About Buffalo Collective

I spent more than two decades helping other people’s businesses grow. Strategy, marketing, communications. I was good at it. I cared about it. And for most of that time, I had no idea that the same conditioning I was trying to help my clients work around was quietly running my own show.

It took me until almost 40 to understand that I had absorbed, early and completely, the message that I should only and always accept what was offered. Wanting more, and asking for it was gasp unattractive. So I worked twice as hard and asked for half as much and wondered why the title and the salary and the influence never quite materialized. That’s what playing small looks like from the inside. It doesn’t feel like smallness. It feels like work.

What finally cracked it open wasn’t a coach or a course. It was a Phish concert.

I know how that sounds. I was there for the music, standing under the tented peaks of Shoreline Amphitheater with someone I loved, and what I got was something I hadn’t been looking for and couldn’t have planned. The magic mushrooms I’d consumed for funsies delivered much more than bright lights and swirly patterns. In a few hours, I learned as much about myself and my conditioning as I had in a dozen years of talk therapy. I accepted things I’d been circling for years. I connected to feelings and ideas I didn’t know I was avoiding. I forgave some things I thought I never would. This is how the medicine works.

I came home changed.

I’ve lived through my share of crap, but my therapists always point out one way in which I’m really lucky: I get integration. Learn something new in the morning, I can start making newly informed decisions in the afternoon. I know how to use my tools, and I had the great good fortune to work with the same therapist for fifteen years. She knew how to support me and I knew how to receive her support, so after that wild night in Mountain View, I was able to move forward with new ways of thinking and being that felt more like me.

But that’s not the only way this story goes. For most people integration isn’t a given and it’s far from easy. I’ve seen up close the slow deflation that can settle in after a peak psychedelic experience fades, revealing the same pain and struggles that were there before the medicine.

That gap, between knowledge and integration, between who we are on the inside and who we perform for others, is why I built Buffalo Collective. I realized that I was carrying the same unseen weight that I was trying to remove from my clients and collaborators. All of us brilliant people doing important work, held back not by lack of strategy or discipline but by the subconscious programming we’d never had the right support to question.

I built Buffalo Collective because I needed it. Because the overlap between my passion for supporting entrepreneurs and my commitment to healing isn’t a niche. It’s the thing I had to make.

I’m a systems thinker, a reluctant entrepreneur who turned out to be very much an entrepreneur, an eldest daughter still unlearning what that cost her, and someone who has done enough of her own work to know that it’s possible alone, but easier together.

I’m so glad you’re here.

— Lindsay