EP 131: Why we came back: How the NEW MDM Academy is even better at transforming moms!

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 Today’s podcast discussion --Inside the New Mission Driven Mom Academy!

This episode provides an in-depth update on the transformation and relaunch of the Mission Driven Mom Academy (MDM 2.0) and highlights the purpose, structure, and impact of the Academy’s three-level curriculum based on The Seven Laws of Life Mission. Audrey is joined by longtime collaborators Lindsay Wright and Tracie Hyde, who share why they returned to serve as mentors and leaders after several years away. Their stories emphasize the Academy’s ability to transform mothers' self-understanding, leadership capacity, spiritual grounding, and family culture.

They outline how the Academy helps mothers build foundational self-knowledge, articulate principles clearly, and understand worldviews and servant leadership in order to influence their families and communities for good. They describe new features—including a community platform, workshops, accountability partnerships, mentoring support, and a member directory—designed to provide deeper connection, structure, and real-world application for women seeking to grow.

Throughout the episode, the women share specific transformations they experienced personally: overcoming victim-thinking, discovering strengths, developing leadership, improving family relationships, and guiding their children more intentionally. They also share updates on the upcoming Mothers of Creation conference and new opportunities for both new and returning Academy members. The episode ultimately conveys a clear and passionate call for mothers to step into mission-driven living, deepen their education, and join a supportive, principle-centered community devoted to renewing culture through virtue and truth.

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Transcript (AI generated)

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, the founder of The Mission Driven Mom and author of The Mission Driven Life, and thank you for joining us. If this podcast is bringing enlightenment and aid to your life, please share it out and give us a review—that helps us grow our reach. Today I am really lucky to have Lindsay Wright and Tracy Hyde to talk to us for a few minutes about all things Academy.

Those of you that have been with us for a little while are going to be familiar with their faces. They’re incredible women who’ve been here from the very beginning. We were getting up at five in the morning and talking about the books that should be in the Academy. It was hard, but it was great fun—really rewarding.

And we launched together and did a bunch of events together, and they mentored for a long time in the Academy. They’re incredible mentors and guides. We are all products of everything that we teach. It's blessed our lives. It's changed the way we think. We want to keep giving it back out and guiding you through those seven laws of life mission.

And so the Academy is kind of new and improved. We spent a little bit of time moving it to a new platform. There was a period of time when mentoring wasn't available, but we know there are a lot of you out there who own lifetime access to the Academy, as well as, of course, many women we want to reach—women we'd love to bring into this beautiful environment to become friends with and to walk together on our mission journeys.

So we just want to update you on some of the things that are new and improved. And I want to start by talking to Lindsay and Tracy. There was a time when they weren't involved with MDM, and they've come back this year on our invitation. And so I want to just ask them first: what prompted them to come back?

Either of you can start—why you’re here and what you're hoping to give to moms.

So for me, the reason I came back is because I do believe in the message and the vision of The Mission Driven Mom. The vision has become so clear of what it is that we're trying to do—that we want to create a movement of mothers and of women that can influence the culture.

Yes, there's so many things—there are a lot of good things happening in the world today, but there's also a lot of things that I would like to change, and I would like to have some friends on the journey with me. And I just know—we’ve seen it so many times—that if you change a mom, you change a family, you change a community.

We just have so much influence as mothers. So I just believe in the message. I believe in the vision. I know that it's changed my life for the better. I am not the same person that I was. And in fact, I'm not the same person that I was even a few years ago. I have continued with my education, continued to try to live the laws of life mission, and it just feels good to be back and to be able to offer the skills and talents that I've developed over the last few years—to offer that to The Mission Driven Mom community.

Oh, that's awesome. Before we move on to Tracy, Lindsay, I have a follow-up question, just based on what you said.

So tell us a little bit about what you did for those couple of years when you weren't as involved with MDM. How did you continue to grow? What projects were you working on?

So the biggest project was teaching an online humanities class, and it's one of my favorite things to do. It's a four-year cycle. We go through ancient Greece, we read The Iliad and The Odyssey. We move through ancient Rome. This year we’re studying the Renaissance up through the American and French Revolutions—principles of government and natural rights, some of the things that we learned about in the Academy. And then next year we'll do modernism and postmodernism.

What's been fantastic is that I'm still in the classics.

So my education has increased just by reading these great books and being able to discuss these great ideas. I love mentoring, so it’s a class for high school students, and I have loved mentoring them. I can see the change that it makes in their lives.

This used to be the standard education that everybody would get, right? Reading the classics, discussing and asking questions—and it's not anymore. We've been robbed of a great education. So I watch these high school students, and they struggle with the readings, but they grow so much. These ideas, just like with the moms, are lighting a fire in their minds and their hearts. It's so fun to see the transformation even over a semester or over a year. Some of them have been with me two years now, and they've taken the class longer than that. They’re just outstanding students who are going to bring that into the things they do in the world.

So it's very rewarding in that way.

Oh, that's awesome. And you've done some stuff with moms too. What’s that other great books… something… what’s it called?

We did the Gateway Project.

Gateway—that’s what it’s called. That’s right.

So I took moms through… so behind me, I’ve got the Great Books of the Western World set by Mortimer Adler, and he wrote a ten-volume set called The Gateway to the Great Books, which was meant for high school students to prepare them to read the great books. The readings are a little bit shorter and a little bit easier—although they’re plenty hard enough for all of us. But it was a good mix for moms. We would read a selection and discuss it for an hour a week, and it was the same thing. It’s just so fun to see what this kind of education does for anyone.

And I know some of those, at least, were Academy students—Academy graduates who are also continuing their lifelong learning and continuing to dig deeper into principles. So great. So much to learn. It’s great.

All right. Tracy, how about you?

I want to echo a lot of what Lindsay said. I think she really summed up why I came back as well. I just believe in this cause and want to uplift women and give them the opportunity to have this education. And I knew that I could fill a place that Audrey needed filled because I come with a lot of experience—years of building the Academy with Audrey and Lindsay and Julie Greenman, which was a wonderful experience for me, and then several years of mentoring Level One and Level Two and working on Level Three with Audrey.

And we hope to have that out.

Yeah, that'll be out next year.

But I just felt like—it wasn't like it was a duty—but it felt like that was God’s call to me: to come back and insert myself into the things I had been doing already with MDM, knowing that I could make a difference with that. And what I’ve been doing in the meantime: actually, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Lindsay doing the humanities course. Julie Greenman started that class and then handed it off to Lindsay last year. So I’m a four-year graduate. This year I'm really sad that I'm not taking humanities because I finished. And we were doing the Gateway Project together and continuing our education together. I just love learning with women, and I wanted to keep doing that.

So I'm really excited to be back and excited to get this off the ground and to more women.

That's awesome. Well, anyone listening can appreciate that these women come with so much experience. They’ve been mentoring for a very long time. They know this material inside and out. And as Tracy said, she was running the Academy at one point previously and is our Academy Director again. Lindsay is a mentor with us but also helped with some of the restructuring of the Academy. Again, we've done this so much and so many times—we just keep getting to make it better, which is really a joy.

Tracy has been taking all of the… we used to have a workbook that we would mail to you, and now the program is in a course platform that actually comes on an app, and it’s attached to a community, and it’s the cleanest, simplest way to consume the Academy we've ever had. But then you still get a journal that we mail to you so that you can have that hard copy to take with you, and you can use that “All About Me” section as you go through the self-discovery—I'm getting ahead of myself there, but…

So that’s what Tracy’s doing for us—directing the Academy—and Lindsay’s mentoring for us, helping build and run workshops. And we’re really excited for the two projects coming up in the new year: we’ll finish building out a mentor training program, which first will be available internally for our students to take so they can turn around and mentor in the Academy. Then we hope at some point to offer it to other people who would like to learn how to mentor better. We all have a lot of experience with that, so we’re excited to offer that for women and mothers who would like to improve their skill set there.

And as Tracy mentioned, we'll be offering Level Three next year. We did two pilots of it, but it's never officially been done, and so it’ll be done officially for all of you who have been waiting for that.

All right, so let’s just talk logistically for a minute about some of the changes and improvements to—well, let's start with the basics. For those who aren’t really familiar with how the Academy works, let’s just give a basic overview. If somebody wants to walk us through the basic structure… Tracy, would you mind doing that for us?

Sure. Do you mean in Kajabi or the whole… just how it works?

Just like, if you're not familiar with the Academy—how does it work?

Okay. So the Academy is built off of Audrey's book, The Seven Laws of Life Mission.

And in her book she outlines the first law, which is love God and love self, and then love truth, and then love humanity. And the Academy is built to help moms get their education in the first four laws of life mission. So Level One is love God and yourself. Level Two is love truth, and Level Three is love humanity.

And so how it works is: you sign up and you start with Level One, and you go through the course material in Kajabi. We have a community that's attached to that where we hope to help you find an accountability partner or accountability group that you can discuss with regularly—keeping each other moving through the Academy so that you do get this rich education and finish.

We also have mentored workshops that are built into your journey through the Academy, through Level One, where you will prepare certain sections and then come to the workshop prepared. We want it to be a time where you discuss and get to articulate the things that you're learning, and we as mentors want to do as little talking as possible because we want this to be a time for you to really bring to the table what you've been learning and have that discussion opportunity. And so we hope it to be an experience like that—something you come prepared to.

But then we also have bonus workshops as well to help with sticking points, like study skills and writing a mission statement.

And then we also have bonus experiences where Audrey will come, and it will be a live meetup with Audrey where she'll introduce a topic of her choice and then take a question-and-answer session. And then as well, we are available as mentors to answer any of your questions in the community feed.

For Level Two it's just the same process, but it's with love truth. And so you'll learn to articulate principles—specifically thinking in an orderly way, thinking in first principles and applications—which will really give you flight in your ability to discern and to lead yourself, your community, and your family.

And then in Level Three, which we still need to build out, that's love humanity. So it's worldviews and also servant leadership. You'll learn details about the major religions and also other secular worldviews. And you'll also learn public speaking and how to help people but not hinder them—how to be a multiplier, not a diminisher—and just learn leadership principles. And so yeah, we're excited to offer that to you.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Tracy. Going back to the big picture, I guess with all of that in mind, a couple things I'll add. We always had—for those of you who are thinking about getting involved or have been involved—the curriculum, the concepts and principles that we learn, and the books that we run through have not really changed much. It still is all that same great stuff. Level One is a really heavy focus on loving God and loving yourself, and what does that mean, and why does that matter? And how are those core relationships the foundation for all your other relationships? And how getting those right is so vital to enabling you to correct and lift the other relationships in your life.

And loving yourself encompasses proper self-care and proper self-leadership and proper self-discovery. When you combine those three things—which I talk about in the book under the second law—you really start to have… in fact, there are so many testimonials. You can go to the website and see a lot of them. You can go to the YouTube channel and see a lot of testimonials.

But Lindsay and Tracy, just tell those who might be listening and curious: what are some of the outcomes that you've seen with Level One in particular, and then with just the Academy in general, for yourselves and for other women you've worked with?

So I really… I love all of it, but the self-discovery sections—learning about what my strengths are, focusing on strengths instead of focusing on weaknesses—has changed a lot of things. But realizing what are the things that I'm good at, and then developing those… I think it was through the self-discovery sections that I came to realize that I've always wanted to be a teacher. And so now I just take every opportunity I can to teach and to become better at teaching. It's something that gives my life so much meaning and purpose, and it's so satisfying.

And that was an insight that I had going through the self-discovery sections, and then to see how all of my other strengths and intelligences work in tandem with that. So that was really powerful. And then for me, the other concept was just that we have needs and we're responsible to meet them.

Just knowing that I have physical and spiritual and mental and emotional needs has centered me so that I can do the things that I want to do. I have the energy that I need to do the things that I want to do. So that was powerful too.

Yeah. Yeah. Any thoughts around some of the results you've seen for yourself or others, Tracy?

Yeah, for me, I think the victim mode that I didn't realize I was in was huge for me to learn about in Level One. And when I read about the victim cycle, or the victim triangle, I thought, “I'm not in that.” Like almost 90% of my thoughts… wow, that's like a personal tendency, I think.

Yeah.

And so that was really helpful for me, and I still have to continue to help myself—remind myself—to be in creator mode.

Yeah.

But I think the way the Academy is structured was so easy to bring my husband along. He didn't read all the readings, but we talked about a lot of the things. And then just my children over the dinner table…

One of my children did go through the whole Academy book by book and did everything. But with the rest, I tried to do it with my boys, and we were on our own—we didn't have a group. And so I just talked about it at dinner. And I talked about it in our meetings that we would have together—just the principles I was learning.

And I had a son who went abroad to serve a mission for our church, and he wanted a refresher on a lot of those things that we learned, because he knew to survive that he needed some of those principles. And so it's been incredible to see my children go into their adult life well-equipped to know how to handle themselves and how to handle relationships.

And also, like Lindsay was saying with self-discovery, I can help them find… it's been a wonderful skill to be able to help them find their sweet spots and to guide them—and to let go of some of my preconceived ideas of what I thought they should be doing, but to really look at what they love to do and to go off of that as a springboard.

So it's just helped me be a greater, more effective mom. And, as Lindsay was saying for her, it stabilized her, and it did that for me as well. But it also stabilized my family, I feel like, and I think it will reverberate through the generations, and I'm really excited about that. And so I'm just excited to infuse that into other families, and it will be a whole movement.

And I have to say, with Lindsay finding her sweet spot with teaching, she really is an excellent mentor. And I think the whole program’s worth it if you can just have Lindsay as your mentor—she really is amazing. You've really found a gem. And I'm really excited to have her mentoring with us.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks, Tracy, but it's… you know, it would be so fantastic if this was the kind of education everybody was getting. And we're just not. And so we needed this opportunity to learn these truths.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when I first found classical liberal education, the transformation that I had for me, and then being turned on to principles… and it was so funny because, you know, I'm there and I'm reading the classics, and I'm in Locke, and he's talking about the natural law. I'm like, “What is this? This is so amazing.” And I was learning all these things. But as time went by, I remember going to… I spoke at a conference that was based on all of this—and it was classical liberal arts and all of that—and attending some of the speeches and talking to some of the presenters and things…

Even in that environment, I felt—even back then—concerned that there wasn't enough emphasis on principles, and that we were still thinking in terms of applications. And so just feeling like this drive—I don't know why I care so much about it, but just this… we've got to figure out how to make this accessible to more people.

You know, I would go and read Susan Wise Bauer, Mortimer Adler—and they're brilliant and they're geniuses—but they would talk about this type of education and they would say, “Okay, so what you need to do is read the book three times, and the first time through do this, and the second time through…” And every time I engaged with one of these brilliant people who understood the value of this type of education and wanted to promote it, I just was like, “Moms aren’t going to do that.” They're just not going to do that. They need it vetted down. They need the best stuff as quickly as they can get it. They need a shortcut. They need to be able to get to the best information and have the principles laid out for them, and they need community. Women need each other. They need safe, vulnerable spaces where they can talk honestly about what their roadblocks are. They need support and accountability. They need to lift each other.

And so that's what we've been working on creating.

Some cool inclusions now that didn't used to exist—we used to get on Zoom and that kind of thing. In the community, it's everything for us. So you go into the community and it's as robust as Facebook or any other platform. You can post videos or articles or images. You can share all the types of things that you would want to share on a social platform. And it's really robust and interactive. You can DM anybody in the community that you want to—and that's one of the things Tracy was talking about. You have access to the mentors anytime you need them for that kind of thing.

And then there are these workshops that happen regularly. You show up—it's right there inside the community—and you just follow the link, and it's just like a Zoom experience. And we go into breakout rooms, and we can share our screens, and we can get in and use all the different technologies that are available. And every time we post one, it automatically sends you an email. So you always know what's going on.

And then we've added an extra layer that actually isn't in the platform itself. We have layered this onto it, and it's our directory. So you can actually go into the members area and see where everybody lives on a big map, and you have access to the emails and the names of women in the Academy. Just to keep their locations safe, it only has their city, so you can't track them down—it's not dangerous—but you have to be in the Academy to get access to that directory.

And you can email somebody and get to know them, you can get on Zoom with them, and, like Tracy was saying, we work hard to help you find someone who can be your accountability person, who can be your friend, who can walk this journey with you in an even more intimate way.

But as mentors, we're there as often as you need us, as much as you need us. And you get some goodies when you sign up—a book bag, bookmarks, we send you The Mission Driven Life book, a journal, some fun things like that. But it's kind of… we keep calling it MDM 2.0 because it's just that much better, having taken everything that we learned before.

And we watched hundreds and hundreds of women's lives be transformed through this content. You know, marriages were healed, and women felt like they were settled into this deep level of self-acceptance, and that they had control over themselves, and their families, like Tracy was saying, were lifted.

And this self-discovery and understanding the culture and the ability to discern… we have a group chat of some women who are graduates, and just this week they were texting each other, “Well, what's the actionable principle for this, that, and the other?” And I was just blown away at their ability to take what we've provided and to build on it and use it out in the real world, and use it to improve themselves and their family ongoing for the rest of their lives and beyond. So that's really fun.

And, of course—and I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before—we have graduates that are doing lots and lots of amazing things out in the world, trying to make the world a better place. And we want to better support them. We want to be there for them. And there are lots of other exciting things that we could mention that are coming.

I have not announced this or sent any emails out about it, but the celebration is back next year. It's Mothers of Creation. And so if you want to join us, you can go to the website, to the conference page, and sign up to be there with us live, in person, in Provo, Utah. We will probably add another location as time moves on, but for now, that's where we are next fall.

But for those of you who have lifetime access—if there's an even funner offer, I guess—we would invite any and everyone who wants to hop on this train with us, who wants to be on a mission-driven journey with us. We welcome you. We would love to have you in the Academy.

For those of you who already have lifetime access to Levels One or Two, you may not know that you can hop back into the community and take advantage of the workshops that we're building out. They're quite robust, they're well thought through, and Tracy—bless her—has actually gone through the content and built out a structure where you know exactly what you need to do to prepare for those workshops.

And we can make you the promise that in 30 minutes a day you will be ready for those workshops, and you will get through the material in nine months. And if you didn't finish the level that you were in, or you had a good experience and you want to go through it again, or you want to move on, or whatever the case might be, you can have access to that community—the workshops, the mentoring, the directory, all of that good stuff—for just a small monthly fee.

So just go to The Mission Driven Mom login. Go to the end of the course that you have access to—at the end of Level One, for example, it'll say “Continue Your Journey.” And that's right—you can sign up for Level Two right there, but you can also sign up (cancel anytime). You can sign up to join us in the Academy on a monthly basis. Just pay monthly until you feel done, and then move on to the next level of the Academy. So that's also something that we want to offer those who miss being part of the Academy and want to rejoin us. Again, we'd love to see your beautiful faces back in the Academy with us.

Is there anything else that—Lindsay or Tracy—you'd like to add? What are you excited for in this coming year? I guess we can end on that question.

I'm excited for the workshops. Oh—go ahead, sorry, Tracy.

Oh, it's okay, I'll be short. Something that I'd like to add is: this really is the education I wanted when I talked with Audrey years ago. We were at a retreat and happened to meet each other. She asked if I wanted a degree. I said, “Not really. I just want to be able to think better and manage myself better.” And I couldn't be more pleased with what Audrey has created and what Lindsay and I and Julie Greenman have helped Audrey create.

It really is just the shot in the arm—what moms need—and in the minimal amount of time, because time is so precious for moms. But it really is the foundational education that will just propel you into years of enriched living.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Tracy.

So I totally agree with that. I'm just excited for these opportunities in the workshops and in the events to meet each other, to form those relationships. The workshops are not intended to take the place of your accountability partners or your accountability groups—they're meant to add an additional resource, an additional refinement to the things that you're learning so that we can truly become mission-driven moms and influence the culture for good. I think the workshops are a big part of being able to do that.

Yeah. A hundred percent.

If you have not read the book The Mission-Driven Life, you can also go to themissiondrivenmom.com and get three chapters for free, and you can grab a hard copy of the book if you're so inclined. We would love for you to learn more about who we are and what we're doing.

We really do—we're going to do everything we possibly can to educate as many women as we can, thousands of women, and help empower them to lift our culture, because it needs to be renewed with virtue. It needs to be reinfused with the principles that founded this nation. And we need mothers who can discern, who can live out and teach truth, and lift our culture with us, hand in hand.

If you're not on our email list, go get on it. There’s a lot of—I didn't want to tell you all the exciting things we have scheduled for this coming year, but lots of super exciting things scheduled. So we'll stay in touch. We'll let you know about all those things.

But in the meantime, this is a perfect time to come back as we re-infuse the Academy with these beautiful workshops that are being built out. We're ready for you. We would love to see you again in the Academy. Whether you're new or coming back, we are excited to spend time with you again and to lift each other and move forward in lifting the culture.

So thanks for joining us today, and we will see you next time.