About Matt Swartz, LMSW, MSSW
Matt Swartz, LMSW, MSSW, is an executive coach and licensed therapist for founders, leaders, and high achievers, based in the Ann Arbor area of Michigan. Over 15 years and more than 30,000 hours, he has helped people release the anxiety behind their success. He helped scale a practice from two clinicians to sixteen and is the creator of the Waterfall Method.
I built the map by walking out of the woods myself.
A few years ago, from the outside, my life looked like a success story. I had helped grow a therapy practice from two clinicians to sixteen. My schedule was full, the team was growing, and we had a strong reputation in the community. I had built the life I’d always wanted.
But as the practice grew, so did the pressure. More leadership. More complexity. More weight. And I thought I was handling it. I’d done the work: therapy, coaching, every personal development book on the shelf. I had the tools. Achievement had always been how I handled anxiety, and it had always worked.
Then my first son was born.
Nothing was wrong with him. He was one of the greatest gifts of my life. But becoming a father cracked something open. The panic attacks I thought I’d left behind came back. I got angry and lashed out at things that didn’t deserve it. Then I went numb and pulled inward, right when my family needed me present. And the whole time I was ashamed, because I knew better. I wanted to do better. I thought I was past all that. Leading, building, and parenting all at once exposed every place my earlier work hadn’t reached, and I failed to show up for my wife the way she needed me to.
It wasn’t a dramatic collapse. It was a quiet, undeniable knowing: the operating system that had carried me this far could not take me where I needed to go next.
So I went deeper than I ever had. Back into therapy, this time into EMDR, the nervous system, and the patterns that had been quietly running the show my whole life: the drive to achieve, the need to hold everything together. Deep work takes time. It took me six years. By the time our second son was born, I was a different husband and a different father, the one taking the night shifts so my wife could sleep. I’ve been panic-attack free ever since.
I healed, and then I grew. And what came out of that search wasn’t just my own healing. It was the method I now use with every client.
From a bucket of water to the Waterfall Method
When I was about ten, I poured a bucket of water down our driveway and watched it branch out like a tree, every stream finding its own way down. I remember thinking: this is how life moves. I’ve been fascinated by how people grow ever since. It’s no accident the company is called Evolving Lives, or that the method is named after water.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in second grade, and my childhood therapist showed me you could build a life around sitting with people and helping them change. By high school I was reading Alan Watts and Wayne Dyer, trying to figure out how to build a happy life.
My training was anything but comfortable: a master’s at Columbia, the Advanced DBT Training Program, and group therapy at Rikers Island and a federal detention center in Brooklyn. It’s easy to sit with CEOs after you’ve run group therapy in a prison. New York was also where I hit my first wall, with panic attacks that left me frozen in the shower and unable to get to work. I learned to manage them. It took becoming a father to finally heal what was underneath.
Back in Michigan, I spent eight years helping build that practice: supervising most of the team, leading hiring, and growing the training arm that served schools, churches, and Fortune 500 companies. I watched up close what happens when a business outgrows the person at its center. No org chart survives an unhealed nervous system. That lesson became the heart of my work with founders.
In 2020 I founded Evolving Lives. Today it’s two separate companies: Evolving Lives Professional Group, my coaching, speaking, and training company, and Evolving Lives, Inc., a Michigan virtual therapy practice.
No org chart survives an unhealed nervous system.
Both sides, often in the same hour
Most of what founders have tried works on one side. Therapy can understand what’s underneath but can’t sit with you in the builder’s seat. Business coaching can sit in the builder’s seat but can’t follow the pattern to the root. I do both, often in the same hour: we start with a real decision on your desk, follow the pattern down to the rule that’s making the call, then come back up and decide from a new place.
That’s the Waterfall Method. First the healing, then the growth that comes after, guided by the Foundations of Flow.
Training, licensure, and the rooms I serve
Family, waterfalls, and the force bigger than all of us
I live in the Ann Arbor area with my wife, Skylar, a counselor and artist, and our three kids. Early in our relationship Skylar made me a piece of art that said #ChangeLivesChangeTheWorld. It’s still the creed behind everything we build. We travel the world together as a family, and wherever we go, we chase waterfalls. The last one I jumped into was in Portland. My favorite is still in Maui.
I’ve done improv for fifteen years, from UCB and the PIT in New York to Pointless and Hearsay in Ann Arbor, and the stage still feels like home. Though I lead with psychology, there’s a deep spirituality behind and within all of my work: a journey toward a deeper understanding of self, and the feeling of connection with a force much bigger than all of us.
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