Matthieu is eight years younger than me, and somehow he has lived almost the same life. Same degree, both of us hated it. Same town in Australia, Wollongong, where we were both bad at the same surf breaks. The same Wheel of Life neither of us can put down. Nearly the same bucket list. Sitting across from him felt like meeting a younger version of myself.
It started with his partner. She saw one of my Wheel of Life posts and told me I had to meet him. So I pinged him on LinkedIn and we set up a 30-minute call. It was one of the strangest calls I have ever had. Afterwards he ran the whole thing through ChatGPT and asked how many coincidences we had. Twenty. So I flew across Spain to have lunch with myself.
We made a game of it in person. Every time one of us said something the other had lived, we raised a hand. My arm started to hurt. He is the founder of Conscious Leaders Dubai, and he interviews leaders too, so he was on both sides of the mic at once. The sameness was the joke. But it was useful for another reason. When someone has lived your life a few years behind you, the things you tell yourself sound different coming out of their mouth.
Coaching without a certificate
We both became coaches sideways, almost against our own permission. Matthieu coached about a hundred people for the price of a beer before anyone paid him a cent. Then he moved to Dubai, where the first question in every room is which certification you hold. His answer: "I don't have a certification. Because I coach people and I transform their lives." But he was honest about what that does to you. It goes into your head. You walk into a conversation with someone you know you can help, they ask what your framework is, and the doubt leaks out. You start projecting that you are not good enough, and then you stop getting clients. The fix is almost annoying in how simple it is. As he put it, it's only when you let go of that you get the clients. One of his own clients said the quiet part to him after a session: it's all in your head, you're a good coach.
The one place we are not the same
There is one real difference between us, and it is the most interesting part of the lunch. Matthieu will not be boxed into the word coach, because, in his words, he is "so much more than a coach." He needs all of his work running at once. "I have many passions, and I have to do all of them." Speaking, writing, the podcast, the coaching, all in parallel. I am the opposite. Give me three passions and I will fail at all three. I need one thing, wholeheartedly. So we sat there, two people built differently around the same restlessness. What we share is the red thread. Both of us have reinvented ourselves more than once, and under every version there is one line that never changed. He broke from the script early, at twenty or twenty-one, and decided to just be himself. It took me a lot longer to even say the word guide out loud.
The Wheel of Life, and then letting it go
The tool that introduced us is the tool he closed on. Matthieu has used the Wheel of Life for twenty years, as a compass, not a scorecard. Score a part of your life a ten, then ask what a real ten would actually look like, and the gap does the work. He talked about the domino effect too, how one honest move tips the next. And then the part I did not expect. He eventually stopped using the wheel at all. The framework becomes a tool in a toolbox, not the process itself. You are the vessel. The tool is just a tool.
The coincidences were the fun part. What stayed with me was watching my own life from the outside, told back to me by someone a few steps behind, the patterns I am usually too close to see suddenly obvious. That is the whole reason I do this.
Worth a watch if you have ever wished you could see your own life from the outside, narrated by someone who has quietly been living a version of it...
