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.
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Appearances
How has being a teacher changed you personally? What are the takeaways that you have? Like, how are you different as a thinker, as a person, because of this experience that you've had with all these students? Hundreds, I'm sure, of students. Thousands.
Every quarter, I learn the most. I try to make each class and each quarter be a reflection of the best I've got. This is my 12th year teaching this year. I spent more time preparing than I did in year one.
I'm trying to like use it as a way for me almost like to personally share my latest and greatest frameworks and thinking on really everything from everything from running a company to personal growth to spirituality, you know. Yeah. I'm trying to bring everything I can.
So it's a forcing function that almost makes me download an entire year of reflection into 19 classes and bring the best that I can. So just the process of that reflection and having to codify it has made me learn it better. And the other thing is I have to practice it.
I can't stand up in front of class and say, if you're running this business, you can't have B plus people in your key roles of your executive team. And then I Look in the mirror and I'm thinking, okay, I got two B plus, you know.
Follow your own advice.
Yeah, I do. I do follow. I have this thing where I really can't stand up in front of the class and say something either I'm not doing or don't believe. And then sometimes it's a good mirror to look at my own life and make sure I'm living that way.
What is your relationship with the students like after the fact? Do lots of them come work for you? This is a very common story you hear. especially at Harvard and Stanford, it seems, and other schools too, of someone teaching and that they're doing it usually for the right reason, but it ends up being tremendous fuel for their business because of the talent. Have you had that happen to you?
The way it became a fuel for talent isn't because I was going out and recruiting my students. It was because I was meeting with enough students to learn what they really care about, what they're passionate about. And then that helped me design a role at Alpine that was directly catering to the things that students wanted at the level that the students were. Cool.
Because I understood that really well. So that's how it was helpful is that I could say, wow, there's all these MBAs who want to be CEOs. They have this skillset, but not this skillset. And it just happened to marry up really great with our strategy, which has like all these 12 to $20 million revenues. You couldn't ask for a better training ground. That's how it was helpful.
Mechanically, it works out really well because we do all of our recruiting at Alpine in the fall. So by the time my class comes around in the winter, students either have a job or they don't at Alpine. So my class is not a job interview, which is really important to me. I draw a line. I never interview students. I don't even ever give feedback on students.
When I'm teaching, I'm really just there to be their professor. The calendar works out that I can do it that way.
Your whole effect and the story and the setup, it just so rings of athletics. And you said personal growth. Somehow in the world of sports, it seems obvious and cool that LeBron would have 25 coaches and spend all this money on his body and do all this stuff to get better. Like, not our heads. Like, it sounds obvious.
And then somehow in the professional world, there still seems to be like a stigma of sorts associated with personal growth and executive coaching. Why do you think that is? The two aren't fundamentally that different, but there doesn't seem to be the same appreciation for the potential value of something like coaching.
The first coach I had in 2009, I sat across the table from him. His name is JP Flom. And he pitched me on being an executive coach. And I remember thinking, what the hell is an executive coach? What are you going to do? And to this day, I don't even know why I signed up. I think he was just a really compelling person. Bought the salesman, not the product. I bought the salesman.
I bought the salesperson. I think most of the people that probably have negative things to say have actually never done it. I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually hired a very high quality coach And had anything negative to say about the process. So, and they probably just don't really know what they can get out of an experience like that.
So if you think about the reason you do it or have done it and have all these coaches that are part of your business or whatever, can you define personal growth? Like, what does that actually mean?
So for me, a number of different coaches I use for different things, but I'll give you a couple of real examples. So I have a coach named Mandy Shoemaker. And just to have a call with her, I have to fill out a form that says, what are your one-year goals? What did you say you were going to do last week? What'd you do? And what are you going to do this week? And what's the outcome of the call?
Just filling that out every week, if I never even talked to her, would be a great accountability. Then obviously, she's an amazing coach. She came up through the Tony Robbins system. For her, it's like a personal trainer for your goals and your life. What better investment is there than that?
I don't need a personal trainer to go to the gym, but I actually do need a personal trainer to grab me and say, what are your goals? Are you sticking to them? Are you on track? I think that's really valuable. I'm not able to get there by myself without a coach. Then I have another coach I use. We will set aside four hours and this will be like really blue sky, messy thinking.
Showing 241–260 of 351 · page 13 of 18
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