And then on 02/18/2012, I ran into a guy here in Boulder that I had three dates with a year and a half earlier, and it just didn't work that first time for whatever reason. I ran into him in Boulder, and we decided to go for a drink. And he said to me, you seem really different. And so then I started telling him about Hoffman. Well, Drew, he is my husband. We married in 02/2016, and it absolutely would not have happened without Hoffman.
Welcome, everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius. It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute, and it's stories and anecdotes and people we interview about their life post process and how it lives in the world radiating love. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman podcast. Carol Frank, it's great to have you. Thanks, Drew. It's great to be here. Very excited for this. Well, you did the process in 02/2011? Yep. February at White Sulphur Springs.
Oh, beautiful White Sulphur Springs. So tell us a little bit about who you are in before we dive in to the journey of Hoffman and what transpired, introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about who you are. I have been very fortunate to make my living in the pet industry
for the last thirty eight years. I started my career as a CPA with one of the big CPA firms, quickly realized that that was not my cup of tea, and went back to graduate school and wrote a business plan for my entrepreneurship class on a pet store, and that was 1987. And for those of you, and I'm guessing you have a lot of animal lovers on this podcast, you know how crazy we are about our
pets. And so over the last thirty eight plus years, I have watched the pet industry grow from about 10,000,000,000 a year to about a hundred and 70,000,000,000 a year. Isn't that crazy? So I started my first business in 1987 in Dallas, Texas. It was a pet store. After about five years, realized that I'm better fit for not being in retail.
So I, opened a distribution company for pet products and had that for about eight years and then owned a manufacturing company for pet products, for eleven, and then pivoted and went into mergers and acquisitions in 02/2009. And my career, and I'm very blessed to have it, is to help pet company owners when they're ready to sell their business.
So if you walk into a pet store and you see all the stuff on the shelves or you're on Chewy or Amazon, you're buying things for your dog, your cat, your bird, your fish, those are the companies that we sell. And so I have been lucky enough to make a fantastic living and work with passionate entrepreneurs who love pets and creating new and exciting products for for pets. So
that is what I do. My company is Birds Eye Advisory Group, and there's no doubt that part of my success can be attributed to me doing the Hoffman process thirteen years ago. Is it true that, I mean, just based on observation that COVID was actually really good for the pet industry? Everybody got a dog or a cat during all of the shutdown? Yes. Pet industry got a huge bump.
The first few months, it was a little scary, but then all of a sudden when people realized they were gonna have to stay home by themselves, not go to the office, they're like, I want a Fluffy or a, you know, Kitty or Fido or something to keep me company. So the shelters were cleared out, the breeders were charging a fortune, and then all of a sudden my clients that make the products, they had the best years ever, 2021, '20 '20 '2, very good years.
Now the pet industry is slow. It's not declining, but the growth is slowing, But, boy, we still love our pets so much. So that has not changed. Yeah. So that's COVID. But take us back to pre 02/2011, and what led you to this week long experience called Hoffman? Well, I live in Boulder, Colorado. There's a few, Boulder Hoffman grads. There's a lot of Boulder Hoffman grads. So I'd had I'd heard of it, and I was single in my fifties, never
been married. Yeah. I'm a very strong independent woman, you know, started these companies, go, go, go, do, do, and I was getting really frustrated because I had one relationship after another that didn't work out. And I'll never forget, I remember the exact moment that I decided to do Hoffman. I had just ended another relationship. We've been together
for about a year. I mean, I was 52, 50 three years old, and I was sitting across the table from a friend of mine who happened to be a Hoffman grad, and I was saying, I just keep picking the wrong guys. She said, I think it's time for you to do Hoffman. And even though she'd mentioned it many times, it wasn't the right time. And but, you know, as they say, when you're truly ready for change, well, I was truly ready for change. I was ready to figure out why I kept picking the wrong guys
over and over. And within a week, I had signed up, and within two weeks, I was in White Sulphur Springs. Wow. So her sort of putting it out there at the right time well, maybe the the number of breakups that kept happening eventually forced you to look at it. Yeah. Exactly. I said, like, just keep picking the wrong guys, and I wanna be in a relationship. I wanna find a partner, and I I am the common denominator here
in all these relationships. And, also, I've had a very I've had a very challenging childhood, And so it was the absolute best thing. I tell this people all the time, the best thing I've ever done was to go to Hoffman. Wow. Even fifteen years later. Yeah. I thank my lucky stars for the generosity that my friend Nancy, when she said to me, I think you need to go to Hoffman. I think it's time for you to go to Hoffman because it really changed my life.
Because Hoffman starts with and part of its foundational underpinning is based in childhood, and yet you're coming to fix present day relationships. So how did you navigate that? Were you okay with that? Did it make sense that alright. We we're gonna help you deal with that. But first, we're gonna have you go back into your childhood and see it from that perspective. Did that all download and make sense right out of the gate, or did it take a while? Well, I hadn't really thought of it that way.
I just knew that what I was doing wasn't working. I also knew and once I realized that Hoffman dealt with your challenges from your childhood and your parents' challenges in their childhood, I knew that I was prime candidate. In a nutshell, my parents divorced when I was eight. My mother left the family. She moved across the country. Then I lived with my dad. He remarried, and then he died in a car accident two years later. So I'm 11 years old. And then my mother comes back into the picture.
It was just, a lot of turmoil. She got married to a guy, my stepfather. I ended up having two stepmoms and two stepdads. So I did extra work in the process because, you know, my dad had married my stepmother, then my mom married my stepdad. And so it was a challenging childhood, you know, and my parents' boy, I tell you, if you wanna know, one of the biggest takeaways I got was just the compassion that I had for my parents after
realizing what they'd gone through. So my mom got divorced through my dad and then she married again, and he was not a very nice person. I really didn't understand why anybody would wanna get married. She married this one guy, she divorced him. He was my dad, but he was very German. He was from Germany, grew up during the World War two. He came over here in 1939. Lot of issues because, having to leave his country when he was 13, so he had a lot of issues. And then she married a very similar guy.
And so while I didn't consciously say, I don't I don't even wanna get married, I did say to myself, why would I sign up for what my mother had? I think that a lot of the work that I did during Hoffman helped me understand so many things both about myself and my mother and also my father. So, yeah, it it all blended together beautifully.
And so, I guess, I wanna just ask about your mom's modeling around relationship was to bring people in and to witness partnership that didn't feel very appetizing to you, did it? No. No. No. My mother was a bit of a doormat. And so what I learned to do was be very independent and very strong. And I think that doesn't appeal to you know, there are a lot of men that that doesn't appeal to. I'm I was living
in Dallas, Texas. So the fact of the matter is is that, you know, I didn't want a Betty Buddy's trophy wife or arm candy, and I'm, you know, I'm running businesses, and no, I don't need you. And and I needed to solve. For sure, I needed to solve. I did not wanna be like my mother. There was some balancing that need to happen. Yeah. You know, in in Hoffman terms, we might call that a reactive
pattern or a rebellion pattern. And we say that those are two for ones because you you have the pattern of really not wanting to be like her, but then you also have the pattern coupled with it, which is that you are like her. So how did you navigate the two for one of not wanting to be like your mom and yet also you were her daughter and the part of you was very much like her? Well, I feel like when I looked at all of the the really good things about my mom because,
again, let's just face it. The beginning of Hoffman, I was pretty angry with her. I carried that narrative with me until I did Hoffman. What kind of mother leaves her children? And I just had this narrative. Didn't serve me very well, but that's what
I had. And then once I did Hoffman and realized that, you know, she was doing the best she could, and one of the most impactful things, I mentioned this earlier, was just when you go back and put yourself in your parents' shoes when they're little, the conversation I had with my parents when they were children, the compassion that I had for them was and is off the charts. They had a tough time. They both had tough childhoods.
You know, I forgave my mother and she died a couple years later and it was priceless, the relationship we had the last few years of her life, because the forgiveness was a %, and she was just doing the best she could. My mother is one of the reasons why I am who I am. You know, she always encouraged me to be independent. She always told me I could do anything I
wanted to do. She went back and got her accounting degree at the University of Illinois when she was 42, so she was an inspiration for me. And so even though, you know, I had this narrative about her being a weak and a doormat and how could she keep marrying these guys, Once I did Hoffman, I realized, well, that is just not helpful. You know? Yes. I'm very much my mother's daughter. She loved people. I love people. I love learning about people, hearing about people, so curious about
them. And so now I just try to focus in all her best qualities. Yeah. And then she died a couple years later. So, I mean, how important the timing was to have that forgiveness for her. You cannot put a price on that. I left Hoffman on a December 18, and I flew to see her. She was living in Illinois. Five days later, and we had the most magical three days together. We cried. We hugged. We laid on her bed. She's not wasn't in good health. And I read her my letter.
I read her my letter to my father and she said, oh my God, I wish your dad could have done something like this. You know, he died in 1970. You know, I still get emotional thinking about, how do you put a price on that? That's worth a million dollars. This is why I sent people to Hoffman. Yeah. I can't emphasize enough how important that was. And when she passed away peacefully at the age of 84, I'm like, yeah. We had a blessed life
together for sure. And you remember that time sitting on the bed together, telling stories, laughing, sharing letters? Yep. Remember what was like yesterday, and it meant so much to her for me to give her my forgiveness. Because I know she felt guilty. When you leave your kids, you know she must have felt guilty about that. I completely forgave her for it. You bring something up really interesting, which is she didn't say, would you be willing to forgive me or
please forgive me? But in you giving your forgiveness to her, something released inside of her as a result of you giving that. Yeah. The next three years, she died just, like, two years and nine months later. We're the best of our our lives together, for sure. Carol, I wanna ask about your dad because that's a very different story. He died when you were 11. Your mom was still alive when you came out of the process. So how did the process help you navigate his death when you were so young?
Yeah. So as I mentioned, my father was, very German. We will do things his way. It will be my way. It's no other way. And I always blamed him for my mother deciding to leave the family because he was, you know, not strong enough to stand up to him. And after seventeen years being married to him, she decided to leave. She said she couldn't do it anymore. And he was not happy about that, and so he said, if you leave, I'm taking the kids. I'm gonna fight you tooth and
nail for these kids. Well, my mother didn't have the resources to fight, so that's why she left and we went to live with my father. And my father was a brilliant IQ off the chart, three degrees in the University of Chicago, loving father. Not a lot of kids, nineteen sixty seven, would take on three little kids. So there was a lot of great qualities about him, but what I was more focused on most of my life was how could you chase my mom off? How could you be, you
know, do that to her? So even though he died when I was really young, what really turned me around for my father, you're having a conversation with your young parents. You know, they're 12, 13, and they're telling you about your life. And this is one of the really important things that happened to me at Hoffman. And my dad started telling me about what it was like to watch his father be taken away by the Nazis and put into a concentration camp. He was 12, and he was an only child.
When I think about what that must have been like for him to watch his his dad be taken away, not know if he'll ever see his father again, and then thinking, I gotta step up and be the man of the house here. I gotta take care of my mother, my grandmother, but my dad's mother. And so then my grandfather was lucky enough to get out of the concentration camp and they all came to The US in January of nineteen thirty nine and started a new life. He didn't know English. He was German.
He was 13. So when I had that conversation with him, I was just complete passionate for gayness. You know? Of course, he was gonna be a control freak. Of course, he was gonna be a little on the angry side. His life did not turn out the way he thought it was going to. I completely forgave him. I'm sad that I lost him so young, but I feel at peace. As a matter of fact, I'm applying for my German citizenship, and I'm actually gonna be able to get my German citizenship
because of my father. I think it's kinda cool. It's gonna give me a connection to my father that I haven't had before. His positive legacy living inside you even today. Well and he was so incredibly smart, and I'm very blessed because from the time we were little kids, all he cared about was is educating us and teaching us and making sure that we knew as much information about the world and about everything we possibly could,
from him. So, you know, I like to consider myself fairly intelligent, and I am grateful to both my parents for that. You have this heart opening experience with both your mom and your father at the process. And then the rest of the week unfolds and the weekend happens. Take us into the back end of your week at Hoffman and the beginning of your life post Hoffman. As I like to say, you have to go through the mud to get to the meadow. The first three or four days was
definitely sliding through the mud. I never thought about quitting, but I was so excited because I was so ready to change. As I was telling you, I was just got out my, workbook from thirteen years ago to remind myself of some things. And every day, I was like, this is so exciting. I am so glad we're doing this. And now I did probably use more Kleenex than anyone there. There was a lot of tears. Tears are so cathartic. Like, I feel grateful that I had all
those tears to shed. So, you know, you start out in your anger with your parents and all these negative patterns they have, and then as you go through the week and you really learn more about, you know, how they ended up the way they did, and how these patterns, I am not my patterns, I am not I mean, I said that to myself over and over, I am not my patterns. And I really came out the other end just going, You know what?
Yeah, Carol, you can be impatient and judgmental and you can be critical, but that's not who you are. So then the joyful part shows up, you know, with all of the play and the laughing and crying, tears of joy. And the first thing I did was call my mother, and we talked for two hours and, ah, just precious. You can feel it now, can't you? I can feel it now. Yeah. It's precious. So you guys are a gift. Such a gift. Many people talk about how life is bumpy after the process,
but it's still different. So for you in your life post process, why is it still great that the Hoffman lives inside you? You know, I also know this that you attend events, you keep the tools and the practices alive. It feels like a regular commitment. That's because it changed my life dramatically, Drew. So after the process is over, I went to see my mother, and that was amazing. But, you know, I have a friend who jokes about the peyote high that we're all on
when we leave the process. You know, we're we are just on top of the world, and it was right at the holidays, and it was just perfect. I started dating a little bit, and I could just feel myself being super confident and super compassionate. And then on 02/18/2012, I ran into a guy here in Boulder that I had three dates with a year and a half earlier, and it just didn't work that first time for whatever reason. So I ran into him in Boulder, and we decided to go for a drink.
And he said to me, you seem really different. And so then I started telling him about Hoffman. Well, Drew, he is my husband. We married in 02/2016, and it absolutely would not have happened without Hoffman. I say a %, I would not be married to my husband Tad if I had not done the Hoffman process. It was just by coincidence I ran into him, and he noticed immediately the change in me. And then, he did Hoffman the following November, and we have both go to a lot
of the events. And we did the relationship, you know, workshop together. As I mentioned earlier, finding the right life partner was one of the main reasons why I chose to go to Hoffman, and I did. So yay. I'll just say one more thing. He's not the kind of guy necessarily would have thought I would pick for myself. And one of the things that Hoffman showed me was it gave me an opening to really consider the just the right person for the new Carol, the person who looks at somebody and is
not so judgmental and critical. Because when somebody does something like, you know, why do we they said that? Well, then I think, what kind of childhood did they have? You know? And I'm I'm just much more compassionate and patient with people when they say or do things that I think are, like, So my husband is a very kind and compassionate and loving person, and I do feel very fortunate to have met him. And so yeah.
You know, we do have people that come to navigate marriages, relationships that are on the brink. But you're coming as a result of wanting to find a life partner and attract somebody different and not the same old, same old. You know, it's such an important decision. Who we choose for our life partner is one of the greatest, most powerful things we can do. If we do it from a place of pattern, then we're just inviting more stress and
struggle into our life. So the fact that you sort of got yourself, as you said, not just understanding why you were picking the wrong people, but also helping you pick the right person. Yeah. Absolutely. It it's, it's very true. And and I do hear that sometimes people come to the process with trying to figure out their relationship, and sometimes the relationship gets stronger, and sometimes it breaks up. But that's how powerful the process is.
It really helps you to get to know yourself and and what's working and what's not. So, yeah, so very grateful to Hoffman for that. As you sit in this position, fourteen, fifteen years post process, what has been some of the work that has kept it most alive for you? Like, what's bang for the buck? What where do you go to do the work related to Hoffman? Well, I get as I mentioned, we have
gone to many of the refresher courses. We're very fortunate to be here in Boulder where you guys will have something about once a year or so. We we just went to one recently that was done in Westminster, and we loved that. Let's face it, Drew. It's really easy for the stuff to just kinda go away, and we forget about it, and we just go on with our lives, and we're doing, doing, doing, and not bing, bing, bing. And my husband, I'm lucky, he's also passionate
about it. So about once a year or so, we try to do some type of refresher. As a matter of fact, you know, you ask kind of what else changed, after I did Hoffman, and we were in a refresher course about about ten years ago. And I had been begging my husband. I was like, we really should buy a place in the mountains, and he was like, no. No. No. I don't wanna buy a place in the mountains. I'm like, we really should
buy a place in the mountains. So we're at a refresher that Brad was teaching, and we were taking a break that morning, and he goes, Carol, I gotta talk to you. He's my husband. He said, Carol, I have to talk to you. He sat down and he sat across from me. He said, you know what? I was not wanting to buy a place in the mountains because I thought I didn't deserve it. He said, you know what? I totally deserve to have a place in the mountains. Let's go up there tomorrow and make an
offer on this one. We've been looking at this one place. I will never forget that. We got we got up the next morning, and we drove, and we made an offer. And Ted that was ten years ago, and we are so happy that we bought this place in the mountains. But it was this realization that Ted had during one of the visionings that, you know what? I would say no because I thought I didn't deserve it. And he goes, yeah. So isn't that cool? Wow.
That's that's fascinating. Isn't it interesting that that kind of deep seated belief has very practical real life consequences positively and negatively, and we don't often link it to our value, do we? Our shame message, do we? No. And if we hadn't been there doing a refresher, that probably he wouldn't have had that moment that he was living in his negative pattern of I don't deserve, I don't deserve. And he was like, yes. I do deserve. So I work with people all day every day with my job,
and it can be very challenging. I'm part psychologist because I'm helping business owners when they're ready to transition and sell their company. And it is a big decision for them. These are these aren't little businesses I sell. They're usually, you know, $30.40, 50,000,000. So there's a lot of doctor Carroll that comes along with what I do. When I find myself feeling like, oh, come on. Really? Why are you I'm like, no. No. I gotta remember where this person comes from, have some compassion.
And so I definitely found myself way more patient and way more insightful about how people operate post Hoffman, which has helped my work tremendously. It sounds like that heart opening, that compassion piece, it spreads everywhere in all aspects of your life. I certainly try, Drew. Especially right now, I feel like it's so important that we have that kindness and compassion for people. I love animals. I love nature. I love wildlife.
That is also something that has just exploded, you know, just my commitment to helping others and helping the environment and helping animals. You know, we all have our moments, right, and there's times I have to just, you know, the breathing, the the hands on heart, that is a huge thing for me. I'm a doer, I'm a goer, I'm super high energy, but I just feel so blessed that I have this understanding of human beings that I didn't have before I went to Hoffman.
I love that. This understanding of human beings and who they are, their complexity, their patterns, their childhoods. I wanna ask about you and Ted because having both done the process, you're aware of one of the left road ways of being with people is to pattern police. And I imagine as both of you as grads, you could call out the other person's patterns. We call that pattern policing when you name patterns that you see in the other person.
But how do you all navigate when you know this work and you both go into patterns and you see the other person going into pattern? How do you not pattern police? Yeah. Well, one of the interesting things about my husband is his father is still alive, and he's 93. It was so helpful for me to know his father and to understand what the Hoffman patterns and how that stuff has passed on.
It's much easier for me to understand and forgive him when he does go into his patterns because I do know where they come from. We try very hard to check-in with each other on a regular basis. The tools that we've gotten from Hoffman has really helped our marriage thrive and the conversations that we have. It's not perfect. There are still days that, you know, where negative patterns take over, but we always come back together
and talk. It's a huge benefit to have both people having done Hoffman. So it seems like that repair where you come home, you come back to each other, patterns are still there, but you have the ability to be resilient, to return to the goodness in yourselves and in each other. That's the critical difference, it sounds like. Yeah. For sure. Absolutely. Because we both still have our patterns that rage from time to time, but he doesn't have the advantage of having met my
dad. He knew my mom a little bit, but it's so fascinating to me. One of the things when I meet a really difficult person, I'll say, I wonder what kind of childhood they had. Or if I meet a really well adjusted person, tell me about your childhood because I bet it was fabulous. But, again, it really does help with understanding people and having compassion for for folks as they navigate their challenges.
Carol, what's it like to talk about your parents and their lives and your process experience and your life post process to reflect on all of that? What's that like for you? Well, I get jazzed about it. The biggest challenges I've had is two knee replacements and four foot surgeries. So aside from the physical ailments I've had, you know, I've met the man of my dreams. We have a great relationship. We bought a beautiful home in Boulder. My career is thriving.
I work in an amazing industry full of passionate people. I'm really healthy. So I really look at it as something I'm very enthusiastic and very positive about. And while I don't wanna preach about Hoffman to other people, if there's ever an opening, if I hear somebody talk about their challenging childhood or this, you know, something that gives me an opening, I will always share about Hoffman in a very nonjudgment mental, and I try to be very helpful.
And as I mentioned, I I think probably ten, twelve people I know have gone through it, and, you know, I have letters here in my book of people that have written because, you know, you're writing a letter to the person that sent you, and I've kept those. It's just you guys are a gift, a true gift. Thank you. Carol, so good to have you on the podcast. Thanks for for being willing to share your story.
I'm thrilled to do it because as you can tell, I'm a fan and I'm a believer, and I'm happy to reach out to and talk to anybody. If anybody has questions, I'm not hard to find. Thank you, Carol. Thank you. Thank you for listening to our podcast. My name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and president of Hoffman Institute Foundation. And I'm Razi Ingrassi, Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute Foundation. Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In themselves, in each other and in the world. To find out more, please go to hoffmaninstitute.org.