Hannah Mendoza
speaker
65 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Hannah Mendoza’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You're putting out fires. Yeah. And I've learned to have this attitude of, oh, I'm having a little breakdown about something today. I wonder how it's going to feel tomorrow. As opposed to, this feels like a problem. Let me pull out all the stops to try and fix it. And... Gosh, especially nighttime thoughts. I don't know if you've experienced this.
But it feels like this kind of cerebral off-gassing that's disguised as insight. I used to stay awake and I would be up at 3 and I thought these thoughts were revelatory. And then I'd write them down and the next day I'd look at it and say, what a load of rubbish.
And I think just knowing that your brain is going to go through these cycles of obsessing about things and then giving them space for them to process subconsciously often is where the insights come. In the shower, if you take yourself for a walk, that's been such a huge help to not take my brain so seriously because you're putting it under a lot of stress. And so it's not always...
It's not always going to react in a way that's logical.
I've never had a problem being vulnerable as a person, at least not since I moved to California and was just kind of surrounded by, you know, a lot more emotional openness than I had grown up with. And I do want to admit, I've really had to play with... the boundaries and how much I do lean into vulnerability and sharing with the team. It's a messy process. Stoicism is so much simpler.
It's so much easier, but it's not the way, especially as female leaders. This is a superpower, but learning when to turn it on and off and by how much is a messy process. I've been in meetings where, you know, I was feeling hormonal and one of our team was leaving and I just started crying in the meeting. And then I watched everyone else look a bit freaked out.
And I thought, oh, that was a bit much. Maybe just turn it down a little bit.
And sometimes if you're drawn to someone because they're quite similar, that actually very much might not be what your business needs because we need to diversify skill set and perspective. And so having a bunch of people around you that think like you can actually be a bit of a trap.
As I said, I do feel like I had a period where I was leaning more into vulnerability as a superpower, but with no filter, than I think was wise. And I got the reflection from Raj, bless him. He was like, you know, I know you're trying to be real with the team, but... And I really, it was a little hard to take in the moment, but I did really appreciate that perspective because what I found is...
By knowing that I did have to play the role of the cheerleader to a certain degree, you're also talking yourself into that attitude. And your job as CEO is cheerleader. It's to hold the vision. It's to, of course, be real and soft about the challenges on the way there. But being tasked with showing up with vision, with drive...
And with kind of unfaltering conviction in what you're building, even if there are moments where you feel like you'll fake it till you make it with that, changes your internal landscape. And so I've loved the transition from, I need to share with my team, you know, all the spectrum of emotions that I'm feeling to, for my sake and for their sake, I am going to be the fearless leader at the front.
And it's been helpful for me too.
This feels very minor in the face of all of these things, but one of the more helpful strategies that I found for having a place where you can be real as a counterbalance to needing to be, you It's a very kind of feminine strategy, but having a completely unhinged text thread with other people who are doing similar things.
I have founder friends, other women who are at similar stages with their business. Becca from Fishwife is a very close friend of mine.
It's very impressive to me. Please tell her that I'm a big fan. What she's done is amazing. But we have a text thread where all caps, you know, partial sentences, three-week delays in replying are completely accepted because sometimes you get off a call and you just need to write an all-caps text to someone that says... What on earth is going on? Yeah. And you need to ramble.
You need to send a five-minute voice note. And having that kind of, that expression in an appropriate way has been very cathartic.
Even, I mean, when you think about also being a female leader and you think about building something around the schedule of hormones on a monthly basis, biological clock, and even kind of on a daily basis, I find I'm very utopian until 3 p.m. And then I'm a complete nihilist from 3 p.m. until bedtime. So I just organize my schedule around that. But you don't always get to choose.
Or what if you have an incredibly important meeting at, you know, a time of the month where you have raging PMS and you just have to push through. And I think even as a woman, it's very amplified in terms of, you know, we are cyclical beings in a way that men are not.
I know with all my certainty that... having that, I guess, maybe switch in traditional role, if we are even thinking about the statistics surrounding, you know, 90% of Fortune 500 companies are run by men. I know that he feels like having a female leader is an appropriate step forward for creating the world we want to see in business.
And he has been so gracious about, you know, playing the role that he plays, which is intrinsic and critical. I couldn't do this without him. And we also have got to both play to our strengths. He is very entrenched in finance and operations. It's not my world. And I think that He also has, frankly, loved being in a company of basically all women.
Showing 41–60 of 65 · page 3 of 4
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