Your Team Isn't Fine. You've Just Trained Everyone to Say They Are. | Mike Brcic
Episode notes
"If the change we desire is big enough, we are going to find all sorts of ways to sabotage that."
You've told your board the culture is strong. You've told your co-founder you're fine. You've told yourself the exhaustion is just the job. Mike Brcic has watched what happens when a founder finally stops saying that out loud — usually somewhere in the Icelandic backcountry, twenty minutes into a silence he made them sit in on purpose.
Mike is the founder of Wayfinders Events, running multi-day wilderness expeditions for founders and leaders in Iceland, Bhutan, Patagonia, and Colombia. Nearly half his community is women, over 75% come back, and his alumni don't call it a retreat — they call it the return. In this conversation, Mike breaks down why the fluorescent-lit boardroom is the worst possible environment for honesty, what happens to a leader's nervous system when you finally remove the noise, and how one founder who showed up insisting "my life is perfect" left with a very different conversation to have with his partner.
What you'll walk away with:
- Why environment — not intention — determines whether your team is actually being honest with you
- The specific self-sabotage pattern that kills big changes before they stick, and how to plan around it in advance
- Mike's "momentum map" framework for making a breakthrough actually last past the offsite
- What one hour of forced silence revealed to a group of 25 executives about how disregulated their nervous systems actually are
- Two real transformation stories — one from a marriage, one from a nearly 20,000-foot volcano — on what happens when someone finally stops rationalizing the status quo
#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #B2BRelationships
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You can connect with Mike Brcic here:
https://way-finders.com/the-council
https://www.instagram.com/wayfinders_inc
You can connect with Karl Pontau here:
www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1
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