Michael Matania, founder and CEO of Mycelium, shares his groundbreaking approach to transforming workplace culture and mental health.
Michael's journey from teaching meditation to people in Facebook, as well as a centre for men in gangs, to building a half-million revenue company is both inspiring and enlightening.
With a background rooted in mental health, Michael's mission is to foster collective resilience and create supportive, high-performing environments within organisations.
In this episode, we explore:
Discover more about Michael Matania’s work at Mycelium and follow him on LinkedIn for more insights into his transformative approach.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Michael Matania, founder and CEO of Mycelium, shares his groundbreaking approach to transforming workplace culture and mental health.
Michael's journey from teaching meditation to people in Facebook, as well as a centre for men in gangs, to building a half-million revenue company is both inspiring and enlightening.
With a background rooted in mental health, Michael's mission is to foster collective resilience and create supportive, high-performing environments within organisations.
In this episode, we explore:
Discover more about Michael Matania’s work at Mycelium and follow him on LinkedIn for more insights into his transformative approach.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Ever felt overwhelmed by the constant demands of modern work life or wondered how you can foster genuine connections within your team? What if I told you there's a way to transform workplace culture, to move beyond individual struggles, to foster collective resilience? Today we're joined by Michael Metania, founder and CEO of Mycelium. They're a half a million revenue company on a mission to redefine culture and mental health and organizations to achieve greater purpose, performance and impact. You're listening to Peer Effect, the podcast that fuels you with new ideas and inspiration through interviews with founders and experts who have made it happen. My name is James Johnson and I coach Series A plus founders to take back control so they can take their business further and live a great life.
Speaker 2:I started Mycelium five years ago and that was when I transitioned from being a one-man band, teaching, at the time, meditation to people in Facebook and also at a centre for young men in gangs, and was doing that off the back of a career with a national mental health charity called Mind, basically working in their culture space and in what we call the prevention space. How do you prevent people from becoming overwhelmed in the first instance, rather than waiting until they're falling apart and then trying to put them together again? I came to work in mental health initially from my own recovery journey in the first instance, rather than waiting until they're falling apart and then trying to put them together again? I came to work in mental health initially from my own recovery journey. I had a psychosis in my late teens, which was a crescendo of a lifetime of self-neglect and traumas in my life that I'd never dealt with or engaged with in a healthy way. I've been burying them with drugs, booze, smartphones, carbs you name it and I became what I would call a founder or an entrepreneur about five years ago, a kind of solo freelancer to running a small team operating a business, finances, legal operations, sales this whole aspect of the behaviours and habits that I had never really picked up in my journey in the mental health space and my career in charity and community development and eventually segued into working with organizations, mainly because I was interested in the mental health of young people and the mental health of parents has such profound implications for the mental health of their kids and so I'd been working for a campaign called Time to Change, which was UK's biggest anti-stigma campaign, and it was all about starting conversations in the workplace about mental health, basically to make it okay to say I'm struggling, and that's where I really cut my teeth. It was from there that I went to work at Facebook, which was a really sweet gig because it enabled me to build my business. I was basically teaching three meditation classes a week at lunchtime and then we'd just hang out on Facebook and swan around and they had just free food everywhere. This is when they were really on that total abundance, prosperity, flex and I'd just sit in their bar sipping Prosecco and organizing my fledgling empire, and I suppose it probably became very normal for them to see their meditation teacher slowly getting pissed by himself in the bar, and I have since been on quite a journey. Yeah, of really. At first, the company was called Tough Cookie.
Speaker 2:I was really fascinated by human resilience, and what does it take to create actual human resilience? What is human resilience? Why do some of us appear resilient and others not? Are those concrete character traits? Are those learned skills? How do you cut that cake? And I was researching and consulting and delivering training on this theme of human resilience.
Speaker 2:Mindfulness and meditation was my road into it, but the more I deepened into it. But the more I deepened into it, the more I saw that resilience is also about the relational practices of the individual. How do they give and receive feedback, how do they set boundaries, how do they design their life so that they can feel good and function well in terms of the rhythms and rituals of their day-to-day behaviors? And eventually, though, the more we were focusing on best practice in individual resilience which is what tough cookie was all about, as in the name how do I be a tough cookie the more you come up against the limitations of the individual.
Speaker 2:There's a paradigm that we're in currently, where most people are walking around focusing on how do I manage my stress, my anxiety, my burnout, and instead, what I became interested in is well, what about our stress, our anxiety, our burnout, our anxiety, our burnout. To what degree does the over-focus on my issues as an individual lead me or block me from coming to sustainable resolutions around those issues? Because if I'm fixated upon and dwelling upon and endlessly rehashing my own personal stress, then problems that could be solved relationally within the team in terms of procedures, team practices, protocols, leadership policy, procedure, are instead basically, just as I said before, dwelled upon and fixated upon and endlessly rehashed as my own static, individual problems. And so it was this sort of hard-won insight that actually best practice in resilience requires us to go beyond the individual and into the world of culture and systems and norms, the system in which that individual is embedded, in that we ended up changing our company name to mycelium.
Speaker 1:So if you don't know what mycelium is.
Speaker 2:It's a subterranean fungus that knits forests together and it's changing human understanding of how forests work, because we used to look at trees and see them all as these individual units, all in a war of all against all for life. But then you look underneath the surface and you see that actually they're all passing each other information and nutrients, and that relationship is mediated by mycelium. It's how that transference takes place. It's through the fungal network. Mushrooms are the fruiting body of mycelium, and what I also like about it is that mycelium is the great metabolizer of the forest. It digests and composts all of the dead and decaying matter, the things that need to die, and turns them into new life.
Speaker 2:And that's what we do in organizations. We take the practices and the cultural norms that have had their day and then we turn them into new life. That's what we do in organizations. We take the practices and the cultural norms that have had their day and then we turn them into new life, new ways of being, and create spaces for people to practice those ways of being, collaborating with each other, and then, to really stretch a metaphor, I suppose what I also love about mycelium is that it's invisible. You can't see it. I mean, it is visible but it's below the surface of the soil. We're a small company, a real kind of crack commando squad, and then we also have a network of facilitators and trainers who also deliver our training programs and master classes and workshops of different kinds. It's taken us five, to be honest, to figure out what is the actual problem we're here to solve, because it wasn't immediately clear what the thing underneath the thing is, why is it?
Speaker 2:that organizations are investing so much in, let's say, the well-being of their people. They're spending more now than they were at the height of the pandemic and yet burnout is more prevalent now than it was at the height of the pandemic. And yet burnout is more prevalent now than it was at the height of the pandemic. Why aren't those things working? And it's taken us five years to actually answer that question and come up with a solution to that which we're now beginning to scale. So an exciting time, big time of change for us, big moment of change for me as a founder. But yeah, we're going from a hopefully a smaller boutique consultancy training organization into more of a tech startup what is the one, the one thing that really brings it together?
Speaker 2:in terms of problems that organizations are facing. Well, the challenge is, we all long for connection at work, sense of belonging, high levels of trust and mutual support with our colleagues in high-performing spaces, but we've been wired for competitiveness, individualism, separation, hierarchies, both informal and formal, and these things get in the way, and so what's required is some unlearning of some very deep habits in order to cultivate the soft skills required to hold a new formal structure. The old structure that we've inherited from our ancestors legacy organizational culture, which governs most organizations we work with, governs most startup cultures. That was dreamed up by frederick taylor and his contemporaries in the second industrial revolution and, uh, it's given us many gifts, but it's also got many limitations, and now we are in a completely different arena. We require new soft skills, and for that we need to see reality clearly. So how do we see reality clearly? We need soft skills necessary to create a culture where there's authenticity, there's feedback, there is psychological safety, there is mutual support and there are also intelligent working practices, so that we're actually performing at a high level sustainably, and we want people performing at a level where they can maintain it for six years, not six weeks, and there's an over focus on peak performance, which is basically inspired by elite sport, whereas workplace is very different. We need to be looking at sustainable performance.
Speaker 2:The challenge is that when organizations come to scale soft skills development, the soft skills required for sustainable performance practices and the new form of culture, basically they rely on e-learning, because that's what they've done before right, compliance training, give everyone e-learning, let's all click through and let's all get a streamlined understanding. But actually the problem now is that e-learning doesn't work for soft skills development for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's optimized for cognitive processing rather than emotional processing, and in order to have lasting behavior change, you require shifts at the emotional level, and so emotional processing is inversely correlated with cognitive processing, which is why you get so many, for example, heady blokes who are terrible at processing and regulating their emotions or intuiting the emotions of the people around them, despite the fact they're very cognitively complex thinkers. And so that's the first piece is you've got an e-learning that's optimized and dials up cognitive processing cut and doesn't address emotional processing. And the second is that those scaled interventions that do address emotional processing it happens in a silo.
Speaker 2:I'll be using my Headspace app sitting on my own again, focusing on my stress, my anxiety, my burnout, my meditation, and at no point do we get into the world of culture, because culture exists in the relational field. I'm not having the crucial conversations that are required to shift culture. We're not practicing new ways of being with each other. It's me on my own doing my thing. I am overwhelmed, I get sent off to my eap and by bringing together a few different modalities that we've identified over the last 10 years of my journey as the necessary ingredients to do soft skills development scale, my journey as the necessary ingredients to do soft skills development at scale, and to do that in a way that takes the burden of really busy leadership development teams and well-being teams, who often just don't have the time and resource.
Speaker 2:Most organizations, even in the tens of thousands, will have one, maybe two people looking after culture and the practices that are required to build new cultures.
Speaker 2:So they also need to be automated in a way that busy teams can press a button when it happens, and that's also what we've been figuring out how to do that.
Speaker 2:Luckily, with developments in AI, we can now do that.
Speaker 2:So we're in the sort of inflection point where we're now able to take what we've been doing in a smaller way, working with leaders and actually be able to bring it to people who aren't leaders all staff and actually that's what I'm much more interested in.
Speaker 2:I end up doing the majority of my work with leaders, but I'm actually way more interested in solving this problem for just common, ordinary person who comes to work, does their thing, goes back home, does their same to be shopping, looks after their kids. Maybe they're not necessarily on a leadership track, but for me I'm really interested in how do we help those people, because it's not just organizations that need an up-leveling in their soft skills development, it's the entire landscape of society. It just happens to be the case that within england in particular, the primary way you get soft skills out into the general population is for businesses, because we've spent the last 10 years decimating our community mental health and so really the only institutions with the kind of resources able to deploy this at scale are organizations, and so that's why I work with organizations.
Speaker 2:Actually, if I could go straight to households, I would, but it is also really fascinating working with organizations and working with high performing teams and helping them solve their problems, and particularly those teams that are working on problems that we really feel needs to be solved.
Speaker 2:I'm not as hyped about helping people get incrementally better at selling shoes to teenage girls, and that's something that it's really hard for founders to think about, because everything is just right there in front of you and very immediate. That's much harder to think about. Things like ethics and the wider impact being a, being a social impact company. For me, I think we set out to do that from the very beginning. It's like how do we, how do we be a company from the start that wants to have impact, but also about how do I actually show up as a leader in not just my company but my community, my ecosystem, so that I can orient myself towards and yeah regenerative planet so the big win comes when you, when you get the mycelium effect and everyone like you say the me problem into a we problem is like how can we really solve this?
Speaker 1:If you can, then, as the founder of a business, help your entire organization function. Like that there sounds like you create these mini mycelium networks where kind of people take these skills and go out into the wider community and start disseminating it, to kind of take them home and can they sort of get their family operating with these principles.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like there's many positive externalities, but even if you did it for yourself, there's benefit.
Speaker 2:Well, there's also a very clear link between, particularly as a founder, modeling and mimicry explain a huge amount of social behavior in organizations. People take their cues by those who have higher status within the system and so, as a founder, if you're practicing sustainable performance and you're normalizing sustainable performance, then it's much more likely that the people underneath you will also see that as as well. That's just how things are done around here and they will also start to adopt those practices and also you are able to encourage those practices in them from a place of integrity. You know, do as I do rather than do as I say. Most founders don't actually understand the relationship between their role modeling, the culture, the subculture of their team in terms of the norm system, what behaviors are rewarded or punished, both explicitly and implicitly and the performance of that team.
Speaker 2:People don't understand the relationship between role modeling, culture and performance, and I think if they really did see how deep that rabbit hole goes, this whole putting your own oxygen mask on first would actually foreground itself as an issue that's genuinely really critical for them to invest some time and resource in of like how do I, as a founder, design my life? What behaviors am I normalizing in my team? Am I doing what is required to cultivate a high performing and sustainable performing culture within my team, in terms of my own behaviors, habits, rhythms, etc. So these are all questions that we should be asking ourselves and ultimately, it's why it's so good to connect with other founders, because often being a founder can be very lonely and isolating and we need to be able to have spaces where we can think out loud with other founders, because often we're all making the same mistakes in different ways it almost feels like the question flips, kind of how can I be more resilient?
Speaker 1:like how can I deal with these things more, and actually think, like what your frame is like. Actually maybe it's not about having more resilience to our current behaviors, it's actually to flip it and go what is sustainable performance? And then maybe resilience becomes a little less of an issue because you're not killing yourself in the first place. It's a bit like focusing on time management rather than what you're actually doing. It's kind of it's dealing with the symptom rather than the cause. And I really like this idea around just mimicry role modeling, because a lot of founders are told leaders eat last and that has become sort of slightly the term like leaders don't eat.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like and actually the founder is the most important part of an organization, because they are the heartbeat of it. They set the tone and actually, by starving themselves, by not eating, by burning themselves out, they are actually damaging their team instead of helping them. Well, I feel like they're doing it for the right reasons, but actually it is detrimental not only to them but to their whole team detrimental not only to them, but to their whole team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, look, there are times in my founder journey where balance has not been, and should not have been, the goal.
Speaker 2:Where it has, where it has actually, what's been required has been just to throw everything into the task at hand, to pull the all-nighter, to work through the weekend, to work through multiple weekends in order to get something over the line, to ask my team to do that too, and to step in and sacrifice for the mission at hand, and there are times when that simply must happen.
Speaker 2:The thing is is that you're in a marathon, not a sprint, when it comes to the founder journey, because if you burn out in nine months, you're not much good to anyone, and people can feel it. So, yeah, for me it's like, yes, there are moments where we need to struggle for the mission at hand and absolutely not seek balance, where we should be doing those 10-hour days, and that is necessary, but that should also be clawed back and it should be the exception, not the norm, if we're going to be sustainable. We can function in ways for periods of time that are unsustainable, but they are, by very definition, unsustainable and the autonomic nervous system can't maintain the chemical composition in your bloodstream in that high level of stress and that level of under-resource for very long before it starts manifesting first as burnout and then as full-fledged immune system dysregulation.
Speaker 2:You know at first that might start as getting allergies to things. Maybe you start becoming reactive to certain foods. Maybe you start getting hay fever in a way you didn't before, but sooner or later, like it did with me, it will start turning into. For me, it started turning into inflammation. It came on my face like a big red blotches all over my face, my scalp started falling apart, started getting tinnitus and roaring my ears through to the inflammation. So I've experienced those symptoms multiple occasions on my founder journey, and this is someone who actually understands the best practice in resilience and sustainable performance, and so I'm not going to stand here and tell your listeners that I am operating from a state of sustainable performance 100% of the time, 24-7. I actually think that idea of perfection needs to die. I actually think that idea of perfection needs to die. It's ultimately about knowing what you, in a state of sustainable performance, look and feel like as a North Star, so that you can orient towards it. And when you start to drift, for whatever reason maybe it's that big client deadline, or maybe it's that huge bid or whatever it is you can notice when you drifted and you can recalibrate. It's that noticing and recalibration which is what really matters. You need systems of accountability around you to check that and notice that this is where psychological safety comes in. Founders need people around them who will tell them the truth In order to invite that culture.
Speaker 2:It's really hard because people are so wired to be people pleasing towards the high status figure.
Speaker 2:You can think you're really open and actually people still aren't bringing you things, even if you might even actively say like, hey, you know, you can bring me anything.
Speaker 2:Um, actually, most founders I've come across, including myself, we're in a constant including myself. We're in a constant oscillation between genuinely being open to feedback, being open and curious and committed to our growth, versus closed and defensive and committed to being right. That's an oscillation process and I think for people to be able to tell you the truth, you really need to be in a conscious relationship with a growth mindset, to notice all of the subtle ways in which you're being defensive, not being up for changing, not being up for really looking at yourself or creating spaces, asking for feedback, requesting feedback rather than just giving feedback, and, as a founder, this is so critical. It's taken me such a long time to build a team that actually tells me the truth. It was actually flabbergasting for me to discover that there were people who were, rather than revealing what they were seeing and thinking and feeling, they were concealing it. And because they were concealing it, they were subtly withdrawing and then withholding, et cetera, and then, with all the, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Do you think as a founder, it's your team's job to tell you the truth? Can you expect them to fully tell you the truth and challenge you and to be that sort of be that person like group people for you, Like? Do you think that is their role? They're not actually operating from a full place of psychological safety because the truth is they don't really have it. So I wonder whether putting that expectation their role they're not actually operating from a full place of psychological safety because the truth is they, they don't really have it. So I wonder whether putting that expectation on them to be the truth teller to you is entirely fair you're not putting an expectation on them.
Speaker 2:You're putting an expectation on yourself to role, model the qualities and values required to maximize the likelihood that they will feel safe enough to stay what they are thinking, feeling and observing. If they're not coming forward and bringing things forward to you, that's on you. And actually this is where a 100% responsibility mindset really comes in. It's really easy to point your finger at your team and say you're not doing this, you didn't do that, you didn't tell me that, but when you point, you've got three fingers pointing right back at you. It's almost a trite old saying, right, but it's true. And so for me it's like. In the same way, we have to be, as founders, so critically acutely aware of when we're being defensive, of when we're not welcoming feedback, and be very conscious around how we actively demonstrate that we really want feedback from people and really create the conditions of psychological safety. Equally, we have to have a mindset of 100% responsibility. We need to recognize that if there's a problem in the team, as a founder you have to assume that you're co-creating at least co-creating that problem and that you, as the highest status figure within that system, have the highest level of power to change things, and this for me is almost a spiritual inquiry. That's how deep that rabbit hole goes, the subtle ways in which I'm in victimhood versus adult responsibility.
Speaker 2:There's a really cool journaling practice actually that can help to clarify and shift you from one into the other, which I've done.
Speaker 2:God, I don't know how many times it's 3 am in the morning when I've been struggling to sleep because of a business decision I've got to make. So you start off by identifying the issue or complaint in your life so that might be, my team aren't telling me when things are going wrong, they're keeping it to themselves and then you state the complaint in victimhood terms. So you're being really dramatic, you're hamming it up, you're blaming as heavily as possible, you're really exaggerating the part of you that's in victimhood and you would basically journal that part of you for three minutes and then, after that three minutes, you step into 100 responsibility. You maybe even change the chair you're sitting on to placing the opposite direction, and then what you do is you gain insight by completing the four following statements. I keep this issue going by. What I get the payoff from keeping this issue going is the lifelong pattern I'm noticing is in terms of thought pattern, emotional pattern, behavior pattern, etc.
Speaker 1:And I can demonstrate a hundred percent responsibility concerning this issue by that's like a really sort of nice do-it-yourself version of kind of perspectives, exercise and coaching huh, yeah, cool, yeah, yeah yeah it's um.
Speaker 1:It's a great tool really practical questions as well, like it's really that gives you a really nice sort of process to step through, because you say people can find yourself. It is a. You can drift into victimhood without even realizing it and there's a thought process pattern that goes with it yeah, if you think you're above doing that exercise, then you're not doing that exercise enough do you think it's as simple as you get triggered into victimhood, you work through that that sort of issue and then you come out of it.
Speaker 1:Or do you think you stay in victimhood in other situations until you recognize the fact that you're in it? So there's kind of a long lasting effect of being triggered into victimhood.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I believe for the rest of our lives. There's like the micro and the macro victimhood. There's the micro victimhood, which is in the moment I react. I have placed my power and agency outside of myself. It's everyone else's fault but mine. And then there's a moment of like, oh right, I'm in that. I'm in that, okay, let me switch. And then there's the macro level, which is actually permeates our entire life and that's something that really only deep inner work in community, with feedback and accountability, will ever resolve.
Speaker 2:But that is the birth of responsibility and that is what is being asked of as founders, particularly if you want to retain your critical talent. Millennials coming through. It's increasingly being seen as just a no-brainer and an expectation that the founder and the CEO is going to be able to model these qualities. So, yeah, I do think that it's a lifelong journey and if you are not in a peer support group with other founders, maybe worth considering being in one, or at least being in a group with people who are operating at a high level but also up for doing the work to cultivate the values, mindsets and behaviors required a 100% responsibility life and an open or growth mindset.
Speaker 1:I think also when you have that group it takes a bit of the pressure off your team because you can show up in a different way. You can provide cycles of safety for them, but you're not expecting them to do the work for you, for yourself. That work almost needs to happen outside of that group so that you can really show up in a really positive way for your team it's yeah, that, that's. That's just spot on where's the best place for you to do that, as you described it, that uncomfortable, icky work.
Speaker 2:Oh, mate, I would say the most powerful place for me to do uncomfortable icky work. Oh, mate, I would say the most powerful place for me to do uncomfortable icky work has been in a men's circle with my close mates. They all run their own things in some way or another and literally everyone just has seven minutes exactly to share what they're going through. Everyone has the same amount of time to talk, no one can interrupt each other, and after seven minutes there's three minutes where other people can offer you reflections so they might say sentences with I see a man who, or it sounds like you, or when I'm listening to you I noticed that, and they're providing you mirrors. So they're helping me see myself more clearly and they might even offer advice, but they'd ask for permission before offering advice.
Speaker 2:That was a game changer in my life. I've had three coaches during my founder journey. I've had two therapists during my founder journey. As a founder, the nature of it for me has brought me into contact with so many different dimensions of my own shortcomings and wounding that it's actually something that I could only have done with a therapy journey. I wouldn't be running a high-performing organization if it hadn't been for a therapist.
Speaker 2:I truly believe that it's one of the highest ROI investments that our organization has made is me having a weekly therapy, especially as a founder, where there's a tendency towards grandiosity, and that's something we need in many ways. Right, you need to have this big vision. I'm going to have this big impact on the world. I'm this big person, and actually that needs to be counteracted sometimes too. And also, you know, the thing with being a founder is that often it's not other people telling us that we need to work 24 7, it's our own internal drive, and that can sometimes move from being a blessing into a set of chains or self-imposed bondage where we never allow ourselves to rest or we never actually inherit and enjoy the fruits of our action because we're always just onto the next, onto the next our conversation with michael martinia underscores a vital lesson fostering a culture of collective resilience can transform the way we work and connect from teaching meditation to building a thriving business.
Speaker 1:Michael's journey is nothing short of inspiring. We discussed the importance of moving beyond personal stress management to focusing on creating psychological safety and interconnected environments within organisations. Michael's insights on developing soft skills at scale, modelling sustainable performance as a leader and shifting to a 100% responsibility mindset offers a new perspective on building resilient teams. Thank you for tuning in into Peer Effect. Join me next week for another inspiring episode. Until then, stay connected, stay resilient and keep making it happen.