Today we’d like to introduce you to Erica DeRemer.
Hi Erica, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
For much of my life, I became really good at being what everyone else needed me to be. I built a career in funeral service, spent more than two decades walking alongside families during some of the hardest moments of their lives, later worked in leadership and human resources within the funeral industry, and just recently earned my MBA. From the outside, my life has looked successful.
But somewhere along the way, I slowly became disconnected from myself.
Ironically, spending years helping people face death taught me what matters most about life. At the end of life, people rarely wish they had worked more or accomplished one more thing. They wished they had built deeper relationships, experienced more meaningful moments, and had the courage to truly live.
I understood those lessons professionally long before I was willing to apply them personally.
More recently, during one of the most difficult seasons of my life, I found myself gravitating back to horses and barn life. I expected horses to be an escape, just as they had always been throughout my life. Instead, they became some of my greatest teachers.
Horses don’t respond to our titles, accomplishments, or carefully curated social image. They respond to authenticity. They quietly exposed the places where my life had drifted out of alignment with who I was created to be.
And although funeral service and horses may seem worlds apart, I began realizing they have far more in common than anyone might expect. Funeral service had spent decades teaching me what matters when a life is ending. Horses began teaching me how to live those lessons while life is still happening.
I started seeing how naturally horses and barn life demonstrate the principles that help us live in alignment—trust, consistency, honesty, healthy responses to pressure, clear boundaries, presence, and the understanding that the only person we can truly control is ourselves. We don’t get to control every circumstance or another person’s choices. We do get to decide how we show up, what we participate in, what we continue to allow, and what choices we make next.
That realization became the foundation for BarnWise.
Today, BarnWise is about far more than horses. It’s about helping people reconnect with themselves, with others, with God, and with what truly matters. Whether I’m working with leaders, families, beginners around horses, or people simply searching for a more meaningful life, the heart of the work is the same: learning to live from the inside out rather than allowing our sense of meaning, worth, or fulfillment to depend entirely on circumstances or other people.
A meaningful life isn’t something we find someday, or through someone or something external to us. It’s something we build through the small, consistent choices we make every day.
I believe many of us spend years becoming successful at being who everyone else needs us to be while quietly losing ourselves in the process. My hope is that by honestly sharing my own journey, others will find the courage to begin their own.
After spending so many years around death, I’ve come to believe there are two ways to lose your life. The first is to die. The second is to never truly live.
BarnWise exists to help people choose to truly live before it’s too late.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not even close. In fact, I often joke that if life had gone according to my plans, BarnWise probably wouldn’t exist.
The biggest struggle wasn’t one single event. It was slowly realizing that somewhere along the way I had become disconnected from who I was. Like so many people, I spent years measuring success by what I accomplished and how well I could meet everyone else’s expectations. From the outside, things looked good. On the inside, I had drifted out of alignment with myself and who I was created to be.
Then life had a way of stripping away many of the things I had built my identity around. Career changes, financial uncertainty, the end of my marriage, and having to rebuild my life from the ground up forced me to ask questions I had spent years avoiding: Who am I when the titles, the plans, and the life I expected are gone? What does it really mean to live a meaningful life?
As difficult as those seasons have been, they’ve also become some of my greatest teachers.
One of the lessons horses have reinforced for me is that growth doesn’t happen by avoiding pressure. It happens by learning to respond to it in healthy ways. With horses, too much pressure creates resistance, but the right amount, paired with trust and a well-timed release, creates forward movement. I’ve learned that life can work much the same way. We can’t always control the pressure that comes, but we can choose what we do with it. When we stop fighting every difficult season and start asking what it’s trying to teach us, pressure becomes something that shapes us instead of something that defines us.
I’m still learning that lesson every day.
Looking back, I wouldn’t wish many of those experiences on anyone, but I also wouldn’t trade what they have taught me. They changed the way I define success. Today, I care far less about building an impressive life and far more about building a meaningful one. I’ve learned that alignment- between who we are, what we value, what we say, and how we actually live- is one of the clearest paths to getting there. That shift is what BarnWise is really about.
As you know, we’re big fans of BarnWise. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
BarnWise exists because I believe we’ve become incredibly successful at building lives that look good on the outside while quietly becoming disconnected from ourselves on the inside.
We’re living in a world that has never been more connected through technology, yet many people have never felt more isolated. We celebrate busyness, productivity, and achievement, but somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten how to slow down, build meaningful relationships, and simply be present.
After spending more than two decades in funeral service, I saw the same regrets over and over again at the end of people’s lives. Very few wished they had worked more. Most wished they had actually lived more.
That’s the problem BarnWise was created to address.
At its heart, BarnWise is about helping people live meaningful lives by learning to live in greater alignment—with who they are, with the people they love, with the work they’re called to do, and with what they believe.
Horses happen to be extraordinary teachers because they don’t respond to status, titles, or the version of ourselves we’re trying to project to the outside world. They respond to authenticity. They reveal whether what’s happening on the inside matches what’s happening on the outside.
That principle applies everywhere—from leadership and business to marriage, parenting, friendships, and personal growth.
We offer leadership experiences, workshops, speaking engagements, beginner horse education, and thoughtfully designed events, but those are simply different ways of sharing the same message. The work isn’t really about horses. It’s about creating experiences that help people slow down long enough to reconnect with themselves, with one another, and with what truly matters.
What I’m most proud of is that BarnWise isn’t asking people to become someone new. It’s inviting them to rediscover the person they were created to be before the world told them who they needed to become. Because ultimately, a meaningful life isn’t built from a handful of extraordinary moments. It’s build through the small, consistent, seemingly ordinary moments we are present enough to actually experience.
If people leave a BarnWise experience feeling more connected, more honest with themselves, and more committed to building a life of meaning instead of simply a life of achievement, then we’ve accomplished exactly what we set out to do.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
One of my favorite childhood memories happened on a snowy December night a few days before Christmas when I was about fifteen years old. I grew up in Tiffin, Ohio, and spent much of my free time at Shadow Creek Ranch, owned by my dad’s close friend, Rick Groves. Rick was like a second father to me. He taught me how to ride and played a huge role in nurturing my love of horses.
It was late one evening, probably around 10:00 that night, and we had just finished the evening chores. There were nearly two feet of fresh snow on the ground, and giant, soft snowflakes were still falling. The barn was far out in the country on a quiet one-lane road, and everything was completely still. The only sound was the snow itself.
As we stood there taking it all in, Rick smiled and asked, “Want to go for a ride?”
Of course I did!
He went back into the tack room and found two old sets of sleigh bells. We tied them to the horns of our western saddles, climbed up onto our horses, and headed out across the snow-covered fields.
As we rode through the darkness, all you could hear was the rhythm of the horses breathing and the gentle sound of those jingle bells echoing across the white countryside.
We eventually couldn’t feel our fingers or our toes, but neither of us cared. The magic of the experience far outweighed any discomfort.
To this day, it’s one of the most peaceful and magical moments I’ve ever experienced.
Looking back, I think what made it so special wasn’t really the horses or even the snow. It was the simplicity of it all. There were no phones, no distractions, no pressure to be anywhere else or be anyone other than ourselves. Just two people, two horses, the quiet beauty of God’s creation, and a touch of Christmas magic.
I didn’t have words for it then, but looking back, I think that little ride contained so much of what I now believe makes a meaningful life: presence, connection, simplicity, love, and being fully awake to the beauty of an ordinary moment while you are actually living it.
In many ways, that’s what BarnWise is trying to help people rediscover.
Pricing:
- Speaking engagements: Custom pricing based on audience, event type, and travel.
- Private and group BarnWise experiences: Customized based on goals, group size, and duration.
- Beginner horse education workshops: Varies by workshop.
- Corporate experiences: Custom proposals available for organizations of all sizes.
- Customized experiences available. Please visit www.BeBarnWise.com for current offerings and additional information.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://BeBarnWise.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/barnwise/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/barnwise
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/barnwise
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erica-l-deremer/
