How MYNDY Started: My Obsession with a Problem
I get asked all the time how I started MYNDY.
So here goes…
I wasn't born to be an entrepreneur.
Some people are wired for entrepreneurship - the risk-seekers who love the high-highs and low-lows, that "sold strawberry lemonade in first grade" types.
That wasn't me.
I used to say I'd never start a company. What’s crazy is that I now can't picture doing anything else.
Since starting MYNDY, I've learned there are 3 kinds of entrepreneurs: those who fall in love with the lifestyle (process), those who fall in love with a partner and can’t wait to work with them (people), or those who fall in love with the thing they’re solving for (problem). I'm the third kind. I fell in love with the problem. The "can't eat, can't sleep, reach for the stars, over the fence" kind of love - my obsession with this problem started 10 years ago when I burned out in my first job….
I was working at a bank and I was told—daily—to be less enthusiastic ("fewer exclamation points please!!"), ask fewer questions (they called me “Bubbles”), and basically told to keep my mouth shut. With incessant feedback all the time, I burned out trying to be someone else.
During that first year, I coped with daily strawberry-frosted donuts and horoscopes from the AM Paper promising dream jobs.
My dad told me I'd never love anything I wasn't good at. So I got good at the job, won a global award, and networked with 3-5 people weekly seeking my next move - somewhere I could be my real, bubbly self.
After speaking to over 100+ people in a 9-month search, I ended up at a 40-person tech company called General Assembly. Our small team had ambitious goals to transform Fortune 500 learning. What started as a job quickly became my life. I worked all the time, traveled even more, and the stress that initially drove me ("pressure makes diamonds, people"), crushed me. My stomach started hurting daily, I had no appetite (again, for anyone who knows my hypoglycemic snack-fueled-days…scary town), I was in multiple countries in a week, and my sleep was no longer restful. It was an incredible experience that, again, wasn't sustainable.
Running was my therapy until knee injuries took that away too. I realized the daily stress or "toastie-ness" I felt wasn't normal, and it wasn't just me—everyone I knew felt this way—even at companies awarded the "Best Places to Work" badge.
I felt lost. My team and our clients were all stressed…I spoke to amazing companies and their employees were stressed. I used to think that the exhaustion, overwhelm, or "toastie-ness" that I used to feel every single day was both normal and solely caused by work.
I didn't know what else to do, so I decided to go study this problem.
I went to MIT to build a quantitative, research-backed model to fix company culture. Why? I thought if I could just solve what I thought was the root of the problem—workplace culture—we'd be all set!
Why? Because how could I have been in two such different places and ended up in the same, run-down-and-out state where I felt like a sad, tired, and watered-down version of me?
So I became an expert in what we call Organizational Fitness and ended up working cross-functionally in services businesses to rearrange internal operations for growth.
In many ways, this work was the beginning of MYNDY.
I worked in companies to fix everything cultural, structural, or politically you can imagine (shout-out MIT 3-Lens model), but I noticed that people were still tired, stressed, burned out, and “toastie.” So I paused this organization-only work to figure out the individual side of things via what we now call Mental Fitness…which you all know a whole lot about.
The cool news is we’re now bringing this 10+ years of both Organizational + Mental Fitness experience to organizations and the employees within them to solve challenges like:
Assessing and managing culture, alignment, and prioritization
Boosting morale, recognition, and productivity during high-pressure periods
Training new managers on foundational skill sets and a strong mindset
Collaboration and communication within a multigenerational workforce
Work-life balance, stress, and burnout in a remote/hybrid/back-to-office environment
Incorporating cultural principles or desired behaviors into everyday operating models
If you, a friend, or leader you know is looking for help with one of the problems above, or are just open to a conversation about this kind of work and how you've experienced these challenges, I’d love to chat!
