I spent years building companies. I almost forgot to build myself.



Lead with Purpose

My updates for founders, executives, and creators who want to lead with vision, not noise

Issue #47 April 19, 2026

I am launching The R.E.C.L.A.I.M. Code

How did my latest Growth Coaching come about?

I want to tell you something I have never said publicly before.

For years, I was the man who had it together on the outside and was disintegrating on the inside.

Two kids. A growing company. A marriage that looked solid enough in photographs. And underneath all of it, an endless calculation of what tone of voice would keep the peace, what I could hide from my kids so they still felt safe, what I needed to be for everyone else so there was no space left to ask what I needed for myself.

I spent years trying to save something that could not be saved. Years in therapy, learning new language for old pain. Years watching hope flare and collapse. From 2014, when I first knew something was fundamentally broken, through attempts at recovery, through being kicked out of my own house and sleeping in my office, through the kind of cycles that grind a person down so gradually they stop noticing.

I called it normal. I called it love. I called it endurance.

It was survival.

I filed for divorce on January 6, 2020. Right before the world shut down.

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I had been through a painful divorce. I had fought for a marriage that was breaking us both for nearly a decade. I had held my kids together through a pandemic, through legal processes, through the kind of instability no parent wants their children to experience. And when it was finally over, I did what a lot of founders do: I threw myself into the work.

Thirty transatlantic flights in 18 months.

I told myself I was rebuilding. What I was actually doing was running.


The question that changed everything

At a retreat in 2022, I finally slowed down long enough to sit with a question I had been avoiding for years:

Who am I, without all of this?

Not the CEO. Not the founder. Not the ex-husband, the co-parent, the man holding it all together.

Just Mathias. Who is he? What does he want? What kind of life is actually worth building?

I did not have a good answer. And that terrified me.

But it also freed me. Because for the first time in years, I was asking the right question.


Why I am here

I stepped down as CEO. I got coaching. I did the real work, the kind that does not show up on a balance sheet but changes everything about how you lead, how you parent, how you show up in the world.

And somewhere in that process, my next chapter became clear.

I became a CDC Certified Divorce Coach®. I built a framework called The R.E.C.L.A.I.M. Code™. And today, I am launching byMathias with a single purpose:

To be available and equipped to help men do what I had to figure out alone.

Divorce does not have to be the end of your story. It can be the beginning of the most intentional chapter of your life. But that does not happen by accident. It takes someone in your corner who has been through it, who understands the whole picture, and who has the training and the tools to help you move through it with clarity instead of just survival.

That is what I am here for.

Not to tell you it gets better. To actually help you make it better. To sit with you in the hardest part of this and help you find your way through to something worth building.


An invitation

If you are a man on the other side of divorce, or in the middle of it, wondering who you are now and what comes next, this is for you. If you know someone who is going or has gone through a divorce, forward them this email.

You do not have to have it figured out. You just have to be willing to start asking better questions.

The website is live: https://reclaimcode.bymathias.co/ and my Instagram is live.

I am glad you are here.

Mathias


P.S. If The R.E.C.L.A.I.M. Code™ resonates with where you are right now, the best next step is a conversation. You can find out more and book a call at the link above.

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Mathias Ihlenfeld

My Mission: To inspire others to become the best version of themselves—through business and personal reflections, tools, and practices I actually use. This is for founders, leaders, and anyone creating a life with clarity, balance, and meaning.

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