April 10, 2025 • 30 mins
Entrepreneur and business owner, Carol Frank, came to the Hoffman Process for one clear reason: she wanted to find a life partner. In her early fifties and never married, Carol had just ended a year-long relationship. The beautiful thing was that Carol was ready. She knew that if she wanted a lasting partnership, she had to make a change. Carol shared this with a friend who happened to be a Hoffman graduate. Although this friend had mentioned Hoffman prior, it wasn't until this moment that Carol said, Yes, to the lasting change that would happen for her at the Hoffman Process.
Within a week of this conversation, Carol had signed up. Within two weeks, she was in the classroom at White Sulphur Springs. This was in 2011. One year later, Carol ran into someone she had dated prior. This time, though, was different. They decided to have another date. After a bit, he said to her, "You are different. What's changed?" It was her week at the Hoffman Process. In the years since, Carol and her partner married, and he attended the Hoffman Process.
Carol's transformation, during her Process and in the months and years after, has been profound. She healed deep family patterns. Carol came to understand why her parents were the way they were and found peace and forgiveness for them. She shares some beautiful moments with her mother directly following her Process. Carol's mother died just a short time later. These moments were a precious gift.
Hoffman's tagline is, "When you're serious about change." And we mean it. People must truly be ready for the deep change that can happen in their lives. Carol was ready, and life was ready and waiting for her on the other side of her transformative week. We hope you enjoy this heart-warming conversation with Carol and Drew.
More about Carol Frank:
Carol is passionate about business, animals, and the intersection of the two. After starting her career as a CPA, she founded and operated three pet companies– a retail pet store, a wholesale distribution company, and a pet product manufacturing company. Carol then leveraged her experience in both finance and entrepreneurship to start BirdsEye Advisory Group. This M&A Advisory firm helps pet company founders and entrepreneurs when they are ready to sell their business. She has a BBA in accounting from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
Over the years, Carol has served in leadership roles within the pet industry. She's also served on the board of over a dozen nonprofit and business organizations, including the Dallas Zoo, the Denver Zoo Leadership Council, and Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation. Carol is a Trustee for The University of Colorado Foundation. She is also a member of the Colorado Chapter of the International Women’s Forum. Her biggest passion is animals. Carol shares her life with her Eclectus parrot, Peri, and Daphne, a sweet, energetic Whoodle. She loves skiing, biking, and birding.
Follow Carol on LinkedIn.
As mentioned in this episode:
White Sulphur Springs:
The Hoffman Institute's past retreat site was lost in the Glass fire, which started in the early morning hours of September 27, 2020.
Hoffman Refresher Course
Raz Ingrasci, Hoffman teacher and Coach
Listen to Raz on The Hoffman Podcast:
Husband, Father, Son
Hoffman and the Enneagram with Raz and Ward Ashman
Spiritual Lineage & the Hoffman Process with Raz and Marissa Ingrasci
Hoffman Couples Retreat
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
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
(00:23):
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
(00:45):
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
(01:07):
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,
(01:29):
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
(01:49):
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
(02:10):
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,
(02:32):
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
(02:52):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:33):
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,
(03:53):
'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
(04:15):
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,
(04:37):
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
(04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:40):
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
(06:02):
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
(06:22):
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.
(06:44):
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.
(07:05):
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
(07:26):
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
(07:48):
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
(08:10):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:52):
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
(09:14):
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
(09:34):
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
(09:55):
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
(10:15):
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.
(10:36):
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
(10:56):
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
(11:17):
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
(11:37):
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.
(11:59):
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,
(12:21):
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
(12:43):
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
(13:05):
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
(13:26):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:09):
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
(14:30):
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,
(14:52):
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.
(15:13):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:56):
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.
(16:19):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:02):
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
(17:22):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:03):
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
(18:25):
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,
(18:48):
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.
(19:09):
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,
(19:30):
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.
(19:52):
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
(20:12):
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
(20:32):
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.
(20:52):
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,
(21:15):
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
(21:35):
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
(21:56):
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
(22:18):
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
(22:38):
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
(22:59):
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
(23:20):
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
(23:41):
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
(24:03):
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.
(24:23):
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
(24:43):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:25):
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
(25:48):
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.
(26:09):
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
(26:31):
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
(26:53):
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
(27:14):
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
(27:35):
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
(27:56):
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.
(28:19):
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,
(28:40):
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.
(29:03):
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.
(29:31):
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.
(29:52):
To find out more, please go to hoffmaninstitute.org.
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
(00:23):
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
(00:45):
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
(01:07):
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,
(01:29):
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
(01:49):
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
(02:10):
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,
(02:32):
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
(02:52):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:33):
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,
(03:53):
'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
(04:15):
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,
(04:37):
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
(04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:40):
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
(06:02):
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
(06:22):
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.
(06:44):
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.
(07:05):
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
(07:26):
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
(07:48):
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
(08:10):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:52):
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
(09:14):
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
(09:34):
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
(09:55):
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
(10:15):
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.
(10:36):
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
(10:56):
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
(11:17):
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
(11:37):
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.
(11:59):
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,
(12:21):
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
(12:43):
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
(13:05):
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
(13:26):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:09):
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
(14:30):
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,
(14:52):
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.
(15:13):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:56):
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.
(16:19):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:02):
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
(17:22):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:03):
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
(18:25):
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,
(18:48):
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.
(19:09):
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,
(19:30):
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.
(19:52):
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
(20:12):
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
(20:32):
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.
(20:52):
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,
(21:15):
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
(21:35):
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
(21:56):
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
(22:18):
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
(22:38):
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
(22:59):
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
(23:20):
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
(23:41):
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
(24:03):
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.
(24:23):
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
(24:43):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:25):
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
(25:48):
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.
(26:09):
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
(26:31):
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
(26:53):
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
(27:14):
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
(27:35):
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
(27:56):
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.
(28:19):
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,
(28:40):
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.
(29:03):
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.
(29:31):
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.
(29:52):
To find out more, please go to hoffmaninstitute.org.
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