Finding Peace of Mind with Max Schneider

Max Schneider is the founder of sand and salt escapes. They’re an organization curating extraordinary experiences for high achieving professionals, and he’s the founder of ritual. It’s an organization that is helping organizations. It’s an organization helping organizations reconnect and provide great wellness and extraordinary experiences for their employees. Welcome to the show, Max. Thank

Max Schneider 0:25
you so much for having me. George. Pleasure to be here. I’m

george grombacher 0:27
excited to have you on. Tell us about personal lives, more about your work. Why you do what you do.

Max Schneider 0:35
I am a person who probably, like a lot of your guests, is wired to constantly go and constantly push condition that way from birth, and then you also have a bit of that wiring natural disposition towards it. So that was kind of my story from high school to college, studied business and then went into consulting for about 10 years after that, I was getting a chance to do some awesome works, traveling about 200,000 miles a year, working with some awesome fortune 10 organizations and just really enjoying what I was doing, but that constant drive to push, that constant drive to not really enjoy the moment, but always focus on what’s next. What’s next, what’s next, really caught up with me, and about three years ago, I burnt out very hard. I got shingles in my 30s, which was quite the accomplishment, and I started having anxiety attacks, things like before getting on planes or on calls, and really didn’t know what to do. It was a totally new experience for me, and so I picked up and went down to Latin America for a period of time just to slow down and get out of my normal rhythm. And while I was there, I’ve always had a mindfulness practice, but I was really leaning on my mindfulness practice pretty hard, and that was an extraordinary experience for me, to be able to slow down and tune back into who I was and just start making sense of how fast I had been moving for the prior really, at that point, like 33 years of my life, and what I knew to be true was that my experience isn’t unique. Unfortunately, we all, I think, different points in our lives, lose a little bit of touch with who we are as people. We’re burning the candle bit too hard at both ends, and we can hit these walls or have these ups and downs during our lives. And I wanted to create something that helps people who are going through those types of experiences, and use mindfulness movement and conversation as a way to do that. So the work started moving. I quit my job, not really knowing what was next, and ended up starting a company where we were running mindfulness retreats for individuals, particularly high performing individuals who do push pretty hard and need some space for themselves. I started running those retreats in Nosara, Costa Rica. I ran 11 in the first 24 months. And as that was going on, I started getting interest from my network saying, hey, what you’re doing is interesting. How might we integrate that with our organization? So we started running off sites for executive and intact teams using mindfulness conversation and movement to help them really tap back into who they are as individuals. And then figure out, Okay, what does that mean for us and how we interact together as a team? And start embedding some of those more mindfulness practices and rituals into their day to day rhythms.

george grombacher 3:19
Well, that’s easy, just totally shift your whole life

Max Schneider 3:21
exactly just like that

george grombacher 3:25
piece piece of cake. Go from being a consultant, traveling all over the all 200,000 miles a year to to not and helping people be a little bit more still.

Max Schneider 3:36
Yeah, it was quite the challenge. I remember the first day I was gainfully unemployed. It was April 9 of 2022 and I sat down to practice yoga that morning, and I just, I started bawling my eyes out. It was a really cathartic experience. And I have somebody who’s never really been like an emotional person, and man that morning, I just, like, lost it. It felt like I was just starting to understand the gravity of what I was doing, of leaving behind everything that I had worked my entire kind of life and career to get to, and all that place that you’re told you’re supposed to be, and stepping away from it with no real plan. It felt like I was in the middle of an ocean, treading water, not able to see land, and just really didn’t know what way to go. So it was really scary making the leap and trying to get things going from the beginning Absolutely.

george grombacher 4:28
Yeah, I appreciate that. So so much of life is it’s an inside job and it’s an outside job. We’re obviously with ourselves all the time. Do you talk to me a little bit about the value of of just going somewhere, of being out of your regular habits and routines, yeah.

Max Schneider 4:50
If so, if you think about just like the evolution of our species over the course of time, about 2 million years ago, we discussed. Covered fire and started making art about 700,000 years ago is when we started building homes, hunting with spears. Homo sapiens became, started evolving into the planet about 200,000 years ago. We didn’t start recording history like 5000 years ago. So think about that pace of evolution over roughly 2 million years, and then think about everything that’s happened in the last 100 years, where you’ve got like, temperature control, take temperature control, mattresses, we’ve got cars to take us places. We can get across the world in less than 24 hours. We’ve got podcasts. We can constellations, like all of these things are going on all around us. And the world that we live in is not the world that we evolved to exist in. So that creates a bit of a challenge for us. I don’t think it’s something that a lot of us are kind of consciously aware of, because we’re just born into it. But our brains aren’t wired to be able to take in this deluge of information that we have all day, every day, and there’s a lot of implications to that. And you talk about the ability to get away from your day to day, that’s massive. If you’re going to be able to slow down and start to peek inside a little bit and understand more about who you are, if you think about your brain as a pond, and every input that we get every day is like throwing a rock into that pond. Some of them are smaller, some of them are bigger. So it’s a text message, it’s the emails, it’s watching the news, it’s listening to the podcast on the way to work. It’s the conversations that we’re having with others, all of these different pieces of information, they’re constantly hitting our brain. They’re kicking up the water. Those big rocks are hitting the bottom of the pond. They’re kicking up muck, and it’s just a mess. And we do that from the moment that we wake up, when our cell phone is the alarm that we use, and the first thing we’re doing is checking our messages to the last thing that we’re doing before we go to bed when we get a chance to get away, particularly in types of environments that we curate where we take care of every detail for the guests, so that they can slow down and focus on themselves. All of a sudden you stop throwing rocks and inputs into that pond, you can begin to see the water settle. You can see reflections off of it. And when you do that for a period of time, you can start to see down underneath the surface. And you can start to see the unique contours that make up the bottom of the pond, where those big logs are, where the rocks have come to rest, and you get a different perspective on yourself simply because you’ve stopped throwing so many inputs in, and you’re allowing your brain to return to a bit more of the natural state that we actually did evolve to exist within.

george grombacher 7:36
What a great what a great metaphor, right there. I love everything about that. Yeah, so, so, so people get off the plane and they’re like, Okay, here I am. I’ve been the busiest human being on Earth working 60 hours a week up until this moment, and now I’m putting my phone down, and here I am. What do I do with my hands? How long does it take for people to to adjust, if at all? Or maybe it happens right away. It depends

Max Schneider 8:01
on the person. Some people are very excited to take their phone, put it away in a corner of their room and not look at it again for the next week. Other people have a bit more of a weaning off process. And we don’t tell anybody to do anything in particular when they’re there. Like, we’ll nudge you to say, hey, when you feel that urge just to look at your film, just see, like, do I need to is this just out of habit, or am I actually, like doing this purposefully? So yeah, it depends on the person how long kind of takes a slide into it. But I think pretty quickly you realize the freedom that you get back when you aren’t tethered to this device, where it’s just like scratching an itch. It’s something you really need to do, but you just constantly have, like this urge to pull it up, to scroll, to check, something that we really have just convinced ourselves we need to do, and we can slow down stop that information in coming in, we just get to pay attention to ourselves and the things that are going on around us in a much more aware and conscious way.

george grombacher 8:58
Yeah, I certainly appreciate that. Speaking of nudges, I imagine that the thought of, for a busy professional of taking a week or so off of work is a wonderful, magical idea, but I bet super hard to actually get to the finish line of, yeah, I’m totally going to do this, but then when the rubber meets the rubber meets the road, I bet that there’s a lot of apprehension about that.

Max Schneider 9:24
Yes, there is, and you can so we talked what I was talking about, there was more on like the individual retreats. When we work with executive teams, that’s certainly the case, and we do, we talk with the teams ahead of time. Hey, you’re going to be here. This is one. It’s an excellent opportunity to empower your team around you, to be able to take on a little more responsibility and step up while you’re out. So that’s certainly like one benefit to being able to step away from it, and two, it’s something that I think at first people are certainly hesitant around. There’s a little bit of skepticism with. Fit, but we’re really selective with the clients that we work with, and we make sure that the CEO who we will partner with is somebody who’s already creating a culture of openness and a culture of kindness, and those are things that are really prerequisites to be able to step into this kind of work. Because if you don’t have an open mind, and we’re sitting there and we’re jumping to a sound back, or we’re jumping into breath work, or we’re having deep conversations just unpacking a little bit more about who we are and the things that are important to us, and getting to shine a light on that. If you’re on a team that already doesn’t have a culture of openness, that’s going to be oil and water. So we’re pretty selective in the organizations we work with, but we found that when we have teams that already have built a culture of openness built in to it. The work tends to speak for itself and bring everybody right along.

george grombacher 10:47
Yeah, yeah. I believe that. I believe that once somebody is in the environment, I has to be function of I wish. Why did it take me so long to do this? I can’t wait to do it again.

Max Schneider 11:00
Yeah? Well, and we just also create, I think, such a like a high baseline for the floor of the experience, where we’re staying in absolutely stunning villas, whether we’re in like Palm Springs, Joshua trees, Smoky Mountains and Nosara, we’re staying in stunning homes. We have a private chef who’s taking care of all food for you. We have private transportations taking you to and from the airport, so everything is already like you’re walking into such a beautifully manicured environment that no matter what so your your guard’s going to get let down. You’re going to be able to sink into the space a little bit faster, because just nothing for you to worry about

george grombacher 11:33
while you’re there. Do you obviously are serving a pretty good cross section of people, all of which are open and kind, and I appreciate that. Do you have to have a background in mindfulness? Do I have to know how to do this stuff? Not

Max Schneider 11:51
at all. In fact, most people that we work with don’t have mindfulness practices, and we take a lot of time and really just unpack and understand, like, what does mindfulness even mean? Why do we talk about that and just the ability to be in the present moment absent any judgment? What like? How do we actually do that? Well, the most important tool that we have to be in the present moment is our attention, and our attention can only be in one place at any given time. So we start figuring out then, okay, well, what does that mean? How do we actually use tools like meditation to train our attention to be in the present moment? And so I think what we do really well is we’re able to just demystify and make pragmatic a lot of these tools that a lot of times can feel a little bit more Woo, woo, or a little bit more out there, but we can take them and break them down in a really just practical way, and give people some very concrete steps that they can take. First of all, experiencing and understanding. Okay, well, oh, this is what it’s actually like to meditate. And why? Why do we always focus on our breath? Well, the only time we can breathe is in the present moment. I can’t breathe in the past. I can’t breathe in the future. I can only breathe in the present moment. So by training my attention to my breath, I’m cultivating presence, like when I first understood that, I was like, Oh my gosh. Well, I’ve been practicing meditation for years, and like, I just now understand that as, like, this big unlock for me. So what we really focus on is just taking those things and making them accessible, making them very pragmatic for people, so you can actually do something with it when you go back as well.

george grombacher 13:17
Yeah, understand that it’s a tool, maybe not like any other, but like, like, like many other, for regulating our emotions and becoming more productive, I suppose, if that is something that we’re desirous of and or just turning it off and having the ability to do that and to unwind and to not let ourselves burn out,

Max Schneider 13:39
yeah, and I think It is important really like use the word productive there. We try not to tie it to productivity. We’re not doing this to be productive. But what we really like to use it for is cultivating obviously, presence is really important, but we use it as a tool to also bring forward vulnerability, to build resilience and to build agility. And those are the three capabilities, particularly working with executive teams, that when we talk about mindfulness, that about mindfulness, that’s what we’re laddering it towards, is vulnerability, resilience and agility, which are skills that every executive in the year 2024, and going forward are going to need in droves.

george grombacher 14:15
Yeah, there’s no doubt, just thinking about myself, if I’m not vulnerable with the people that I’m working with, it doesn’t work at all. Certainly, just we all need to become more resilient in the face of everything that we’re faced with, and then certainly the ability to perform many different sorts of tasks, slash interactions, slash functions throughout the course of the day, to be more agile is certainly of value, so we’re just making our brains better.

Max Schneider 14:46
That’s a great way, buddy.

george grombacher 14:50
So you’ve been at this now for for several years. Is it? Is it what you expected? Exactly? Is it close?

Max Schneider 14:59
The. So journey has been far from what I expected. I don’t know that I had a whole lot of expectations going to I just knew what I wanted to be doing, and the ups and downs that I’ve experienced in building this is been, it’s been a lot you saw talk about resiliency and agility. Those are massive, massive things that I’ve had to continue to work on, just in my own practice. But as far as the work itself and the meaning that I’m getting just like to be part of with these individuals in this team, these teams, is extraordinary. It’s exactly what I did hope for going into it, and that ability to just help people kind of come home to who they are as people that the core of our experiences. But we’re human beings. We ladder on these other titles on top of it, where we’re like EVP at this bank, or we are a parent to these kids. We’re a partner to this person. We’re a child of this person. We’re this role in the community. We layer on all these concepts of who we are, and oftentimes that’s what we identify as, is these titles. So to help people to realize that’s not actually who I am, sure it’s part of my existence and part of my identity, but that’s not who I am, my core, my core I’m a human being. And to give people the space to be able to peek into that and to see who am I as a human is incredibly rewarding work. To be able to sit there and hold that space, to have those conversations and explore that, and then we can deconstruct. Once we deconstruct, we can start putting back on those other layers to figure out, okay, great. Then what does that mean for me to be a parent in a way that’s aligned to who I am? What does that mean for me to lead my organization in a way that’s aligned to who I am as a person, rather than who I think I’m supposed to be,

george grombacher 17:03
I think, and certainly, I feel like we are waking up to all the realities that you’ve been talking about, how you laid out this great human history, timeline of $200,000 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens came to be. But it’s been 5000 years or less, we’ve been actually recording history where now we’ve got mattresses that we can heat up or cool down. And it is very much breaking our brains. And this most recent political cycle, or whatever it was, is certainly breaking our brains. And we think that we need to collectively wake up and do a better job of managing how we’re interacting with the world and technology and and what you’re describing is essentially that

Max Schneider 17:46
it certainly is. Yeah, I I agree. I think that there are some shifts that are going on, and some use the phrase waking up. And I love that, like, there’s a little bit of waking up that’s going on and realizing that we are conditioned as, like, a society and a cultural like, there’s, I don’t think there’s some like, nefarious person at the top who’s like, saying this is, like, the direction we need to be moving society, or anything like, conspiratorial like that, but just the way that we are as, like a species, as a culture and as a society, we have start to, like, have this conditioning and this uniformity that exists. And I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy. I think that we’re all it helps us that prevents us from understanding who we are as people and really accessing that unique individuality that we have and the superpowers that we have as people, and being able to bring that to the world. And I do think that there is a bit of a wakening up to that going on right now.

george grombacher 18:41
I like the I really like the exploration of human superpowers, because I think that we have a lot of them, and very few that we tap into. And I think that vulnerability is 1,000% one of those human superpowers and one that we don’t tap into enough. And in the face of artificial intelligence coming to each one of us, and the implication that that that’s going to have, I think, that that’s going to strengthen the case for being more vulnerable and recognizing the things that make us unique and the skills and gifts that we bring to the world. And then when we actually do that, it’s going to help us through whatever the future is. It’s such a

Max Schneider 19:24
more human approach to life. And I mean, if you’re in a conversation with a friend and they ask how you’re doing, like, oh, things are great. Here’s just the highlight reel of what’s going on right now. And then they just play back the highlight reel of what’s going on with them right now, and you both leave the conversation you’ve not tapped into. Like, probably 70% of what’s actually going on in your world. But in those conversations, when you can lead with a little bit of vulnerability and say, Actually, I’m having a really like, it’s been a really bad week. I had this happen, this conversation, this occurred at work. I’m struggling with this at home, when you open that door up and you lead by. Being vulnerable all of a sudden that gives that other person permission to go, Hey, this is, this is actually a little bit of a safe space here where I can share some of the things that are going on in my world that maybe aren’t as great. And when we can start getting that out, you realize, oh, wait, I’m not alone in all of this struggling or challenge that I’m facing. We all have our own challenges and our own kind of baggage that we’re carrying through this existence. So it just opens up those conversations and that ability to connect with each other as human beings. Yeah, and to your point about AI and all the technology, technological advancement that’s happened over like the last quarter century. So the ability to be human is becoming more rare, and I think, as a result, more valuable.

george grombacher 20:51
Yes, I think that’s I think that that’s so well said right there. We’re all, uh, we’re all carrying a bunch of junk around with us, or rolling the rolling the boulder up the hill every day like Sisyphus. We’re all doing that in some form or fashion, and we all know it. So why not? Without just walking around like I’m your and being mopey all day long, but have real conversations and and create those. I dislike the term safe space, but we all know what it is create more of those authentic spaces. Yes,

Max Schneider 21:27
yeah, that’s it’s a gift when you can do that for yourself, and you can first learn how to be vulnerable with yourself and admit some of those, maybe insecurities or things that are going on or things that aren’t as great as you hope that they are. And you can first start to do that with yourself, and then you can start to do that with others, and you can start to just create opportunities of actual human connection.

george grombacher 21:51
That’s a beautiful thing. Max. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they connect with sand and salt and ritual. Yeah.

Max Schneider 22:01
So you can check out website, sand and salt escapes.com or you can email me directly. My email address is max at sand and salt escapes.com it’s the easiest way to get a hold of me. If you have any questions about mindfulness, going on retreats, you’ve got an executive team who’s interested in it. I just, I love this stuff. I love just geeking out on it. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. George. Any listeners ever want to connect about it? We really appreciate you having me on. I really enjoyed the conversation today.

george grombacher 22:33
Awesome. Likewise. Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, some extra appreciation, share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Go to sand and salt escapes.com spelled out. Shoot Max an email. Max at sand and salt escapes.com and jump into these worlds that Max is creating and curating and see if it is the right fit for you to do all the things that we’ve been talking about. Thanks again, Max, Thanks, George, until next time, remember do your part by doing your best. You.

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.