- Welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute. My name is Drew Horning, and on this podcast we catch up with graduates for conversations around how their internal work in the process is informing their life outside the process, how their spirit and how their love is living in the world around them, their everyday radius. Hey everybody, my name is Drew Horning and welcome to the Hoffman Podcast. Today we have Lindsay Meyer.
Lindsay, would you introduce yourself? - Hi, good morning everyone. I'm Lindsay Meyer. Thanks, drew. And for the last 12 years I've been living and working in the San Francisco Bay area. I am the founder and CEO of a venture capital funded company called Batch, and also one of Time Magazine Silence Breakers.
My work focuses on transforming homes for sale into pop-up retail environments in urban areas, but I'm also a dog mom, a millennial, a Minnesotan, a Korean adoptee, a Notre Dame alum, and a December, 2019 Hoffman Process graduate. - Wow, it is great to have you. Would you December, 2019, take us back to a moment in time in your process? Where are you? What's happening and why do you, why that particular moment in time?
- Yeah, it's so interesting. So I was initially signed up to take the process in October of 2019, and unfortunately, Northern California had experienced these terrible wildfires and there were these power outages. And so we were, I think one of the first or maybe second processes in the history of Hoffman process to have to be rescheduled. And several of my classmates, by the time we made it to white Silver Springs in December, were like so eager and excited to be there doing the work.
So we were all really grateful to be, uh, in that place at that time.
And so when I think back to December, um, one of the things that was just so incredibly impactful for me, um, were some of these expressive writing exercises where, um, you take time and you sort of go off on your own and either you're writing, um, to someone specific or you're creating dialogues, um, and really trying to unpack what's in the subconscious mind, um, and give it a little bit of space to exist so you can sort of maybe get free of it or let go, um,
after kind of bringing it to the forefront of your mind and, um, accepting and acknowledging what it is. And then, you know, after inviting space for that, figuring out how to reconcile some of those things, whether they're sort of good, bad or otherwise, about what those thoughts were.
And so for me, I remember this moment where I was invited by my process teacher, um, to create some dialogue about some things that I thought my birth parents in Korea were wanting me to know and feel and experience in my life. And so I had like a, gosh, it was probably no longer than 30 minutes, but just an incredibly strong outpouring of things that was striking to me because it was almost like the things that I wanted to believe they wanted me to hear.
Um, and I have no idea about the, the validity or the truth or the exact nature of these words and if they're directionally correct or not. Um, but what was so powerful about it was just the opportunity to receive a message. And frankly, it was like a bit of my mind's message to me. Um, but from these people who are still a significant part of my life, they, um, they gave me life.
I have had limited or very little interaction with 'em, but as I've gotten older, their wish for my life and, and the person that they want me to be in the world, um, I think has been in my subconscious.
And so it was so profound to be able to, you know, have some time last December to be able to think on that and then to sort of let it come to the surface through written word - A beautiful description of the value, couple things, the value of the subconscious, the unconscious to, to show us things that we don't know. Right?
- Absolutely. And I think, you know, what still stands out about that moment for me, especially since I've gone back and and reread some of that dialogue in the day sense, is just how much my heart and my head needed to hear those things from them. And in some ways, I think the exercise was a little bit one of fabrication. You sort of imagine like what these people are trying to tell you, and they're people that frankly haven't been in my life for nearly 20 years.
And so yeah, it was really amazing that, um, I could do that. I could have that connection with these people who simply gave birth to me and then gave me away for, um, for a different life, who then I, I reconnected with once when I was 15 and haven't since seen since 2001, um, that I could be receiving such a, like, powerful set of messages.
Like, you know, we have so much love for you and we understand that maybe not everything in your life is always gonna be simple or straightforward, but you know, we're always gonna be holding you in our hearts. Um, those were, I think, messages that I've wanted to know with certainty for a long time. And what was so shocking to me was that I could sort of give them to myself. And such was my process of the experience. It extended far beyond this 30 minute, um, exercise on paper.
It was sort of about learning that, you know, a lot of my anxieties and insecurities were things that I could learn how to process differently and really develop some skills to be able to, to take on those challenges when they would come up in different parts of my life. - Lindsay, what's it like to remember those messages that even though we gave you away, we care about you, we love you, and we're supporting you even as you move forward in your life.
What's it like to remember those here now in this moment? - I think it's incredibly gratifying and also very grounded to just know and understand that like the human experience is one that is anchored and, and rooted in this idea of the love that we have for ourselves and, and other people. And any form or way that we can experience that and create more of that, um, I think just enhances our, our capability to have a good life in this world.
Um, and so yeah, really, really grateful and, and happy that I was able to experience that so deeply. - One of the things I love about the process among many is the fact that it is based in the experiences that we support and hold for students to have. And, um, there's just such a cellular wisdom. You can take an idea, a concept like self-compassion, and if we only allow our inter intellect to digest that, it can only go so far.
And the embodied experience of self-compassion and self-love, and I'm imagining you in that moment really allowing that love from your birth parents to reside in your being in such a deep and profound way. Uh, is is the part that's transformative about it. It's beyond just your intellect. Do you resonate with that? - I do, because I consider myself such an intellectual person.
Um, I recently took this, um, Clifton or Gallup StrengthsFinder, um, and it returns kind of five of your signature strengths, and it turns out that four of my top five cluster around like logic data analysis strategy. And so like that's the part of my brain and existence. It's been really like, first of all, it was kind of always naturally very capable. Um, but I think throughout my life I've just honed into being this like superpower.
And so as much as it's a superpower, it can also quite frequently trip me up because I'm living in this world of logic and data and needing to explain everything. And frankly, you know, as I've gotten older, I've just learned that there's, there's a lot of parts of life that we can't solve with logic. Like it's experiential.
And I think that's one of the beautiful things that Hoffman allows you to do is sort of step outside of your programmed world and life for seven or eight days, um, and try out new concepts. Um, and for me, a big one, well, a few were, um, vulnerability and self-compassion and things that I just hadn't had time or space to try on.
And those have been really valuable kind of new skills for me sort of in the seven or eight months since Hoffman - I wanna in, in, um, you filled out a form in part for this conversation, and I'm just struck with your capacity with words both, um, orally but also written. And I just wanna read it back to you because it, it, uh, there was something profound in it. You said there are days and months where you topple things on purpose.
If, and you write that if life was going to suck so much, at least I could be the force of devastation. Sometimes I did things to create opportunities to be validated if I ran away or had an outburst or started at Tiff, that represented an opportunity to be paid attention to and loved. But frankly, the best strategy is to let go of the things that reinforce our fundamental shame messages, the people that hurt us, the jobs that break us, the failures that crush us.
I spent my entire life integrating those things as evidence that my life couldn't possibly match the vision in my mind that I was so desperately toiling to create. So I bravely let go of it all, and it didn't happen at once. It's been a gradual thing. Sometimes it's actually physical. I delete something, I get rid of something, and sometimes it's emotional. I close the door on something important.
All I know is that, that it didn't have these skills before and they're totally a net positive for me. Do you remember writing that and can you share a little bit more about that? - Wow. I do. And as you read it back, I start to get, um, really emotional. Um, I think it's one thing to write it and it's another thing to kind of read it back to you at a later time. Um, but all of those things still resonate as very true for me.
Um, I think the important part is that I have a bar from which to peg my own growth. Um, and I can go back to kind of November of 2019 and remember the feeling of being so trapped by these patterns. And a lot of them you mentioned like, I would create conflict or I would blow things up, or I would be very critical or argumentative.
Um, and despite those strategies which were generally not working, they were causing more things to break and go wrong, um, or not progress in the fashion that I wanted. I so much more deeply actually wanted change. Um, and I think you have to get to a point in your life where you can invite that in.
Um, and so one of the amazing things that really attracted me to the Hoffman process was, um, one, the personal testimony of people who had been there and been able to reflect back on how much it was a catalyst for that change in their lives. Um, but two, again, just being able to step into an experience where you can learn that your patterns and the things that you kind of learned and taken on and collected throughout your life don't have to be your destiny.
And for me, like that week and understanding that was all about getting freedom from those parts of myself that, you know, frankly, I, I loathed as much as they were my playbook, um, I wanted to figure out a way to kind of live in accordance with actually, um, a brighter, more beautiful sort of vision for the person I wanted to become and the life I wanted to have.
And, you know, what happened in December was I think the beginning of that and eight months later I can reflect on, wow, I'm, I'm doing that. I'm doing it better than ever. I feel better, I look better, um, I'm living better. Um, and that's exciting. It's really self-reinforcing, um, but still also very difficult to hear you read those things back to me and, and just understand kind of where I was and how I got there.
And, uh, I think one of the things that was so curious to me about the process is in my class cohort of about 40 people, you know, I met people as young as 24 or 25 and people well into their, their late sixties or early seventies, and so much diversity in every class cohort. And you know, I I went to the process when I was 33 and I felt so much gratitude about, um, taking the time and being able to get ahead of these things, um, in my early thirties before more of my life unfolded.
I feel like that's been one of the greatest gifts is knowing that I get to live out the rest of my life knowing and practicing, um, and having and doing these things. And, um, you know, some people unfortunately don't have these catalyzing events where they're in the space of inviting that change until later in their lives. And, you know, we're obviously all on our own journeys. Um, but I felt so, um, leading up to the process, I I carried around a lot of shame.
Like, I'm a really broken person, a lot of things are not going right or not going the way that I would've wanted them to. Um, and then I sort of got there and said, well, sure, a lot of things have broken on the way to getting here, but now I can fix them and I can live the rest of my life, however many years that's gonna be, um, as closer to the person that I want to be. And that was really, really empowering. In fact, um, I think there was a lot of like freedom, um, in that for me.
And it's, it's given me this sense of optimism and positivity that I'd never experienced before in my life. - What's it like to walk around with that sense of optimism in your being? What what's the experience of embodying that? You know, it's - Almost as you go through - Your day-to-day life. Yeah, - It's like flipping the switch from negative to positive almost because before Hoffman process, I sort of tended to catastrophize like almost everything.
And I sort of learned that week that the power of our positive thinking actually has the ability to change, like the outcomes of events just based on very small differences in how we respond or how we react to the things that are coming up in our everyday life.
And so I guess learning that, or sort of getting to age 33 and, and sort of seeing this potential, um, path for myself where I would continue to be pessimistic and sort of glass half empty, um, just understanding that that was gonna be a life filled with scary things was like a, a pretty major wake up call for me. Um, and I think 33 years was long enough to know that like I didn't want my life to play out so negatively.
And so, you know, flipping that switch from negative to positive just feels like an incredible gift. Um, and it's taught me so many things about living with less fear of the next thing going wrong or kind of constantly waiting for the next shoe to drop. And oh my God, I can't imagine sort of living in a time like now with the COVID-19 pandemic and not having more of that skillset. I mean, it's really like this inner resilience that needed to be cultivated.
It's about having self-compassion and kind of trusting in one's own abilities, um, on the basis of being able to understand yourself and how you operate best. So, you know, those are our big important things that took me a lot of time to come around to, I can also recognize that many people, um, never come around to them. So again, like so much satisfaction, pride, um, and just, uh, a sense of gratefulness that I was able to, to get there, um, in the timeframe that I did.
- Well said. And I, as I hear you, I'm, I'm getting what, what so many graduates get, which is kind of a reset and a foundation for how to show up and how to allow their self-compassion to then move outward in their spirit to live in the world. And what also is true is that it's, you get so many angles on this work, but not, not only the foundation for the future, but a kind of rewriting of the past. And I wanna go back to 2017, uh, or maybe 16 or 15 when things were, um, harder for you.
And I just wanna share this as a, as a venture, uh, um, capitalist someone who's raising money from venture capitalists, someone who's, um, start in, in the startup world that you're in. So in 2018, venture capitalists in the United States distributed $131 billion to startup businesses, hoping of course to spot the next Google or Tesla. And that money went to roughly 9,000 companies, um, and just over 2% of them of those companies.
And of that $131 billion, 2% were founded entirely by women, and then only 12% had at least one female founder. And the rest, 86% of those companies getting that $131 billion were founded entirely by men. I just have to ask you, what's it like to be, uh, a woman in a field so dominated by men on so many levels? - Yeah, well, I can corroborate those statistics with my own personal experience and, um, unfortunately some, you know, tragic experiences that I encountered on my way.
So in 2014, I started a company and spent most of that year and a subsequent year raising money to get that off the ground. And along the way, you know, I, I met with probably about 150 perspective investors and heard, no, I don't know, 148 times and you know, that that really does take a toll on a person, on a person's spirit.
And, um, for a person who at that point was kind of wired to be a little more pessimistic, it really reinforced sort of how I felt about myself, how I felt about my odds or chances of success. Of course, I know now that like, actually if we have a little more self-confidence, that can really help bend or change the curve of what outcomes can look like.
But in some ways, I think both the, the statistical realities of what it's like to be a woman in, in an industry where most of the dollars are flowing to men is tough. And it also means that if you think you are gonna be the exception and not the norm, the norm, meaning you're actually gonna go out and do this successfully, um, I sort of adapted or took on the attitude that like, well, you might have to compromise certain things about how this happens.
And that led me to a not great place of sort of ending up embroiled and, and being just harassed actually by someone who demonstrated some interest in my business. And at the time I really reconciled kind of having a tolerance for that behavior, which was not model behavior, it's not the behavior that I would say to a friend like, yeah, you should just let that happen.
Um, I let it go on because the story I told myself was, um, the odds are very long and, you know, generations of women have had to put up with being treated kind of on a subpar basis, explicitly on the basis of their gender or their appearance. And, you know, who are you? You're a 29-year-old, um, non-white woman trying to be successful in a white man's world. Um, and those messages just, just sort of reinforced a lot of the fears and insecurities of maybe I wasn't gonna be successful.
And, um, unfortunately after nearly two years of trying to fundraise for that business, I had to step aside and, and move on with my life in other ways. I ultimately got sort of a mulligan or a do-over opportunity, um, about 18 months later to start another company, um, which became batch in which I've been running successfully for about four years now. But I learned a lot in the experience of doing that for the first time.
And then, um, you know, as I alluded to in my introduction, it became the basis of a very public movement about, first it created awareness, uh, initially in Silicon Valley and venture capital, and then it, it really like bubbled up and became a national and a global movement, which we think of now as as Me Too. And you know, the last several years have been very interesting.
I, I can't think of any other way to describe them, um, in terms of those experiences becoming national news and becoming a little bit of a public figure around that. Um, but also navigating like my day-to-day life and experience of giving it another go and what that means and sort of sticking to my, my own agenda. And, uh, I think it's very lucky and fortunate that I have been able to do this again, that I have been able to raise venture capital, but it wasn't a straight forward path.
Um, and I'm not sure that it ever is for an entrepreneur.
And unfortunately, a lot of those experiences that I'm not convinced I would've had if I were, you know, a white man did contribute to, to a lot of these somewhat limiting beliefs that I took on about myself and what I was capable of accomplishing and, you know, frankly became contributing factors to this, this thirst or this, um, this hunger for personal change that brought me to Hoffman process last year - As a result of you telling your story there.
You mentioned the front page article in the New York Times, but before, as you were considering to share your experiences, um, and whether to go public with those experiences, you, you mentioned in the New York Magazine article that came out a year ago, kind of honoring the anniversary of, of all of that Me Too movement.
You mentioned watching an episode of Million Dollar Listings LA at this TV show, and an agent was selling Rose McGowan's home because as it was positioned in the episode, she needed to pay cash for her legal bills around this Me Too movement and her coming out telling her story. So I imagine that that was also impacting you and, and the litigious nature of our society, and should you go forth with your story? - You know, that episode really hit me hard.
I think I did, uh, a fairly good job kind of distancing or keeping my emotions at play, um, as this was unfolding because I felt that I needed to be strong and I couldn't kind of, there couldn't be any cracks in the veneer, and there was like no places I wanted anyone to possibly be able to poke a hole in. Um, but you know, years later, um, I had the opportunity to literally watch what was one of my worst nightmares play out on television.
And by the way, I didn't turn on this episode of like what I thought was gonna be lighthearted TV to watch another person in a similar situation, um, have to go through and, and live through what was one of my worst nightmares. And so that really caught up with me in that moment, and unfortunately encapsulated, you know, a lot of what those big fears were, I, I didn't end up in that set of circumstances.
Maybe it's luck or good fortune or some amount of strategizing that I sort of did in the lead up, but sometimes these things come back to you in unexpected ways. And certainly like that day when I was just hoping to kind of tune out and watch some TV was one of those moments. But, you know, there was, I think an incredibly high amount of calculation in the consideration process of what to do about this.
And it was not immediately clear or straightforward that being public and and vulnerable was going to have a lot of benefits to me personally. And so I really had to get into kind of a decision making space where it was no longer about me as the individual, but it was about kind of my experience and my willingness to, to use that in service or in support of the thousands, millions, um, of other people who have found or would someday find themselves in a similar situation.
And as it turns out, you know, there was a lot of resonance there. I think that's how we kind of quickly went from niche sort of stories here and there to multiple stories every day, breaking in sort of every major market across industries and then global movement and now is something that gets airtime still three years later. So, you know, I, I never could have projected how this was going to unfold.
Um, I'm not sure that the movement itself has been a huge success, but I am proud of my role in being an early voice and a catalyst and being able to, I think, move societal awareness about these topics forward. - I'm, I'm thinking about you as you're in the process, um, nine, 10 months ago and, um, this, it, it almost as if it's the, the abuse or the mistreatment, um, that happened in 14 and then the coming out with your story, going public with it, it's almost as if it's two chapters.
And then as you were in the process, the Hoffman process, did you have a rewriting of that and a, did it allow the past to take a different shape for you, your own story being rewritten, um, even during the process and since then? - Yeah, absolutely.
And frankly, a lot of the thematic or topical ways that I was able to achieve that, which I'll share in a second, um, had much broader, bigger implications for my life, even beyond sort of making sense and sorting out and, and reauthorizing those particular experiences. So to be more specific, um, I guess, uh, two things come to mind immediately. One, um, letting go.
So I don't think anyone wants to be on the front page of the New York Times for sharing a story of how they were harassed while trying to raise capital to start a company. Certainly that's not why I dreamed of being or making front page news. Um, and so, you know, I carried a, a pretty massive amount of shame around and what had happened in those years, um, really reinforced this refrain that I wasn't good enough or I wasn't accomplishing enough.
Um, I wasn't successful enough and I spent the year subsequent to that trying to prove that wrong by taking on perfectionist tendencies, this annoying trait that's been following me around my entire life, or thinking that I could outwork or outmaneuver some of these shortcomings. If I could accomplish more, if I could get more attention, um, some of these things in my past that I didn't feel great about would be less loud in my head.
I mean, it wasn't just, you know, struggling or failing or going sideways with raising capital to start a company. It was, I can think of, you know, half dozen other experiences on top of that. But that became kind of part of this mountain of evidence that I was failing at having this perfect life.
And so Hoffman represented, you know, this opportunity to really unpack that, you know, what you were sharing earlier about sometimes I would try to become my own force of devastation because I needed the validation that things were gonna be okay, or that someone loved me or that everything was gonna work out and I needed a, a path for kind of just rewriting that, for finding a different strategy.
And it turned out that kind of letting go or, um, having more acceptance and being able to integrate all of the pieces and parts of our life story, whether they're shiny and bright or things that we kind of tend to like put under the bed, was huge. Another one for me was just actually gaining some perspective. And a lot of what the process does is it builds in these exercises that help you think beyond your own experiences and viewpoints.
And you know, I think I showed up last year at the process thinking that I was really trapped in my own set of beliefs and realities and starting to get beyond that and, and understanding that hmm, actually we're all just kind of people in the world with imperfect human lives allowed me to gain a lot of perspective about I'm not the only person who struggles. I'm not the only person that suffers.
And actually through that I sort of got this unanticipated bonus benefit of learning to cultivate more empathy. Um, and that's something that I think I was fairly deficient in. I definitely had been walking around for many years with this belief that you couldn't teach empathy, but now I know more.
I know that you can like actually package your imperfect human experiences, integrate them, reflect on them in a way that helps you gain that perspective, um, and that you can use as sort of a roadmap for having a richer, more rewarding set of life experiences subsequent to that - Beautiful, using empathy to, to teach yourself that it can be taught and that that can be a, a, a richer roadmap for how to show up.
Lindsay, what's it like to just kind of sit down, I'm imagining you're in San Francisco in your home and, uh, with your dog and just kind of, uh, reflect back on on these years and your process and, and your life forward. What's that been like? - Yeah, it's incredibly profound.
One of the amazing things that happened for me while I was at the process was sort of later described, I think by my Hoffman teacher, was like, I got to have this experience of myself for the first time ever where I could reflect back on the years of life experience and work experience and family experience and experience relationally with friends and partners and not make any judgements about whether it was good or bad or helpful or not, and just sort of see it for what it was
and being able to experience and appreciate kind of the the ways in which I had navigated those relationships and experiences well, actually. And, and so having this experience of not being judgmental about the paths that I had walked or the shoes that I'd walked those paths in, I think really catalyze this ability for me over recent months to get comfortable integrating all of those parts. Because remember before Hoffman, I think I was just very self-critical.
Anytime anything would go wrong or would be hard or someone would let me down, it was just more evidence that, you know, life was gonna be hard. Imperfect d and the world is a, a pretty crazy place in 2020. And so I feel like I am better equipped to navigate the uncertainty of the every day, but also to kind of honor and even sometimes celebrate the person that I've evolved into and the things that have led to that evolution and to actually feel acceptance of that.
And that's a noticeable, like, palpable change. I mean, so many people have said to me, you seem more at ease, or you seem relaxed in a way that I have never experienced from you before, or you seem happy, or they've asked, like, you know, I've noticed you to be doing things differently, making different choices, choosing other things. Like do you think that's because of Hoffman process?
And I think the answer is yes, - Lindsay, for your time, for your keen intellect, and most of all for your courage emotionally. I am grateful for this conversation. - I am too. I feel so warm inside to be able to sort of step back into some of those deeply transformative days of my life. And I'm really looking forward to more of the people in my life and network listening to this conversation and sort of getting a taste of some of the brilliance that has happened for me in the day sense.
So thanks for, um, allowing me to come on and, and be a guest today and wishing you all the best. Drew, - You're welcome. And I, I know that you're headed off to meetings for batch, so I imagine it's gonna be a, a shift in energy. Is that true? - Indeed. - Lindsay, thank you very much. - Thank you. - Thank you for listening to our podcast. My name is Liza Insi. I'm the CEO and President of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
- And I'm Rassi 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 hoffman institute.org.