11 - Katalin Noveczki

30 minutes reading

It's been half a year since I had to let her go. I haven’t been myself since then. Everything feels a bit… different. Harder. Emptier. While she was still here, it wasn’t easy either, especially the first year. But now that she’s gone, I just look at her photos and reminisce. Even the bad moments feel golden now; every single second with her was of high value. A massive learning experience. And now that she’s no longer here, it hurts. It hurts immensely.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have a Hungarian Vizsla and those who don’t. Those who have one know that a Vizsla is not just a dog—it’s a Vizsla. And those who don’t have one should know this too. Without delving into scientific details, while dogs generally have the intellectual capacity of a 3-year-old child, a Vizsla is said to have that of a 5-year-old. With all the advantages and disadvantages that come with it. They are extremely affectionate, almost as if they could talk, so eager are they to express their love. They snuggle, nudge your hand off the keyboard with their nose, and sneakily tuck their head under your palm, as if you had planned to pet them all along. Their curiosity knows no bounds, and their need for activity can seem insatiable (making them excellent running partners, even over long distances). In simpler terms, you need to exhaust a Vizsla. Oh, they’ll keep themselves busy if you’re unavailable, make no mistake. But you might not want to be buying a new couch every month as part of their free-time activities—or a new TV, for that matter.

Diccso Marcipan Magor “Marcika” @Szi-Benedek Photography

Yes, I’m a Vizsla person. My beloved Gyomber [Ginger], adopted through breed rescue and burdened with all the bad habits one could pick up due to neglect by their previous owner, naturally moved with me to the United States.  A tough cookie, especially in the first couple of years. Maybe the only thing I didn’t try, in my attempts to turn her into a “city Vizsla,” was a lobotomy (for her—or myself). And yes, I had to buy a new TV. Then came the tip: try this…

So, I tried it. I tried Katika’s Sunday Vizsla mass. From then on, with newly came daith, I religiously attended the fields in Szod every Sunday to watch my hopeless protégé transform into a vibrant hunting dog. I watched this boyishly-hairstyled, delicate woman in her Aigle boots and full khaki green gear stride through the grass, with the dogs hanging on her every wish. She barely spoke, communicated with hand signals, and went about her work quietly and modestly, while the dogs performed their tasks with reverence. I watched her and couldn’t believe such a thing existed.

Katalin Noveczki is November’s Attagirl. She’s a game management engineer, a canine specialist, president of the Hungarian Wirehaired Vizsla Breeders Association, head of the Hunting Dog Performance Judges Committee of MEOESz [National Association of Hungarian Dog Breeders], Golden Wreath Master Hunting Dog Trainer, Golden Wreath Master Breeder, and the heart and soul of the Csovarberki Kennel, which breeds both Short- and Wirehaired Hungarian Vizslas. A dog whisperer, dog enthusiast, and an extraordinary person. A role model. I’m bringing you her story now.

Created with love – read with delight.

Katika, welcome to the world of Attagirl!. I’m so happy you accepted my invitation.
Hi, Kami, thank you for inviting me; it’s a real pleasure.

Tell us a bit about how your extraordinary career began. Where do you come from, and what kind of family do you have?
Well, to be honest, I come from a completely average family. My life began in the 13th District of Budapest, on Gogol Street, living with my grandparents. Later, when I was in preschool, we moved to Pesterzsebet, to an apartment building. Despite this, my brother and I spent a lot of time with our grandparents, especially during school breaks when they took care of us while our parents worked.

Quite a typical setup. What was life like in Pesterzsebet? Do you remember it?
By that time, my mom wasn’t working anymore; she was the one who wanted a dog, so we got a Hungarian Vizsla. Unfortunately, the dog had a heart condition, and after spending all our money on treatments, we had to return it to the breeder. Our next dog was Gerda, a German Shepherd. I spent a lot of time with her, attending guard and protection training courses, which I enjoyed a lot. It was amazing to see how quickly she learned and how much she loved working. Then Linda, another Hungarian Vizsla, came into our lives.

An apartment building, right? Two large, active dogs in a small apartment? (Not that I wasn’t in a similar situation, living in a fifth-floor flat in Angyalföld with my Hungarian Vizsla and Wirehaired German Pointer before moving to America…)
Easily. Let me tell you, if a dog gets the mental and physical exercise it needs for its breed, the apartment becomes just a resting place for them. We regularly took both dogs to obedience school, where they got worn out, so it wasn’t a problem that we lived in an apartment building. We soon found a hunting dog school near Godollo, in Babatpuszta, led by Agoston Pomazi, where Linda could really thrive.

Did you have time left for school?
I managed, and I enjoyed studying. I did well in school. However, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. I ended up in a chemistry program in high school, which I didn’t regret. I earned some pocket money tutoring math to younger students. In the summers, I worked alongside my grandmother with pharmaceutical materials. After high school, I went to the Budapest University of Technology and Engineering to study chemical engineering, but I only spent two years there. University exams weren’t for me, so I became a chemical technician instead.

Wow, I didn’t know that about you!
Well, we’ve never talked about it. But that’s part of me, too. I worked as a chemical technician, a microbiologist, but I was still drifting. Before graduation, my family moved to Csovar, where my mom could focus more seriously on working with dogs. She didn’t really see the point in me attending university, which played a role in me letting go of it early. I started working at Vodafone, which led to a career in phone retail, eventually landing at Pannon GSM, where I spent eight years. It wasn’t truly my world, but it paid well, and that was all that mattered at the time. I was trying to find my footing.

And the dogs during this time…?
They were always there. To backtrack a bit, Linda achieved great results, winning multiple competitions. In 1994, we got our first Wirehaired Vizsla, Mano, whom I trained entirely myself. Our dog Csuzli, bred by us, won the European Cup in 2001. 

Csovarberki Csuzli

Meanwhile, my father fell ill, and my mom had to go back to work. Then, one day she left and… never came back. It was just me and my dad. My brother had long since moved out and was living his own life. Suddenly, I was responsible for taking care of my father, maintaining the house in Csovar, and looking after the dogs. Although I was already 25, that’s when I truly grew up—and very quickly.

That’s a big change, mentally and emotionally, for sure. How did it affect you?
To be honest, I didn’t have much time to dwell on my wounds. When your mom walks out on you, it can leave you with a “you’re not good enough” mentality. If I hadn’t had responsibilities, if I’d had time to wonder what I did wrong, this kind of thinking could have consumed me. But I tried to keep a clear head and look at things realistically. I already knew my mom well, and this step of hers, in a way, wasn’t unexpected. It wasn’t about me, nor did it define my father or me. But it’s also true that I didn’t have time to analyze it too much. I worked from sunup to sundown. My day began with the dogs, continued with caring for my father, then I’d head to the train station, commute to Budapest—of course, I didn’t have a car back then—and work a 12-hour shift. The upside was I didn’t have to go to work every day. I worked 15 days a month, but each was a 12-hour shift. Then back to the station, commuting home, spending time with my dad, and attending to the dogs. I worked like this for eight years at in the phone industry, and then moved on to Raiffeisen Bank.

That sounds intense, Katika. That couldn’t have been easy.
It wasn’t. But people are built from strong stuff, and you survive what life throws at you. I did too. During this time, I had dogs to train, held weekend hunting dog schools, and ran the Csovarberki Kennel. Let’s just say I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself or dwell on how hard life was. I accepted that this was my life and adapted to it.

As I listen to you, one question keeps coming to mind: how did you become a hunter? When did you become a hunter?
There are two paths to becoming a hunter. One is when hunting interests you, or you’re born into it, so you get your license as soon as you can and dive in. The other path is when hunting doesn’t interest you at all, but then you get a hunting dog, and you realize that to truly make your dog happy, you must head in that direction. You need to gain knowledge about hunting and the environment where your dog truly shines. I took the latter path when I started working with Vizslas. I taught them and their owners, but at some point, I felt the need to grow personally—I was missing something. It also bothered me that I hadn’t finished university. I had already decided I would study again, but I made it a condition for myself that I would only attend a school where I could write my thesis on the Wirehaired Hungarian Vizsla. After some searching I found a course in Gyongyos, where the conditions suited my lifestyle, and I graduated as a game management engineer. Then I continued my studies at Godollo, where I earned a master’s degree in game management engineering and a canine specialist engineer qualification at the same time. Naturally, I eventually obtained my hunting license and felt like a complete hunting dog expert. I gained a wealth of new knowledge, which I’m still grateful for today.

@Szi-Benedek Photography

Meanwhile, your usual routine continued: your dad, the dogs, commuting, work, repeat.
That’s right. It was a very stressful and packed period, but I believe it was worth it.

At this point, you were still doing what you had to do to secure income, enough to cover all your expenses, while your passion had already become an integral part of your life.
Exactly. It was becoming increasingly clear that my ultimate path lay with dogs, but I wasn’t yet in a position to fully focus on them. My father, who was at home, could fortunately help with some things and enjoyed doing so—it gave his days purpose, which was undoubtedly a positive. Initially, I didn’t dare charge for teaching; I helped anyone who needed it. But over time, I noticed people were happy to pay for the help they received from me, and that’s how my side income began. Breeding didn’t bring in much money at first. Our first litter wasn’t even registered under our name, and we weren’t experienced with selling puppies. We relied on the person who named the litter to handle things, which moved quite slowly. Later, the puppies were registered under the Csovarberki name, and things started picking up.

Tell me a bit about this breeding thing. What do we, outsiders, need to know? How should we imagine the job of a breeder? Or, put another way, how is a good Hungarian Vizsla made?
Haha, good question! In simple terms, the breeder’s goal is to ensure that the offspring inherit the best qualities characteristic of the breed from both the father’s and the mother’s lines. In the case of Vizslas, second- and third-generation close relations are permissible without any issues. Appearance is important, but the Csovarberki Kennel has always prioritized work ability and skill.

How do you select breeding candidates?
As a judge, trainer and handler, I’m fortunate to know and see the most significant Hungarian Vizslas in action, making it easy to decide which dogs I want to include in my breeding program. As for appearance, I prefer dogs that are neither too dark nor too light in color, have beautiful head shapes, and, for me, the eyes are crucial. Those iconic brown Vizsla eyes, intelligent and expressive - they are highly important to me.

How do you price your puppies?
I primarily consider market conditions, as well as the quality of the puppies, if I may say so. I hand over the puppies to new owners fully socialized, vaccinated, and with pedigree documents. I traditionally choose their names by flipping through a dictionary and selecting from words that start with the letter assigned to their litter.

How often are your puppies born?
I’m not a fan of mass production. I like my dogs to rest, and when puppies are born, I want them to be of excellent quality. I believe in one or two litters a year, which is what you can expect from the Csovarberki Kennel.

If I’m not mistaken, you also worked as a breeder professionally. What can you tell us about that?
Yes, that’s correct. I bred police dogs at the Dunakeszi Police Department at a time. It was interesting; they called me back a year after I had submitted my application. Just when I received a pay raise at Raiffeisen as a reward for my good work. I liked the Raiffeisen team; it was a good, cohesive team, but the work itself wasn’t my world. Dog breeding, now that was it—I didn’t think too much before making the switch. The work environment, though, was pretty toxic. Nothing can be perfect, right?

And that was my last job. When I left there, I became my own boss. By that time, I had already built connections through attending many competitions, the dog school was booming, breeding was going well, and I was standing on multiple solid legs, so I dared to take this big step. I could finally leave behind the “necessity is the master” mentality and live off what I was passionate about. Of course, even though all of this is work, I believe that any job for which I receive money is just that—work. And I put my heart and soul into every task, striving to provide the best quality. But it feels really good to have been doing only what I love for the past seven years, and to be my own boss.

It seems like my work is appreciated, too: in 2008 I was elected as the president of the Hungarian Wirehaired Vizsla Breeders Association, and since then I’ve been re-elected every term. It’s a great honor, and I feel it’s feedback for everything I’ve done and continue to do for the breed.

I was also elected president of the Performance Judges Committee of MEOESz, which is a big deal for me. The countless hours of work, the energy, and the time I’ve dedicated, despite all the difficulties in my personal life, has paid off, and that makes me really happy.

How much of a “man’s world” is the dog-breeding world? How much can a woman succeed in this field?
I don’t think it’s a man’s world at all! Hunting, as a sport, perhaps yes, but maybe that’s why women receive even more respect when they endure the snow, frost, mud, rain, and wind just like their male counterparts and perform just as well in hunting. As for breeding and competition, it’s completely co-ed. Women play important roles and achieve success. I believe that women’s voices have nuances that dogs can sense and distinguish, so women are able to soothe, reward, or even discipline a dog with their voice, which is crucial in dog training.

Katika, just like with the other Attagirls, your life journey hasn’t been easy. Getting where you are today was preceded by significant soul-searching, a lot of stress, unexpected situations, and tough decisions. Now you are finally where you should be, doing what you love, and you are able to give to others, to set an example. Your days are clearly not easy, the physical demands are significant, considering you spend almost all day outdoors, regardless of weather or day, including weekends and holidays. What helps you get through the difficulties, how do you gather strength and energy on a daily basis?
I always look forward to the end of the day. After each day, returning to Vac, where I’ve lived with my partner, Laci, for the past six years. Csovar is partly my home and also my workplace and if I think of it like that, the daily 20-km-commute doesn’t feel so exhausting. So, when I return from a competition, or from my part-home-part-workplace Csovar, to my full-home in Vac, after a hard day of work, nothing feels better.

I enjoy watching series, and just the other day I finished a show I’d been watching for the umpteenth time, this time with Laci, called Slow Horses, with Gary Oldman. It’s huge. I also have favorite phone games, logic games, which can completely switch off my mind when it’s racing. And I really enjoy baking and cooking, although I’m not yet a master at it. It bothers me when I’m so busy that I can’t fit in cooking for Laci and my dad. When that happens, they have to eat something from a cafeteria, and they loudly miss my cooking, which feels bad. I want to cook for them, but unfortunately it doesn’t always work out. And when I do have time for it, and they say, “It was good!” I know it was worth it.

And then there’s hunting. The way I work in harmony with my dog in nature. How we understand each other without words, how we breathe together, how our hearts beat in unison as we move toward one goal. Only those who lead a lifestyle like this themselves can truly understand it. Or when people around me care so much about the dog that they change their lifestyle for it and, say, take up hunting. People for whom what I offer brings about a complete transformation, a shift in perspective, a change in thinking. Watching this process unfold fills me with such pride and happiness, which makes me feel that it’s worth getting up early every day, worth spending my weekends outdoors, worth enduring any weather conditions or physical discomforts. At times like this I feel like the world gets just a little bit better.

@Rado Ratic

Is there anything you wanted to achieve but haven’t succeeded in yet?
At one point I really wanted to earn a doctorate, but the master's program in game management engineering, alongside my canine studies, was too much. Those two years were incredibly tough, and I realized that the sacrifice required for a PhD title wouldn’t be worth it, it wouldn't give me as much as it would take. So, I let go of that. It bothered me back then that I didn’t stick with the chemical engineering faculty, but now I have two degrees, and with that I was able to say goodbye to studying.

One of my big dreams that’s not urgent, but if I had a bucket list, it would be the only item on it: is a road trip across America. One day – but for now, there’s still a lot to do. Maybe when my days aren’t so packed, and there’s more time to spare…

How would you sum up who Katalin Noveczki is today?
I’ve learned to truly appreciate what I’ve achieved, what I have. I can genuinely celebrate even the small successes, and I take great care of everything I’ve created together with Laci and my dad. I approach every task with maximum dedication, with heart and soul, and even though I get paid for them and they appear as work in my life, they are also my passions. There’s no happier life than when you can say this. I don’t long for big things, I never chased unreachable dreams, I can honestly say that I live a very simple life, where it’s not hard to notice and appreciate everything that is good. I am happy, I’m in the right place, nature is an organic part of my life, and I believe that it has a healing power in itself. I work with animals who calm me, are predictable, and if I do my job well, they perform excellently. I think that what can be achieved today in dog-related circles, I have achieved. I have European and world champion dogs, my kennel brings me joy, and it makes me happy when I can recognize my own dogs in other people’s dogs. I wouldn’t change anything about who I am today.

Katika, thank you so much for these few hours I could spend with you. It was incredibly valuable to me. I know that I personally owe you a lot, and it's an honor to have gotten a glimpse into everything we've discussed here over the years. I'm happy that now the readers also have the chance to get to know you (a little better), and I believe that many will recognize themselves in your story on some level.
If you're right, it was already worth it. Thank you for letting me be a part of the Attagirl! movement, and I wish that more and more people recognize what their true desire is and dare to dive in and believe in themselves that they can make it happen. If I succeeded, they will too, I’m sure of it!

If you want to learn more about Katika, click the links.

LinkedIn
Facebook
Kennel Contact
Film 01
Film 02

It's been half a year since I had to let my pup, Gyomber, go. Only the memories remain, and the valuable connections she brought. Just like Katika. Thank you, my beloved Vizsla.

Gyomber @Szi-Benedek Photography

10 - Paula Hoskinson

23 minutes reading

I’ve known this woman for a few years, we previously worked together. I always admired her strength, the beauty she had and put into anything she did. The wisdom and motherly care she treated me with. I have learned and will never forget the term “fluff” she gently pushed on me whenever I lost my temper and used the… terms… taken over from my husband, man of the mill, in my office – and believe me, that office made me lose my temper multiple times a day, every single day. Then there she came, waltzed in, ginger hair and denim shirt, and my day was made. Some winter mornings she would just hop by to grab or drop a document, in her pink knitted hairband, fingerless gloves and men’s bibs, and would utter the words “can’t, I’m digging a grave”, like others say “can’t, I’m going for shopping”. She was something else.

For sure, she is one tough woman. At that time she worked cutting timber or digging graves besides being on the council of this dusty little town in Iowa, her adopted home – a real battlefield, and not only on meeting nights. She is a true pioneer woman working hard, being a devoted wife in an unusual kind of marriage often bad-mouthed by many, who also finds time to live for her passions. She is not the kind of person who ever sought the easy way out; she has always been more like the type who spoke her mind and accepted challenges, going out of her way to find the right solution to those.

I have always been attracted to people like that, I have always tried to stick around people like that, so no surprise that today, 2 years after I left that office, we are still friends. Her life has been “nothing special” for anyone else but herself, but I have always found her path courageous and a great example of following one’s heart to be happy. So, I made the decision to include her in my Attagirl!-series in 2024, booking her for the blog all the way back at the start of the year.

She is a real-life, flesh-and-blood woman, the lady next door, life-smart, with a proper compass in her heart, someone who dared to follow her instincts so that today she lives the dream she had as a little girl. Alright, not exactly that dream, she is still in Iowa; but if we give it a thought, a pretty close one Read her story and meet the lady I have always considered a mentor of mine. Paula Hoskinson, natural-born redhead standing tall (it is crazy, everyone is so tall in this country!), speaking honestly, doing whatever she starts doing at full throttle.

Created with love – read with delight.

Hey Paula, it is a huge joy to welcome you here as the Attagirl of the month of October!
Hey Kami, who would’ve thought we’d end up here together! It’s a great thing you do, Attagirl!, and I am so proud to be given the opportunity to be part of it.

The pleasure is mine, Paula. You are absolutely the right person to present to the readers.
Thank you. So, how do we start?

Well, the routine is to start with your childhood, if there were any circumstances that were outstanding and turning you into a certain direction, towards a certain dream. What were you like as a child?
Oh, my family was really stable and the members have always kept together, even to this day. I am the middle of three siblings, I have a brother 2 years older and a sister seven years younger. We grew up in an old farmhouse in the smalltown Lehigh in Iowa, at the end of a dead-end gravel road. A huge house with sucky heating, I remember that. We did not have a lot of money, but I never considered us poor. When I did not eat, it was because I would be a picky eater, and I still am, haha, but we always had enough on our table. True, we never really went on vacations, but we always had so much fun with my parents and neighbors. In the winters we would play cards or board games, together. I really had a great childhood. I did have chores, the dishes, cleaning, and what I hated most, cutting wood for heating. And it was a lot of wood cutting, believe me.

When I turned 16, I started to take jobs and contributed to family finances mainly through buying my school clothes: shirts, jeans. But it was alright and I always wore what I liked.

Sounds like you had a nice childhood.
Yeah, I did indeed. We kids all understood our roles in the family and never really rebelled against those. That’s how we could ease our parents’ burdens a little bit we did that gladly. It was a small price in exchange for the genuine good times we had together.

Was there any difficulty, anything that gave you a headache as a child?
I would say, no, but yes, there is this one thing which I think gave me a lot of headaches at a time. I was a redhead. Like a true redhead. Not an orange or dark red-haired kid but a real ginger one. Which meant I never went unnoticed. And that meant that should I have taken part in any mischief; I would definitely be the one remembered. I could never blend in. I could never remain unnoticed. Not that I was a bad kid or anything, but still. Parents, by the way, kept together back in my childhood, so on those few occasions that I was caught up in some mischief, by the time I got home my parents would already know and that would never be cool. So I did try to avoid trouble but there is only so much a kid can do…

Haha, okay, I see. So tell me, what was this ginger girl dreaming about as a teenager?
Oh boy. Well, for one, I loved being in the kitchen. Back then we did not really have cooking shows like today – today we have separate channels for food and cooking. When I was a child, there was only one show, the one with Julia Child. So when I saw her on TV, I immediately decided to have my own show in our kitchen. And my audience/director/aid was my mom. I baked, I loved baking, and acted like I was on my own show, announcing every step in the process, and it was so much fun!

I also was an avid fan of horses, I rode as much as I could, and I was dreaming about my prince on an any-color horse – I just wanted him to be a rich horse rancher in Montana. He was my dream husband. I imagined myself being with the horses all day, baking for my man, who would make it possible for me to stay home and be financially safe., in forever-love. I was dreaming about him – but I never even had a boyfriend. I never considered myself good-looking, so the confidence needed to befriend boys was missing, too.

Hah, I bet you ‘re a Yellowstone fan!
Haha, I do like that show! Waiting for the new season to come out.

A few more weeks, I guess. Mid-November. But now tell me about your life after high school. What was it you were preparing to become?
In all honesty I was not preparing to become anything special. I was looking at a future that could give me the most based on my experience and abilities. I went to business college but could only cover the finances for one year and then I had to make the hard decision to leave. After applying for a ton of office jobs in the hopes of satisfactory work hours and benefits, I took a job at a hospital in the radiology department. I was an assistant, a transcriber, who typed up X-ray reports for the doctors.

I did great. And in time I became a full-time employee as an admitting assistant . Now there I had this supervisor who took me under her wing. She saw the leader in me and made it for her mission to teach me, train me for a greater role. For whatever skills a leader would need. To understand business,  to carry myself properly, to understand whatever it takes to manage others. I ended up as the head of the admission department.

You see, this sounds to me like a real Attagirl’s story. True, you never planned to work at a hospital for a career, let alone to become the head of admissions, but you grabbed the opportunity that life threw at you and made the most out of it. That is one thing I try to show fellow women. We may not always be at the place we have imagined, but wherever we are, we must aim at making the most out of it. Learning as much as we can because we will never know when we can use that knowledge in the future. Tell me what happened afterwards.
Well, I need to clarify something, these years I had been married.

OK, well, what difference does it make? A lot of us were married in our, I would assume, 20s.
You are right, I was just another woman married in her 20s trying to build a career. But my marriage was very unhappy.

Would you mind sharing a little more about it? I am not the best person to talk about relationships, in all honesty, I have always been on the safe side, like one foot out, in every single relationship I had. I also know, though, that a stable relationship is essential in a woman’s life. Or no, let me rephrase that. Once we decide to be in a relationship, if it only takes away but does not add, it can destroy us. Me. (This is why I have been one foot out all the time, I guess, ready to flee…) So, if you don’t mind, would you tell me what the problem was?
Certainly. He was somewhat older than me. The relationship lasted ten years. Five years of courting and five years of the actual marriage. The guy was completely…for himself. Only he mattered. My will was never considered. My needs were never considered. At some point it became clear that he had been cheating, since day one. For like ten years. After finding out, I tried to be a good wife still. But then…

But then…?
Then my dad died. My dad died and it opened my eyes to the fact that life is short. Not only short but one can never know when it will end. His battling cancer made me understand that my marriage would never improve. And when he died, I made the decision to divorce. I was 27. I had been with that man for a decade and things just kept gradually getting worse. I could see the flashes of my moms, my grandmom’s eyes, I knew they knew, and when my dad died, my mission became to get out of my hopeless situation. I felt like being a single woman would be much less bad than being tied to a man in an unworthy marriage. So I filed for a divorce and moved back to my mom’s house.

I hear you, Paula. Good for you, really. So here we are, you on the highest step of the work-ladder, in your pencil skirt and high heels while extinguishing your relationship with the man who you have known intimately for ten years. What came next?
Well, not next, more like in the meantime, I had this horse. And I was looking for a place to board him. I heard about this guy who had the proper set-up for boarding horses and I approached him. At first he turned me down but then got back to me saying he changed his mind and I could use his property for my horsie. I went there as often as I could, to ride my horse and maintain him, and met the guy himself on and off. He ran a tree-cutting/grave digging business, was successful and very popular in the neighborhood. He was also in a long-term relationship with a woman living with him. I was as considerate and decent as one could be, setting any boundaries that needed to be set.

What makes me think that despite those boundaries set he became important to you?
Haha, because your antennas are sensitive…? We became friends over the horse, true. He boarded him for me, and I visited frequently, obviously. But when my divorce was decided on, I informed him and said I’d take my horse to my cousin’s, who had offered to board him in the meantime, to avoid any unpleasantness or gossip. But he said, no, you don’t have to move your horse because of that. And so I left my horse, Horizon, there. And slowly things started to change.

We started to share more and more, we had great, deep conversations. We started to open our eyes to each other. Like man-woman eyes, replacing the friend-eyes. Soon he ended his relationship which had not had much left in it to offer for them way before anything grew between us. But with the situation changing he felt the need to put an end to that part of his life.

Would it be fair to say that, in both of your lives, getting to know each other helped you get out of the relationships that had already been doomed, and you both gained clarity by meeting each other? I am asking that because I know this is a situation a lot of ending marriages face, when the ones wanting to end it are criticized, even marked as cheaters, even if no actual cheating happened. Missing to look at the ones left, who in reality have done little to work for the relationship, other than complaining and expecting the change from the one who finally left. Thus feeling betrayed and hurt.
We can say that getting to know each other did have an impact on both of our relationships, yes. With the purest intentions though, as we never planned to leave those for each other. But life happens, emotions happen, and when a relationship is not strong enough and has gaps, those gaps might be filled by the most innocent-intentioned new-coming person.

So well-said, Paula.
Thanks. Even though I never intended to drive a wedge in a relationship, I was just getting out of my terrible marriage myself, I got billed as a home-wrecker, a gold-digger. Keith, my now husband, was pretty successful in his business. And me, the little ginger, half his age, literally, had to be the evil. It was tough. Even my family was very worried about me because of the age difference. But in my family we accept each other’s decisions even if we don’t agree. And we are there for each other even if the decisions we did not agree with did not turn out well…

That must be an awful situation in a small town. How did you cope with it?
First of all Keith was very supportive. I never really got hurt by the gossiping, or the gossipers, I’d rather say I got stunned by those. I only can get hurt by people who I care about and fortunately those people care about me, too, so they would rarely hurt me on purpose. So that was that. Keith would get angry about some stuff more. So that was that. And then both of our families were very helpful and kind. Having your family around in hard times exceeds anything else when it comes to healing. And on top of it all, we worked our tails off all the time. We were on the road all the time. Either for cutting someone’s timber or digging for a funeral. The preparation, the trips, the work took our minds off of stupid little unpleasantries quickly and easily.

Did the decision to get into a relationship with the double-your-age Keith turn out well?
Yes, I’d say so, haha. We have been married ever since. My divorce was really fast as I didn’t seek anything from my ex financially. My wedding with Keith happened very fast, too. He has this wise thought, in a marriage there is growth. Either growth together, or growth apart. We have been growing together for 32 years now, and thankfully it never seems to end.

What was it that grabbed you about Keith?
Haha, oh boy. Well, he was good-looking, of course. Smart. Wise. And calm, which was a great completion to my own fiery temper. And he was funny, oh my god, he has such a great sense of humor. And then he liked horses. When we got married, we started to have a number of draft horses. And a cart for them to draw. For one of my birthdays he surprised me with two miniature donkeys. We also had quarter horses. He loved animals and so did I and this was a very important connection between us.

You got your rich horse rancher after all, right?
We can say so, haha. In Iowa, though, but I don’t mind Iowa, in all honesty.

OK, so you got married to Keith when you were like, what, 28? What came next?
Well, I decided to leave my job at the hospital and join Keith in his business. I did the admin work, but not only that. I grabbed the chainsaw and helped him out in tree cutting. I hopped in the excavator and dug graves. I did anything and everything that needed to be done for both businesses. I worked like a man. Was it tough? Hell yeah. Winter was the worst, for graves you needed to thaw the dirt first, before you could dig. That equipment was really heavy, it was such a hassle. We did not even pursue tree cutting in the winter, we did all of it in the spring-summer-fall seasons. Tough, tough work. With a lot of sacrifices. You cannot really attend your own family’s activities on the weekends when there is a funeral for someone. Like weddings, for example. Work comes first. But we were a team, the best team, understanding each other from winks of the eye. Together we could solve any issues.

Why is the past tense…?
Because we officially quit last year. For a year now we have been happy retired people.

Haha okay, so how have you spent yor past year?
We have all our time on ourselves! And no, we are not glued together. We believe in the “live and let live” principle, in personal freedom. Keith likes to spend time on our farm where he has cleared the shed, repaired the fences and cut some timber – once a tree cutter, always a tree cutter. He also tries to keep the pasture clean. We rent out that land and he loves to maintain it for the cattle raisers renting it. At the same time I have my beautiful black camper bus and I go camping either with my sister, or alone. Keith stays away, he is not a caping type bloke. I still love baking and I bake a lot of cookies for a lot of purposes. Especially in the wintertime. I get orders from friends and organizations, events. It is my true hobby and I love seeing people loving what I make.

And I sew. I love quilting. There was a time I would be on the go every weekend for shows, I was invited by small towns all over Iowa to present my dresses on my family members as models. The outfits were modeled on the Victorian era and told stories, which I would present to the audience with a mic in my hand, while my mom and cousins would be marching on the stage to give a better look at the pieces. It was fun – until it felt like an obligation. As soon as I had to do it, I stopped finding joy in it and slowly I just let it go…

That must have been very interesting, but I imagine a lot of work, too. Designing and sewing all those dresses, and then the travels… Do you have anything left on your bucket list?
I do! I have decided to learn something new every year. This is how I have already taken a yoga course, a tap-dancing course – yeah, I know it sounds crazy in Iowa but oh well, that is what I wanted, so that is what I did! I would love to buy an old pickup and fix and drive it. I also plan to take a self-defense class. It would be unwise to not notice how dangerous life has become and for a woman spending so much time on her own, going to a lot of places alone, this is the least one can do for herself. I also am planning to take a chocolatier class.

Oh, let me know when you do that, I would love to join! That’s something I myself have been wanting to learn. I am sure they have one in Des Moines. I’ll look into it.
Yeah, certainly, let’s do that together!

And then there is this council-thing…
Yeah, it adds some to my obligations and sometimes I don’t even know why I am doing it. People can be very mean and critical and when you are a council member, you are the one exposed to all that criticism. It is sad, but it is what it is. I think it is just natural, there always needs to be someone to blame. But oh well. I have one more year, I will continue doing my best to add to my town – and then it will be over.

And, finally, I have my morning walks, one hour every morning, regardless the weather…

I remember that!
Yeah, I still do it. That is my little health program, not much, but there is no way I’d miss it.

Your life seems to have had quite a few tough times where you had to expose yourself, where you had to gather courage to move on. We all have our rough paths and have developed something to balance or resolve those. What is it that has worked for you, how did you try to solve those hard situations?
I am a communicator. I do myself a favor when I try to put the pieces together and summarize the situation, it makes it easy for me to find the root cause – and through that the best solution. Talking it out helps a lot. I am lucky and grateful for having my mom and family, who will hear me out whenever I need to discuss something with them. My boss at the hospital, who took me under her wing, my mentor, we can say that, was a similarly great listener. A beautiful personal relationship evolved from this work-relationship, and we could discuss everything. Unfortunately she passed away a few years ago, a great loss of a great person. I could always rely on the advice of these people.

Paula, at the end of this conversation, tell me what your advice would be for those who are stuck in a rut and know they have a tough decision to make, maybe even know what it should be, but do not dare to take that big step just yet.
My motto is, life does not come with a book to learn from. We need to experience it all. So dare to experience. Go out, invest into that study, take that job, start that business, fight for that guy and bask in the love you create together. Visit your parents, apologize to those who you may have hurt. Life is short, it is way too short to be unhappy. Go, find happiness, grab it, hold onto it, take good care of it. Happiness is the ultimate goal, and we are not guaranteed to have a long life to enjoy it, so the sooner you find it, the better. Make the most out of it.

Thank you, Paula, for the magnificent time. Thanks for sharing these bits of your life, and the wisdom you have gained from it.
Thank you to you, Kami, for asking me, it was so much fun. I like Attagirl!, I can identify with the activity very much and I am proud that I could become part of it.

Paula has no links to share so if you would like to find out more about her and her life, please feel free to contact me.

09 - Zsoka Fekete

27 minutes reading

Fall, 2020. I am in the United States. I live here. My husband is American. (Omg, I am married!) We have a house, our own house, nice and big – the only thing bigger is our yard. It takes five hours for me to maintain it with a push mower, the only type we have at the time. Super. How happy the pups will be when we get them over here with us from Hungary. And now what…?

One rule of my current status is that I can’t work. I could drive myself to places, that is allowed, but there is no vehicle for me to drive yet. My husband uses our Silverado to commute to work. What I can do is shop online, if I really want, and when I do, hubs picks up the goods and delivers them home. The house is clean, multiple variants of meals are prepared. I have done my daily walk too. The season is way too late for gardening – maybe next year. So what is left there for me to do…? I want to hear a little Hungarian… so I take a look at what is available on TV.

I have just figured out how to transfer a few Hungarian TV channels on the biiig TV screen. I am an avid fan of the national MasterChef shows [Konyhafonok], Akos Sarkozi is my hero. Even my husband likes the show, we watch it together in the evenings when his shift allows. He is curious enough not to care about the language, he just enjoys seeing all the food and the energy of the competition. When he is interested in any detail, he asks me. But… now I want something different. Something… more Hungarian.

That is how I bump into the mini-series Wonderful Countryside [Csodas videk]. I am glued to the couch. I love shows like this, I always have, even in Hungary – but here, in the middle of the US, it is vital. I binge the full show, 10 episodes of 25 minutes each. A huge favorite is the goat farmer couple, they are young and passionate. I am interested in raising goats (and rabbits and ducks and geese and what not) myself, so I want to talk to them and get the inside-scoop on raising goats and making goat cheese. I call the guy a few days later and he says that they only teach cheese making today, no goat breeding. In fact his spouse is in Spain on some long-term study trip.

But the Mangalitsa girl. She is something else. She takes it all for me. Watching her I am in awe.

Four years have passed and she has popped into my mind from time to time. I have followed her social media, I have watched her progress. I like her being so goal-oriented, her talent, her results. No wonder that as the creator of Attagirl! I am certain about wanting to dedicate a month to her. I contact her – and she says yes. And I could not be happier.

I hope you too, will like her the way I do after reading her story. Lots of studies, sacrifices, and hard work have made her the leading Mangalitsa-figure of Hungary. Zsoka Fekete – a super pretty, super friendly lady with a huge heart and a wise approach to life despite her young age.

Created with love – read with delight.

Hello, Zsoka. I am so glad to welcome you here at Attagirl!
Same here, Kami. It is really exciting for me, thank you.

Let’s dive into it, shall we. Tell me about this Zsoka girl, who she was as a little girl, where she started from and what lead she followed.
Okay. I was born into farming and countryside life, my parents worked in agriculture. I sucked this lifestyle in with my first breath. It was natural, the norm for me. Even my grandparents were farmers and I would spend a lot of time with them. As long as I could remember I have loved animals.

In the time of privatization in Hungary my parents started their own business. They created a seed potato business, in which work was directed by my dad and accounting was covered by my mom. I started to work with rabbits at the age of 9, and by the time I turned 10, I already had 120 bunnies to decide the fate of. I kept my income in the bank after procuring feed and supplies for the operation. Then poultry joined my palette and I got my own incubator. At 11 I would use my own money to buy things I wanted, like a mountain bike – or a saddle. Because horseback riding had become my everything.

This kind of farming life was not child’s play though. I started the day at 5:30 a.m. before school, and my first thing was to supply the animals. Then I had breakfast at 7 and left for school at 7:30. After school I went home to supply the animals again, feeding, cleaning, whatever needed to be done was done – after my extracurricular activities, of course, such as music and painting or basketball and handball. Every single weekday.

Duracell-bunny, I bet you were never bored.
I was never bored and I loved everything I did. Rabbits, poultry, studying, arts and sports – my true love, however, was riding. Through my granddad I could ride a lot. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ place in the summers, whenever I could, surrounded by nature and horses. That’s where I felt in my element. Work, though, did not stop for the summer – that’s where our money came from. I hoed, weeded, did anything and everything the potato fields required. In time we became organic vegetable producers while the potato business remained conventional.

Did you have any idea about what you wanted to do for work when growing up? Usually there are two types of children coming from such hardcore agricultural background: the one that dreams of living in the city not having to see a spade or hoe ever again, and the one that could not imagine their life in any other way, without land and livestock. Which type were you?
Definitely the second, even if with a little detour. Veterinarians for me were gods. In my world, vets were put on a pedestal by farmers. And they were my idols, as a child I wanted to become one myself. So, I stepped on that path.

How?
I was admitted by the Agricultural Secondary School in Pallag, and I went for agriculture as well as horse breeding specializations.  I could ride here for free, in exchange I volunteered to maintain horses, clean stalls, and build courses for show jumping competitions. And I was soooo proud of myself! Besides, I entered every single study competition I could. One of my contest essays written about Kincsem [a world-famous Hungarian racehorse winning all her races] and horse racing got a special award. And another one I wrote about organic farming won me the top award for the contest, which was beyond comprehension. I was the best. Me, the horse-loving, vet-wannabe little girl who I considered myself to be. Oh my god, how could they choose me?

It's amazing how many things you had the energy and patience for.
And that was not all. I had one more big project. At 15 my dad brought home a German Shepherd for me. The only thing my poultry yard was missing, right? It was a mischievous dog, extremely undisciplined. It caused so much damage that my parents wanted to get rid of him, but I said no, that I’d discipline him myself. And I did. I took him for training classes, spent a lot of time with him which was productive. German Shepherds are highly intelligent and he learned fast and with pleasure. And then he got stolen…

Oh, I was not expecting that ending. I am so sorry.
It was bad, I missed him badly, but there was nothing I could do. Life had to go on. School and the usual activities, and even more work in the summers. In the mornings I worked on poultry and cattle farms and at riding schools. I wanted to show everyone how well I was getting along on my own. By lunchtime I’d be home cooking lunch, which I enjoyed just as much as anything else I did, and the family ate together.

After the meal I’d have a short nap - and then leave for the potato lands to dig and hoe a little. Until my junior year I was preparing to become a vet, but after winning that study contest things shifted in me. Upon finishing secondary school, I landed in Budapest, to study for being a food engineer. In the meantime, I had also applied for a farming apprentice opportunity, which I was granted even though my English was lacking in every other area than the language of riding. So, I put my not-even-started-yet university studies on hold as I found myself in England working for this super-hip elite racing club.

Sounds exciting, like heaven for someone who loves horses!
Everything about the experience was unbelievable, the professionalism I witnessed there, I could not help but wonder how I got there, how it was me they chose to go there.

Riding there was tough, I was practicing with professionals from India. 12 hours a day, riding, and I was the only girl. I only had the chance to call home once a week, and I enjoyed this kind of freedom and self-reliance. As it was a job, I got paid, and a pretty good money. However, all the lifting, carrying, and hardcore riding took a toll on my back, resulting in chronic pain that had no time to heal and for that reason I had to say goodbye to that club.

I transferred to another club to work with a Hungarian girl and that place was more laid-back, and I had the chance to properly heal. I spent half a year there before I started my university studies back in Budapest – but I returned in the summers. To speed up the story a little bit, I spent some time in the Netherlands through Erasmus and eventually I finished my university studies with two degrees, food engineering and professional translating in the food industry.

And then I hit a plateau.

You did not know what to do next? You got two great degrees and had no clue where to continue?
Exactly. On the one hand I had the pressure to go home and join my parents’ business. Potato, veggies, hoe, farmers’ market. I could choose that any time, I wanted to look around first. See more of what was out in the wider world. I enjoyed studying, I wanted to develop myself a little more. So I started to look into farming apprenticeship programs again and I landed in Denmark, on the organic farm of the Folk High School. They advertised a promising cooking course that enticed me.

Because Zsoka still likes cooking.
Yup. Now this was a completely enchanted world not even remotely reminding of a college, or any teaching organization. You had all kinds of arts here: painting, ceramics, music. It was quite a free-spirited school that taught you complete self-reliance. And then there came the horses, which somehow always happen to find me. Two horses were brought on the vast campus site that needed to be fed, cleaned, and ridden. What can I say, I was happy to volunteer for the work! I spent five months in this dream world.

Upon arrival back to Budapest, though, I still did not wish to farm full time, so I started studying again. My training this time was in equestrian culture at the Hungarian University of Sports Science. I worked at Diageo in the daytime. On the weekends, of course, I helped my parents in their business. Which, in the meantime, was extended with a farmhouse, an old dream of my mom’s, which served as the new location for trainings, seminars, shows, and other events. I used to travel so much those days. My home base was Budapest and I was religiously driving back to my hometown, Hajduboszormeny. What was surprising, though, was the schedule of my weekdays. Like I did not need to wake up early. There were no animals to feed or stalls to clean. What a way to live! I was amazed at 26.

New life, huh?
Seemed pretty much so, yet no. In 2010 I entered the Young Farmer contest in which I marked livestock breeding, too, with the thought that the by-products of vegetable farming would form a great base for animal feed. In 2012 a super opportunity came from the National Society of Mangalitsa Breeders. My parents were planning to get a small Mangalitsa stock of 10 sows and a hog for me to enter a Young Farmer Contest. The society offered a stock of 20 sows for sale in Vas County due to a farmer’s retirement. My mom called me with the news – alright, time to hop in the car and go home.

Out of blind luck my parents had been able to purchase a hog farming facility around that time equipped to some level. So, we went to pick up the sows and deliver them to this new facility. Within a week all 20 of them farrowed. Man, all of a sudden, we were facing a stock of 50 animals out of basically nothing a week before. We were just standing there thinking, now what. What have we undertaken?

There is this wisdom that no challenge is sent in our path that we are unable to overcome…
Back in the day it was pretty hard to believe, but my story of course has proven me wrong. This setup meant much more than driving home on Friday nights and driving back on Monday mornings. There was all the newness, the excitement, and the doubts, the situation could not be managed from Budapest. So, after a few months I said goodbye to the capital, and Diageo, and settled back into my hometown.

All of a sudden it was not my parents’ business that I worked for anymore, it was my very own, me being a young farmer. Their help, however, was essential in starting. With my mom’s proposal writing practice we were able to extend our facility. We designed many extensions of the facility based on the expertise of my grandad. My dad’s vegetable farming knowledge was extremely helpful in feeding the Mangalitsas. And  my grandma’s product specifications and her farmers’ marketing experience for our sales was much needed. It was teamwork, a real family activity. It looked really promising.

Looking at it today I am confident to say it did work. Tell me a little about your life today.
It may not be surprising if I say it has not been any less busy than it was when I was a child. Currently I work with 250-300 animals. Raising, breeding, processing, sales – all are my duties, or at least it is my responsibility to ensure the smooth operation of them - obviously, I cannot be everywhere at the same time. Getting up early is an organic part of my life even today, those few months in Budapest were the only extraordinary ones when it was not necessary.

Besides selling at farmers’ markets I have a lot of requests for attending festivals, fairs, various kinds of events, where I show my goods which often are awarded with some kind of a title. That kind of feedback allows me to understand that what I do is good, and my products are of high quality indeed. It shows there is real demand for them and that my clients are grateful for me to satisfy that demand.

We tend to live our days robotically, just do what we do, and then there comes an invitation to an event or a nomination or the winning of an award and that is when I realize that my passion holds value and wins the highest rewards. That is when the cleaver stops in my hand for a second and my heart bursts with happiness. My childhood experience, waking up early, the endless work, the endless studies, looking around in the world were all so worth it – pouring all that knowledge now into my Mangalitsa Farm together with the love inside me the end result is something that people just love. What else is there to do it all for?

So finally, everything has jumped to place in your head and heart.
Yes. And no. I have always been searching, I have not settled down yet for good, I have always been brainstorming and wondering about the future. I do not plan major, organic changes. But I do always plan changes, modifications. That is how business works for others, too, I guess. Always seeking ways to do it better, to serve more, to give something new. That is how it is with me for sure.

You want to share some details about tis, maybe?
I have been working on a big project recently, but I can’t say too much about it just yet, out of superstition as well as keeping it a secret for business reasons. If… when it happens, it will be cool, I can promise that. Well, okay, let’s just say that I have this big dream of designing new premium products which I’d love to market outside Hungary, too. That is what keeps me busy these days, it is a very exciting and interesting challenge.

From the bottom of my heart I hope you can make that dream happen! Obviously, a new project always requires focused attention and involves stress. We have found out so much about your crazy level of energy, your non-stop activity, how do you stay healthy and not go nuts?
It is good stress, but still stress. We do need to pay attention to that in ourselves, no doubt. I have specifically started to feel this in recent years. When we are young, we just go and do it. If we are basically healthy and strong, it is hard to imagine we can be defeated.

Of course, if one moves 50-kg bales in a super riding club, like I was in England, then back pain is unavoidable, and horseback riding can be dangerous in itself. I myself fell off the horse a few times so bad that I was not sure I’d ever be able to move again. After months of hospitalization I did get up and back on that horse eventually. Today I would not be able to do that; saying this now I am injured after lifting totes stuffed with Mangalitsa meat like half a year ago and my hips got cracked. As a result of which my legs are… off. I tried to have a rest in the summer, I did a lot of exercising, and they did improve some but I am far from where I used to be. And of course it is worrisome. Time will not spare me either, I can’t afford to not pay attention and be a lot more careful.

During this enforced rest I had the chance to think a lot. That was the first time it occurred to me what if I wasn’t able to continue. My parents are old now, they can’t really help anymore. My grandparents died a time ago which in itself is painful, but it also means that practically I am alone in business, with all the physical and mental challenges it brings. Of course, I have a mini team who helps me whenever that is needed but… what happens if something happens to me?

So is this your big fear?
You could say that. There is nothing without health. We need to admit that. Everyone needs to admit that, whatever it is they do in life. Health is square one where everything starts from. We must strive to preserve it at any price. Even I must.

How demanding are your invitations to the various events?
They are definitely physically demanding. The travels, presenting the products, even simple farmer’s market appearances. To be on your feet from sunup to sundown, for days, it is not easy, I am exhausted every night. Since 2014 this line of my work has become pretty relevant, with all the speaking gigs and all. On the other hand, it’s the way I can meet many people, that I am able to have personal contact with my clients, which is really important to me. To see the joy on their faces when they are enjoying the taste of my little bites with eyes closed, that means the world to me.

Besides health risks, what do you find tough in your world?
I am going to be a hundred percent honest here, my lifestyle is tough on personal relationships. I get it, it is not easy to adapt to a woman who manages her own business, especially one reliant on hard physical work – and livestock raising and breeding is exactly like that. It is non-stop responsibility and activity, and someone is either able to accept it or the relationship won’t last.

Another thing, one that can really impact my mood, is when a problem comes up that I cannot find a solution to. Of course, in the end it will come, but till it does, I find myself in a gloomy mood, I get sad, and even panic a little bit. Yes, of course I can panic, too. Then one nice day the enlightenment comes bringing along the answer and the relief – but in the meantime I can have some pretty bad days. There is no other remedy than the answer itself, a nice hot bath won’t ease my anxiety.

How do you relax after a hard day… every day, in your case?
To be fully honest I never really thought it was important to relax, there has not really been a break for 38 years. There are maybe two weeks, tops, that I can take off in a year. I have already mentioned the importance of health and for that mental relaxation is essential, so I have started doing that recently.

The thing that helps is riding my dirt bike. I like to exhaust myself with intense riding in nature – when I go all in, then I can actually rest after such a adrenaline-filled ride. I also like reading, during my forced rest I reached again for my books. I enjoy self-help and psychological pieces.. And in the winter I always find time for a good sauna. It rejuvenates my body and soul, recharges me. I love it.

Continue doing that so that we can enjoy your Hungarikum-products which, let’s share with the readers, completely satisfy the requirements of a ketogenic diet with their high fat content, regardless of which product we choose. What is there to know about Mangalitsa?
True, Mangalitsa is a perfect choice for a ketogenic lifestyle. A 160-kg animal consists of around 40 kg of meat, 30-60 kg of fat and the rest is bone, which is great for making bone broth, a nice, fatty-collagenic cooking base. Based on current science fat is not the enemy, it is not what turns into body fat (that is excess carbs unprocessed by the body). And Mangalitsa fat is high in Omega 3 fatty acids, which is the best kind of fat for our bodies.

Ketogenic lovers, go for Mangalitsa! And anyone who seeks a healthy kind of fat for cooking or ultra-tasty meat products. Zsoka, how could you summarize everything you have gone through in your 38 exciting, action-packed years? How could you cheer those who cannot decide yet which way to move, only feeling they should move somewhere as being where they are now is not the right place for them?
Listen to your heart, no matter what. Give a chance to everything that interests you. Figure out what your real passion is – that is half the way to success. Seek ways to turn that passion into an income. With perseverance, diligence, and dedication we can create anything if we are able to believe in ourselves.

Thank you for the great conversation, Zsoka. I wish you the best of the best, I wish for your dreams to come true. But I know you will make them come true, like you have always done
Thank you so much, Kami. It was a pleasure to be here and share. I’ve enjoyed being a bit nostalgic and revisiting those memories for myself. Which, honestly, come to my mind only rarely with how much I’m always running around. It was refreshing to have a little rest as an Attagirl! in your haven. Thank you again.

If you would like to know more about Zsoka, click on the links.

LinkedIn
Weboldal
Instagram
Facebook
Csodés vidék

08 - Leigh Coates

43 minutes reading

I remember the first time I ever flew. It was a 50-minute trip from Budapest to Prague when I was still in elementary school. Meaning the 1980’s. A memorable trip, because the little plane got into stormy weather and fell 8 meters. Which was basically a hiccup – I feel that hiccup every time I drive on Iowa’s roads. But up there in the air it was enough for the stewardess to trip and throw her tray of these little cognac cherry bonbons in the air. And I, as a resourceful Hungarian kid, spent the minutes afterwards picking up as many bonbons as I could while others were busy screaming and holding onto their seats.

Later I dreamed about becoming a stewardess myself to be able to see some of the world, which would’ve been impossible on my own budget. But while I was dreaming about it, I grew too old, there is not any nicer way to say it, so I had to let it go.

Thanks to Covid and the extremely long trips between Iowa and Budapest, today I don’t even want to think about commercial flying. The last time I flew was in November, 2020, and even if there are a few things for me to still settle in my mother country, I have not been able to convince myself to get on a plane to fly there ever since. Maybe later. 

This lady, however, the one I am about to introduce you, well, she is just the opposite. She spends every minute she can up in the air. Mind you, she has her own vehicle to do that, a beautiful, Christmas decoration-like chopper she is in total control of when flying it. It is just her, the copter, the scenery and the weather. Even our dates for the interview were – this is hilarious – selected based on the weather. The rainier the conditions forecasted, the bigger the chance for a lengthy phone call.

She is a superhero, a completely unique creature, a lover of aircrafts, with a life she established for herself full of excitement and adventure – a little blonde bomb of energy, peace, joy and a huge-huge heart for flying, nature, and her sweetheart, partner in crime, Mike.

Meet Leigh Coates, the Attagirl for the month of August, and have a little taste of freedom as she understands it. I promise when you stop reading, you will feel the adrenaline and the desire to look up at least a few things she talks about here.

Created with love – read with delight.

Hello Leigh. Welcome to be Attagirl, I am thrilled to have you here.
Thank you, Kami, my pleasure to be here. Where do we start?

Well, Attagirls are usually asked to talk about their childhood first, their circumstances, which I believe has a huge impact, one way or another, on the direction we take when dipping toes into independent decision making. So tell me about who you were as a little girl.
OK, well the story really needs to start with my parents. My mom was adopted and was raised in a loving but very poor and deeply religious family whose motto was the Lord will provide. In search of alternative schooling, which was all the rage back in the 1960’s, they sent her to a boarding school in Mexico when she was 14. While the people running the school had good intentions, they had an extremely strict regime, and became more like a cult, or a commune, rather than a school.

My father, who came from a more affluent family, landed in the same school at 18 years old, after going AWOL during the Vietnam war. Young Beth and Bob were immediately drawn to each other and as the institute was strictly against any kind of fraternization:  no dating, kissing or even holding hands out of matrimony, they chose to get married at a very young age. I was born soon after, as the school also had a strict rule against the usage of birth control. My Mom was a bit of a rebel and shared with me that once she learned of it, she actually smuggled birth control in for her and the other ladies. But anyway, you can see how it was more of a commune, and hence I was essentially a product of that. They were living in a primitive camp outside of Ensenada at the time of my birth. 

Oh wow! Not a usual story.
No, not usual at all. In this commune you had to figure out on your own how to live, you were forced to be sort of self-reliant, live off the land, milk the goats, collect fresh water, etc. – learn to survive. It was a camp-style gypsy life, and the school moved often. Mostly around different places in Baja, but also Belize, where my little brother was born; Guatemala and we even lived on a tugboat in the Sea of Cortez.

So that is how it all began, with my parents parenting two children while they were hardly grown themselves, in a strict commune, trying to figure out life for themselves, moving all the time.

Seems like no deep roots were grown anywhere in your early life.
Exactly. When I was 3, my parents decided to move back to the States. My brother was born with hydrocephalus and needed better medical care, so we settled down in Maryland, where my mother’s parents lived. Another alternative type of living situation, in fact the community was called The School of Living. I remember going to community yoga classes with my mom and making peanut butter in the community mill. This is also where my dad learned his trade as an arborist while working with one of the community members there, a wonderful man named Bill Anneker, who had an off-grid round yurt-type home with an indoor bean bag swing and super thick, soft carpet. I would stand on his hands, acro yoga style, and he taught me how to do somersaults and cartwheels. His wife, Margret, read us books and fed us warm soup. Wonderful people and wonderful memories. But again, my folks needed to find better medical help for my little brother and for financial reasons moved us all to Southern California where my dad’s parents lived. I was 5. 

Quite a move, from East Coast to West Coast.
All I remember really is the airplane ride. I got to sit by the window and was in awe of looking down at the beautiful puffy white clouds. It was magical and must have planted the seed for my love of clouds and love of flying.

But anyway, California was the first of what felt like real life and witnessing real life challenges. We weren’t in the La La Land of alternative community living anymore. The struggles were real, and this is when my parents decided to divorce. My Mom moved next door into a small basement apartment and my Dad stayed in the small rented house. At first it was really no big deal to my 5-year-old self. I walked across the street to school each day, and after school I’d either go to Mom’s or Dad’s… didn’t matter, because they were next door to each other and across the street from school. Remember that at this point my Mom didn’t have any real world experience. She’d been in Mexico from the age of 14 and had never had a job, never driven a car, and really had no mentors or friends or family nearby to help with advice or guidance. So with our best interest in mind, and figuring we’d all live close for years to come, she had given my Dad legal custody of me and my little brother. She hadn’t considered that my Dad would meet up with his high school sweetheart, get married, and move us all off to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was devastated.

Oh no!
As was I. I missed her desperately, but also wanted to embrace my new family unit. I had a new Stepmom, and stepsister who was my age, and we started school in a new place together. This new family started off well. We didn’t have a television, and we ate dinner together every evening and played cards and board games and other fun creative games like scavenger hunts. Things were good, but not for long… soon there was tension in my parents’ relationship and lots of fighting. They gave up their no-TV policy and Dad and Stepmom would eat and watch TV during dinner while us kids ate in the dining room by ourselves. We had some very strict rules and if we didn’t obey we went to bed without dinner.

What??
Yup, I believe she had good intentions and did her best to navigate running a blended family, but my Stepmother had some interesting ways of disciplining. Bedtime was 7 pm, and if we hadn’t had a bath, cleaned our room and washed/dried our hair by 5 pm, we were sent to bed without dinner. My stepsister and I actually kept dry dog food in our bunk bed as we went to bed hungry so often. One of the crazier ones that I can remember was when she kept us home from school one day and fed us candy for each meal until we threw up. This was the punishment for accepting a piece of candy from a school friend earlier…

I am so sorry, Leigh.
Naw, no family is perfect, and honestly I’m just sharing some of the things that stand out in my memory. There were some good times too. Fishing and camping and road trips and visiting the Grandparents: lots of love and learning and growing in there too.

But I definitely lived for my summers when I got to go visit my Mom in Southern California. I’m so proud of her and how she was able to pick up the pieces and find the strength to reinvent herself after losing everything she knew, divorce and losing her kids. She had put together an embellished resume and landed a job as a secretary at JPL [Jet Propulsion Labs], a very cool, hip, new school company that contracted with NASA. She was actually the first secretary to have an office computer! This was a big deal back in the 1970’s. And she found community in the new age of disco dancing.

Summers with her were magical. She saved every penny she could to buy our plane tickets and make them possible and figured out so many ways to have fun on a very tight budget. I loved playing in the kitchen with her: baking, licking the spoon, cleaning up the mess, even scrubbing the floor was super fun. We’d spray water and soap everywhere and get on our hands and knees with 4 sponges… hahaha, who knew housework could be so much fun?! She taught me to make bread and how to sew and we went roller skating, disco dancing and we even went horseback riding, my favorite! Magical times, those summers.

Then I’d head back to Santa Fe for the school year and hang on to those summer memories as long as I could.

Santa Fe was interesting as an elementary and junior high school age kid. In a predominantly Hispanic community, I was the little white girl; so shy, quiet, and meek. I never got beaten up, but I sure worried about it as a real possibility. I kept to myself as much as possible. And I lived for my summers with Mom.

I can imagine.
I had always wanted to live with my Mom, but it seemed like a fairy tale that would never come true. And then when my Mom met my Stepdad in1986 – a super kind man, very resourceful and ready to take on the custody battle. My life changed drastically. It wasn’t easy on any of us, but we won, I packed up and moved to Southern California.

[Leigh audibly tears up when she talks about what comes next.] I remember distinctly when my Stepdad sat me down and said: you can be whatever, whoever you want. You can even change your name if you want. I think he meant my last name, but I took it to heart and decided to leave my shy, meek, quiet and lonely self behind and embrace my strong, powerful, confident inner self. That’s when my nickname, Leigh [sounding like Lee] came to life. Emily was my birth name and everyone shortened it to Em, Emma, Emmy, or M&M, all of which felt cute, and small, meek and maybe a little too feminine. I wanted to be strong and powerful, and when someone called me Lee one day, short for Emma Lee, I liked it, and it stuck. I experimented with spelling for a while: Ly, Lei, Lee, until I stumbled upon the actress from Gone with the Wind, Vivien Leigh, and there it was: Leigh was the new me! It was short, strong and powerful, just as I wanted, more fitting for the strong, confident young woman I was becoming.

This new family unit was full of love and possibilities. Mom, Stepdad, my brother and a new stepbrother my age. I was 15 and felt like the door to the world was now open to me. I became curious and tried everything. I took dance classes, got a mountain bike, went hiking, swimming, jumped off the bridge into the lake – so many new experiences and I was loving it! Financially we were still very poor, but being very resourceful, my Stepdad was a private pilot and one day said: Let’s go for a flight!

Why do I feel that this is an important moment…? What have your eyes got open to?
Freedom. Wow, total and utter FREEDOM! It was magical to pull the yoke back and slowly climb and look down at the little houses getting smaller and to see the little cars on the freeway, stuck in traffic, and I was above it all! Freedom, it was liberating! It felt like having a superpower, like Superwoman. Then and there I knew it was for me. I knew I had to do it.

So that was decided for you at a pretty early age, huh? To fly?
Yes. I got bitten by the bug, had to do it. I worked at least three jobs while in high school and saved every penny for flight lessons. It was not easy and took me 3 years just to get my private pilot certificate. I flew out of Camarillo and Van Nuys, one of the busiest general aviation airports in the country. My Dad back in Santa Fe was inspired to see my aviation journey and when I graduated high school, he offered to help me finish by matching every future dollar I spent on flight lessons. He was recently divorced and in hopes of mending our relationship, I moved back to Santa Fe and continued my training. I got my private ASEL [a license for airplanes with single engines landing only on land] and then started on my instrument training, but then…

Oh my god, but then???
… I got a bit sidetracked. Haha, I was waiting tables at the Royal Buck Restaurant, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the owners also had a ski shop… So one of the perks of the job was free snowboard rentals. I met a great crew of snowboard instructors who saw me struggling to figure it out and took me under their wing.

I loved it! I ended up snowboarding every single day and spending all my money on lift tickets until I got offered a job as an instructor. I was like sure, I can barely get off the lift without falling over, but free season pass, yes please, sign me up!

Santa Fe Ski Basin was a great place to learn, but I wanted more. I kept seeing Breckenridge Colorado in the Snowboarding mags, so I packed up and drove there. Stood outside the post office and asked every single person who walked by if they knew of a room for rent. It was about 100 people before one lady looked at me and said, Actually, yes! I have a small room, no furniture, no window, but it’s right by the ski lifts and you can rent it for the winter. I took a ridiculously bad job in a cafeteria at the top of Peak 9, for my season pass, and survived on free happy hour food using my fake ID. I think I was 19 at the time… haha, good times! When the season was over, a good friend and I decided to chase the snow to the southern hemisphere. New Zealand! I had just enough money to buy a plane ticket plus $1,500 that converted to $3,000 kiwi dollars – just enough to buy a season pass to Coronet Peak and the Remarkables out of Queenstown. Those were some cool days and I made some amazing lifelong friends. I did two seasons in Breckenridge, 4 seasons in Queenstown, and I planted roots in Squaw Valley, Lake Tahoe for 10 years. I got sponsored, went pro and ended up traveling and racing boardercross. Really, really good years.

Oh, fun! But what happened to flying? It became unimportant, too?
Life had taken a different turn. I completely forgot about flying. It was all about snowboarding. 

You never wanted to lead a conventional life, go to college, have a job, anything like that?
I actually don’t even think I knew what a conventional life was. Nobody in my family had gone to college and I really didn’t understand that it could be a possibility or how to go about doing it. Let alone paying for it. My Dad is a tree trimmer, my Mom a secretary, my Stepdad a handy man.

But yes, I did almost go that route. In my senior year of high school my best friend and I had talked about moving to San Diego and going to Mesa, the Junior College there… probably because there were cute surfer boys who went there, haha! But that was one of those crossroad moments, a single moment that changed the course of my life.

May I ask what it was?
Trigger warning, but here’s my Me Too Story! We went to San Diego to tour the school and find housing. Somehow I ended up alone with one of the potential future roommates and when I turned down his advances, he tried to force himself. It was terrifying but I was able to get away and ran down the beach. I screamed as he attacked me and threw me to the ground, held me by the neck and ripped at my clothes. Luckily someone on a bicycle heard me and started yelling and I was just barely able to get away. It was a violent attack and definitely made me more aware and wearier of my safety and surroundings. Also one of the most challenging times of my life was pressing charges and looking at his pleading sorrowful innocent looking face in court. But learning from his other roommates that many a girl had come back from a walk with him looking disheveled and out of sorts gave me the strength I needed to prosecute.

Oh my, I am so sorry to hear this. Thank you, it was an awful experience, but it made me stronger as a person and it also helped pivot my path to go back to New Mexico to take my Dad up on the offer to finish my private pilot rating. And that’s where I found snowboarding. So, in retrospect, I’m grateful. I wouldn’t be who and where I am today without that experience and who knows how many more women he would have raped if I hadn’t helped put him in jail.

So, Lake Tahoe, pro snowboarder, travelling.
Yesss, wonderful time of my life! I love that place, the people, the joy of being outside in the elements and the physicality of honing my sport and going to so many amazing places: Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, all over the States. I would have kept going, but I had an accident.

You had a bad fall?
Lots of falls and injuries from snowboarding, but the one that ended my career was actually a car accident, a hit-and-run. We were road tripping home from a contest in Big Bear, headed back to Tahoe and parked in a parking lot in Apple Valley. I was grabbing my wallet from the trunk of our car and a drunk/drugged driver backed into me, pinning me between the two cars. I couldn’t believe what was happening and all I could do was scream and bang on the car with my hand to get her to stop reversing. Only one leg was caught, and I remember just flexing my leg as hard as I could to try to protect my knee. She finally realized she had hit something and drove forward. She actually got out of the car and looked at me as I fell to the ground with horror on her face, like “what have I done?!” and then her passenger yelled at her to get back in and they drove off. A witness tried to chase them but the passenger waved a gun, so he gave up. He came to tell me at the hospital, what a nice guy. The crazy thing is they had no license plate; it was a beaten-up old Chevy Chevette, totally not street-legal, but there they were, high as a kite and driving. The police also came to the hospital and said that the security cameras in the parking lot were not operational. Hit-and-run – and they were never found. Another life changing moment for me, a Y in the road.

Wow, Leigh, in all honesty luck does not seem to have been a good friend to you!
That one was tough. I had 3 broken bones and 2 torn ligaments and had to wait over a month for the bones to heal before the first surgery for the ACL. I moved home to my Mom and Stepdad’s place to rehab and heal. I felt all my dreams slipping away and was feeling quite lost in life. I remember hobbling into the pharmacy on my crutches, feeling quite sorry for myself, when I looked over and saw a girl my age, also on crutches, but missing her leg from the knee down. It struck me immediately, almost took my breath away, like a slap in the face, and I realized I was not unlucky, but in fact I was lucky! I was involved in a traumatic accident, yet I was fine! I still had all my limbs, I had people who loved me, who took care of me, I had had an amazing career and I still had a whole healthy life full of possibilities in front of me. That really was the moment when I found gratitude. I am not a victim but a victor.

Life is funny, huh? Some seemingly minor moments are able to make a 180-degree turn in our thinking!
So true! That was an important, seemingly minor yet such a profound moment in my life. Back in Lake Tahoe I still did some recreation snowboarding for a couple of years and had another surgery, but my knee was never the same and just too much pain, and I knew I’d never be able to snowboard like I used to. So I said goodbye to my dreams of snowboarding in the Olympics.

A serious rerouting was needed, I guess.
Yes, I just didn’t know what that was. Until a friend who had moved to Hawaii mentioned that she was looking for a roommate. Boom! I had never been to the Big Island, but immediately knew it was the right place for me, so I packed up and moved across the Pacific Ocean.

Aww, Hawaii is a bucket list item of mine!
It’s a magical place, you would love it! I moved into this beautiful house, with a beautiful view of the Kona coast, most amazing sunsets ever, warm tropical breezes, smells of plumeria flower leis… just pure lovely Hawaiian dreaminess. One night we had a bunch of people over for a housewarming party. I was talking to one of my roommate’s friends, a super cool looking guy with tattoos and a goatee and when he told me he was a helicopter pilot, I was like wow! I used to be a pilot, I mean I have my private ASEL but haven’t flown in over a decade. He then came clean and told me he was a student helicopter pilot. I hadn’t even thought about flying again. In my mind ,that ship had sailed. But right there, in that moment, a fire was lit. He told me about the helicopter school right at the Kona Airport. “You just get a loan for $50K, you go at your own pace, but it usually takes a year to get all 5 ratings, including instructor rating, then the school hires you as an instructor, you teach until you get 1000 hours, and then you go get any job you want, because all the Vietnam pilots are retiring and there are lots of job openings.” And I was like, where do I sign?! 

You really sound like instead of planning you made the most out of every opportunity that came.
Yes, I was, and still am a person who chooses living in the present moment, I am not worried about the future because it always works itself out. This way, however, I remain free , first, of commitment and, second, to choose whatever I feel like instead of what I have to do. This, just like my constant location change, must come from all the moving in my early years, you must be right when you say the circumstances of our early years have a huge impact on who we become as an adult. When I think back, I must admit I have traveled, changed locations so often, and do so even today, that it might sound unusual. I do not like tying myself down with promises or commitments, I prefer keeping the kind of flexibility that allows me to be the person I am without breaking any obligations or hurting any feelings.

Sounds pretty free, but I have to ask: do you think making ad hoc decisions defines you as reckless a little bit?
Haha, good question. Some may see it as so, but I feel very fortunate to have always been kind of footloose and fancy free. I’ve hitchhiked around New Zealand and done other kinds of traveling without a real plan. I’ve definitely put myself into vulnerable positions. But taking that risk has also opened my world to so many experiences that I am so grateful for. Yes, as I shared before, I’ve had a few bad experiences too: the attempted rape and the hit-and-run car accident and I’m sure countless other little things I can’t even think of at the moment, but overall, in 51 years of wild gypsy lifestyle, I wouldn’t change a thing. They are all experiences that made me who I am today.

And now here you are in Hawaii: a brand-new environment and this new idea of going to the heli school on Kona.
Yes, when this guy – Tattoo Guy – had told me how the helicopter school and training worked, I got so excited. I called my best friend over and told her the story the way he had told me, and literally the next day we both walked into helicopter school. 

Grabbing the opportunity!
As always. I was working at the Four Seasons at the time, serving in their fine dining restaurant  and making decent money, so I actually paid as I went through school. I don’t like being in debt. I like to be free as a bird, and debt always seemed like a freedom killer to me. But I went through school faster than I could afford, so I caved in the end and took a loan for 30K so I could finish quickly and get on with my new career. I was already 31 by that point and felt I didn’t have time to dilly-dally. It went basically just how Tattoo Guy said. It took 13 months to get all 5 ratings, 8 months working as an instructor to get to 1000 hours, then my first real commercial part 135 [a certificate for a company to operate as a non-scheduled air charter] carrier job for 3 months till I had the turbine experience needed to get the real job that paid enough to pay off my loan and buy a condo. I paid off the condo loan in 5 years. Again, I don’t like being in debt. But as I’ve gotten older and a little more educated on how our system works, as an entrepreneur, debt can be a really good thing. Just have to play the interest rates right and find the right investments and tax write-offs. 

And you are not the first Attagirl to say that…
I know!

What kind of jobs can you have as a helicopter pilot? And which are the ones that pay the best?
There is such a wide variety of types of jobs/missions in the helicopter industry. Pay depends on experience. Typically, the more streamlined your specialty is and how much experience you have in that niche will dictate the salary. Flying tours in Hawaii was very early in my career and a great learning experience at that time, but not super fulfilling for me. From there I ended up working in remote areas of Alaska and found my niche as a precision long line utility pilot doing mostly mineral exploration. Most of the contract jobs I was sent on were way out in the middle of nowhere basing out of a “man camp” basically glamping with a solid floor tent with a diesel stove/heater, a camp cook, outhouses and structured camp shower times. The work was moving and setting drills, fuel tanks, water lines, donage, and whatever materials they needed for the project. This type of contract work took me all over the great state of Alaska, working with geologists, biologist, archeologists, glacier scientists and other things like radio/cell repeater sites where I slung in fuel or solar panels, radio stacks, towers and dishes. I learned a lot and my skill set grew, figuring out remote logistics for fuel and other things like weather: rain, frost, fog, clouds are the fun stuff for me. It’s challenging and fulfilling work.

I did a short, 10-day job in the small town of Valdez, Alaska which is where I met my boyfriend. He’s a true Alaskan, he’s been here all his life and grew up hunting, fishing, boating and flying  - all the hot guy stuff. I took him for a ride in the helicopter and he took me for a ride in his super cub bush plane. We’ve been each other’s co-pilots in life ever since… for 15 years now.

Remote field work was hard on the relationship, so in 2010 we and a partner decided to start our own company. We bought a helicopter, and I started working from my new home base where I finally grew some roots Valdez, Alaska. We built up the business over 10 years and in the end had 5 helicopters, a hangar, a fuel facility and a gift shop. A perfect opportunity came up in 2020 to sell the business and we collectively decided to cash out and enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Retired early, enjoying life, doing what we really truly love… and, yes, we kept one helicopter for ourselves, flying the Alaska mountains and exploring. Mike and I also bought a brand-new Bell 505 Jet Ranger X helicopter that we lovingly call the CandyCaneCopter for the super fun red and white high-vis paint scheme. It is easily recognizable and it’s amazing how many people spot us when we are traveling. We fly it all over North America: from Montreal, down as far as Dominican Republic and everywhere in between and on up to  Alaska. It’s our new school version of barnstorming, only instead of sleeping in a farmer’s yard under wing, we stay with friends or hotels and take people for flights for free. I share it all on social media, mostly Instagram and Facebook, and daily in Stories. People reach out when they see we are in their area and we do our best to meet up with everyone we can. I get pictures sent almost daily when we are on the go, playing  #ispythecandycanehelicopter. 

Oh my, sounds so cool, you must come visit us here in Iowa, we have a huge backyard where your CandyCane Baby can rest while we are grilling a good steak or two, and you can stay with us! We could even get our small town involved for a day, I am sure they would be happy!
See, you understand how it works! We would love to visit you guys. I’ll just  add you to my Foreflight [navigtion app] that helps remind me who is in an area as we fly through. There are 10,000 variables when traveling like this so I don’t commit to anything but as long as I get you in as a waypoint in my app, there will be some day in the future… maybe this year, or in 10, that we will come through.

Understood! You’re welcome any time, really. Now listen, lady. Driving a chopper must require insane focus and discipline, and courage when the unexpected (wind or precipitation or a bird or whatnot) happens. It is a lifestyle, I understand, but I also know that for such a dangerous lifestyle some kind of winddown is needed. At least that is how I imagine it. If so, what is it that you use to release the stress it generates?
It is not only the flying itself, that’s actually the easy part. But being out in the field and staying in different camps, everything is always changing, different people, different environments, it can all take a toll if you’re not careful. And yes, I have my methods to keep me grounded.

I’m listening!
Every time I showed up at a new camp, I would first go to my assigned tent and make it my own. I had a vision board that I actually packed around with me, and a bag of “feel goods” like a vanilla scented candle and a little box of happy quotes, and Yogi Tea, and of course my yoga mat. Camp life can be rough and self-care is often brushed aside. But it was important to keep myself grounded. I used a great little app called Yoga Downloads that had short, 20-minute yoga flows to guide me through a quick little practice. Some of the camps were too fast-paced for even a 20-minute practice, but many times I’d at least have some downtime out in the field with the helicopter while waiting for clients. I’d find a rock or tundra or someplace I could get a short little yoga practice in.

Yoga! When I was doing my prepping homework on you, I remember I found a lot of yoga-related references!
Haha, I am not surprised. I used to share a lot of yoga on my other social media page. Yoga is essential in my life. I suppose it all started in Maryland when I went to classes with my mother, when we first moved to the States. After that wherever I was, I sought out the local yoga classes. In Hawaii I had the great honor to practice with Norman Allen before he passed. If he accepted you as a student, you practiced with him for free – you only paid when you missed one. And when I was flying for work all the time, I practiced outside or on the helipad – that is how my HeliYoga movement was born. I would be waiting for my passengers, sometimes for many hours, so I started taking my yoga mat with me, or just Yoga Paws which are little grippies for your hands and feet so you can practice on any surface and have traction. I started participating in yoga challenges on Instagram, and soon began hosting challenges. In fact, I guided a year-long handstand challenge in which I would give a daily assignment towards the end goal of strengthening our handstands. An incredible community was formed. I feel unspeakably blessed to have connected with so many of my fellow hosts and participants from all around the world. We formed a super cool community, with many of them I keep in touch to this day. Yoga gives me strength and completely relaxes my body and mind, a very important aspect of my life.

Anything else that helped or helps you relax?
Yes, I believe in small daily habits. Every single day, usually in the shower, I take a short moment to stop everything and focus entirely on myself. I take a deep breath and close my eyes, wrap my arms around myself with a hand on each shoulder, bow my head and just give myself a big ol hug. I first started doing this when I showed up on a new contract job that felt a bit above my skill set and I was intimidated. That morning I gave myself a pep talk in the bathroom mirror, said to myself, “you’ve got this” and a self-hug – and it was so powerful. I have done that every single day since, and it works. My other daily habits are Nahli, a core cleansing exercise, I touch my toes every single day and I do a standing puppy pose against the wall. I’d like to say I have a daily meditation practice, but lately I have let that falter a bit. However, even just talking about it is a good reminder to find it again; even just 3 minutes a day of mindful meditation is a game-changer. I also love a good book to read, that’s always a lovely getaway.

What do you read?
As a really young kid, I used to read a lot. It was not rare that I read 2-3 books a day. A day! I loved Nancy Drew books, haha. I’m quite the detective as my boyfriend will tell you, he playfully calls me Leigh Five-O. That’s a whole other long story, but one time I sleuthed out a bad guy when he had robbed my neighbor’s in Hawaii and got him arrested. Turns out he was wanted for all kinds of awful crimes and I’m the one who spotted him and tailed him till the cops could get there.

But anyway, as I got older I got into philosophical books like The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Celestine Prophecy, The Alchemist, Siddhartha, and my all-time game-changer book was Illusions, the travels of a reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach. Richard Bach was a pilot himself who flew and barnstormed across America. Illusions was about him doing just that, but also learning that everything is truly an illusion and comes from the perspective of your own mind. You create your own reality. Reading that at a young impressionable age is probably why I’m doing this today.

Yoga, reading – anything else maybe?
As a young girl back in Santa Fe, my biggest comfort was my pet cat. He was actually a feral kitten that I had captured in a farmhouse barn that my parents let me keep. He slept on the foot of my bed with me all during the school year, and then he’d disappear while I was gone to California in the summer. Each fall when I returned, so would he. His unwavering love and companionship really helped me stay strong through those hard times.

Home life was tough, but school life was too. I was a good student as far as academics, but I was definitely a bit awkward and never felt like I really fit in. And even when I got to move to live with my Mom and Stepdad in Southern California, I was still the awkward outsider, especially because we were quite poor but lived in an area of a lot of new money. Everyone had the latest brand name clothes, and drove fancy cars, etc. I was like a poor little country bumpkin in the big fancy city, lol. But I was gathering strength and confidence at this point in my life and really just focused more on my passions, like dancing – I loooved dancing and took every class I could afford, modern dancing, ballet, jazz. I loved hiking and mountain biking, oh and sailing! My Stepdad and I did a lot of sailing together in a small 2-person sailboat called “Orange Juice” as it was painted bright orange… hmmm, probably why I painted my whole fleet of helicopters orange in recent years… just putting that together now, haha. Anyway, yes, I was a bit of a tomboy and loved everything outdoors.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
As a kid, I never really had a clear picture of what I would do, careerwise, except for the normal fantasy things like actress, singer, dancer, and so on. But I do remember, during a family road trip I saw this really cool looking lady truck driver at a gas station. She was so strong and confident, and she was driving that big wild looking tractor trailer all by herself, and she was getting paid to travel all over the country. Yes, I had a brief phase of wanting to become a truck driver, especially with all these commercials on TV for the Debbie Dootson Truck Driving school. But I never followed through on that one… fortunately, plus the flying bug caught me pretty early in life.

So what is it today that you do when you don’t fly?
Well I fly a lot, haha! My home base of Valdez, Alaska has some of the most beautiful flying conditions in the world. I love to dance my way around the mountain peaks, wispy fog layers and electric blue glacier ice. And being able to share it with other people is super rewarding… just seeing it through my passengers’ eyes sometimes brings me to tears. It’s surreal and honestly never gets old. When I’m driving to the airport in the morning and look out at the mountains, my heart starts to flutter and I get a little giddy. It’s absolutely magical. I like to fly to a mountain peak for some outdoor yoga, or hike the ridge, or take a picnic to a waterfall, or walk amongst the giant icebergs. Alaska’s summer is mesmerizing, but it is short and fleeting and I want to soak up every moment. I don’t like to be away during the three peak months, June, July and August. I try to share the magic on my social media pages, but it doesn’t always do it justice. 

Your lifestyle sounds pretty healthy with all that hiking and yoga. Is it something you do consciously? You mentioned the importance of self-care earlier.
It’s pretty easy to eat healthy while we are in Alaska. We fish, shrimp and hunt for sustenance and prepare our meals at home including smoking and canning our own salmon. There are really no good restaurants in our small town, so we cook at home every night. Yoga and hiking keeps me fit and when we are traveling or wintering elsewhere, we join a gym and try to go daily. Yes, we do try to live a healthy lifestyle and keep the doctors away.

The time is coming for us to close down this conversation, unfortunately. But before we do that, please tell me about your beliefs and values, dreams and goals, for your retired years. What else is there for someone who seemingly has achieved everything?
Retired life is good. We are making a bucket list and have crossed a lot of the items them off this summer. Seemingly little things but big experiences, like flying to the North Slope of Alaska to see polar bears on the Arctic Ocean Sea ice, and the caribou, and muskox – wow, they are magnificent creatures! And we wanted to see the walrus haul-outs on the Aleutian Islands; the beach combing there was incredible, too. Just collecting experiences.

As far as beliefs I am not religious per se, but I'm definitely spiritual. I meditate regularly to stay tuned in with the energy of the Universe. I believe all beings are intrinsically good and I strive to spread joy and happiness and always be supportive and uplifting and help to better the world. Just be good, do good, don’t harm others. I think it can be quite simple really.

Well, Leigh, we have arrived to the point where I want you to share your life wisdom with the readers who may benefit from those - some sage thoughts deriving from your experiences.
Understanding that we are all the creators of our own experience is essential. No matter what happens in our lives, it’s our own choice how we react to it.  Once we understand this, we become totally free. Two people can have the same exact experience but may perceive it completely differently. One may choose to feel like a victim, that someone else did something to them, while the other may choose to feel grateful for the experience and the opportunity to see an opening, another path laid out in front of them that they otherwise may not have seen. Perception is reality. You are the one to choose: do you choose to be a victim, or do you choose to be a victor?

I am so happy that I found you, Leigh, I can’t wait to meet you in person when your app spits out which could be a good time for you. You have established a magnificent life for yourself, by following an absolutely non-convenient, non-standard path full of actions played mostly by ear, making bold choices based highly on your gut feelings. Amazing, if you ask me. A great example for the readers to see that listening to our instincts can, true, put us into unexpected situations, but ultimately lead to freedom without error. Thank you for sharing good and bad, drawing a true picture of the road that has taken you where you are today. In your happy, free, flexible life. 
Thank you so much for having me here, Kami. I feel honored and grateful for the chance to talk about all this, and I hope there will be at least one person who is inspired by my story and takes her fate in her own hands, risking the known for the unknown.

If you would like to find out more about Leigh, please click on the links below.

LinkedIn
Instagram 1
Instagram 2
Facebook
YouTube

07 - Ricki Oldenkamp

40 minutes reading

When I decided to start a business in the United States, I figured that any the writing coming from me and being available in any part of the Universe (which is a lot, apparently) would need to be in proper English, as much as possible. Being a non-native speaker, I figured, no matter how much grammar I have learned or how much time I have spent on mastering the living language, I would never become as perfect as one born here. So, the decision was made: I would need to work with a copyeditor.

Yeah, but how to find one, a good one… someone I would click with, who would understand the concept, my fussiness of wanting to keep my own identity, and style that is a little weird on occasion? I don’t know anyone in the U.S., let alone a bunch of copyeditors. I decided to reach out to a renown writer and ask him – and I did so. I sent an email to Jeff Goins who is not only a writer but also teaches writing. He passed me on to someone, who passed me on to someone, and I finally ended up to be in contact with this girl, a millennial, living in Alaska.

Hmmm, Alaska! A place on my bucket list. It’s where I wanted to move in 2013 while being so fed up with my life in my job at this imaging solutions company, a position I just got assigned for, I never applied for and I would have never taken rationally either, had I not been afraid of losing my income as a single mother. So, I thought, whoever chooses to live in Alaska as a young person must be a cool one. And what did I know…

We started to discuss some details and I felt this girl was very structured and organized. Something that I crave. Conscious and confident, radiating strength and wisdom. In a really short time I felt myself in good hands. We had a few video discussions and I totally liked what I saw and heard. So, I said, let’s do this. She’s been helping me with my content since the beginning and takes any English-related worry off of my shoulders, which is a relief.

She keeps me on my toes, true, and fiercely protects her own boundaries. By nudging me to push my writings along a little when she sees I am behind, so that she can keep her own schedule of life. Which I kind of like, even if it feels uncomfortable on my end sometimes, wanting to just mope around instead of working. Or, by not sharing her phone number with me, which at first I thought was crazy and unacceptable. As that is something I had never seen in Hungary. It may be a generation-thing, though, I am not sure, but I could not imagine having a contractor that I could not reach any time of any day in case of an emergency. She has proven herself though and is literally available any time of any day via e-mail, a super-fast responder. So by now I have made peace with not having her number, and I even like and respect her approach. And ever since I found out who she was, how she became a copywriter/copyeditor, her work ethics, and the determination in setting boundaries in a way I have never seen, I have known she is an Attagirl!-must. Read the interview with her and find out why. Attagirl! is proud to present Ricki Oldenkamp in the month of July.

Created with love – read with delight.

Hello, hello, Ricki, how exciting that this conversation will be so different from any of our previous ones! I am so happy to welcome you in the line of Attagirls!
Hello Kami, yeah, I am so excited, I have seen all the Attagirls’ interviews from the inside and now I am in their shoes, which is fun!

[In the period prior to the interview Ricki was getting ready for a solo trip throughout Alaska living in her Subaru. She has recorded and presented the preparation on her YouTube channel, Feral Girl Freedom (link under the interview), a highly informative and honest, transparent, at the same time funny and sweet documentary material. I was surprised to find out that the interview itself was happening during the actual trip already. She explained that the delay between the videos coming out and where she actually was on the road was for safety reasons, which is just another proof of her being conscious of knowing exactly what she is doing.]

Ready for the Subaru-trip throughout Alaska

Let’s talk about your young life first. How did you grow up, what defined you as a kid?
I was a very sensitive and curious child, I grew up in a pretty rural area and that meant there wasn't a lot to do. So I read a lot of books and played outside. And that was definitely where my fascination and love of nature began.

What did you read?
When I was really young, I became obsessed with The Boxcar Children books, which is a series about orphan children living in a boxcar in the woods and all the different adventures they had. But also, just the idea of them having to do the daily chores of taking care of their boxcar home. So, my younger brother and I would often play that in the little woods we had next to our house; we would bring out plates and suitcases and pretend that we were living in the woods. We spent a lot of time outside and entertaining ourselves.

You mention a lot of time on your own, what do you mean?
My parents owned a construction business together and were constantly busy working. My dad would run the jobs and my mom did the bookkeeping from home, but she was always busy so we basically needed to be out of her hair. But it was also an escape.

Escape?
Yes, because having parents running a business together… it was very stressful for them, I remember money being a big stress in the household. From my memory it feels like that was a major factor in their divorce which, yes, followed. I was in middle school when they divorced. The business was successful, but when you run your own business and you don't have any set ceiling, you feel you need more and can always do more, can always earn more, it just never ends. I was so young that I don't know the particulars, but they never felt like they could stop working. They never felt like it was enough.

How did your young life shape after the divorce?
While all of that was happening, my younger brother and I needed to kind of take care of ourselves even more. My older brother and sister were 11 years and 9 years older than me and by then they were already off on their own life journeys. My younger brother and I stayed living with my mom and we moved to a house that was closer to the school. That way we could walk to and from school and sports and were just a bit more responsible for ourselves.

I was into pushing myself with sports, but I was still very much into reading. I really loved books that dealt with real people's adventures. I adored Jane Goodall’s books because she was very unique for her time, to be living in the jungle studying chimpanzees and doing things that people didn't really believe women could do (or should do) at that time. I thought it was amazing that she stepped out of society's expectations and had this completely different life. I was fascinated with the idea that she charted her own path. I read her books and I thought, okay, I don’t see myself living in this small town in Michigan forever. I kind of already could project myself out into the future and see what my life was going to look like, same ole small town drama, married and likely having a family at a young age. Honestly, it made me distressed. I didn't feel like there was any adventure there. No surprises. I didn't have the draw to have a baby. I didn’t want to know what the next 60+ years of my life already looked like.

What happened after you recognized those feelings?
I was very fortunate to meet my older brother’s girlfriend, who originated from the same smalltown but ended up in Alaska. My brother brought her back home and she opened a bookstore that I worked at in high school. I truly believe she opened up a new future to me. She was able to expose me to all these other books of women adventuring all over the world. [She still helps people find ways to live bravely with her podcast, In Kinship, link under the interview.]

The first book that I remember getting from her was called Tales of a Female Nomad, by Rita Golden Gelman. The author had this draw to travel the world in a time where it was unusual for a woman to be in her 30s and 40s, unmarried, traveling alone to some of the remote cultures she lived in. I thought it was absolutely fascinating that she would have the guts to do that.

Another book that was actually pretty influential (and this is one that so many people will know) is of course Eat Pray Love. I enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert because she was so openly honest in the book about how she was a mess. She wasn't confident. She was dealing with all of these anxieties about her life and trying to grow and I thought it was really refreshing to have someone tell a story in the moment of all that messiness without just the nice buttoned up version at the end that makes it look like they had everything together the whole time… because I certainly didn't have it all together. I've dealt with a lot of anxiety, doubt, and self-criticism in my life.

Tell me a little more about it.
Well, to summarize it briefly, I had an unpredictable childhood. My parents didn't know how to comfort a highly sensitive child. The lack of consistency in my life made it difficult for me to feel I could count on things; it made me feel like I wasn't safe. I felt I needed to be on guard all the time to look out for myself, since I didn't feel like anyone else knew how to look out for me. It made me less able to connect with others as I didn't want to feel uncomfortable and unsafe in their hands. I threw myself into solo projects, sports that could be more solo (track and cross country), and I indulged in fantasies of the freedom to create my own life, one where I could live on my terms.

I have had a hard time reconciling my sensitive nature and my desire to grow, experience, and achieve. Both are in me, and the latter forces me to have to step out of my comfort zone and find ways to deal with my anxieties. To do that I have learned coping mechanisms. I often have to take time alone to recharge and not feel like I need to react right away. And to not feel like I need to be "on" in front of people all the time. That space allows me to tease out what might be causing anxiety (fear of not knowing how an experience will play out, fear of looking silly in front of others, fear of failing). It allows me to give myself pep talks about how fear will not keep me safe, it will only make me feel unfulfilled when I don't get to have the experiences that I desire. I do a lot of talking myself through things. Change is hard for me, but I love the aliveness I feel in new experiences. It is difficult every single time, but I keep putting myself in the way of doing the hard thing, and my life is so much better for it.

I still deal with the anxiety with all of the big adventures that I plan. I always have those moments that come up where I start to feel overwhelmed and question if I even want to go through with it. But I push through.

I might always have anxiety that tells me why I shouldn't trust, or shouldn't take risks. But I now have a wealth of experiences that show me the wonderful outcomes when I do trust and take risks. Now I conjure up those "wins" and I also remember that while things do go wrong (and they have spectacularly, and sometimes a lot) I still have made it out of every one of those experiences more knowledgeable and ready to do better the next time. And as I’ve gone through those major anxiety-filled emotions, time and time again with each adventure, I’ve started to recognize that it's just a cycle that happens. I like sharing those stories with others that have some of the same fears, now I talk openly about it because it takes a bit of the sting out of anxiety when you see someone else "failed" but made it out and didn't quit, but instead just moved on to the next adventure. Which has led me to create a YouTube channel to share the ups and downs of a new project, this trip throughout Alaska. My desire is to test out a more nomadic style of living, while trying to live and work out of my Subaru.

Crazy lady!
Haha… yeah, to some it is crazy to leave the comforts of a house to travel long-term in a vehicle, but there are so many places in Alaska I haven’t seen yet and I have been living here for a couple years. Now I am planning on leaving, but before I do so, I really want to see more of this beautiful place. And this trip is a dedication to my older brother who passed unexpectedly at the end of 2022. I realized that if I only had 10 years left (if I were to pass at the same age he did) then there is so much I yet want to see, do, and be!

Anxiety and conscious self-discipline to balance it. What else was there in the early years that you think might have determined who you are today?
There’s this one, and I really don't know what the catalyst for it was. But I remember being very young and having a fear of going to sleep at night because I wasn't sure I would wake up the next day. Just this recognition that if there was something I wanted to do in life, I better get on with doing it, because we don't know how long we have; so that has been a factor throughout my life that's pushed me. Even when I've been afraid of some of the things that I've wanted to do, even when anxieties come up, I recognize that I don't have forever to do those things. So, I better kind of get over it and get on with it.

What are those things? Do you have a bucket list?
That's a great question because I don't actually have a fully formed list. I don't have a list that I'm trying to tick off.  Opportunities always show up for me at the right time, I get really excited about them, I get obsessive, and I go all in on them.

One day you will have to write your own book of adventures, like the ones you enjoyed reading as a child!
I think someday I will write a book. I do have a lot of stories. I'm just not quite there yet. There are more adventures that need to make it into that book. I feel I have some of my greatest adventures in front of me.

Amen! I personally can’t wait for it to come out. But let’s get back to the young girl indulging in adventure books of real-life women. What came next?
One of the most important aspects that gave me the route that I have gone down is the fact that I was very afraid of debt. To me debt meant that you didn't have choices and it could force you to work in jobs and to be stuck places you didn't want to be. When I started looking at college, I knew I didn't want to go into a massive amount of student loan debt. So, I opted to join the military to pay for college.

Military!
Yes, I was only 17 as a senior, so I had to convince my parents to sign for me because before you're 18, you're not allowed to join on your own. And they did. I didn't apply to any colleges because of joining the Army, but I had made them confirm that I could leave for boot camp at the end of the summer, when my friends were going off to college. After all the paperwork and testing they said my bootcamp leaving date was in June… one day after my 18th birthday. They misled me, and I started to think that if they lied about that, what else where they going to pull. It was very frustrating, but I took matters into my own hands and after a lot of research I found out that if I didn’t step on the bus to boot camp, which would’ve been the official commitment to them on my side, then I wasn’t obligated to go. So, no Army for me.

Oh boy. You must have been disappointed.
Very. It felt bad. I had trouble pushing against that authority. I never wanted to get in trouble. I always wanted to be a good girl, to make people happy but now I really had to stand up for myself for the first time and tell them, “You lied to me and I'm not doing this.”

Without any better option I started working in a high-end restaurant in the closest big city and I was making a lot of money. But I was 18, working with people that were in their 30s, and I again saw what my future would be if I stayed in that job. It was like Groundhog's Day; they would make a bunch of money, spend it out at the bar, repeat.

So, I started going to Community College, because that's one you can apply to anytime. When I was close to graduating with an Associate degree, I needed to figure out what I wanted to do. I was pursuing English because I always really loved books, obviously, and literature and writing. But for the degree I needed a science class. In high school I was told by my math teacher that I was terrible at math so I believed that I wouldn’t be able to do science (those more analytical subjects). I took the easiest one available, a 10-day-all-day, on-site summer course. It was literally living at a research site catching frogs in ponds and forests and I was like wait, what, this is a job!? I was hearkening back to my Jane Goodall-dreams like that. I could do science like Jane did! And a whole new phase of my life unfolded.

I utilized my writing skills on my report for that class and the professor was blown away that I wrote up the research like a real journal article. He insisted that I pursue biology. It progressed quickly with my first grant as a community college student studying ferns and mutualistic relationships with ants in South America. My dreams of adventure and travel were materializing in an exciting, unpredicted way!

My next research was through Duke University on lemurs. It started with a simple e-mail to a renowned scientist at Duke (thank goodness I didn’t realize it was a bold thing to “cold call” a famous professor as an undergrad). And he replied through one of his students! The lemur cognition project went so well that I was introduced to an opportunity for a research position through the University of Switzerland on orangutan mother-infant pairs. I was able to fly to Borneo and work with the primates for four months while still an undergraduate student. I actually got my Jane Goodall-moment.

Ricki, this experience is so cool, congratulations! Okay, go on. I'm so amazed at your choices – and it started with a little email from an undergrad to a renowned professor…
Yeah, that's the thing. I learned a lot just through these small experiences – where all you have to do is ask for something. Ask the people who can help you, ask the Universe. Really, it's not crazy to ask, because the worst is you hear a no. But at least you tried. People have such a hard time asking for what they want. I try to encourage others to first dare to want something big, something you dream of, and then… ask. Look at my example. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

When you have that hunger for experience, you just won’t leave any stone unturned, especially not because of fear. I think a lot of people have fear of looking silly or fear of ever asking. And that's the thing, if you can transcend that fear, just see it for what it is – a measure of how much you want it and are scared you won’t get it – and decide to keep taking steps. Even if they are baby steps. So many magical opportunities can open.

Now that I know this it makes it so much easier for me. I mean, I wish I had known this when I was even younger. I sometimes talk to people who say they wish they could do what I do. I always say, “You can.” They are like, “What is my family going to think?” Or “I could never figure it out.” I can get on a soapbox about this: Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses, stop trying to live to make other people happy. We would all be so much happier if everyone was really only minding their own business. Talking openly about our desires with others who want to keep us just like them can be hard. I get it, they don’t want to lose us. But if your heart wants something, I think it’s important to use our limited time here to at least try for it, otherwise you’ll always wonder. I think being exposed to all the Attagirl!s hopefully gives people the permission to dream enough to transcend that fear.

Amen, again! What’s next?
In all sincerity, coming back from working in the jungle I really started to doubt I wanted to have a Jane Goodall-future, because working in the jungle for four months at a research site hours by car and then hours by boat out in the jungle, no phone or internet, so no contact to any friends or family, was very hard. It was a very lonely experience. I decided I didn't want to do that regularly for the rest of my career. While I am glad that I did it, that stone was not left unturned, I knew that I no longer wanted to do that forever. I had just turned 24 and it made me start thinking about what else I would want to do.

And, what else?
I still wanted to do some kind of research and planned to switch to natural resources management in the States, so that way I wasn't traveling half the year to some other part of the world for work. I realized that I could actually just travel for pleasure. I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do yet when the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain came across my path. Immediately I knew I had to go. Thus, I jetted off to Spain by myself for two months and I hiked the most popular Camino route, the Camino Frances.

The Camino was one of the most magical experiences I've ever had, because I had quite a few issues come up on the trip where I had to rely on complete strangers, which was initially a nightmare for someone with anxiety. But I was so taken care of by these strangers in many different ways. It just cracked my heart open. It made me feel really supported. Having the experience of people who didn't know me at all yet care about me that much, going out of their way to help me even when they had to help me in another language, it was really amazing. More proof that once you put yourself in the way of an adventure and push back against fear, you can gain unimaginable experiences.

True!
There’s this song that I really like. It’s by a band from Michigan called The Crane Wives, it has a line that says your fears will not keep you safe. And it's very true. There's a lot of other things you can do to keep yourself safe. But ruminating on fears doesn't do it. And I love that reminder.

So, Camino – check. I assume the story has not ended…
I was offered a research assistantship for my masters at the University of Georgia. It was a pretty big move, definitely a culture shock for me… people thought I was Canadian based on my accent… but it was an interesting experience. One of the hardest things I've ever done. And when I finished my massive thesis, I was done with the South and I decided to drive up to Alaska to see my younger brother, who had been living here for five years at that point. I hadn't been up to Alaska to visit yet and I had applied for some jobs in the Pacific Northwest and up in Alaska, too. I figured I should probably see these places in case I was offered one of the jobs, so I could know if I'd even want to move there.

I ended up taking an interview call on the side of the road in Montana. It was working with the Forest Service as a ranger on one of the most popular sport salmon fisheries in the world. I was supposed to patrol the rivers, talk to the fisherman and make sure that they were using the right tackle, were catching the right fish in the right part of the season, and also make sure they were not going to put themselves in a position to be eaten by a bear – because bears were also fishing on the river…

I took the job, I basically walked around talking to people all day and it was a very unique experience for me as a woman… oftentimes men don't necessarily respect what you have to say in the natural resources realm. So, I got to practice that confidence because I did know what I was talking about and I did have the authority to tell them what to do. I was able to practice that in a really unique, supported way because I had a partner on the river, as we had to go in twos. It could have been a woman, but it just happened to be a guy who let me take care of the issues. He didn't step in and try to be the hero for the little lady, he let me take care of hard conversations, which gave me the confidence to do that in my life and to shut people down when they were saying or doing things that were inappropriate. Something I would have felt uncomfortable doing in the past. It was a great experience. But it was just a summer job.

Oh my. What came after this summer job?
Back to Michigan for a full-time job working in the State of Michigan Wildlife Disease Lab. It was a coveted job that was working on any wildlife brought in from around the state that had died, for necropsy to see why. For two years I did this, wanting to get to the actual field throughout that time. But I was able to interview for a biologist position eventually. They gave the position to someone else and said I obviously had the book knowledge, but not real-life experience. I left to go get that field experience.

I decided to take a field job at a nonprofit nature preserve managing 800 acres and teaching undergraduate students about natural resources management techniques. Here I ran into a problem where I was told one thing about pay and benefits and after my year anniversary, those promises were not honored.

But then came the point when I start assessing. I thought to myself, I have done all the things I was supposed to, good grades, lots of research and other experiences (like becoming a type II wildland firefighter), I should’ve been able to have a good job, one that would afford me financial security, but that just wasn’t the case. And I kept running into the fact that with how things are in the natural resources field, it looked like I’d never have that, never have a chance to retire someday.

It was a wakeup call to realize I was going to have to do something on my own and not rely on someone else to provide me with that security.

So that is how you started your own business?
That is how it all began. I threw myself into trying to figure out how to do that. I did research on what I could do with the skills that I had. All of the positions that I'd been in before had some form of writing, often publishing scientific journal articles. Thus, I knew I had writing skills. I found a program teaching copywriting, just a different technique of writing than I’d done before.

I found out that I could support businesses that I really believed in personally. I felt like this was something that I could get behind, because there were so many more unique, local businesses (in a world becoming homogenized by big box stores) that I wanted to support. While still working at the nature preserve, I ripped through that training. I started to reach out to friends and family with small businesses and did pro bono projects for them. As I started to grow my portfolio, I pitched myself, gaining business within my community. Then referrals started coming in and today the majority of my work, after four years, is amazing referrals.

That is how I got you!
Yes! I’m so glad you got to me; I love our work together.

I started the business parallel with the nature resource position, but after a time I had to make a choice and my choice was to become my own boss. In the very beginning I barely made it all come together with my bills, but I never had to ask family for financial support.

OK, you started the business while in Michigan, and how did you get back to Alaska?
After a while I realized I could run the copywriting business from anywhere. In the meantime, I was offered a part-time position working back in the natural resources field. I was going to turn it down, but everyone thought I’d be crazy to give up the opportunity to work for 3-months raising baby caribou. I didn’t want it to hurt my business so we agreed I’d keep my mornings for my clients, but afternoons for the caribou calves, and that is how I ended up working in Alaska again.

I didn’t leave natural resources because I hated the field and leaving it had always been a bit sad. This was a beautiful way for me to marry those two interests together for that summer. By then I had some friends in Alaska too and I started to see how I might want to plant some roots, so I decided to stay for the winter. And that was two years ago.

And now you’re leaving…
Yes, to be honest winters here in Alaska are too dark for me. I can handle the cold and snow, but the darkness does a big number on me mentally. Where I live, around the darkest time (winter solstice) the sun comes up around 10:30am and that's not full sunlight, it's only just kind of dusky, and only lasts till 3:30pm. Short-short days in the winter. I see myself coming back here many times over the years. I just think that my heart is pulled elsewhere now.

Now tell me about your values, what are the most important pillars of this nomad girl’s life?
I believe in doing the scary thing. If your heart reaches out for something and you are worried about going for it, I think you should do everything in your power to try to do it. If that takes therapy to work through fears, if that takes keeping it a secret to not hear other’s dissenting opinions, if it even takes paying a courage coach to help you plan out all the micro-steps to make it happen – we only get one go at this life thing, and I don't want to have any regrets on not trying for something my heart sings about.

I also believe in kindness. I'm still learning to be as kind to myself as I am to others. I do feel great compassion for others, we all have our past traumas and we all are seeing life through the lens of seeking safety. It allows me to see why people make certain decisions and why they act in certain ways. I try really hard to be a soft place for them to be open and vulnerable. A place I would have flourished in as a child.

And health. Physical, mental, and spiritual health are big concepts in my life. At the end of the day all of my choices come back to supporting my health in these three areas. I have tried to simplify my material possessions to allow me to travel and have time for physical adventures (like hiking the highest volcano in Central America this past winter) and spending time in yoga classes wherever I can find them. I know that if I neglect any of these areas then the rest of my life suffers. And I'm continually trying to bring myself back to center in this fast-paced world that is telling us we need to work more, make more, and buy more. But long ago I realized I couldn't live that sort of life. While my life may not include the latest trends, it is rich in experience and memories, and those I can take with me anywhere.

Beautiful thinking! Now, as a practice with my Attagirls, I will ask you to share any life learnings you think would be helpful for anyone only dreaming about good stuff to happen to them, not yet daring to actually make steps towards those. What would you tell them?
I would suggest to try to step outside all of the societal expectations that have been laid out for them. And really get honest about what makes their heart happy and what they really want to do. It's not easy to then proceed to do that thing. But even if it bumps up against these societal expectations, it's worth it. Because at the end of the day, we only have one life and we have no idea how long it is and how long you can live it in a joyful way as injuries and illness can sneak up on anyone. Being delighted by the experiences that you're having, sharing those experiences with someone you love – that's the best life I can imagine. We have the opportunity to create that for ourselves, no matter what situation we're in. Even if it's the very smallest little time that we carve out for ourself for this. If you can just step outside of what would be expected of you, in your role in life, and do that thing with the pure joy of doing it, then you are going to be successful. That is a successful life to me.

Well Ricki, this was awesome. Thank you for sharing all these things with me, with us. You, just like the previous (and future) Attagirls, have clearly found your happiness, which I think is the ultimate reward to all those who have dared to take that big and freaky first step. I am truly grateful that I have bumped into you. And now you can start working on your own Attagirl-story so that I can post it on the website in time!
Haha, yeah, it is going to be fun to see myself in this form and work on my own piece. I am so glad for the opportunity Kami, and I hope that I can give some strength to those in similar shoes to where I was at in any part of my story. Because the power that comes from realizing that you are in charge, and can make your life whatever you desire, is something I wish for everyone to experience.

If you would like to find out more about Ricki, please click on the links below.

LinkedIn
Instagram
Website
Feral Girl Freedom
YouTube Channel
The Crane Wife - Keep You Safe
In Kinship Podcast

06 - Chriscilla Browing

32 minutes reading

You must have noticed by now that some of the Attagirls have familiar faces; you might have seen them on the TV screen before. Truth be told, as a homemaker and a person with a home office, a true homebody, TV is the thing that keeps me company. My morning routine includes switching it on so that I have human voices around me throughout the day, which I need most of the time. I am doing my cleaning or cooking and I can hear the convos. Plus, as a foreigner, it is a great way for me to learn new expressions, too. And then when I am having a little rest, I just sit down and there it is. Like everyone else, there are certain shows that I like and watch, like right now Presumed Innocent these days, or the survival series Alone, but it is the background noise to my days, too, without which I might feel pretty alone.

And that is how I spot some of my Attagirls, yes. Whenever I see or hear someone who impresses me in a way, I jot down names, details, and my research work begins. When I am convinced they would be perfect to introduce to the readers, I reach out to them. And then the result is available as part of my interview series.

Well, my June Attagirl is not one of them. It was her work I fell in love with first. Her art came my way, it kept popping up in my social media feeds, and I was like damn, that’s beautiful! As the photos just kept coming, I wanted to take a closer look at what I was really seeing. Who I was seeing. The creator has a sense of perfection, clear. She has a sense of beauty, that is clear, too. The shapes, the colors, everything is so properly designed. Now, we are talking about drinks and food (what a surprise…), and I feel like I would not even have the heart to consume the things she decorates. I’d just take them home and keep them in my vitrine.

After reading and watching everything I could quickly find about her online, I knew I wanted her to be one of this year’s twelve. I dropped her an email and when she replied, I felt so proud to have the chance to work with her. Dear readers, meet the artist from rural Virgina, working in Atlanta, GA, now residing in North Carolina. The delicate girl chasing her dreams, juggling motherhood while breaking her way into the fashion world she imagined for herself as a child. The lady of strength, determination and courage who, as a result of her strong vision of where she wanted to be, today is a most sought-after food and beverage stylist travelling all through the country to help give special grace and glow to various products of various clients’. A true, pure soul full of passion and love for life and everything she does. A beautiful example of freedom and authenticity. Chriscilla Browning.

Created with love – read with delight.

Chriscilla, welcome to the Attagirl Team! I like to begin the interviews with finding out who the little girl that turned into the person she is today was. It will not be any different today, so, who were you when you were a kid?
Hello Kami, nice to be here! [I can hear she is driving, and I can see the exact picture I read about her by the very studio she collaborates with and she is visiting just now, her long blond hair whipping in the wind, out of the window of the Silverado she is driving. Actually, based on her looks she could easily be on the other side of the camera, with that wild, long blond hair and the figure and face she has. She lets me know though that she has replaced the Silverado with a huge Toyota wagon since then.]

Well, I was born and raised in a small Virginia town, Waynesboro, in the Shenendoah Valley, on a farm. Ours was a hobby farm because I loved animals and wanted them around me, but my grandparents were true farmers. My hometown was very country and very remote, and I am not sure how other rural smalltown little girls were, or are today, but I was always dreaming about getting out and living in a big city. The way I saw it was that people staying in the town got married in their teens, and I did not find that desirable for myself. I wanted to go to a big city and become a fashion designer.

A fashion designer, no less!
Yeah, a fashion designer, no less. My grandmother was an amazing seamstress and she taught me at an early age. I was a sucker of sparkly materials and loved using them. However, I was pretty impatient, so I was not great at sewing for myself.

At the age of around 10 I got ahold of my first fashion magazines. I loved Seventeen, and all I wanted was to get on the cover.

A little girl with great ambitions.
Sure thing. And guess what, Seventeen ran a contest which I entered and I became a finalist in. I did not get the cover but a full article spread of me, with professional model prepping, hair and makeup – it was an unforgettable experience for a 13-14-year-old girl.

Seventeen, 1989

So we have arrived at high school age – how were things in high school?
I liked to dress like a businesswoman. Fashionably, following the trends, I liked wearing suits, I definitely was different.

Did you have any favorite models?
My ultimate favorite one was Cindy Crawford.

Mine too!
I even had the chance to meet her once in person, in college.

No way, get out of here!
Yup, she was our special guest in one of our classes in my first year, near Phipps Plaza where she must have been all day. She was arranged to jump over for a little lunch with us, college students. In all honesty I have no idea of what she was talking about exactly, all I remember was just watching her speaking, how she carried herself, and I was lost in the moment. Cindy, Naomi [Campbell] and Christy [Turlingtonl were the ones that had the most impact on me.

When your parents heard that you wanted to move to a big city, how did they react?
They were really supportive. I had a happy childhood, I grew up in a great family. They usually supported me in my endeavors. They did not want me to go to New York, though, they thought that city would be too big. So, I ended up in Atlanta, GA, at the American College for the Applied Arts. My major was Fine Arts, extended with photo courses. I loved studying, enjoyed my classes, I was planning to go to London which I thought was a must for someone wanting to work in the fashion business. But my story up there was apparently written differently…

What do you mean, what happened?
I got pregnant with my first kid, Skyler. He was unplanned but I was happy about his arrival, even if it turned everything upside down. I was with his father but we were not married so the feeling of shame completed the total chaos that had already described my life back then. And the marriage that came afterwards and lasted for four years did not make things easy either. Unfortunately Skyler’s dad had issues with substance abuse and even if I tried my best to make things work, eventually divorce followed.

What happened to your studies?
During these years I graduated from school, and I was taking a variety of jobs. I wanted to become a fashion photographer, so I started my career assisting photographers. My payment back then was $350 per day, not much, but I accepted the fact that I needed to learn the process and the little tricks before becoming a photographer myself. Interestingly, though, it became clear that I like the staging part more. I enjoyed preparing for photo shoots, making beds, decorating rooms, all those things, and after a time I started to assist the photo stylists instead of the photographers.

In this phase of my life I learned a lot, met a lot of wonderful people who I actually considered family. They were there for me like family when I was going through my divorce, or when Skyler was sick, or any other family emergency came up; they were very supportive.

During this incredible period I first became a full-time junior stylist, then lead stylist. However, my income was still very low and even with the evening job I took at a bar to make ends meet more still did not add up to much.

I know what it means to be a solo, working mom. Tough is not an accurate enough word to describe it. How did you get along?
After serious thinking and consideration I decided I would quit my full-time job as a stylist. I had the feeling I was being taken for granted. I could see freelancers working in my studio for a ton more money while I, who was there every day, no matter what, did anything that needed to be done, no matter what, was paid ridiculously low. So no matter how hard it felt, I knew I had to make the right decision to become a freelance stylist myself. I asked my dad for $3,000 as a safety net and I quit.

It's interesting it was your dad that you turned to. How come?
Well, by then my parents were divorced, too. By the time the kids flew out of the nest, they had grown apart. Now, the reason why I turned to my dad for financial help is very simple. He has always been a saver and known how to take emotions out of the equation when decision making is needed. He has the ability to focus solely on the issue and the possible solutions. To be level-headed and make a plan. And that was what I needed those days.

Makes sense. What happened next?
Fortunately, I did not have to wait too long for jobs. My past employers invited me back to continue working with them right away. And they gave me the larger amount of money I asked for, too. I worked like crazy to give the best impression, that was my ethic. To work like crazy and make the best impression. The nice thing about being a freelancer was that I could decide what I wanted to do. No more beds, no more clothes.

Food.

The studio had this fantastic freelance food stylist, Angie Mosier, who taught me everything about this job. That was my favorite by far, styling food. My life got the right turn finally. I worked my butt off, but I loved what I was doing so it did not feel hard. Did it feel like a lot? Yes. But enjoying what I was doing helped me overcome any bad feelings about my life being so busy.

When anyone is talking about this, I am always so happy. When you don’t consider your job a job and can approach it with passion, that is when I think you are in the right place. Sounds like you got to that place yourself and I am happy to hear that.

You are right, I did enjoy what I was doing, despite the long days and the sacrifices it took. I was in my element, content and proud of my achievements.

It was this period of time when I met my second husband, a freelance photographer from North Carolina. After a year of dating we got married and soon after that my second son, Miller came into this world. Now the thing was that I resided in Atlanta and my husband resided and ran his business in North Carolina, so he was traveling between the two locations and I was on my own with the kids a lot. I had to put my job on hold a little to be able to be with my children and be a mom, and that was good. However, I missed working, I loved my job and I missed it badly. After considering everything we decided that we would establish a home in North Carolina so my husband could continue running his well-working photography business locally.

It must have been hard to leave everything behind, the life you knew, your business partners and close friends.

In all sincerity I was not a hundred percent happy about the decision, but at the time it seemed to be the best one we could make. I truly felt a big part of me was left behind, and I had to start all over in North Carolina. It did feel frustrating. In my new home I took my time and put together a book of my work and started calling photographers. I got listed at a modeling agency as a stylist and I also got into placing Venetian-style plasters on clients’ walls, which was fun but had nothing to do with photography - it was a necessity, not a new passion due to the simple fact that there were not enough jobs available.

Did it ever occur to you guys to do business together? Given a photographer and a stylist in the same household and a photography business already established, it would be my first thought.
We did have some projects. However, he was focused more on interiors and I was focused on food.

Here, I will be completely transparent now. I won’t say it differently as it is, we are getting a divorce. The boys have grown up, and we have grown apart. We spent 22 years together in our marriage and today it is clear that our goals and views on growth have parted on the way. That is what we have realized. Bittersweet, because clearly I have arrived at a new phase of my life. Being who I am, tough, changes like this are an opportunity to me instead of a rut. And seeing this change as an opportunity is very exciting.

Chriscilla, I am so sorry to hear that. I understand it is a tough crossroad for you and I appreciate your honesty. I am sure a lot of readers have been, or even are right now, in the same situation. Knowing your thoughts about it is very helpful, if you ask me. Thank you for them. Loving someone is not necessarily holding them tight no matter what. Letting go is the right thing sometimes. Good for you, having been able to realize it. That in itself takes as much courage as acting upon it, if not more.
Yes, it is very hard to do business as usual, to be creative while you are shattered inside. 22 years is a lot of time with, of course, a lot of good memories. But life won’t stop, it can’t. We need to move on. I am able to compartmentalize, that helps a lot.

Let’s talk about the requirements to become the top tier professional you have become. What principles have you gone by, what are your values when it comes to work?
The most important one is to meditate every morning. I listen to inspirational material to control my attitude, to get the proper mindset for the day. In my world attitude is everything and the one thing that we can control in any relationship, business relationships are no exception. This is why it is essential for me to set it right before work.

Another important factor is my hard work ethic. Consistently showing up, being present. With discipline. My motto is, whatever needs to happen to get the work done must happen. For me work is never a 9 to 5 thing. Many times I add my own dime if the budget of the client is not enough for my vision. Going above and beyond is the way I approach my projects. Proper communication, looks, respect of the people I work with are a must, too. And extreme patience. Adaptability. Crucial for this kind of work. On many occasions five to six people are flooding me with their ideas at the same time. I am listening to them, taking all the info in, as well as feedback to my opinion. Sometimes I have a lot of guidelines and no freedom and then that is how the job needs to be fulfilled. I am a paid service provider, clients come first. And failure is not an option. I am very goal-oriented.

I also have a principle that I keep in mind. If I cannot control something, I won’t worry about it. It helps me focus on what really matters, which, in my job, with so many ideas whirling in your head needing to be organized somehow, is essential.

I do a lot of research about my new client and the product(s) I need to work with. Familiarizing myself with my work subjects is a must. Which is tricky when it comes to working with meat…

Because…?
Because I am vegan. [I laugh out loud.] Thanks to my hypothyroidism, which I was diagnosed with almost 20 years ago, I shifted my life in basically two weeks after the initial freak-out and started an eating regime very gentle to my body, which excludes rice, pasta, bread, dairies, eggs, and sugar. I love hot teas, fruits and veggies, raw or grilled, and thanks to my travelling lifestyle and the routine built over the years, my meals are never boring. I do not feel deprived in any way.

So, what do you do when it comes to styling meat products? Do you reveal that you are vegan to clients who want you to work with meat?
Absolutely, and never has there been an issue with it. I have acute smelling and I can tell by just feeling the smell of the meals what it is like and what they can go well with, as in decoration. I am a stickler for authenticism, so it is really important to understand the product, the vision, the strategy and all.

Nice! Now what is still to come? What is your destination now?
My really big dream is to become internationally renowned. I would love to visit Italy for work one day, for instance. It is a slow path but I feel it has begun. An Israeli event planner has reached out about me designing cocktails for one of his events. That is a start!

hat is, wow, sounds very exciting! Now, much-much stress, that’s how your life sounds – not necessarily bad stress but certainly a lot to process and fulfil. I can imagine you feel hyperactive or super tired on a long, hard day. What is your way to unwind, relax?
I run.

Oh! I love to hear that! Tell me more about it.
In high school I was in track. I loved it. But as an adult I started 16 years ago, to get fit. Strong-fit. My daily dose is 8 miles and I would not even call it running, it is just slow, peaceful jogging for the fun of it. In the last couple years, though, I have been plateauing, so I have added lifting. Not in a gym, in my home, mostly. I have my own dumbbells, I work out with 15 lbs. I can easily toss them in my trunk, together with my jogging gear, so no matter where I go, I can have my workouts without an issue.

Religion is another thing that means a lot to me and helps me relax  my mind. I don’t mean organized religion, I don’t go to church every Sunday, no. I grew up going, but as I grew older, I disconnected with the church as it is. It is more like a deep, personal relationship with God. Every morning I say my prayers and gratitude, for instance. And every time I feel there is nowhere to turn, praying helps me release what I cannot control. Helps being in tune with my day. For example if I leave for a job in the morning and realize I have left my phone home, I won’t panic or cuss or freak out. Just turn back and think that nothing happens without a reason. Maybe by leaving my phone home I avoided an accident on the road.

Lots and lots of things have happened in your life, you have been through so much, good and bad, and I love that calm, smart way you have been talking about it all. Full of life and maturity. Freedom, by doing what you love, by living how you love. Freedom, by knowing where you are going, thus being able to handle hardships properly. Full of ambitions, goals, not giving up ever. Attagirl! If you had to give the essence of your life learnings to those still beginning their journey for a life tailored for them, what would that be?
Always step out of your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing grows there. Step out, reach out. It requires a lot of courage but it is so worth it. We all know how life ends – what is there to lose...?

Thank you, Chriscilla. Perfect closing words, ones I go by myself. It was a wonderful experience talking with you, thanks for the time you spent with me. Every minute was a diamond.
Thanks, Kami, for the opportunity. I am proud to be part of the Attagirl World.

If you want to find out more about Chriscilla, please click on the links below.

LinkedIn
Instagram
Website Salt Paper Studio + Productions
Website Daniel Ray Photography

05 - Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan

32 minutes reading

I’m like who does she remind me of…? Beautiful doe eyes, a huge smile; brunette, forever-young-cute… who does she look like…? And then I see this trailer of The Idea of You. Yes. I knew it! It clicks immediately. She completely resembles Anne Hathaway! Not that it matters, you know; but when it comes to a point where you have that burn to put your finger on it whenever you see her on Zoom, it just relaxes the mind to finally remember.

She also makes me homesick in a certain way, one hundred percent. Back in Hungary I was crazy for wines. In the early 2000s I even took a sommelier course that was based on Hungarian wine regions. My favorite region was Szekszard with a few wines from Eger and Villany. I was a huge fan of Takler cab sauvs, Malatinszky rosés and chardonnays from Matyas Szoke, as well as pinot noirs from Tekenohat by Thummerer. Not to mention a good Montepulciano or chianti from Italy. What can I say. Iowa is not quite a hot spot of wine and, like everything else from bread to ham, wine in the U.S. is way too sweet for my Central European palate.

Now this girl knows a lot of Hungarian wines. When I contacted her, she listed the wines she tasted in Tokaj and she walked me down memory lane, for which I will forever be grateful. For warming my heart with not only that, but also with using the proper punctuation of Hungarian language when she was writing me about her experience in Hungary some 14 years ago - which even I am slacking on here in the U.S. to keep things simple. She captured my heart, no doubt.

Attagirl! for the month of May is Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan, MW. Meaning Master of Wine, which is huge. She was the 4th woman in the United States to be bestowed the title, and mark my words, there have only been 149 female Masters of Wine worldwide since 1955.

I first caught sight of her on TV, on the reality TV show The Real Housewives of New York where she orchestrated a wine game for some celebrity crowd. She was humble, extremely knowledgeable, super polite and funny at the same time; a great host all in all that made me do my little research. What, she used to be a finance expert…? What, she left behind her 6-digit-salary profession for living for her passion, wine?? Attagirl! I knew immediately that I wanted to reach out to her.

Rest assured I did, too. And now you can read the essence of our three little encounters in May, which we enjoyed so very much. She talks about her decisive childhood experience, her progress in adulthood, and the choices she made as well as the mechanisms she overcame her difficulties with.

Created with love – read with delight.

[I can’t help but notice that her office in her California home is so bright with the sunshine pouring in, while my office in Iowa is pretty dimly lit by the rays fighting their way through the gray duvet of clouds characterizing Iowa weather for much of the month.] Well, hello, Jennifer!  I can tell it is beautiful over there!
Hello Kami, nice to see you! Yes, it is beautiful here and it is only 9 a.m.

I’m happy for you. Here in the Midwest we are in the tornado-thunderstorm season, but oh well. So, welcome to Attagirl! I am so glad we‘re doing this, very exciting.
Thank you, thank you for getting me to be here, I feel honored to contribute. I am very excited, too.

Well, tell me a bit about growing up, your triggers, goals, and all.
In all honesty, when I look back, my primary drive was to be authentic and value my own uniqueness. I am an identical twin with my sister, which explains so much. People could not tell us apart and when they would get my name wrong, they would remark “Jen, Liz, same thing”. No, I am not my sister, and she is not me. Feeling invisible often made me vulnerable, I wanted family and friends to know me specifically, Jennifer, not just as one of the girls, or one of the twins. I felt unseen, unremarkable, like I did not matter. So, early on I had the desire to be different.

Fortunately, our mom encouraged us to dress differently, so I went with the girly stuff: pink shoes, dresses, purses, while Elizabeth was the ultimate tomboy. Our mom also made a conscious effort to enroll us in separate classes in elementary school. Additionally, our personalities are really different. Elizabeth has always had this inner confidence from birth. [She laughs when she tells the story of how Elizabeth, the breech one of them, was to be born first but she literally “kicked” Jennifer out first.]. She has been the strong one, too. Once, on the school playground, I was picked on by a group of kids, which was not unusual, kids usually found me when they wanted to bully someone. But this time they pulled me by my hair and while struggling I hit my head on a rock. Elizabeth must have seen what happened because she bolted out of the school building and beat the kids.

The pattern remained the same in high school too. Elizabeth was the strong one, I was the one always picked on, most likely because of the insecurity I continuously displayed. Oh, how we hated these juxtapositions, these either-ors: Elizabeth the strong one, me the weak one; Elizabeth the active one, me the scholar one; Elizabeth the tomboy, me the pretty girly girl. We could not be considered the same at anything even if we were not truly that different. I sang in chorus, played the violin, did cheerleading – no matter what I endeavored, bullying followed. I could not find any reason for it other than being too sweet and wanting to people-please. Making friends back then was obviously not my forte. My strategy was to show strength in academics instead. I studied and read a lot. I was a top graduate in high school, with A pluses.

I guess sports were not something you could stand out with.
Oh boy, no. Both Elizabeth and I were sick a lot, and I was not even as strong as Elizabeth. It changed with time, though. In high school Elizabeth was on the tennis team and we were both in badminton (though many in our school thought badminton wasn’t a sport). My mom saw my struggles with confidence and before sending us off to college, she had this idea for us to take self-defense classes, a taekwondo-based one. I practiced a lot with Elizabeth. Those practices gave me a lot of courage to try and step out of my shadow. It was clear, though, that I was doing a great job at defense but was very weak at offense. I had to learn to fall appropriately. I became aware as time passed that this was the chance for me to show that I could do it. That I could get hit, I could fall, but I still could keep coming back. My mantra became Keep going forward! And I did. And at the test, where we had to fight one-on-one with the class members, I finished with a trophy for “most improved.”

This class gave me much confidence and resulted in martial arts becoming an organic part of the years that followed. I got a brown belt in taekwondo, and I also started tai chi to gain more balance, in physical as well as spiritual aspects.

So things started to change in your life, right?
They did indeed! My college years showed the first signs of real confidence. I had two goals: to study international business and to study somewhere else than my local university, where I spent my first two years. Which was New York by then, where my family had moved when my dad retired from the Airforce (have I mentioned that Elizabeth and I were born on an Airforce base in Wyoming?). I wanted to travel; I found the idea of being in the international business world to be extremely exciting. So, I switched gears and I consciously put all my time and energy into my academic work. Which resulted in several paid scholarship offers. One from Georgetown University in WA, where Bill Clinton graduated from, however, business courses seemed insufficient for what I was looking for. I wanted more. So, I went with the unexpected option, the University of Denver, CO, where I could gain a broad understanding of international business.

I studied like crazy for two years and finished close to the top of my class. All that all-nighter studying, all the books read and learned, all the energy and time invested into my knowledge paid off. New York, be ready for me, I am coming! With all the credentials you need, helloooo!

New York, huh? Where better to dip the toes into international business!
Exactly! But guess what. New York did not seem to be interested in either my top grades, or me. I was trying to get a job for close to a year, applying with my high academic record everywhere and more. And nothing.

Bang!

I could not understand it. My resume seemed to be going off into the abyss. Finally, the husband of a friend of Elizabeth’s, who by the time had immersed herself into aerospace technology, drew my attention to a job at Citibank in Manhattan. I jumped on the opportunity. But, for God’s sake, it was a secretary position for a man in the automotive industry department. Secretary?! I didn’t need to go to four years of college for international business to type memos for my boss and get coffee. But I could find nothing else after applying for dozens of jobs for many months. It was demoralizing.

So you took the job.
I did, of course. These years were very humbling, a huge slap to my already fragile ego, but I understood I was not in the position to be picky. I had to readjust my expectations and approached the opportunity with as much positivity as my hurt feelings would allow. Lucky for me, the division had products with huge international potential and my boss was a guy with tremendous knowledge and international experience. I looked up to him very much. I did my best to be the best person for the job.

Because my boss was an expatriate, when he came back to the US, he was preparing for his Series 7 & 63s license exams. When he offered to also take the classes with him, I jumped at the chance. If I could pass the exams, the doors for the Management Associate Program, which was mostly entered by Ivy Leaguers with Master’s Degrees, would open for me. A fierce competition, but a fantastic opportunity for an international business career. It was huge. I wanted to be in the program, badly. Being offered a spot in the classes meant the world to me. I studied on my own, and with no external support I passed. I applied for the Management Associate Program. My boss wrote me a recommendation letter to help and I got in.

Must have been a highly stressful time in your life.
Well, the real stress just began at that point. The program lasted 6 months, but I only had 6 weeks before I had to travel to the UK for the opportunity they wanted me for. Believe me when I say I felt completely insufficient. There was so much I did not understand, despite my hard work, my studies, my best efforts. I felt I was drowning.

Eventually I ended up spending two years in London. Two years of constant anxiety. I wanted to call in sick every day. I sunk into deep depression. I worked 15-18 hours a day, every day, weekends included.

Oh boy. Sounds tough. What happened then?
I started dating this guy. He was English, eloquent, ridiculously smart, successful and I was enamored with him and his “work hard, play hard” lifestyle.  He was a Management Associate that just transitioned out of my department to work in another rotation.

But this guy wanted it back into my department and they wanted him back in too. Only problem was, I had the position and was set for a long rotation. While I can’t quite blame the department for wanting someone back in that they had already invested in and got up to speed, the way they went about getting him back in felt more of an ambush and intentional set-up.

To add insult to injury, this same guy I was dating for months was hiding from me that he was engaged!  I thought we were exclusive and I found out days before the department worked to get rid of me. If I had thought that I could feel no lower – that made me hit rock bottom.

The day they organized to get rid of me I was brought into a private conference room and told to sign a consent contract with this list of mistakes I had made. I realized later they did this so that I could rotate out earlier or be fired from the Management Associate Program so they could get this guy in.

When I read the document, some of the list were indeed mistakes I had made, but some of them were not.  They needed me to consent to it to get this guy in there quickly and I saw it for the ruse it was. All of a sudden, my Keep going forward! mantra from taekwondo clicked in.

I said, no.

For the first time in my life, I said “no” to authority. I was trembling and terrified, but I knew they could not force me to sign anything. At least that was a small victory I could hold on to.

The Management Associates Program did not fire me, but because my department no longer wanted me (he was local and I was an expat), I was sent back to New York for a new rotation. While I felt like the biggest failure on the planet at the time, this turned out to be the best thing for me, though I didn’t know it yet.

I was put in a new department in Manhattan, where I got a more analytical, financial statements-based position which I excelled at. My superiors thought I walked on water. I had all the success I had craved in London. But it was too late.

Because…?
Because I realized banking was not for me. A very combative, competitive, ruthless world and I did not want money enough to be in that world. The money I made was great, but I had to realize it was not everything. Part of me felt it was destroying my soul.

My epiphany came one afternoon at a business lunch in London, but it took months to really create change. I was again falling into my memory of that wonderful sensation when I had that particular meal with that particular wine at that bank lunch event. My most enjoyable culinary experience, a Sancerre, which is Sauvignon Blanc grown in the region of Sancerre in Loire, and herb-crusted salmon – one that was occupying a greater and greater space in my mind and in my heart. It started to grow. I began to think that maybe it was not business, per se, that I needed to be engaged in. I loved events, so perhaps I could work in international event planning.

After that very lunch I went back to the office and worked until 11 p.m., which was very typical by the way. I was so exhausted and then someone said to me, “Jennifer, don’t worry. In about ten years you will have ‘paid your dues’ and you can then do whatever you want.” And then I thought to myself, “I am not going to suffer like this for the next ten years, doing something I don’t like doing, being stressed, yelled at every day, belittled, working like a slave. For what, the possibility of more money and a little more freedom in ten years? I’m in my late 20s and in 10 years it will be more difficult to be married, possibly have children if I want them…” I immediately knew, that was my second epiphany that same day, that this was not going in the right direction. I also did a quick litmus test: “Do I want my boss’s job? No. Do I want my boss’s boss’s job? No.” Then what was I doing there????

Once I got back to New York and pondered these thoughts for a few months, I signed myself up for a wine class for enthusiasts held by Kevin Zraly himself, at Windows on the World restaurant at the Twin Towers in Manhattan in 2000.

And I entered a whole new world and it occurred to me, no business is more international than wine.  This is what I went to school for originally, international business! Things were starting to feel more right.

I tasted wines in the class, and then opened up a map and found the origin of those, the culture, the food recommendations to accompany them, how wonderful! And how much less of a competitive and judgmental world than banking… At this point I was only curious, I had no plans to work with wine. The experience was great, though. Around 200 wine enthusiasts in the audience, a dynamic teacher, a world I did not know existed before opening up for me. I was hungry to know more and I could not learn fast enough. If the spark was that lunch in London, this class was definitely the gasoline on that.

When the course was getting towards the end, I started panicking. What will I do afterwards? So, at the end of one of the classes I got my act together and approached the teacher with my newly found passion. He told me to wait a little and we’d come up with a plan for me. I was so proud to tell him later that I’d taken a job at the Burgundy Wine Company and I was selling wine! In a real wine store! Selling wine to corporate clients! Well, he was not so enthusiastic by my choice of working in wine sales and he simply told me to call him in six months. I called him nine months later wanting out of that job and we finally put together my resume and he gave me a list of names to contact and collect information from. “Just informational interviews for you to ask questions”, he said. I dove into my research, excited, proud, and happy.

Sounds like so much fun!
And it was. To my greatest surprise, when I reached out to this lady and she accepted me in her office, she literally interviewed me while I myself was trying to get info from her. I just kept and kept and kept asking her my questions and she asked what kind of a job I was looking for. Wait, what? She mentioned then that they had a job opening for an event planner. What I did not know was that Mr. Zraly had previously consulted her about me. Of course, I took the position and could not have been happier. In six months I became a brand manager.

I never stopped learning. At 4 p.m. I would grab my things and leave the office for home, where I would spend my evenings learning and learning and learning.

I trained myself from ground zero in 2000 into a Master of Wine by 2008.

Huge, congratulations! What about your private life, which seems a little bit pushed beside all that learning. Share a little with me, and the readers, of course, about that.
Without a doubt I did not have much time for dating or for friends. I did not invest much time in dating. I invested all my time in studying. But I did need to give love and be loved back. However, I wanted to minimize time loss as a result of dates leading nowhere, so I decided to go online. That is how I met my husband in 2004. We got married in 2007.

I had this technique that I used to focus on what was important to me and believed was working when I needed help from above. I had this pastor who taught me about calling-in of wishes – call it manifestation, call it attraction, call it hope, call it faith, call it whatever you wish. The point was I gave thanks to God for making the desired situation possible and acted like I was already in that situation. I created what I call a manifestation card, about my husband, where I gave thanks to God for the perfect man and all the characteristics he had. I did this practice twice a day, and I truly believe it played a serious part in finding the right guy for me. Ahm… I guess I did not give enough particulars about his job and the irony was that, of course, he was a banker. But oh well, everything else was just perfect. Plus, him being a banker meant he was extremely busy, like myself, which clearly was not a halt for us. On the contrary. We designated Wednesdays and Saturdays as date nights. It was clean and easy to follow. That way we could make the most out of our relationship, these few occasions were truly high-quality. I believe I have the greatest husband, he has always been super supportive of my intense passion, there has been nothing I could not pursue with his consent and full support. He is a wise man whose advice I can boldly take knowing he wants the best for me, for us. We truly are two peas in a pod.

So cool, Jennifer. When you started the relationship, you were already walking on your path to MW, right?
Yes. I was in the middle of my MW program with a lot of blind tasting of course. Well, the more I learned, the more insecure I felt. During this time it seemed everyone knew more than I did. The good-ole imposter syndrome overtook me. It is so crazy how the mind can challenge you and make you believe less of yourself. I am grateful to my husband who opened my eyes to my actual value that seemed to appear less and less in my own eyes in the course of my interactions with fellow students.

We had a study group for tasting where we gathered and tasted wines together and shared our ideas. When it was my turn to host this study group, of course my husband was home, a silent observer. He helped me understand that when I felt torn down by my study peers, I had every right to feel so, as they truly were trying to tear me down and not build me up. With his help I was able to make the conscious decision to leave this study group behind, prepare by myself, which forced me to do it in a smarter way focusing on the positive things only, and leaving behind things making me insecure for good.

In 2008 THE phone call came. They were looking for Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan, Master of Wine. I made it. I finally made it, it took me two tries, but I made it! The happiness was accompanied with a sense of sadness, too. Again, now what?

And, what? What does Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan, Master of Wine do today?
Well, after the initial sadness of one chapter ending, again, I took my inventory. I realized my knowledge of wine, practical and theoretical, was immense. I figured I had become a much better writer, thanks to all the essays I had to turn in, and the wide, powerful vocabulary I obtained during my journey. I also had become more analytical and discerning.

I felt I just had to utilize those polished skills in my new, MW life. I sought ways to do so and, honestly, ways seemed to find me, too. I got the invitation to do a five-course series with The Great Courses (now called Wondrium), a proposal I accepted gladly. In 2010 I published a wine book, then another one, co-writing it with a Certified Master Chef (CMC) about food pairing, which was super fun. I was on TV on multiple occasions, on morning shows and what not, but, in all sincerity, these years were pretty intense and not as enjoyable as I would have liked. I found this kind of life very depersonalizing, one’s integrity may be questioned. A lot of work was put into these things and minimal gain of any nature came in return. That was another epiphany. Things needed to change.

After taking everything into consideration I decided to start my own company. It was a huge step for me and a 2-year period of mental-strategic planning preceded my first online course that I launched in 2020. I had to learn all about production and the strategy I wanted to follow in constructing my business plan. It was a very interesting learning curve and the business, an online teaching platform, continues to be a success. This company is what represents everything I have acquired in my life. Through my banking experience, through my wine experience, through everything I have witnessed and learned as a person. It is my baby.

Sounds like you have achieved everything you wanted in life. Is there anything you would do differently if you could?
I don’t regret anything that happened to me, it might sound cliché that what happened to me have made me into the person I am today, but it is true, one hundred percent. My drive was to be the best at least at one thing. And the Master of Wine was the opportunity to be the best in the world at something, like the Olympics.

Do I regret not having children? Sometimes. Should God have graced me with children in my 30s or 40s, I would not have turned them away. However, my husband, Christopher and I were not actively or intentionally trying either. All mothers have my greatest respect as it is the most intense and most difficult job in the world. They have real courage.

Jennifer, your life seems to be so rich as it is, you have had unique experiences, from being an identical twin through seeking and finding your authenticity to taking the risk of leaving the banking world behind to pursue and live your passion, your dream. I am amazed by the courage you have had to steadily fight for what has been important to you. What would you advise to anyone who is in a similar dilemma today?
To follow any dream, I think of the words of President Theodore Roosevelt from 1910 when he was giving a speech.  Theodore Roosevelt’s home at Sagamore Hill on Long Island is close to where I spent most of my childhood and his words really resonate with me to not give up.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – President Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

Keep pushing forward!  Go slower at times if you need to, but don’t you give up! Wherever you are, whoever you are, I am cheering for you on the sidelines to keep going. I hope my story has helped you in any way it can.

Thank you, Jennifer, for your honest words and the chance to peek into your immensely eventful life. I am sure a lot of us will find multiple takeaways from all that have been shared. It was a wonderful experience working with you.
Thank you, Kami, for the opportunity, it was my pleasure.

If you want to find out more about Jennifer, please click on the links below.

Instagram
Website 1
Website 2
TEDx: Unlocking The Hidden Power of the Palate
Audible: The Everyday Guide to Wine
Audible: The Everyday Guide to Wines of France
Audible: The Everyday Guide to Wines of Italy
Audible: The Everyday Guide to Wines of California
Amazon: The One Minute Wine Master
Amazon: Rosé Wine: The Guide to Drinking Pink

04 - Thea Parikos

22 minutes reading

Today my Lemon Verbena plant arrived. I will enjoy the leaves in my evening tea for a better, calmer sleep. Which I have been seriously lacking for at least the past year. I am happy if I can sleep 5 hours in a row. My mind just won’t stop spinning. I have tons of thoughts in my head, never resting. Melatonin won’t help and Tylenol PM is not something you want to pop on a daily basis. I had been trying to find a good long-term solution for some time when I got the advice to have a Lemon Verbena tea before going to bed.

And I know that if the person who advised Lemon Verbena as the solution says it will work, then it will work. This woman knows all about healthy lifestyle. She runs her own healthy, island-specific restaurant in the middle of the Aegean Sea, on one of the five Blue Zone locations of the world, the Greek island of Ikaria. If there is anyone who knows all about these vital greenleaves, it is she, in whose culture herbs play an essential role and who uses her own herb and vegetable garden for making heavenly longevity dishes for her inn, her business of decades.

For those who are not familiar, Dan Buettner was the man who researched areas in the world where people tend to live the longest. He identified what we call the Blue Zones today: locations of longevity. He studied the lives of people, their routines, and found nine common denominators that contribute to local longevity in all five Blue Zone hotspots. He lets us peek into the lives of Blue Zoners in his show on Netflix, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones - the exact show where I caught sight of this Greek lady, his guide.

As an advocate of clean, lean eating and a healthy, balanced lifestyle, I was more than excited to connect with my Blue Zone Lady today. Attagirl! in April is Thea Parikos, the owner of Thea’s Inn on the Greek Blue Zone spot, the island of Ikaria. Despite some island-specific technical difficulties that tried to sabotage our interview multiple times, we had a very exciting discussion about her life philosophy, the decisions she made and the dreams she followed to arrive where she is today. An amazing, event-rich life that is authentically hers, with people around that she loves, family and friends; great food and wine, and the endless sea surrounding it all with its blueness and softly splashing, white frothy waves. Our discussion is presented here for you.

Created with love – read with delight.

So, what is your journey, Thea? How did it start?
I was born in the U.S., in Michigan….

I was not aware of that!
Yes, I was. My grandparents settled down in Michigan, in a large Ikarian community, with lots and lots of cousins, and that is where my parents were born. I am second generation Greek in America, that is where I grew up. I started visiting Greece after the age of seven. We would go to Ikaria in Greece, where the roots of my family were. And I loved going there. And I hated coming back to the States.

Especially because I always felt awkward in the U.S. I never felt that I belonged. When I compared myself to my schoolmates, I always thought I was differently wired, a UFO. It gave me much anxiety in my school years. I simply did not have the American mentality.

What happened then?
The end of high school came and I still did not know what I wanted to study. All my cousins went on for higher education and here I was, not fitting in, not knowing what I wanted to do, the only one in the family not continuing studying – so I flew to Ikaria. And this time I spent a full year there.

What did you do there for a year?
Not much, to be honest. I did not have a job, one of my friends ran a private school and I helped out at it. When I ran out of money, I went back to the States. My parents were classic Greeks in the States. Like the ones in the Big Fat Greek Wedding, the movie. They were strict. They were like yeah, go, travel to Greece but come back here eventually. They were honestly concerned about what I wanted to do. And I still was kind of experimenting. In the U.S. I worked as a waitress and once I had the money, I went back to Ikaria, helping out in that private school again. That’s how my life went until I turned 23, when in Ikaria I met my now-husband.

Oh, nice! What’s the story, do you mind sharing?
Not at all! There was this large congregate in the summertime where I was having drinks with a group of people and he was there too. Eventually he offered to give me a ride home. That’s how it all began. We spent the summer together while he was working on a marine cargo vessel, planning to obtain his captain’s license – and then I ran out of money again. I told him I needed to go back to the States, and until the spring I waited tables again.

And with that things started to speed up. My parents wanted to meet him.

And you don’t say no to the parents of a Greek girl when it comes to meeting her sweetheart.

And I started panicking because the most reasonable way for him to come to the States was a fiancé visa but our relationship was honestly not there yet. So… we decided we would get married and then we would see what happens. (And he is still my husband so we can safely say that we were not wrong to go with that fiancé visa…)

To speed up history a little bit, in October he entered the States, in November we had our not-so-big fat Greek wedding hosting around only 200 people (if it had been held on Ikaria, it would’ve been double the guests as all his relatives lived there and only a few could come to Michigan) and in December, as newlyweds, we left the U.S. for Ikaria. I was 24 then.

After him joining the army, and us having our first son, a trip followed to the U.S. and the first real conscious, thoroughly considered decision of ours was made: we would settle down in Ikaria. The Greek island would be a perfect location for children to grow up, and that was the most important factor for us. And we were the crazy ones to come up with that decision.

Crazy is good, I like crazy! In my vocabulary it is a synonym of authentic and courageous. And I think that decision was a really authentic and courageous one. So, what next, back in Ikaria?
Back in Greece we were still testing the waves, trying to figure out what we could do for a living, dipped toes in this and that. It took us a few years to see a somewhat clear image of our future. And it was the image of a family-operated eatery. We decided to name it Thea: in in Greek it can mean goddess or view and is also a female name (my full name means Gift of God). The restaurant opened in 1997. A few years shy of thirty years ago.

I bet it is your pride. What is there to know about Thea, the restaurant?
Well, today we call it Thea’s Inn. And we have rooms for rent, too. Today I only rarely do the cooking myself, I have help. I mostly host guests; I enjoy talking to people. The restaurant offers fully Ikarian meals with a lot of vegetables, fresh meat, fish, and fruits. The menu is built on natural ingredients, completely following the change of the seasons. It changes based on what produce is available. We strive to use local produce and meat. We add our freshly grown herbs to our meals, lots of herbs. They thrive here on the island. Olive oil is another must, and, of course, it is locally grown and produced too. Honey here in Ikaria is highly valued, pesticide-free and we complete syrups, yogurt, and tea with it. Very special. Also special is our local wine.

Sounds like heaven for someone like me who loves clean, healthy meals. Who are your guests?
Our visitors mostly come from Europe, and more and more from America in the past years. People seem to look for quiet places, off the beaten tracks. We have frequenters who stay here for months in the summer, always coming to our restaurant, while others are regulars in other places. There are five restaurants in the village, but it is completion, not competition, the way we coexist. Tourism here provides enough for everyone. There are no ethnic restaurants, all of us operate with locally available ingredients and make Greek meals, but we differ in the meals or even the preparation of the same meal.

What was the reason for you to start a restaurant and not something else?
You know, when my husband and I started to brainstorm about our future in Ikaria, in 1992, it wasn’t an easy place to live. True, we had our property through his family, but in all honesty, there was not much on the island back then. There was some tourism already, Ikaria was liked mostly for the outdoors: by swimmers, hikers, because the scenery was truly perfect here – but not much else. There were two or three restaurants only,; earth roads, unreliable electricity, and no need to say, not many jobs available either. So we could choose from building a home on the property and commuting to work on a daily basis or starting a business on the property based on tourism. And we went for the second one. We decided to establish a restaurant and offer accommodation for visitors as our future income. Again, we were the crazy ones, but oh well.

Again, another authentic and courageous decision. And you already had some experience having served tables in the States back in the day, right?
Well, yes and no. Yes, because I did spend some time close to the fire of hospitality business for years. And no, because running a restaurant in the States is very different from running one in Greece. In America business dictates owners to make sure tables turn as soon as possible. Meals are served and plates are picked up, table is changed fast for new guests. That would be an insult to guests in Greece. When we eat socially, we like to take our time, we do not like to be rushed. We order multiple meals, our tables are full of food and wine, and eat slowly while having fun, enjoying company and just relaxing. Oftentimes a group like that spends three hours in a restaurant, without being in a hurry. Now imagine that in an American restaurant… We run our inn on our island Greek style.

Your life must definitely be busy during the tourist season.
Yes, starting in spring it gets really crazy. That is when I begin getting anxious. On the island it is impossible to do any repair work in the winter, so much rain and wind, and it is hard to find skilled workers in that season too. So whatever needs to be done for the new season basically starts being done around April. Which means April brings the usual worry if everything will be done in time. This anxiety ends in the beginning of the season, then the focus is on the guests. That is a nice period but also a really active and busy one. After guest season things calm down, we get ready for the winter, and then the cycle starts over.

So, what is your way to wind down, what is it that you like doing when you can afford some time for yourself?
I love reading. I also love the nights when I sit down with a view on the sea and the stars, sipping my husband’s wine – red, rosé, white, does not really matter. All of his wines are wonderful. Another great method for me to chill is meeting my friends. Changing the environment is essential for a balanced lifestyle in my opinion. Every time we meet, we try to go to a different village, a different bar or restaurant, or even to someone’s home who has food and drinks. 8-9 women, or even if just two, we always find a way to meet.

Yet planning is funny here; plans are extremely flexible. Unless it is a doctor’s appointment or a plane to catch, we are very generous and casual about time. In Ikaria time is definitely not the boss! We have a saying here: if we cannot fully finish what we plan, no problem, “that is why God gave us tomorrow.” Coming from the States, I really had to learn to adapt that principle in my life, but I think I am pretty good today. An example: when we decide to meet at, say, 8, it is safe to say we are still getting ready at 8:30, so we normally make it by 9. Ish. This is just how we are; nobody stresses out about being late for a friendly event.

I remember that lady from the Netflix show who did not have a watch and estimated time by looking at the sun, while getting ready for a party roasting fish on an outdoor fireplace!
Yes, that is pretty much us, Ikarian people!

It sounds like getting ready for the season is a stressful period for you. What else gives you anxiety, if anything?
Oh, yeah, I do have a few more. The most important one is if everything will be right by spring reservations. I hate mistakes, that is a big fear for me, making mistakes. Every year we make small improvements, change the menu a little bit, and everything has to be fine by the deadline. These are my basic stresses. In Ikaria however, you need to live for the moment. Other than the business-related perfectionism-induced fears the basic rule here is that if you can’t do something about it, leave it.

When you are having these emotions, fear or anxiety, what is the best way for you to release this kind of stress? What works the best for you?
A good swim in the sea always cools me down. Wine releases stress. Wine is always good. And another way that does wonders for me is just “being away.” Again, a change of scenery. I just walk to my husband’s farm – he is responsible for the vegetable and herb garden and the animals. I sit down, enjoying the quiet, some wine, the smells, the intoxicating ambience. Beautiful and highly relaxing. I can hear my thoughts which eventually fall in place from the jumble that makes me visit the farm in the first place. If you let your thoughts just be for 30-45 minutes, the answers you are seeking will come. Perfect.

That sounds so nice. I bet the whole point is not the specific scenery of the sea and the farm, but that we need to find our own recharging place where we can stop, rest, and let the answers come.
Everybody has some kind of stress, you cannot escape those. Problems won’t just go away. What you can do though is just stop. Wherever in the world you are. You will see it is worth it.

You know, I might have said it to every single Attagirl! so far but I do enjoy talking to you, Thea. Very relaxing and, you know, also promising. You are sharing such simple ways to cope with stress, we all can walk somewhere nice, or sit down in a public garden, enjoy plants, a good wine, some of us even the sea. These don’t sound like super magic tricks that couldn’t be done by everyone.
They don’t, indeed. The point is that we need to find a way to feel ourselves, what we need, and the answers come when we can stop and be quiet for a little while. That is my condensed version of the best practices or tricks that serve me well and I can whole-heartedly encourage everyone to give it a try. My life wisdom.

Now tell me about what makes you happy.
Happiness for me is definitely not about buying stuff. I am grateful for everything that I have. And I am optimistic about every day. I am happy that my kids are healthy, that I have a great family, that I am surrounded by great friends. Nothing is about money. I am happy for the quality things; those are what matter.

Totally agreeing here! So, a great family, great friendships, gatherings, super healthy, natural, seasonal food, good wine, lots of physical activity like walking, swimming, even gardening – these are the recipe for your fulfilled and happy life?
Those are truly a must. I’d also add our religion, which is a strong part of the culture here. We are orthodox Greek, and it is not only a religion but a means for social gatherings too. Yes, we go to church on Sundays, but we also meet for social services, like memorial services. Everyone knows everyone here, so we attend funerals together, there are a lot of holidays that we prepare for or spend together. These are very important for us. In general, we care so much about one another in the Ikaria community. The awareness that we can rely on each other and the times we share together I think is just as important as having healthy meals or a fulfilling occupation. Belonging means a lot to us.

Also, again, the relaxed way we exist here. Not being afraid of time. We put down tasks at the end of a busy day but we don’t have the kind of stress about unfinished to-dos like in other places of the world. We do not stress out about deadlines. Time here is not a source of pressure. Like I said, that is why God gave us tomorrow…

I can imagine living on an island can change a lot about the way we think in general. What are the pros and cons of living in Ikaria?
Let’s start with the cons, I feel that list is much shorter. Availability of services are naturally limited here. We have basic healthcare in Ikaria, but significant services are only available on the mainland. For example, cancer treatments or even childbirth require us to either use a ship, which takes seven hours, or a plane, which is a 45-minute-trip to get to Athens. Emergencies are not easy here for sure.

Education is a similar situation. Elementary and high schools are present in Ikaria but going for higher education means that kids have to travel to Athens, or abroad.

And restaurants on the island are closed in the winter. Not an essential factor but for us, people who like to gather, it is not ideal.

On the bright side though the island of Ikaria is a fantastic place to raise children. Safe communities for families with a non-existent crime rate. In today’s world that is very rare. Kids can play outside without being afraid, or us, parents being afraid to allow them to play outside. The air is clean, nature is within arm’s reach. Kids can grow up becoming familiar with and understanding the ways of Mother nature; learning about plants and animals, as well as traditional farming activities. There is a great dynamic of people here, so they get a very nice example of how to interact with and care for one another. To me all of that was a highly important factor when we decided to start our family in Ikaria instead of the States. We wanted our children to be part of this community, and today it feels like it was a great decision.

Every place to live probably has advantages and disadvantages, and Ikaria is no exception. I appreciate all that my life has taught me, that I could see the contrast between city and island life. I am happy I was crazy enough back then to follow my heart that drove me back to my roots. And I am even happier that I could share all that with my children. This life humbles everyone as it is not easy by any stretch, and it also gives you a clear vision to focus on the really important stuff. Like shifting emphasis from financial success onto valuing what we have and supporting one another as a community. I feel privileged for my life experience and that is what I wish for everyone: to be brave enough to follow their hearts. It can be hard but never wrong.

Thank you for the beautiful closing words, Thea. You are truly beautiful. I wish you so many more happy years in your dream life, in your dream environment.
I thank you, Kami, it was such a great opportunity to share all this with you and the readers.

If you want to find out more about Thea, please click on the links below.

Instagram
Website
Dan Buettner - Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones

03 - Gabriella Racz

25 minutes reading

I am sitting here with my laptop wondering how to introduce her. What to write in this first paragraph. A whirlpool of memories are spinning in my head. I have known her since childhood, from my hometown Debrecen. We would draw horses together. We would spend study hall hours in the schoolyard leapfrogging and playing volleyball. We would continuously be in action: run, play Chinese jump rope, do anything, really, requiring movement. I always looked up to her. She was smart, excelled in Math – it was easy for her, we could say, her dad was a mathematician. But then my dad was a physicist, yet my grades at Physics or Math were not as good. Today I know that the difference was that neither one interested me. She loved Math though. She invested a lot into practicing. A lot of time into a lot of practicing. Her sculpted face, which face, let me tell you, has not changed a bit apart from a few lines of wisdom appearing now; bright, greyish-green eyes, perfect teeth, athletic, tall figure and her royal but never superior posture and manners gave her this special aura that made her stand out – to me for certain. I always felt she was different.  As a child I thought success was measured by importance and I was not sure where I might see her looking back at me from: the TV, a podium as a politician, the stage with a medal around her neck as an athlete, or the leader of an enterprise; I just knew this girl would be successful.

What neither one of us was aware of as schoolgirls was her desire for freedom that would break through everything in the life her parents had imagined for her. The unshakable desire for something different started emerging when the river of her thinking left behind its good old and expected bed and started a life of its own. When she started to see through learned reality and recognized real truth, which, again and again, brought her into situations unimaginable. Through which, however, she had the chance to find out who she really was. That was when her real life, her authentic, free life in maximum balance with her identity, truly began.

The March Attagirl! is Gabriella Racz, everyday hero, an absolutely self-made, complete woman; a lover of horses and free life. An elementary school classmate of mine, one of my most valuable, most genuine friends and the the only lifelong one. She heroically endured our three three-hour Viber-discussions after her never-ending, springtime horse-farmer days, which is summed up here for you now.

Created with love – read with delight.

Well, hello, Gabi. How are you doing?
Fine, thanks. We are cooking.

You are doing what? [I am in disbelief. Gabi Racz does not cook. Gabi Racz unwraps and heats up.]
We are cooking! We are making mackerels. [And she laughs while uttering the words. With the typical heartfelt, loud Gabi-laugh. In the same instant Viber chimes and there is the pic of the fish in the making. A beautiful pair of mackerels with lemon and compound butter. She is asking for a little more time so that they can finish and eat.]

Are you done?
Yeah, here I am.

Was it good?
It was.

You ready?
Ready, let’s kick it.

Alright. First of all, tell me what provided this schoolgirl in first – eighth B with the background for success, with perfect performances in studying, sports – and basically anything you decided to have a go at.
Well I was an only child, so my parents’ attention was not divided, they had time for me, and I had time for myself. My dad is a mathematician, and he spent a lot of time with me. From him, I derived the kind of logical thinking that has been an integral and organic part of my life to this very day. We had endless discussions, played a lot of cards, did math together, and the need for understanding problems and happenings in the world just got cemented into me. And from my mom, besides a great love of animals, I inherited the kind of extremely practical way of thinking that she applied when approaching any issue. The way she always solved problems standing on the ground with both feet.

My performance was also due to the strictness they raised me with, a 4 was not acceptable. [The best grade is 5, the worst one is 1 in the Hungarian school system.] From their acceptance of nothing less than the best comes the kind of maximalism that raises the bar for me no matter what I do. At the same time, though, some kind of inhibition started to develop in me, too, which kept me “in my place” securely, not letting me grow wings and fly. It resulted in extreme self-control and led me to question my abilities in new situations.

Well, Gabi, I never thought that you weren’t confident. I never sensed any over-confidence about you either, but it not once occurred that you had such inner conflict.
To tell the truth, I did not know it consciously either. I just accepted my parents’ directions without hesitation. If I had to be an eminent student, so be it. If coming up with ideas was said not to be my strong suit, then I did not force coming up with them. I was bringing the expected results, I was a good kid, I did not argue, and I was fully convinced my parents had my best interest in mind with all they said and did.

I went to the high school they chose for me and I made my decision about studying economics at the university because I fully agreed that I needed a career that was based on logic over studying a couple subjects in the BA/MS system. I just had no doubt they were right. In elementary school I was still confident and calm. But then, as a result of external input and parental rigor, self-doubting became a thing. In high school I was already feeling that something was off. Studying did not interest me as much and my grades got worse. I remember, not so long ago I came across a little note sent to my parents by my high school math teacher. It said something like she could be much more confident with her capability. I was shocked when reading it as an adult. My teacher had noticed even back then what I figured out only later as a result of contradicting experiences.

How did things shape up for you after high school?
I stayed in Debrecen and went to the university to study economics. Those were the best days of my life. I enjoyed being a student in Debrecen. I loved school, I loved my study team. That was when I met my first love with whom I spent seven years together. He was the one I moved to Budapest with later. I started to work during university, at Citibank in Debrecen, then, in Budapest, at Warner Lambert, Budapest Bank, Stollwerck and MOL. Long years full of mixed experiences that gave me a lot to think about and which played an essential role in my decision against a traditional, big firm environment. I felt I did not fit in. I had a different scheme of thinking, I spoke a different language.

Tell me more about this.
I grew up thinking my parents’ statements were categorical, and I took over that mentality myself. That was how I approached everything. Then, the more I saw of the world, the more I realized that my parents’ opinion was not the only proper one; that one problem could have multiple solutions. I caught myself on more and more occasions being taken by surprise by people’s feedback on issues that could have been solved in a multitude of ways, when previously I only saw one. And those occasions just added to feeling that I was less and less, and my childhood confidence completely evaporated. I started to position myself below others. I questioned my every value I had considered stable, and I figured I was not enough. Even if my results were excellent, I did not feel the kind of trust from my superiors that I was anticipating. I felt that my coworkers with much worse performance were succeeding more. This feeling haunted my life for a very long time, creeping up at each single workplace of mine and without going into the details, it is safe to say that apart from a few companies I worked for which shut down, my workplaces terminated my employment.

I guess this had an impact on your relationships, too.
It did indeed! My first, long relationship was stable and safe, I felt like I was in a love membrane. But our paths stopped crossing one another’s and time brought it to an end. We said our goodbyes in peace, there was no door slamming or arguments, we both knew there was nothing left for a relationship. And with that a series of relationship failures began. Most of my relationships either did not even start because by the time I said yes, the potential partner stepped back, or even if it started, there was no connection established on which anything serious could have been built. I did not understand what was derailing my connections and after a time I did not believe I was loveable. I created situations in which I anticipated hearing and seeing my partner’s validation as proof that he loved me. The constant churn of my own thoughts sometimes made even me go crazy. Of course, all this only led to the overwhelming feeling: I could not be loved. I was not good enough. I was not enough.

There was one relationship, however, which made me realize what I had been doing wrong all those years. It made me understand that a connection between a man and a woman needed to rest on a completely different base than what I’d had in mind. That the way the kind of distrust I faced with my superiors at my workplaces was not working there, and it wouldn’t work in my relationships either. Looking back, I am grateful for the teachings of every man I’ve had in my life, I have learned a lot about myself, my role in a relationship and today I approach my emotional life consciously. I am happy. I am really complete and happy in my current relationship of almost three years.

It is clear that the road to where you are today was not an easy one. From how you appear now, I wouldn’t have suspected this tough journey though. What gave you comfort, support, what made you hold on all this time?
There have been a few constants in my life that were present in the good and the bad. One of those is horses. I am not sure where loving horses this much came from, I am not sure why I had a fascination with horses instead of dogs or cats like the majority of children. The family anecdote is about me asking to ride a horse for Children’s Day when I was just three years old. The anecdote doesn’t really say if I actually got to ride one, though it is safe to say that ever since I can remember, horses have been an organic part of my life.

My mom’s parents lived in Merk, a village 80 kms away from Debrecen, where I spent my summers. These summers kept me going from September to June. While I was only drawing horses during school season, in the summer I went to visit them in the meadow every single day. I hopped on my bike in secret and rode to where the horses of the local co-op grazed, spending hours watching them. They let me get closer and closer day by day, they trusted me. Also, I went riding three times a week with my cousin, where I learned the basics and I loved it so much. These summers in Merk were essential for me. Village life, its pulse, its dynamics became my element and as a child I knew I wanted to lead a village life with horses when I grew up.

When I was ten, my mom took me to Pallag, in the outskirts of Debrecen, to a serious equestrian place. I remember it was an Isabella [pale Palomino] color horse they gave me to test my abilities and the verdict came: the kid is good, she can join. That was when my mom got anxious. She questioned how I would get to Pallag for the courses as I could not take the bus there alone. And these were serious, large horses, I might break myself to pieces. Equestrian sports are dangerous, and I was too small she reckoned. So, she decided to enroll me in volleyball instead.

Oh, I remember your volleyball career. Now I know how it came to your life.
Well, that’s how. Volleyball was my second big love during childhood. I played well, I had a great team with a great coach. A new life started for me, with new possibilities. We travelled to compete, we performed well, I spent my summers with the girls by the public pool. Riding horses was put on the backburner till I turned fourteen, when it completely disappeared. I continued playing volleyball in high school and university, I was on the NC2 Biogal team as well as the university’s team. My fourteen-year volleyball era ended when I moved to Budapest. I could have signed on to a new team there, but I had no desire to get used to a new one, get to know new girls, or adapt to new dynamics – so I let volleyball go. I still needed activity badly, so temporarily I ended up doing aerobics by Western Railway Station – only to end up with horses again.

How many years did you miss out on riding?
If my calculation is correct, twelve. Now, I met this old bank coworker one day who accidentally mentioned a possibility to ride. I took my chance and after a few sessions I consciously decided to restart from the basics. I looked for one-on-one courses. I tested multiple places and multiple trainers, spending time at multiple equestrian centers. But no matter where I was, I could not see their vision. The structure of the training was unclear. Instead of systematic construction the sessions seemed random. I did not feel any improvement and was missing the system from the training. Again, my logical brain was demanding understanding. By then, when I was 30, I had purchased Baro [Baron], my first horse. A young, raw one, while I by no means considered myself an advanced rider – not a good combo. But I had the chance to work with him and we were in such harmony that I realized he was the one that I needed.

Years passed and I felt the need to obtain a riding trainer certification at HUSS [Hungarian University of Sports Science]. I had this deep desire to know more about horses, riders and the ideal harmony between them. From then on things sped up. I had ridden in English style all my life and now I was introduced to the Western riding style in the course of my studies. That was a completely new experience I had never had before. For example, I sat on my first Western-trained horse which started backing up and I had no clue what I had done to make him do so. I admired the freedom Western-style horses had with the long reins, and so many more small things that were new to me. I craved learning and all I felt was that something good and exciting had just started.

Baro was my partner in crime, together we created a riding style where horse and rider worked together in gentle, light harmony without stress and forced postures, a kind of mix of Western and English styles. We worked together 1,5-2 hours a day, six days out of seven, crystallizing the method in each single gait. My trainer career started thanks to an accident again, when the manager of the riding center I was at with Baro asked me to jump in as a trainer as they had none available when a rider arrived. Well, that very rider stuck with me and was followed by others with whom I could test and further massage my method. In the meantime, I got my second horse, Cobalt. All of a sudden, I was a full-time trainer with ten riders who fully provided me with the same income I had gotten from office work – without the numerous paralyzing emotions, toxic environment, and destructive competition.

Today when I do training, it is fully for the passion of it. It is my personal mission for my riders to learn to sit and feel the horse stably, and to be able to move together with them with pleasure. Sixty minutes of breathing and pulsing together with nature is what I give my trainees.

It is so good to hear all this. To listen to your enthusiasm, it is such a pleasure, really. In the years when you had no classical office job, how were you getting on?
In all honesty I was an opportunist, a freelancer grabbing every chance that bumped into me. I always had a deep interest in financial solutions, so I dipped my toes into this and that to make ends meet. Natural healing was another interest of mine, and I gave myself a chance in real estate, too. I liked it but after a time it stopped engaging me. I had an ocean of time, so I researched, read, learned a lot, consumed a lot of self-help. Most of the time I had a financial safety-net, there was only a brief period when a small panic took over me when things temporarily seemed off track. I had studied astrology by then, again I was trying to find some logic-based help and I ended up there. I used it mostly for my own purposes, to understand my life’s events, with success, more or less. I am not lying, that was the time that made me anxious about my finances, I literally was praying to the higher powers for not having to sell my horses. I was listening to many Abraham Hicks recordings and there were thoughts there that deeply stuck with me and helped me through the hardest times. One of them was “If something is not a hell yes, then it is a no.” Or not to do anything until we are aligned with our source. And I believed that there was always tomorrow. And there was. Things started to make sense; solutions came. In the form of an inheritance, luck stroke too. The sun started shining over my head.

A lot of self-help, research in the name of the desire to understand, two horses, a bit of luck – what came next?
That is where my fairy tale begins, with another “accident”. A spontaneous weekend excursion to Lake Bank, waiting for my pancakes at the local buffet, brought me to meet my partner. For almost three years now we have lived in perfect harmony, belying my complete relationship history. He lived in such a mesmerizing area in a small village in Nograd [a county in Hungary] that I decided to utilize my inheritance to buy a little farm right there, where we live together today, with his fox terrier and cats and the horses.

We have been renovating the small house on the farm which is my personal passion and pride. The farm came with established horse stalls, which I have exciting plans for, too. The really shocking part to me is that I now garden and cook. Yes, the Gabi that found making an omelet a hardcore challenge now cooks, almost every day! I still thrive in research mode; I learn a lot about plants and ideal planting circumstances online. My partner, Peti, and I religiously watch Chef of Chefs every night, this is our evening program, we started to revisit from part one. From this, and many other inspirations, come the ideas for our culinary experiments in our own kitchen. We make all kinds of meals together, it is real quality time for us and we strive to use healthy, natural ingredients, the majority of which come from our own garden. Fellow villagers here are very nice and cooperative, they provide us with eggs, meat and bread in exchange for stuff that we can provide them with.

This is my dream life. When I think back to the painful, hopeless days of my pathfinding process of my earlier life, I am happy to realize that I have arrived home. I have the relationship I always wanted, the horses of my childhood dreams and the village life I daydreamed about in my apartment on Kiraly Street not so long ago. It is unbelievable, but I know it is true. It makes me happy to be able to do what I like, and the freedom derived from it. To exist like this.

How would you summarize what you have learned on this colorful journey of yours? What are your thoughts for those who are struggling on their own hamster wheels, like you were, while feeling deep inside that they are not where they want to be?
I definitely encourage them to stop that hamster wheel. Don’t struggle when you are faced with an obstacle. A stop sign is not there to hinder, it is there to help. Do not be angry with it, be happy about it. Fighting the wrong target only wastes energy. Do not force finding a solution if it is not in view right away. Wait a little and it will come when you are not expecting it. Decisions that are made in anxiety or anger, in an unbalanced state, will not be the right ones, they will only make things worse. So, calm down and give yourself time. As Hicks would say, “pet your cat.” Which means, distract yourself from your actual problem and let your head clear. The rest will come. You will recognize the arrival of an inspiring thought and when that happens, go for it without fear even if it appears to be irrational and foolish. So just grab that cat and keep petting it…

Gabi, it was so good to have this convo with you. It is great to see that you have arrived. You radiate, happy with life, and you live it full throttle. Your journey is a real success story revealing everything Attagirl! represents. Facing ourselves, identifying what nurtures us and what we need to get rid of to give ourselves a chance to have the life that makes us truly, genuinely happy. Thank you for sharing your journey. I wish you many-many happy years for everything you have fought for and you have established for yourself.
You’re very welcome, Kamka, I thank you for the chance to share my experience. The way I have succeeded, anyone can. The point is to be honest with ourselves, loyal and kind. Through abandoning any path that is not actually ours and waiting for our own path to arrive under our feet. Sometimes it is freaky and risky but if we don’t get scared and keep going, we will arrive home. And there is no better feeling than arriving home.

Gabi has no links to share so if you would like to find out more about her and her life, please feel free to contact me.

02 - Gabriella Chamorro Carlsson

23 minutes reading

I love cooking. Asian, Italian, Hungarian meals and basically anything from any recipe. When I first was thinking about starting a business, I wanted to open my own healthy-choice diner. I am devoted to eating clean and possibly organic and I am even more devoted to growing my own produce. My garden in Iowa is full of peppers and tomatoes of crazy shapes, colors and flavors; cucumbers, cantaloupes and zucchinis; goji and various other berries. I am a huge fan of tropical plants and strive to get my frangipanis, which I started from seeds three years ago, to flower. I sprout pineapple, kiwi, citrus or pomegranate seeds and turn them into plants.

So, when I saw my next interview subject and her husband on TV, literally residing in the cloud forest on the highest mountain of Panama, with flora nurtured by the mists coming from the Caribbean, and operating their business, a beyond-imagination magical restaurant right there, I could not help but feel a little envious. Full honesty here. Amazed too. And happy for their success, suspecting that it has come amidst a lot of struggles, numerous dead-ends taking them back to square one multiple times. Amidst worries and anxiety – but also smart and conscious planning, a lot of creativity and resourcefulness, and as the result of the determination to not give up. It must be their heart, I reckoned, that keeps the dream alive; and holding on has paid off, big time.

If you have seen Kristen Kish’s signature show Restaurants at the End of the World, you know who Gabriella Carlsson is. The co-dreamer, co-maker-come-true; co-owner and co-chef to Hacienda Mamecillo. This little miracle is on one of the most unique locations in the world, hosting guests for a full Mamecillo-experience, dining included. I feel fortunate to be given a look into her extraordinary journey and to find out intimate details of her phenomenal life, the result of bravery and instincts – and a little luck. The interviews with this extremely humble, calm and soft-spoken woman were held in the beginning of February as she and her husband were busy preparing for the Panamanian Carnival Holidays rush. The essence is here for you now. Created with love – read with delight.

Gabi, tell me who Gabriella Carlsson, little girl, schoolgirl, young adult is. Where did your story begin?
I grew up in Lomma, Sweden, a smalltown in the outskirts of Malmö, with my parents and two siblings. I went to the local elementary school and took my high school studies in Malmö. My grandparents were farmers and nature lovers and so were my parents. It was in my genes to fall in love with nature early in my life; a love that has not stopped ever since.

Back then I really had no clue of what I wanted to become as an adult. I just lived the life of an average kid of down-to-earth parents, who were not pushing me into any direction but made me feel assured that no matter what I chose, they would one hundred percent have my back. Years passed and I happened to choose my mom’s profession, osteopathy. That is when I made my first serious decision and moved to England. English osteopathy education was known as highly rated, and I wanted to practice my English too, so the die was cast.

What happened next?
After my education I worked in England for a year and then jumped on an opportunity in the Caribbean, in Antigua. There I spent a season as an osteopath at a local facility. When my contract expired, I decided not to go back to my home country of Sweden just yet, as I wanted to explore different places. I remembered I had received an e-mail, while still in school, from Panama with an opportunity. I looked for that e-mail and contacted the Panamanian sender. Two months later I was en route to Panama…

Sounds like quite an adventure!
Yeah, and it is not over yet. Some time into my stay in Panama I met a man at a barbecue party who would become my husband. We started out as friends but after three months everything started to speed up. We became a couple and not much later we found we were really meant for each other. It was the right time, in the right place. We both wanted to go on to the next chapter, ready to really join forces and establish a family. We waited for half a year, planning in the meantime, looking for land in Panama, the country we imagined our life together in.

It took us 3-4 months to find the land we live on now. We stepped on it the first time and knew immediately we were home, even if it only had a small wood cabin on it at the time. Our daughter, Isabella was on the way when we started to build our home ourselves, designed by an architect friend. That was over 11 years ago now.

Rolando & Gabriella

Living in a cloud forest on the top of a mountain must be challenging, to say the least. How do you overcome the problems that occur up there?
Well one of the most important things is to learn respect and roll with nature. You cannot really make any changes about it; you can only adapt. Rain and humidity are the factors here that can give you the biggest frustration if you do not learn how to adapt. In the worst months (September-October, sometimes November) and then in the rainy season starting in April-May, we have to keep everything in a plastic bag, pantry items as well as even clothes.

You need to take weather and nature characteristics into account to minimize surprises. We are much better at that than in the beginning as a result of experience. If I had to give a ratio of nature difficulties affecting our lifestyle, I would say it does about 30% of the time. But we have learned how to handle those events. In addition, you cannot hang on to the losses (like when the wind blows away your greenhouse four times in a row), you cannot do anything about it. You need to put these bad things behind you and go on with your life. We also noticed the summer seasons are drier and drier year by year. It surely will have an impact on our coffee plants at some point in time, so we are getting ready for a different variant that nature will develop as a response.

Another thing that helps us stay focused when issues happen is the way my husband Rolando and I complete each other. No matter what differences we have – and rest assured, we have a few – we put high emphasis on communication. And we also have the same goals, the same vision, the same taste. We blend together. This keeps us going and facing everything together, no matter what circumstances come up.

The Chamorro Coffee

Tell me more about that completion of each other. Sounds like a bunch of best practices are going to be shared in a minute!
Well, a Swedish girl married a Panamanian guy, you can guess. For me it is hard to stop or just sit down. I am a checklist-kind of person, he is not as organized. But we still can get the results we want. Normally I put the checklist together and he helps with the tasks. Over the years I have become more tolerant. Now I can let things go when Rolando does not feel like doing something right away. There is always tomorrow.

One big burden he takes off of my shoulders is doing the shopping. I am so grateful for that. For shopping we need to go to the nearest smalltown, Boquete, which is seven kilometers away. The first half of the road is earth, which is not fun in the rainy season, the second part is curvy. Once in the town he runs all the errands, which I hate doing. In exchange I do everything around the house and with the children. Everything but the dishes – that is shared joy. And Rolando cooks, he loves cooking. Also, the coffee plantation is his responsibility. Sharing the obligations in a way we both are happy with is essential and we are fortunate we could reach a consensus that fits our personalities with no major compromises needed.

How do you make an important decision? One would think with this difference in personalities it is impossible.
Not at all. First of all, the big picture is the same for the both of us. We have the same goals. This is essential. Rolando is the one to come up with the ideas, I am the one who needs to take time to think about them. First, he just mentions something, that’s his tactic; he sows the seed in my mind. And then I can start thinking. Later we sit down, comfortably, with a glass of wine, relax and negotiate about the details. Then I need time to process the decisions, but in the meantime, things just start coming along.

A good example that happened not long ago, is when Rolando hinted that we should offer lodging for our guests and have a few cabins. A big picture we both saw in our future. We agreed to have four of them. Some time passed and all of a sudden, he broke the news he had bookings for the cabins for January. While we still did not have any. Well, that is how things happen here. He just mentioned how cool it would be to have a little plane and fly guests in…

Do you guys ever fight?
Fight? As in yelling and slamming doors? No, never. Of course, we sometimes get annoyed or irritated. But for me the key is communication and instead of wasting time on hurt feelings, I try to resolve the issues and move on. I have made it a habit to express what makes me frustrated. Sometimes it is a result of misunderstanding. Sometimes I might have expressed myself in the wrong way. Annoyance goes away after a time. As long as I feel appreciated or get a thank you, which Rolando never misses to express, everything is alright. We always show appreciation to each other for the chores we help with, which is very important for keeping the peace.

What has been your riskiest decision so far?
In all honesty, everything has come into our life gradually. When we stick to what we believe in, keep our goals in mind, and we don’t give up (like during Covid), then we get one step closer to the next level and no decision feels risky.

Let’s talk a little about the business itself. When I saw the show on TV, I had so many questions. As a person who hasn’t given up on her own restaurant business idea yet, I want to know about everything: ingredients, alcohol, competition, all that stuff. Tell me Hacienda Mamecillo’s story.
Well, Rolando always wanted a restaurant. He had been in the hospitality business before, organizing hiking and kayaking trips, and working as a pilot.

Mamecillo is a local oak-type of tree that has various beautiful colors. We chose the name for our place to imply the diversity of nature and our offers to our guests. Rolando designed the logo for the farm and created our sign himself.

We started with coffee plantation tours on our land and offered buffet food outside the house, over nine years ago. Then things started to gradually evolve. First, we figured it would be more personal if we served the food ourselves. Then we started to put more emphasis on meal presentation and offering cooked meals.

Haciends Mamecillo

We are a service provider approved by the Panama Tourism Authority in the agrotourism category. What we offer is so much different than any other restaurant. We don’t even call it a restaurant. It is a place that provides guests with a full experience: a hiking tour, storytelling, and of course a nice, seven-course meal with wine. The program starts at 9 a.m. and it finishes at 3 p.m. officially. But, if anyone is only interested in having a meal, not the tour, they have the option to dine only. The dining experience begins at 6 p.m. And when the weather does not allow the morning hiking tour, we have a plan B for an indoors activity.

We operate on a reservation basis, collecting detailed information of our guests’ dining needs; allergies and dietary preferences. Once we know everything, we create the plan for the meal courses. We like to pay attention to every little detail that might make the Mamecillo-experience the best for our visitors, their happiness is our fuel. The best feedback about our passionate work is how often guests don’t want to leave. We have guests who return multiple times and when that happens, we try to offer them a different menu than what they had the last time, always making it as special as we can.

The experience we provide is unique; thus, we do not really have any competition. We grow our own ingredients and use nature’s produce too. Our menus are based on what is seasonally available. Whatever we cannot grow on the farm, like wine, is available in the neighboring towns. Neither of us are certified chefs, our skills came with a lot of practice, and our meals come from experimentation. Rolando keeps an eye on a few chefs we like on social media to get some inspiration, then we try ideas and that is how we develop our recipes.

Beautiful meals at Hacienda Mamecillp

You guys are amazing. But it sounds like an insane lot of work. How do you fit everything in 24 hours?
Well, we normally start preparing at 5 a.m. When it is a large group of guests, we use the help of friends for doing the dishes and serving. Also, we try to prepare what we can – peeling, slicing, dicing – the previous night. In general, we like to do everything from scratch in the morning, though; freshness is a must. And when we have no dining guests on a night, we can go to bed early.

Do you ever think of leaving all of it for an easier life? Do you miss city life?
You know, I think this is the best place to live. True, there are many challenges. But if an issue arises, you can always work around it. Also, we do not have neighbors, which is good – and bad. If we did not have the visitors coming, we would feel really isolated. But they come, so it is good. Balanced.

During the pandemic life was really isolated. And in Panama the lockdown was very serious. It lasted for eight months and you had only two hours a day to leave your home and do your shopping. There was no work, and no future vision, nobody knew what was going to happen. That was the only time we thought about selling the farm. We had no answer though to the question of what we would do if we sold it…

Living here you need to stay open, as you never know what will happen. We have had to sacrifice a few things. For one, spontaneity is gone. We live by the schedule of our business. We can’t decide to do this or that just on a whim, we need to plan in advance. Leaving the farm behind requires a lot of preparation so spontaneity is really out of the question. And then, I mentioned that before, sleep time. It is much less than it used to be before farm life. Also, social activities. And even if there is anything, like a course for the kids, it requires so many logistics just to get there for a 2-hour activity that it is not ideal. If I think of what might be missing from my life today though, I would say nothing really. So many things have changed. Yet, things need to change for personal growth.

You really gave up important elements of your old life. It does not seem like you regret that though. What are the best things of your current lifestyle?
Number one would be the closeness to nature. The second one would be the freedom of space, not having any neighbors. The third best thing is the healthy lifestyle we have here. The disguised exercising you do every day, all that walking and gardening. And the produce you grow for yourself. Also, one more thing, the most important one; reconsidering, this is definitely the number one: we are together, all the time. We are involved in this lifestyle, we are all part of it, even the children. We work together for the same goal, and so we spend time together all day, not only in the evenings when we are tired and snappy after a hard day. We are lucky to have this life. We do not work for a boss; we work for ourselves. It is very nice to be able to do that.

And the worst things about your current lifestyle?
Haha, the rainy season and the humidity in that season, for sure. The remoteness when doing chores comes in second. The third one is definitely the distance from my family. I do not see them as frequently as I would like. My parents are amazing, our biggest fans. I just wish somehow, other than online, we could be around each other more.

If you encountered that mythical goldfish that makes your three wishes come true, what would you wish?
The very first one would be to see my family any time I want. That would be really cool. My second wish would be for people to be more aware of how to preserve nature and learn how to give back to it after utilization. How to treat, for example, fungi and use pesticides in a nature-friendly way. We support the native tree nursery movement, creating local trees from seed and selling them to people who need trees on their farms. And the third one would be to be able to stay healthy. Without health there is nothing. I really think nature is a healer, which is one reason why I am glad I can live in the middle of it.

Living within nature, what animals do you have around?
There is this bird, the Quetzal, which is the symbol of Guatemala, and we are excited when we spot one. Then there are the White-faced Capuchin monkeys which take our crops, yet we support them as we are taking part in a project to keep their number growing. Sometimes we meet some spiders, non-venomous tarantulas on our walls, now that is not so neat. Also, certain snakes that we see during coffee harvest or hiking can be venomous, but we know how to be careful and how to not disturb them and we do so. Also, we find signs of coatis, sloths, tapers and pumas – they all live around us but we don’t bump into them almost at all.

abi, what do you consider your biggest success in life?
Definitely my kids. They are amazing kids and we are really proud of them. They think about taking over our business one day. I try to make it easy on them saying they do not need to make a decision just yet. In a few years they might want to look around the world. I won’t be their most beloved person in their lives forever (right now they cannot even imagine that though) and it will be alright. Whatever they want to do, we want them to know that they will have our full support.

Nice! Is there anything you fear?
Well, that something: an illness, an accident, something bad will happen to any of my loved ones. I am worried about that but try not to get carried away or think of it too much. Thinking too much takes away time and energy. It is good to feel these things, but it is a mistake to dwell on them for too long. You need to move on.

What are the good feelings that characterize your life?
I usually feel happy. Loved. I feel the love around me. I feel secure where I am in life.

And the bad ones?
Isolation. Disconnectedness from people. Sometimes I feel unmotivated – when I see the dishes piling up at the end of a day. Longing, as a result of being too far from my family.

Hacienda Mamecillo

It is clear you have a lot on your mind and a lot of things to do every day. Do you ever have time to relax? What do you do to gain some energy back?
I know it sounds crazy because it is actually a physical activity, but I love hiking. That is how I get my mental energy back. I like to be outside, even working outside is much different than standing in the kitchen all day. Like fixing the goat fence. Another thing is woodwork. Building furniture. Like kitchen cabinets, bedside tables. Rolando and I made all of our furniture, we like doing stuff like that. Establishing a proper workshop where we can store our tools permanently is among our plans.

Gabi, I could have this discussion with you till the end of time, but I know your time is limited. So, last but not least, do you have any sage advice for our readers?
Well, try not to think too much about the past or future. Try to live in the moment, appreciate the moment, don’t get lost too much in planning. To me it is the key to happiness. Appreciate the day. Make the most out of it. Of course, you still need a plan, a focus – but if you have too much of it, you’ll forget to be in the moment. Life is never perfect, issues always come up, you must be able to balance everything. Just stay in the moment.

Also, from time to time, change your scenery. Sometimes you need to leave your everyday scenery to be able to appreciate what you have.

Gabi, I wish you much-much joy and happiness in Hacienda Mamecillo. Keep up the great work, what you guys do is a wonder and a huge value-add to today’s world. Keep educating people about nature, balance, love, and appreciation through your Mamecillo-experience; the hikes, the stories, and the beautiful soulful meals you offer. It was a pleasure to have these few hours with you, thank you so much.
Thank you, Kami.

If you want to find out more about Gabi, please click on the links below.

Instagram 1
Instagram 2
Website
E-mail
Kristen Kish - Restaurants at the End of the World

01 - Reka Turoczi

25 minutes reading

If you are a hobby runner in Hungary, you can’t not know who she is. Whichever race she runs, you’ll recognize her. Sea mist, metallic blue, kiwi green, magenta, bold orange, neon yellow – an easy-to-spot-from-a-distance vision, thanks to her unmatched sports gears. With fluffy earmuffs harmonizing with her clothes on cold days. With a huge smile on. With effortless gallops. I first laid eyes on her in person at the season-opening Balaton Super Marathon in 2012 and have been following her life story on social media ever since. She is a continuous inspiration.

Ethereal, graceful, beautiful, a dark mass of hair floating behind her. Tamas Naray’s model-discovery. Mom of three, with three degrees, triathlete. Coach, influencer, brand ambassador. Confident, determined, successful. She is Reka “iRUNmom” Turoczi, as we know her. A household name in Hungary, for one reason or another.

What we usually fail to consider when it comes to her, who has it all by the look, is how immense sacrifices and what great courage her kind of lifestyle needs. Being exposed to the public regardless of your inner feelings, while navigating motherhood and pursuing complex sports. Dreaming big and squaring up to make it come true. It needs an enormous dose of bravery. It requires consciousness, planning, persistence, diligence and discipline, without which, regardless of the raw talent you were born with, success will stay away.  

That was the angle of my many conversations with Reka all through the month of January, the summary of which is shared here with you now. Created with love - read with delight.

Reka, have you ever thought of yourself as a brave woman? Do you think you are courageous?
It has happened, yes. I do not consider myself continuously brave, those thoughts usually come when I make a hard decision or when I think back of such decisions.

If you flash back on your life, what were the events in which you needed all your courage? When, like you have just said, you made a bold decision and even hesitated but persisted and finally achieved your desire?
My first brave act, as far as I can remember, came towards the end of my elementary school studies. My plan was to move to the capital. I had been dreaming about this for quite some time and I knew it would present multiple challenges. One in which life without my family would not be easy. Yet I was sticking to it. Finally, I was able to start my high school studies in a bilingual grammar school, Xantus, and studied every subject in German. The unknown, the newness made me uneasy in the beginning, but I was so proud.

Another decision, this time without pride, was letting my marriage go. I knew my choice would not be popular. I was fully aware that I would make loved ones sad beyond words but I also knew that the marriage was over. For me it was unacceptable to keep acting like it was not the case instead of facing the fact, getting my act together and owning up to my feelings. It was clear that life as I had known was over and the new life was not going to be easy in either financial, or logistical terms, not to mention the emotional damage. Yet I knew this was the right thing and the only thing for me to do. My self-talk in weak moments was that this way we all had the chance for fuller, more honest lives – and that is what happened. We both started with a clean slate and kept a healthy, good-spirited relationship and today we communicate regularly, of course, mainly because of the kids – and it’s all good.

A third one, my watershed decision, and I am happy that I had the strength to hold on to it, is related to sports. Looking back I am glad that I was strong enough to persist and apply any necessary pressure to the “opposition”. That I was able to make them accept that I needed this and sports were the thing I intended to invest time, energy and money into in the future. It changed everything in my life. It led me to become who I am today. Definitely my bravest, most impactful decision.

Needless to say, like everyone else, I had circumstances that I had no impact on, so I just had to overcome my fears, accept the situation, stand up and move on. Like a few of my break-ups – but the hardest of all was the passing of my Mom. I know that most of us will have to face this situation sooner or later. It came to me sooner and it was really hard, first of all the fact that she passed away, but also the way she passed. I am not sure if there will ever come a day when I can think of this without tears.

Speaking of tears, how often do they come?
When I am truly sad, it is hard for me to fight them. It is enough if someone shows kindness or listens to me with attention and my tears are already falling. In those moments I feel vulnerable, and kindness somehow moves me. I am an emotional woman and I never try to hide my unbridled happiness, nor my deep sorrow. In joy I smile wildly and laugh boisterously, and in my sadness I, well yeah, cry.

Reka in Action

You mentioned fear previously. You have any? What are they tied to? What is your way to overcome them?
Of course I have fears. As an athlete my biggest fear is injury. And the slow regeneration after an injury. This can mean a serious setback in any race preparation. A dread of mine, something I have burnt myself with already, is downhill cycling. Since my first bad fall in 2016 I have been overly cautious and I do not even care about others passing me downhill, I am saying to myself, it is not worth it, you just go, see you uphill, buddy. And I usually do pass them back.

Then, since my Mom’s death predisposition to cancer is something that gives me serious anxiety when I am thinking of it. My mind knows, and this is what I am trying to convince myself with in those moments, that I have done everything in my power to prevent it. However, sometimes that little devil of doubt just grabs space in my mind and then it is pretty hard to calm myself down. I need to control myself when it happens, and say my little mantras, and that helps. I like taking a dim-lit, hot bath, popping in my favorite compilation of slow melodies and trying to relax. By the way this is how I switch off and relax after a hard day, too.

I dared to say in the intro that you were confident. You do look confident from the outside, with everlasting smiles and heartfelt laughs on your social media – what about your inner fights and what do you usually fight yourself about?
I do consider myself a confident person naturally, I am aware of my values as well as my imperfections and I strive to manage them both. However, like everyone, at times I am insecure. Then I wonder whether I am too strong. Too independent. Too selfish. Too much of an exhibitionist. Too much. If I am compromising enough. I spend time analyzing the situation that has led me to those thoughts and try to focus on the takeaway, which I try to remember later. Sometimes I soothe myself with my favorite song, SIA’s Bird Set Free, and am just letting myself feel, live, which helps me process and carry on.

Negative commenters. They are always hounding the beautiful and/or successful. How hard do you find it to manage them, do they ever bring you down?
Yeah, they are there. I am lucky not to have many of them, but they are definitely there. I have no issue with criticism. I truly believe in the importance of constructive criticism. However, constructive criticism arrives mostly in a private way, avoiding publicity, and is usually presented in kind language. I take my time to think about it and I find it useful even if I do not agree. I give thoughts to the criticism arriving publicly and with hurtful words or intention, too. My approach is that there might be a learning even if disguised with ill-willed words, but to be honest, those opinions find me much harder. I try to respond to all of them, even the ones written in a humiliating way, my weapon is kindness. I have figured that kindness disarms hurters who lose interest in hurting after a time, so it is worth applying. That is something I learned pretty early, as a child, and I find still valid, it works without error.

How early? What was it you were bullied with as a child?
Look, my skin tone is a tad darker than the average, so I inevitably was called gypsy at school all the time. Of course, it felt bad back then. That is when I learned kindness was a great tool to manage those situations. Today I look at it through different eyes and, by the way, Szaffi has always been one of my favorite animations, so much so that I named my black cat Szaffi as an adult…

Are you a planner? Do you have any resolutions, goals set on New Year’s Eve?
Absolutely. Not necessarily on New Year’s Eve or any other special day, but I do have goals for a new year, shorter-longer distance ones. I believe that if we want to achieve anything, it is not reasonable to wait till Day X, it is best to begin it and start developing the supporting mindset right away. At least that is how it works for me; it is a question of attitude.

What are the plans that you want to fulfil or start fulfilling in 2024?
I am starting my preparation for the 2025 IronMan World Championship. I would love to get to Kona in 2027 the latest, the decision is injury dependent. Another goal for the year is to build my Pilates clientele. Pilates is the latest one in my line of sports, and I think it can support the strength of any endurance athlete most efficiently. That is what I wish to promote, and it is a crucial goal of mine for the year. Finally, another plan for 2024 of equal priority: improving my spiritual-mental strength. Last year was a testing one from every angle and I feel I lost focus a little bit. This year I’m getting back my mojo and will fortify it, I reckon that my family, my wider environment, my coworkers, my coachees as well as my athletic results will profit from that equally.

Reka in Action

How do you plan to make the first steps towards those goals?
Regarding the IronMan WC, training needs to start in a gradual, systematic way, with constant monitoring of my performance. I have not recovered from my last injury completely, so progress needs to be achieved in a smart way. I will start the work with my good old coach again, and we will also decide together which the best Kona-qualification race for me would be for the beginning of 2025. Multiple factors will be considered here, the final choice will be preceded by serious research work. We will need to find the very IM race that ensures me the best chance to qualify for Kona. I will return to speedwork, too, which mostly means course work; I will train with the Team of Experience Couriers (Elmenyfutarok) of District 3 in Budapest. I used to love training with those guys, and I am certain that it won’t be any different now.

My first steps towards my Pilates plans will be holding trainings for beginners while finishing my third module of my Pilates coach course. Both are anticipated around the end of summer, and then, in Q4, I would like to start holding my training tailored uniquely for athletes and working with a strong clientele.

My self-boost/self-development goal feels to be a very exciting one, I expect a lot from it. Up till now it was always the improvement of my body that was in my focus but it is clear now that I need to deal with my soul, too. I am not ashamed to admit; I think most people arrive at the point where they realize it – well, it came in my life, too. Right now I feel I could use help and I will work with a life coach on a rock solid, conscious, fulfilled Reka.

How hard is it for you to step out of your comfort zone in favor of achieving a goal? Which was your most difficult situation when you had to do so success?
We need to leave our comfort zones time to time, true, but the way I see it is that when you do that, you will get stronger in the soul. My latest occasion was not too long ago, circumstances made me make the wise decision to go back to my old, liquidation-related job after 13 years of making my livelihood mostly from my sporting activity. I consider this change a temporary one and I am aware my situation is privileged to have a workplace I was able to go back. I still see my future in sport, nonetheless, and this is the vision that gives me the power to cope with this temporary discomfort easier. My motto is, everything is a three-day wonder – this feeling will not last long, either. In the meantime, I will give my best at my workplace as well as in my sports. Luckily this kind of emergency is not frequent in my life but when it comes, I quickly realize the importance of moving on instead of extended self-pitying (which, of course, will not stay away. I can feel very-very sorry for myself, but as is not really constructive, it won’t last long).  

Sacrifices were mentioned in the intro. Tell me what sacrifices your lifestyle requires.
Well, this is a painful subject. I will not talk in length about the quality time spent with my children that suffers from the time invested into my sporting activities. I am striving to consciously shape my athletic life in a way that helps them feel the least of my absence. To achieve that, the kind of flexibility that characterizes my life is a must. On many occasions we do sports together, too, which qualifies as quality time itself. 

What is almost always a victim of my lifestyle is the relationship line of my life. Unfortunately, I have to admit, this has a major role in the ending of most of my relationships. Riding the bike for 1-3 hours a day plus swimming and/or running another 1-2 is one thing. Add regeneration activities, manual therapy, massage, sauna, such and such treatment that are an organic part of an athlete’s life, all those take additional time. To put it short, sadly, my relationships often got to the point where my lifestyle became a source of conflicts.

Small-scale sacrifices like cancelling a fun program, juggling with scheduled dates to squeeze in a much-needed workout or some kind of therapy instead are not even worth mentioning. Those are everyday little things that I have learned to live with; fully natural by now. Prioritization is highly important in my life.

Reka in Action

Do you procrastinate?
Heck yeah. Oh boy. I’m going to be brutally honest here, I am not a domestic goddess. I am not too big in housework. If there is anything I procrastinate, deep cleaning and serious cooking are those things. Girl, I hate both of them. It does not mean I will not do them when it is needed, it just means that all of a sudden everything turns out to be much more important. Shame or not, when I have the chance, I seek help in those activities.

Let’s talk about luck. What are your thoughts? Do you believe in it? Do you think it finds you when you need it badly?
My experience is that life (providence, mind’s creative power, whatever we believe in) does help solving situations.

Speaking of luck: is there any symbolism to the number 3? When I was wording the introduction, I couldn’t not notice the 3 kids – 3 degrees – 3athlon trio.
Haha, I do prefer odd numbers but my favorite one is 9, not 3!

OK, then back to reality now. Are you able to accept that you are good at something? To pat yourself on the back and take your success as the result of you doing great and not as others’ achievement?
Today I am able to recognize and believe that something is my success. I am aware I am not super-talented at anything but I also know I am above-average diligent. I put a lot of work in anything I set my mind to. When I succeed, I am proud, but for too long, I will move on after a brief self-celebration. I am pretty much aware, too, of my motherly values added to my children’s successes.

If an outcome is not as it was expected, do you tend to beat yourself up over it? Do you feel patting back and being hard on self are in a healthy ratio in your life?
Normally I find self-praise more difficult than self-criticism, but my three-day wonder motto stands solidly here, too. Self-blaming lasts like twice as long as my self-satisfaction, though, seasoned with a little self-pitying, too, but in general I am able to process and leave behind both feelings rather fast. I try to learn from my mistakes, draw the proper consequences and remember those next time. 

Do you tend to let things that don’t come out right after multiple attempts go, or do you keep trying till they finally happen?
I am an ever tryer, a not giver upper. However, there are situations that simply just will not work. When I have that realization, and I am positive that I have run out of options, I conclude it is healthy to move on and that is exactly what I do. Even so, I am open for another try at some later point in time, but I won’t fall on my sword if I have to let something go for good after trying a thousand times.

In the 1970’s Mr. Csikszentmihalyi discovered the theory of flow for us, a term used by the common language as the hallmark of fulfillment, or even happiness, but definitely of performance ever since. What brings flow to you, what are the activities that you can become lost in, live your true self in?
Now that is a question the answer to which I do not have to think too much about. Swimming and running are definitely flow experiences for me. I am able to do them literally for hours, fully immersing in them, becoming lost in free movement, giving myself over to my thoughts and emotions. When I am swimming or running, I am falling into a separate world, my own little world, where I get healed, fortified, convinced and repaired. I can become the same lost in listening to classical music or looking at paintings. I love visual art, since high school, where I learned a lot about painters, the circumstances impacting them, their love lives, their ars poetica; of art eras and techniques. When I immerse myself in a painting, I remember all the information I have and incorporate those into the comprehension of the emotions expressed on the canvas. This can truly enchant me and, in all honesty, I have not found a partner yet for sharing my enthusiasm of this kind and talking about it in depth with. Maybe it is OK, though, as this is part of that little private world of mine…

Tell me, why is it so important for you to be a coach? You could concentrate solely on your races, your results, your preparation, or your self-development, not to mention your roles as a mother or an employee. Why did you choose to help people after all?
With all sincerity to get certified as a sports coach was the result of my desire to develop myself. I simply wanted to know and understand the activity I had pursued on a daily basis for long years by then more. The brand Polar was first to approach me with an offer to hold one course training every two weeks and, if I want to be fully honest, during those trainings I felt no right to teach anyone anything. I loved it very much, though; that what I taught my runners was working and I liked to have a good impact on people’s lives. That is what made me decide eventually to begin my studies. I wanted to be able to give them more; I wanted to become more authentic, firstly in my own eyes. Today my drive is to distract people from work for a couple hours; from the crazy race for money, the problems of today’s modern world, and to introduce them to the joy of health preservation and the ability to move. I wish to make them able to turn that joy into a key part of their lives. The world today needs happy people and for that making money is not enough. There is nothing without the health of body and mind.

Reka Brand Ambassador

Reka, do you have any advice for those who see it impossible to incorporate what they love into their everyday lives the way you do? Who think it is impossible to make a change about their ways: that they are so busy that there is no chance to find time for themselves?
There were three things that helped me and the way I see these are the three things that provide room for improvement for most of us. My experience says these are the areas where scheduling of one’s life goes south significantly. The first one is the “outsourcing” of tasks and asking for help. As I see, many turn it into a question of ego whereas asking your family or close friends for help should not be driven by pride, that is what I think. A family that keeps together will help out the member in need, and should it be regular help, by setting certain rules a long-term collaboration can be established. If someone is not gifted with a strong family background like what I have, I am sure will have a few trusted friends that can jump in sometimes. And if there is really no help like that, the worst-case scenario is to hire a babysitter or a cleaning aid, whatever assistance is needed for. I tend to utilize all three options and I will not take it as a personal offence if someone says ‘no’. I accept it and shape my plans accordingly. I sincerely believe where there is a will, there is a way. This is one of those things, too, with a way if there is true will.

And that brings along the second, well, showstopper, as I consider it myself, known to many. Flexibility. Or rather the lack of that. What works for me is adapting to the situations. Even though I love running in the a.m., and if I could, I would never have my runs any other time, that is the least likely. Instead, I squeeze my workouts in when my kids are having their own training. Or whenever I appear to have a little time. Lunchbreak, for example (and so my running gear is almost always at hand). From this viewpoint I am an absolute opportunist – but this is the way I have no workouts missing. Obviously, my results are not always the ones that I need but at least the movement happens which is essential. This is my choice over pushing my phone buttons for the entire 50 minutes while my children are having their workout. It is not good or bad, it is just my path and this kind of flexibility was and is of high importance in me having got where I am today. Circumstances must be harnessed for our needs; we need to be able to notice opportunities and grab them – otherwise life really might seem to be impossible to change.

The third problem which I think has an important impact is the rejection to organize. Often times it might seem so difficult to plan the kids’ weeks for the nanny that many decide in the end, darn it, it is not worth all that work for just planning, and finally they choose to give up on their own plans and stay. However, thinking it over in advance what should be how is really useful even if we are not seeking help. I notoriously summarize my children’s daily schedules in a spreadsheet so everyone will know exactly what will happen and how during the week, kids as well as nannies. This way questions and glitches can be prevented, thus time can be saved. Of course, it is not simple to gather thoughts thoroughly like that but it won’t take more than an hour per week. It is highly worthwhile for me because it gives me a peace of mind as well as an opportunity to focus on my athletic activities.

The short version: relax a little, dare to become a little more vulnerable. Gather your courage to reach out for help and expose yourself to being turned down. You will not be any less good of a mother or partner; as a mother or a partner we, too, are entitled to the right to focus a little on ourselves on a weekly basis. Notice the opportunities and grab them, and plan in advance - help so that you can be helped. It is so worthwhile. So worthwhile for a mentally and physically healthy, fulfilled life. Certainly worthwhile to me.

Well, I think this is pretty much it for now, Reka, it was fun. Thank you for your time for making this interview happen, it is highly appreciated. Good luck with your goals and, please, keep us in the loop about your progress on Instagram.
It was my pleasure, Kami, thank you.

If you want to find out more about Reka, please click on the links below.

LinkedIn
Instagram
Website