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Speaking at a Wedding on Lasting Partnership in Love & Business

I was recently asked to speak at the wedding ceremony of two of our founders (in separate businesses) that met in Memphis by participating in our accelerator. They asked me to speak on, and this is a direct quote: “Relating characteristics of 1) creating a great partnership as co-founders to build a successful company to 2) creating a great partnership in life / marriage for a successful relationship.” Here is what their prompt and their love inspired. I have altered the names and some facts to give some privacy to the couple. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Spoken on the Occassion of Your Wedding

Good afternoon. I am Eric Mathews. I’m not the best man. And thankfully so. Sam you are certainly the best man for putting up with James for these 9 plus years. Nonetheless, it is a great honor to be here and be asked to speak.

For those who don’t know me, I’m the first investor for many business partners who come to Memphis, Tennessee to build and launch a new, amazing technology based business. James and Kimberly entered into our program in separate businesses in 2013 and found way more than business in Memphis – they found each other. With this in mind, James and Kimberly asked me to speak at their wedding ceremony on how business partnerships and lifelong loving partnerships are, at their core, the same.

For those gathered here today wondering, the answer is YES.

I was apprehensive to speak in business terms at a wedding ceremony. However, given the trust and love I’ve felt from and between James and Kimberly, I got comfortable with the words. More so I hope their love that inspired these words will inspire each of us to bring more love and care back into our daily lives and to the world of business. James and Kimberly, I’m grateful for the trust you have placed in me here.

So let’s start at the beginning and the first foundation. In the first days of our business accelerator program, we have the new business partners review their personality types to better understand one another. Next, we ask them to answer tough questions openly and honestly with each other. We also place them into tough and uncomfortable situations where they will have to come together and rise and fall as a team. This is all done because one the biggest causes of business failure is having a dysfunctional team with poor interpersonal dynamics. I think we can all identify with the importance. We all need strong partners that have complementary strengths to account for our weaknesses. We need the strength of honesty, when things are going wrong. We seek mutual respect to understand that failure is an event and not a person. We need the personal strength to accept and solve our own problems, our partners problems, and your collective problems without blaming the other person. We need open communication so that nothing is hidden including unspoken expectations, personal needs, or opportunities for growth.

All great partnerships require a daily commitment to these relationship principles to be lasting.

This leads to the next foundation that our entrepreneurs learn in Memphis: start with “why.” Why do we wake up each day? What is our collective purpose and intent? Purpose drives great entrepreneurship but also great love. You and your partner wake up with a shared purpose to change the world and each other for the better. Money is not a sufficient motivator in business and marrying for money can lead to far worse. Money is not sufficient because of the amount of sacrifice needed for mutual success. You need a purpose around which you wake up everyday and are motivated to help each other succeed as individuals as well as a unit. You will need to understand and contextualize your purpose so that you can celebrate the small victories, lift each other up in defeat, be excited to discover the unknown together, and to work together to leave the world a better place — these are the true rewards.

All great partnerships require a daily commitment to purpose to be lasting in the good times and in the harder times.

Finally, there is a step beyond the foundations of building a great team relationship and defining and living with great purpose. A great team and a great purpose will get you started, but over time we’ve found that you need something that helps guide you over the long haul. You need a manner in which you can evaluate whether your partnership is on track or whether you need to course correct. You need a lens by which you can evaluate tough decisions where perhaps there are no good solutions or the opposite scenario where there are too many good options. You need a way to evaluate the unexpected together. We find that the best partners in life and in business mutually hold the same core values and beliefs. These guideposts are unique to each partnership and help all partners make great decisions daily in service of one another and the purpose and intent of their relationship.

All great partnerships require a daily commitment to core values and beliefs to help them stay on track.

Kimberly and James, arriving at a business accelerator in Memphis, I think we would all expect to find great business opportunities and great friendships. However, I don’t think love and marriage would have been an outcome that any of us would have placed bets on in May of 2013. Yet here we are and it is testament to each of you. You have the kind of love that empowers not only each other, but also empowers those gathered here today who can feel it and be better for it.

May your commitment to each other, to great purpose, and to your core values and beliefs be your guide forever and always.

Anti-Conformity in Authentic Leadership

I have experienced feeling out of place and that made me who I am today. Some tried to sand me down, and at times I thought conformity was the best way to get ahead, but once I got to college, and even more so when I started my own business, I realized I needed to be my authentic self to succeed and lead. Now that I’m even older and wiser I realize how conformity can creep into so many aspects of life.

For instance, I’ve been working in the tech startup world for a while and it is easy to get caught in comparisons with Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is held up as the standard for disruptive anti-conformity and innovation. However, most in Silicon Valley are conforming. Leaders who draw comparisons between themselves and their communities and Silicon Valley are using conformist thinking that is limiting. Conformity in Silicon Valley looks like fitting into founder archetypes like being either highly technical or highly visionary. Conformity gets you a startup executive coach that has his or her own conformity mindset on what coaching is. Conformity gets you looking for examples to follow from the books you read. Can we truly lead with fancy business school degrees and majority views of success? I think it maybe the hardest way to lead.

Conformity creeps into everything and is the enemy of authentic and real leadership. Conformity is what we are fighting inside ourselves and in the world. We need the courage to think differently and take the most courageous path and not the well trodden pathway that has been portrayed as the road less traveled.

To lead yourself and others on courageous pathways, you need to be true to yourself — not a sanded down, conformist version. When you aren’t yourself or acting authentically, people detect that and then they try to find out why you are not acting authentically. Trying to find out why you aren’t acting like your true self breeds distrust in you and your leadership. When we are trying to lead others and move to the next levels, we must realize that people prefer leaders who are authentic and different because it makes leadership appear accessible to all in the care of our leadership and they in turn will strive for more too. You thus inspire others to lead themselves.

So my invitation to you is to have the courage to be yourself, get out of the comfort and conformity of life, and find your own path so that others will be inspired to find theirs too.

You Can’t Give Something You Don’t Have

It’s hard to learn how to live and lead [a great life] while you are living, let alone consider leaving a legacy.

You know deep down you can be more . . . We all feel that way. We want to be more so that we have more to give.

And we want to become more in many dimensions of life, because a life can be unlived in so many ways.

What we are each missing is an invitation to take a courageous path.

And sadly most will never get that invitation.

I’m extending that invitation to you. Build your life, leadership, and legacy, because you can’t give something you don’t have.

Reach out to me anytime to learn more. If you have gotten this far, let’s talk for 30 minutes about life, leadership, and legacy. Let’s talk about your future and how coaching gets you there faster and how it is different than anything else you may have encountered.

Readers are Leaders

One of the Spots in My Home Where Books Reside

Books and reading are important and central to my work in building myself and others. I only recommend what I have read and in the pandemic I picked up quite a few books whether it be by Audible, Kindle, or physical copy (I usually have 3-5 books going at a time). Important books get shipped, sent by link, or handed directly to someone straight from my bookshelf. Jim Rohn said that “Success leaves clues.” John Maxwell said, “Readers are Leaders.” Others have said that instead of having the knowledge of one lifetime, you can garner the knowledge of a thousand lives through books.

Here are the books that I can recommend to you that I read in the past 12 months. Most of them were recommended to me and now I recommend them to other leaders.

The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary, Alex MacCaw, Misha Talavera
4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
Machiavelli for Women by Stacy Vannick Smith
Levels of Energy by Frederick Dodson
Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
The Weekly Coaching Conversation by Brian Souza
The Trillion Dollar Coach by Alan Eagle, Eric Schmidt, and Jonathan Rosenberg
Humankind by Rutger Bregman
Daily Stoic Journal by Ryan Holiday
How to Measure Your Life by Clayton Christianson
Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley and David Kelley
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harare
Culture Map by Erin Meyer
The Art of Community by Charles H. Vogel
People Powered by Jono Bacon
Range by David Epstein
Say What You Mean by Oren J Sofer
Trailblazer by Marc Benioff and Monica Langley
Customer Success by Dan Steinman, Lincoln Murphy, and Nick Mehta
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
How to Not be Wrong with Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg
Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins
The Laws of Success by Paramahansa Yogananda
Golden Book by Dale Carnegie
Relentless by Tim Grover
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
The Startup Community Way by Brad Feld
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
Living with a Seal by Jesse Itzler
Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman
Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin
The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle
Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
Turn the Ship Around by L David Marquet
Die with Zero by Bill Perkins
New Localism by Bruce Katz
Talking to Strangers by Malcom Gladwell
Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

Reviewing 15+ Years of Accelerator Dividends

This quarter GAN released my industry report on the past, present, and future of startup accelerators entitled: “Reviewing 15+ Years of Accelerator Dividends: Innovation and Entrepreneurship Returns and a Roadmap for Future Success. “

You can grab your own free copy through this link (https://bit.ly/15YearsOfAccelerators) and we’d welcome feedback and also recommendations on what I should write about next.

How do we start a coaching relationship?

TL;DR: The first step in building a coaching-client relationship is scheduling up two virtual introductory sessions of about an hour each to learn more about each other, where you want to go, and how I can help. These two introductory sessions don’t cost anything — you and I both co-invest our time and see where that takes us. At the same time, I send a couple of digestible emails to give a little more background on my coaching as well as more detail on how we get started. After this I can introduce the client to references if needed. You can set up a free 30 minute introductory call as well to learn more here. Or if you are ready to dive in we can schedule up our first 1 hour coaching call by emailing me at eric@ericmathews.com.

More Background on Building Our Coaching Relationship

I like to crawl before I walk and walk before I run. I think it is incredibly important to be vulnerable and build trust for our relationship to work and for you to get the quantum leap level results desired. Building that relationship doesn’t come easy and sometimes it won’t arrive at all. And that’s ok. But we’ll want to figure that out quickly through structured “dating” and figuring out if our relationship will empower each other. I will see how self aware you are. You’ll see if I am self aware, too. We’ll make sure I know your strengths and weaknesses and you know mine. We will find our blind spots.

Some things we’ll want to cover and consider and even try out during the relationship building process:

What do you want to get out of coaching?
Can we see each other in a variety of contexts and enjoy each other’s company?
Are we adding energy to each other’s lives when we are together?
What are the quantum leaps and the big ideas?
Do we complement each other?
Are you coachable and am I the right coach?

Overall the right fit for those I work with looks like:

Willingness to dive deep and view all angles and aspects as contributing or holding us back from very big wins
Honesty
Humility
Grit and Perseverance
Willingness to go to the “gym” (all of the gyms) and do the hard work
Curiosity and openness to learn
Realizing the journey is the reward . . . to celebrate success and lift each other in defeat.

My job is to make you better and enable you to serve your team better through enhanced self awareness and quantum leaps of goals and action noting that we all must be a servant to something bigger than ourselves.

While I seek anti-bullshitters who work to end dishonesty with others and dishonesty with ourselves, I am not without sensitivity to imposter syndrome and other fears that can hold us back, prior history that shapes the present, or other challenges. We’ll sort it all out together.

Schedule you up a free 30 minute zoom call to learn more directly with me by clicking here.

Sign Up for Insights

For my colleagues and friends who are looking to grow and lead in new ways, I periodically assemble together a compact email of curated insights, information, new thinking, tools, articles, essays, and more. Sign up here to get both if you are interested. These emails will come occasionally, not often. If you get too many of them or not enough good stuff, please let me know so I can adjust. When you sign up you will get a welcome email with my Life Planning System which is my most requested tool.

To Do More, Become More.

insights, articles, and other reflections that I send to friends and colleagues.

Experts, Leaders, & Mentors Are Not Coaches

It is important that we all understand the difference between Experts, Leaders, Mentors, and Coaches.

Experts: An expert is a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area. You usually call upon them when things aren’t going well and you need help solving a problem. When you bring an expert they start tackling symptoms and technical faults.

Leaders: Certainly the best leaders coach but most guide and direct people without a coaching mindset. There are leaders that earn the respect and esteem of those they serve (aka Servant Leaders). There are situational leaders who are called to step in to fill a gap and help in a time of need. There are also the positional leaders who are placed in leadership roles – some, of course, try to earn the respect of those they lead once in those positions, but others may manage and abuse their power and authority, losing the respect of those they lead. This is not coaching either.

Mentors: Coaching is often confused with mentoring. A mentor shares with a mentee (or protege) information about his or her own career path, as well as provides guidance, motivation, emotional support, and role modeling. A mentor may help with exploring careers, setting goals, developing contacts, and identifying resources. They can take the form of teachers, sponsors, advisors, agents, role models, and confidantes. Mentors can be more experienced in the arena in which the advice is sought.

Coaches: A coach does not depend on being an expert or being more experienced – a coach is not passing down their knowledge and that is intentional. If a coach is working to increase and sustain performance, then that knowledge must be earned by the coachee. Mastery comes from self-belief. Coaching requires expertise in only coaching and those coaches who are not formally trained may even have greater coaching skills as they are also built over time going beyond the limits of formal training. Coaches do not need to be experts because they are awareness raisers for the coachee. Every time expert input is provided it diminishes the responsibility of the coachee. Coaching is about believing in the potential of the individual and creating self responsibility. It is very hard for those with high expertise to withhold their knowledge sufficiently to coach well. This is why you can point to many examples where the best players in the world of sports made horrible coaches. Experts tackle symptoms and technical faults, whereas a non-expert will raise self awareness of problems. Being detached from expertise brings curiosity on the part of the coach to guide coachee into a state of self awareness. Coaching is about optimizing individuality and uniqueness and never to mold opinions and best practices. Coaching has been defined by some as “partnering in a thought-provoking and creative process to maximize personal and professional potential.” The best coaches should take a coachee beyond the knowledge and other limitations of the coach.

Schedule you up a free 30 minute coaching call with by clicking here.

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