Graham Weaver
speaker
351 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Graham Weaver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I thought about it for a week and I was like, I light up every time I'm in that classroom and I don't think I'll ever have this chance again. And I ended up teaching.
I know it's like one of the or the most popular classes there now. How did you build it? Same set of questions kind of is for Alpine as for the class. What do you hope the class does for the students and how do you architect it to achieve that goal?
In the first four years, I just wanted to learn how to be a professor and teach. I had so many limiting beliefs, like thinking I'm not a professor, I've never taught. And so I just was probably the first four years, I was just trying to be like a B plus in that. And the curriculum is largely around how to be a CEO, things like hiring, firing, having difficult conversations.
It's not big strategic things. It's kind of like at the one foot level, like you're going to have a conversation with an employee about getting demoted or whatever it is. And we're going to role play that actual conversation. So it's really like granular people stuff. It is the important stuff as a CEO. So it was a great class. So I did that for four years.
And then what I realized is students love the class. but they weren't doing it. They were like, oh, that was a great class. Thanks for that. And then their dream was to go run something and they didn't go run something. So I said, I need to add something else to this class. I want to help students figure out what their dream really is and spend a bunch of time on that. And so...
We talked about this a little bit earlier, but a big part of the class is really giving the students some space and asking questions and having them do exercises, visualizations, and some other exercises to truly figure out what the thing is that they're excited about. Like if they could do anything over the next 10 years, what would that be? And that takes some time.
We spend a bunch of time on that. They have to keep a journal and we have a bunch of classes and visualizations. And then when they get kind of clear on that, Immediately, they're going to have all these doubts and fears and limiting beliefs. Their head's going to talk them out of it. And so we go right at that. Hey, what are the obstacles? How do we overcome that?
How do we design a path to go do that? So that's probably 25% of the class now. And I think that's probably the students remember the most.
Yeah. You've told me before some of these incredible framing questions to like expand the mind beyond incremental thinking into more like blank sheet thinking. One of the ones you told me that I liked best that I've thought about a lot since is imagine you have nine lives. You're just going to do this life. What do you want to do in the second life and the third life?
And like really like make it feel bigger, more expansive. Are there other questions like that one that you found to be the most effective to get people to like give you the real answer to what you're trying to help them find, which is like the thing that's burning inside them?
Yeah, what's cool about the nine lives exercise is I think people get really intimidated by saying you got to find your passion. And I got one thing and they get in their head and I'm like, okay, let's say you had nine. They can rattle them off like right away. Okay, I'll do this. You know, I'd be a professor and I'd be a law author and I'd start this business. I'd do a nonprofit.
They could come up with them like right away. And then I'm like, good news. Yeah, good news. Your thing is in there somewhere. And then we try to take those nine and talk about which ones they have the most energy for. Who are they going to meet along the way? How are they going to grow? I mean, a great example is a student of mine. One of their lives is the thing they did before school.
They were going to be a convertible bond salesperson. Life number three was run a business. And as they started learning, how are they going to grow and learn? The convertible bond one wasn't as interesting, even though they were going to make more money doing that initially.
You can dig into those nine lives and then it's just a lower stakes way to kind of get them to something they're passionate about. And the secret is you can have all nine at some point in your life, just not all at the same time. And then other questions, we do visualizations, which you go out 20 years and we spend some real time in this.
You're meeting your future self 20 years from now and your future self has just been incredibly successful and everything's worked out and you really spend some time on like, what does that look like? And then you come back and say, well, what advice did that future self have for you now?
The advice is always go do this thing or, hey, relax, it's going to work out or don't stress about these things. We do exercises like that. Some of the key questions are, what would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail? Relaxing the how, not worrying about how to get there, the nine lives, you know, there's a whole bunch of those.
Incredibly powerful. And I'm curious how you've learned to administer them. Do you personally have to do it one-on-one with the student or is it more scalable than that?
It's both. So there's a lot we can do in the class and then they can break out into groups and do some one-on-one stuff. Earlier in the quarter, I have a class just on coaching where they learn how to be like a good enough executive coach for each other. We have a whole class on that. So then throughout the quarter, when they have to coach each other, they have some core skills.
So I can do that for an entire group. And then I do tons of one-on-one meetings. My one-on-one meetings are typically, they're almost always the same. The student comes in and says, they ask the same question, which is like, what should I do with my life? Number one question I get asked. Great question. And then they say, okay, I have path A and I have path B and I'm torn.
I spend a few minutes with them asking some questions. In 10 minutes, it's clear that their heart wants to do B, but their head's talking them out of it. And A is the kind of safe thing. And then we just spend the rest of the time trying to unpack how they can do A in a lower risk way and that sort of thing. And that's the framework I use in the class as well.
Showing 221–240 of 351 · page 12 of 18
← Previous
Next →