How Thomas Edwards Became The Professional Wingman® – Interview

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Over the years, we’ve met a lot of fascinating people at SXSW. But one of my personal favorite connections is The Professional Wingman®, Thomas Edwards. It’s not every day that you meet someone who earns a living as a “wingman.” We had to know more and Thomas was gracious enough to let us interview him for MethodShop.

You certainly have a unique profession. How did you become a “professional wingman”?

After a string of failed relationships I started to realize it wasn’t everyone else that was broken, it was me. I became obsessed with self-help books and spent years studying topics like relationship dynamics, personal communication, nutrition, fitness, fashion, professional networking, how to interview for a job, sex, and public speaking. Basically, I wanted to learn about anything that would help benefit my life.

I started putting what I had learned into practice, and it worked. I started blogging about my relationships, including one with a 42-year-old when I was only 23. She was almost 20 years older than me, but we really connected. That relationship gave me a lot of credibility, and it really resonated with my readers.

Then one day someone I knew from an online personal development forum asked me to mentor him. He had just gotten divorced and wanted to hire me to help him get his life back together. All of that studying that I had committed myself to over the years paid off. My advice helped and he started a business, reconnected with old friends, and even started dating again.

But the wingman thing is fairly recent. It started at SXSW when a friend offered to buy my drinks for the rest of the festival if I helped him get this girl’s phone number at a bar. I helped warm up the conversation, he got her number, had a great date with her the next day, and thanked me for being his “wingman.” And that was it. That was the spark I needed.

Soon after that experience at SXSW, I founded a company called The Professional Wingman®, which helps people develop their social skills so they can have better dating lives and work relationships.

That’s where we met you, at SXSW.

Yeah, I met some really great people at SXSW this year who talked about the awesomeness that is MethodShop. I am now a pretty big fan of your site. I love the variety. You never know what you’ll read each day. I’m a geek at heart, so I like any article that involves gadgets. Also, MethodShop one of the websites I check out now when I’m looking for a good laugh.

Who inspires you and why?

Great question. Gary Vaynerchuk is originally the one whose passion sparked me to eventually discover my business. Tony Robbins has always been an inspiration to whatever I want to accomplish in my life. And of course, my parents are my biggest inspirations. I saw them work so hard, just to give me a chance to do something great in this world. I can never be more appreciative.

Tell us something about yourself that your friends reading this right now won’t already know.

I’ve been very focused on launching The Professional Wingman and haven’t had a lot of free personal time lately. As crazy as my life may seem right now, there are a lot of you I constantly think about and I can’t wait to see you when things settle down — which I promise, they will.

Please complete this sentence… I want everyone reading this to…

Live your life with passion, live it with flare and most importantly, live it with love.