somehow... nobody heard you. That's not a communication problem. That's something deeper. In this episode, Genea Barnes gets radically honest about a lifetime of feeling unseen … from a music teacher who shamed her out of singing, to a sexual assault at age seven that wired her nervous system to believe that using her voice was dangerous.  She...

She didn't just lose everything. She lost everything she'd spent her whole life trying to become. Kirsten Franklin entered this world with the odds stacked. Adopted by white parents in a homogenous neighborhood in the 1970s. Neurodivergent in a world that had no framework for that. Straddling two financial realities after her parents divorced — one where money was easy, one where everything was a...

She had hundreds of books sitting in her hallway. And she still couldn't let herself be seen. Genea Barnes traveled the country photographing ghost bikes. She ran a Kickstarter. She finished the book. But when it came time to put it into the world... she couldn't do it. Not because the work wasn't good. Because being seen came with consequences she hadn't healed yet. In this episode, Genea tells t...

The worst inner demons don't start out looking like demons. Lilia Bogoeva was 12 years old when she found her first sense of control. She called it a "project." The world would later call it anorexia. And for a little while,  it actually felt like freedom. This is a conversation about how our survival strategies start out as gifts. How the restrict/explode cycle isn't a flaw in your character, it'...

She did ten years of therapy, ayahuasca ceremonies, shamanic healings, and coaching. The good feeling still kept fading. In this episode, Genea Barnes shares the quest that built Be the Wolf. Not the polished version. The real one. Growing up inside neglect, abuse, and trauma, she spent decades touching joy and losing it again. She chased every tool, every modality, every framework that promised c...

She didn't stay because she was weak. She stayed because leaving felt like throwing away everything her family sacrificed to give her. Alenka Kyslik is the daughter of Soviet immigrants who fled in the middle of the night for a better life. That story became her nervous system's operating code. Opportunity meant safety. Achievement meant survival. And saying no to either felt like a betrayal of ev...

If you want a life massively different than the one you grew up in, you're kind of f^cked. Unless you know how to dismantle the cage. Genea doesn't hold back in this one. She walks through the brutal truth most people don't want to hear: the dynamics you learned in childhood … how you got safety, love, attention, needs met … are the exact dynamics you're replicating in your business, relationships...

Peace and harmony looked like an empty apartment and a recliner. That's when he knew something was wrong. Dave Shotgun Shell spent decades chasing adrenaline … football, MMA fighting, even karaoke when his body couldn't take the hits anymore.  After multiple concussions and near-death experiences starting at age two, he subconsciously became addicted to intensity.  But when the crashes started out...

“I really want to… but I can’t.” That sentence sounds harmless. But it’s quietly shaping your entire life. In this episode, Genea Barnes tells the truth about why so many high-functioning people struggle to say what they actually want … and how fear, childhood conditioning, and survival patterns turn honesty into excuses.  This isn’t about time management or boundaries. It’s about authenticity… an...

You can't ride the middle between joy and bitterness. Rachel Martin thought she could. She thought if she just held it together, stayed grateful, did everything right, the chaos would fix itself. But the truck got repossessed. The finances were abysmal. And she kept saying "it is what it is" like it was protection, when really, it was surrender. The wake-up call came on a winter road in Minnesota...

She held his hand while he died. Genea was four years old. He was a Vietnam vet. A junkie. And the only person around who made her feel loved. Her mom was emotionally unavailable, physically abusive, and gaslighting her constantly. So this man up the street became her best friend. He gave her what her mom couldn't. Belonging. Encouragement. Safety. And then he overdosed. And she watched him die. T...

The system was designed to create destruction, and she was part of it. For nine years, Jen Mitchell Love worked as a litigation attorney. She watched families get torn apart in courtrooms. She saw kids become collateral damage. She felt the heaviness of a broken system that treated people's real lives like billable hours. And she knew something had to change. This conversation captures Jen in the...

Your no doesn't land because there’s something deeper at play. Genea spent years behind a bar, unable to say no to doing shots with customers. Come on, just one drink. Just one more. She'd start every shift saying she wasn't drinking, and end it five shots deep. Not because she wanted to drink. Because her no was laced with guilt, fear, uncertainty. Fear that they'd be upset. Guilt that their expe...

She had everything she was told would make her happy. So why did it feel like a cage? Ashley Jordan built a life that looked perfect on paper. The dream house. The marriage. The career as an activist. A life that looked enviable from the outside. The result … feeling absolutely caged on the inside. She walked away from it all. The marriage to a good man. The activist career. The friendships that c...

You might not like this one. If you're someone who does a lot for other people, buckle in. Because Genea is about to challenge the story you've been telling yourself about why you give so much.   You think it's because you care. And yes, you do care. But the capital T truth? There's something deeper. Something you're avoiding by making everyone else feel better.   Genea shares her own pattern of o...

What if the image you're projecting is “perfect,” but the identity underneath is even better? Celeste Moore teaches people how to align their external presentation with their authentic self.  But she only learned how to do this after decades of performing identities that weren't hers.  From childhood trauma to toxic relationships to living a double life, Celeste survived by becoming whoever she th...

The to-do list isn't the enemy. Your relationship with it is. You know the pattern. Spin it in your brain. It feels like 500 things. But when  you write it down. It’s only five things. And even when you finish, there's no relief. Just more tasks. More pressure. More proof that you'll never catch up.   Genea shares a story about being trapped in a closet as a child at night. Literally tied up. Wait...

What happens when you get the life everyone else wants and still feel empty? Ed Reay moved to London to live with his girlfriend. He made more money than he ever had by multiples. Business class flights to Dubai. Five star hotels for weeks. Booking spontaneous trips to Amsterdam on New Year's Day just because he could. Industry leaders asking him to speak on their stages. Clients paying premium ra...

What if joy could last … without worrying that it’ll end? You've done the work. You've built the business, shown up for the relationships, pushed yourself to grow. But there's this feeling you can't shake. Like something bad is waiting on the other side of success. Like the moment you finally relax, it's all going to fall apart. Genea calls this the upside-down pattern. It's when your nervous syst...

Success isn't supposed to feel like this. That's what Jeff Glauser kept thinking as he climbed the ladder, checked the boxes, and built the life that looked good from the outside. But inside? He was exhausted. Angry. Feeling like nothing he did was enough to “get him there.”. From latchkey kid to sports journalist to film school to corporate burnout, Jeff's story is about the cost of chasing a def...