MYTH MAKER MANIFESTO

Skills, strategies, or hard work usually solve business problems. When they don’t, the issue is internal, personal and emotional.

myth maker helps decision-makers move from following others’ priorities to developing their own strategies based on their instincts, without any consulting BS.

No agile. No paradigm shift. No OKR. No value proposition. No BS.

My name is Matteo Cassese. I am a queer nerd into mythology, technology, tarot, fitness, nature, and cars.

I never set out to become a coach; my clients made me one. I’ve worked in corporate (Warner Bros.), as a consultant (Netflix), and as a university teacher (Unilink), and I finally found my way coaching thousands of individuals in every industry. To be the best coach in the world, I need to bring my true self to every encounter with you.

Through the trials and tribulations of my life, including 10+ years of therapy, I’ve been given a magic spell: I can create a space for you to feel totally vulnerable and completely fine at the same time. 

Do you want to join me in that space? 

Mechanical Problems

Many issues in business can be solved mechanically with a framework, knowledge, and hard skills. You can design a better UX,  develop better software, get a better product-market fit, and you can even, to a certain degree, run, launch, and scale a company thanks to skills, techniques, and frameworks. There are several specialized courses, consultants, and mentors for financial, mechanical problems, knowledge, and skill-based problems.

Mindset-Related Problems

Half the problems companies encounter can only be solved if you fix the leaders.

Confidence & Overconfidence

You may lack confidence when you need to sell your ideas, yourself, and your product or service. When the issue is a lack of confidence, no course can help you. Confidence is a mindset. It cannot be taught; it can only be discovered directly.

With confidence, you can pitch, sell, negotiate, persuade, nurture relationships, develop charisma, lead communities.

In many other situations, you might have the opposite problem: overconfidence. You tend to be overconfident in your technical abilities, in your intuition, and in the ability of your product to carve an actual market. Even overconfidence is an internal trait. It cannot be dampened by a course or tutorial. You need to explore it in a coaching setting.

Without overconfidence, you can make level-headed decisions, plan ahead, and foresee and avoid the downside. 

Fear and Decision-Making

You will go through phases of intense fear, worry, anxiety, and discomfort. For instance, when there are too many decisions to be made, when it’s time to choose one path that excludes another, when you are personally on the line, or when other people are directly impacted by your decisions.

Fear can make you reactive, leading to decisions that aren’t true to you or your mission. This can scatter the company in a million different directions.

There is no training that will help you deal with fear. You need to work on it internally. You must confront it like a hero or a heroine in an action movie and overcome your own fears. It helps if you’re not alone in that process.

Without fear, you can make difficult decisions, stand by your actions, show your courage, inspire, show the way, and turn your vision into reality.

Resistance or Eagerness to Change

You can show resistance to change. You can be attached to the status quo even if you are an innovator. This manifests when you need to pivot, change the product, change the company structure, or let go of team members that you previously thought were fundamental.

You might be overly eager to change things, hoping that the next strategy, tool, or shiny object will be the key to achieving the success you dream of.

The flexibility to change opinions is not something you can learn during a workshop. It’s an internal value that needs to be nourished and constantly tested.

Without resistance to change, you can adapt, be flexible, pivot quickly and decisively, make better hiring/firing decisions, and plan for contingencies.

Relationship with Scarcity and Money

Scarcity and money can become enormous obstacles for you. If you feel anxious, attached, or worried about money, you can enter a scarcity mindset and prevent your company from progressing.

You might feel that money is overly abundant and start spending it in pursuit of growth, status, or vanity metrics. If you spend recklessly, your clients and investors will quickly distance themselves from you.

Emotions about money need to be out of the picture because money is fueling your objectives. Imagine if an airplane felt shy about loading up kerosene for an intercontinental flight. To fix your relationship with money, you must develop and hold on to an abundance mindset. It can’t be trained, only coached.

With an abundance mindset, you can have a neutral relationship with money, negotiate bigger deals without anxiety, persuade, and think bigger.

Avoidance or Search of Conflict

By far, the biggest obstacle to reaching your full potential is your relationship with conflict. Every meaningful act you perform in life is bound to generate pushback. Change is destined to create an adverse reaction. You may label this reaction as bad. 

When you act with purpose, you unleash conflict. I often tell my clients that conflict is where the work begins. Pushback is where change makers begin to make an impact.

The founders we cherish in the startup community are troublemakers, and the fact that you started a company makes you one of them—a mini-troublemaker. Now is the time to adopt this mindset and become a mega-troublemaker.

But constantly picking fights wears you and your team out, causing so much confusion that it gets in the way of achieving your vision.

With a healthy relationship with conflict, you can change anyone’s mind, sell anything, talk on stage confidently, recognize the patterns that block your peers, see a larger upside in every opportunity, and manage any crisis situation.

Burnout

When the problems caused by lack of confidence, overconfidence, lack of clarity in making decisions, fear, resistance to change, scarcity, and shyness to deal with conflict accumulate, you fall into burnout.

Detaching yourself from how you feel is not an answer. It will just get you even closer to burnout without you realizing it. 

Even though some practices can help you recognize and assess your risk of burnout, a resilient mindset is the only guarantee that burnout will not be a problem.

With a strong, resilient mindset, you can do everything more easily, work less, feel better, be more grounded, and be more connected to the people who matter.

How does it feel to work with me

My Approach to Founders’ Development

Starting with the Individual

I start from the person, initially ignoring skills and abilities. 

Once you work with me, you will make better decisions influenced by your true values and realize that you have more power than you think.

Here’s how it works step-by-step:

I help you make space and put you in a condition to trust your guts & to listen to your intuition. This allows us to quickly discover the bigger vision behind your day to day actions. Once we discover this vision I want to blow it up and make sure it’s ambitious.

We check if this vision emerges naturally from you or if it’s forced in any way. We are looking for your power, the things that make you sparkle, what you’re exceptional at that everyone else finds impossibly hard.

Then, we can afford to start communicating this new, bigger vision in this new, personal way you discovered. This is just the beginning; we’re testing the waters. But now, instead of soul-searching, you’re seeing action.

At this stage, we can also explore the challenges associated with your vision (sales, funding, hiring, scaling, product development, etc.) and the channels that will help you achieve them (hiring, fundraising, paid media, social media, public speaking, etc.).

As we progress, you might build a wall between yourself and your business self. Don’t worry, it’s only natural. I can help you demolish this wall every time it starts splitting you in two.

As you start acting as the new intuitive, powerful and personal you, we can align your positioning with the company’s positioning. This opens you up to the potential for myth making. 

Myth making consists first in collecting and telling all the stories that bring value to you and your company. It then continues by making sure that your brand is aligned with your bigger vision and your new positioning. 

Once we have those building blocks, we can start building a world for your customers, team, board, and other stakeholders to live in, a true mythology.  

Steve Jobs famously said:

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

Don’t just run a company. Make a dent in this universe.

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