For Matt, Parihoa has been a place of profound change. It helped him shift from an unsustainable "Life 1" way of being to a simpler, wellbeing-centric "Life 2" balance. This involved Matt exiting ChapmanCG, the global executive search company he co-founded and spent more than a decade building, by then the largest of its kind in the world.
Matt left behind his corporate life in Singapore, moved to New Zealand full-time, and embarked on the process of healing from burnout and simplifying his life. As this process unfolded, it inspired Matt to transform Parihoa from being just a place of wellbeing, rest, and reflection for him and his friends, to becoming the physical heart of the Parihoa Network, a global collective focused on amplifying potential through wellbeing.
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Parihoa entered my life in a rather serendipitous way, beginning with a picture and a vision back in 2012 while I was living in Singapore.
At that time, my life revolved around a small condominium in Singapore, one of the world’s megacities. There, I co-founded and began building ChapmanCG, a global search firm.
It was an exciting time, filled with opportunities to meet HR leaders from various industries. These interactions were not just about understanding their career paths; they were about grasping the essential capabilities their teams needed to succeed. I developed a unique skill set focused on enhancing people's capabilities, which provided me with a fascinating window into diverse companies and cultures through the lens of HR.
Ideally, the HR leader should serve as the right hand to the CEO or founder, playing a pivotal role in optimising the skills, talent, and motivations of the people they employ. I had a front-row seat to the strategic and visionary aspects of HR and saw how this came to life in practice in a huge diversity of companies across the globe. After nearly two decades in this space, I reached a disheartening conclusion: wellbeing was often relegated to the sidelines, existing outside the core functions of HR and predominantly scattered across the business.
As I saw how a failure to manage staff wellbeing was damaging both people and business performance and resilience on a corporate scale, I came to realise the toll that my own working life was taking on my wellbeing. In 2012, after attending the wedding of two close friends in Aotearoa New Zealand, I fell in love with the country. The breathtaking landscapes and the warmth of the people ignited something within me. I began exploring properties online, and that’s when Parihoa came into my vision.
After a heartfelt decision, I boarded a plane to New Zealand to meet the family who owned Parihoa. The property had been on the market for three years, and from the moment I set foot on the land, I knew it was meant to be mine. It took me a year to figure out the financial logistics, but on the 1st of August 2013, I officially became the custodian of Parihoa.
Over the next eleven years, I organised my life around this new chapter. I continued to run my firm and co-created Bawah Reserve, an incredible island archipelago off the coast of Singapore, with my friend Tim. But eventually, this ‘two-track’ life felt unsustainable to me. I sold everything to focus on my wellbeing and to cultivate what I now refer to as my “Life 2.”
“Life 2” represents a metamorphosis, a transformation from who I was in “Life 1” to who I aspire to be. It’s not merely about my career; it encompasses the entirety of my being, myself as a whole human. For me, wellbeing embodies sustained happiness, a balance of mental and physical flow—an aspirational yet attainable state of being.
As I became centred in my new life, I began to dream of a future where CEOs, founders, and senior leaders would be ‘well leaders’ and their companies would create a new corporate paradigm. New era companies will have Chief Wellbeing Officers (CWOs), key members of the C-suite, who will ensure that wellbeing is central to everything they do. Specialist wellbeing teams will form, and well cultures will emerge.
By unleashing potential in this way, these companies will excel in all aspects, from products and customer service to performance and sustainability. These well companies of the future will create incredible concepts that have wellbeing at their core. They will attract the next generation of talent, leaving behind organisations with toxic cultures led by unwell leaders who have destructive impacts on people and the planet.
So I began to play with the idea of creating a global network of people who would foster, develop, and model this thinking. Now, from a physical place, Parihoa is evolving into a wellbeing company. At present, it’s a network that encompasses my friends, alumni, and their connections who share this vision, but which is now opening to other friends we don’t know yet.