Hi and welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. My name is Paul Zelizer and I'm your host. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs and it costs you nothing. Thank you so much. Today our guest is Lauren Howard, also known as L2, and our topic is vetting investors as much as they vet you. Lauren L2 Howard is a telehealth program operator, mental health advocate and women's champion who believes above all that isolation lies. It's not just you and help is available. She is the CEO of LB Health, a virtual mental health treatment program that supports people recovering from burnout, toxic work environments and trauma, while also providing full spectrum mental health care with an emphasis on accessibility and lower cost options.

Lauren is also the CEO of L2, a digital platform and community boldly calling BS on outdated ideas of professionalism for women and inviting them to join team Difficult as they redefine what leadership and success can look like across our companies and consulting work. L2 uses technology, storytelling and care to build space spaces where people can heal, tell the truth about what they're going through, and do work that feels more human and sustainable. L2, welcome to AwarePreneurs.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm looking forward to this. You're doing such amazing work. And let's go back to the beginning. Give us a sense of the origin story of LB Health and L2, and was there a moment when you realized you really needed to build something that didn't exist yet?

Yeah, I mean, the origin story is really my kind of origin story. Some would say my villain origin story, depending on how you look at it. But my background has been in behavioral health administration for most of my career. I ran a practice starting right out of college. It was my dad's practice and he was an incredible psychiatrist and the world's worst business person and never should have been allowed to run a business. And I think honestly, watching him be really bad at business made me really good at business. And so we complemented each other really well. But I, like, didn't.

I had no idea what I was doing. Not to say we ever did anything that was improper or not compliant, but I didn't know what red tape to look for, so I didn't look. And that meant that we built a lot of innovative programs that other people probably would have been like, well, you can't do that. And when you ask why it would be like, well, that's just not the way we do things. But the real reason for it was never based in science or evidence based medicine or, you know, making good decisions for people. It was always just the way it's always been done, which has, which has always been like, just really abrasive to me. Like, just because that's the way it's always been done doesn't mean that's the way we should always do it. My dad passed away in 2016 and I moved on to another job that was a really, really incredible experience in education and startups and business and how to do things a little bit differently than how I had done them previously.

And also a really excellent education in burnout and toxic work environments. And I eventually left that role pretty unceremoniously without a plan in place, which is very much unlike me. Usually my control issues are way too substantial to allow that to happen. But I was so burned out that it just didn't matter. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. I was to the point where I could, I physically couldn't do more. And from there, from that experience, just kind of started talking on the Internet about some of these things that I had experienced without.

I didn't have a plan. I don't know why I did it. To this day, it is pretty like against who I was then. I was pretty private and really didn't want any eyes on me ever. And really expected that people would be kind of mortified that I was sharing such personal stuff. And instead they said, wait a minute, that happened to you? Because that happened to me too. And I thought it was just me. And I was like, okay, well if it's you and it's me and it seems like it's all of us, then maybe it is all of us and we're not talking about it.