I asked Yancy Wright whether the thing that nearly broke him was also the thing that made him successful.
Toughen up. Keep going. Work harder.
Isn't that the advice?
Yancy had spent a decade helping big companies build a more sustainable future. Microsoft, Amazon, the Gates Foundation, major healthcare projects. The work mattered to him. And somewhere in the process of sustaining everybody else's future, he stopped doing a particularly good job of sustaining himself.
He described ending up in the ICU and having his heart reset with a defibrillator three times. That became a turning point in the story he told me, eventually leading him to build Casa Alternavida, a leadership retreat center in Puerto Rico.
But I didn't want to leave the conversation at, "Burnout is bad. Take care of yourself." I know. You know. That's the easy part to agree with.
The harder part is what happens when working harder feels like the only thing you can control. Or when you're afraid that letting go of the pressure will mean letting go of everything you've been able to accomplish.
I had some objections. A lot of them were pretty personal.
In this episode, you'll learn
- How meaningful work and a harsh inner critic became tangled together in Yancy's career.
- What he means by somatic coaching, and why he pays attention to pace, tension, and the body.
- Why I kept pushing on whether stress, sacrifice, and relentless work are necessary for success.
- What a short, inexpensive self-care practice looks like for him.
- How we worked through my 80/20 boundary, flow, money, natural gifts, and discipline.
- What happens at Casa Alternavida and how his book helps leaders examine patterns they may not see.
Contents
- The work mattered. He was still running himself into the ground.
- When toughening up becomes the whole plan
- What if achievement is how you learned to earn love?
- The weight of the world, and a surfboard
- What he means by somatic
- Can you stay in the career and change how you live in it?
- But what if stress is my superpower?
- Self-care that doesn't require a retreat budget
- Is burning out just a phase on the way to success?
- Nobody gets my last 20 percent anymore
- The story that only working harder can make you successful
- Where discipline fits
- What happens at Casa Alternavida
- Questions to take into your own work
The work mattered. He was still running himself into the ground.
Yancy wasn't describing a job he hated.
He was working in green building, helping large organizations think about sustainability. There was a purpose behind the long hours. In his head, the planet needed help, and he wasn't doing enough.
So he kept pushing.
Exercise, food, sleep, time off. Those were the things he said he wasn't taking care of well. Taking time off was a particularly big one.
But when he talked about what had worn him down, he put a lot of emphasis on his inner critic. The voice that kept telling him to do more.
That makes the whole thing a little harder to catch. You're doing something good. People benefit from it. You can always find another reason to keep going.
Eventually, though, his body wasn't cooperating with the plan.
That's how he describes the turning point in his own story. I wanted to understand the pattern he saw in the years before it.
When toughening up becomes the whole plan
I've heard a lot of founders talk about burnout. I wanted to start with a pretty basic question.
What is it?
Yancy said he hadn't really recognized his own burnout until he was already in it. Looking back, he could see signs for at least a year.
Normally, he'd be excited to get out of bed. He wasn't. He was frustrated, pessimistic, and more likely to be in what he described as a blame or victim mindset.
He remembered health problems and tension showing up for months while he kept telling himself to push through.
Working hard through difficulty was familiar. His dad had done it. His grandfather had done it. And in construction, "toughen up and keep going" wasn't exactly an unusual message.
So I asked the question that was sitting underneath all of this for me: Isn't that simply the key to success?
If you stop being committed to struggle and hard work, what happens to the thing you're trying to build?
He called it a funny trick question. Then he started explaining why he'd needed to redefine success in the first place.
What if achievement is how you learned to earn love?
Yancy's parents divorced when he was two. He described a difficult childhood and a belief he'd picked up early: love was something he received by doing something for somebody else.
Do something important enough, and maybe you're worthy enough.
That belief can put a pretty strange burden on a career. In his case, it had grown into something like, If I can save the planet, maybe I'll finally be worthy of being loved.
He wasn't offering that as the explanation for every entrepreneur. He was describing what he'd had to unravel in himself.
When he began separating his value from his achievements, he also began reconsidering the work he wanted to do.
He said his heart wasn't in green building anymore, literally or metaphorically. He took a sabbatical to get some perspective.
I wanted to know what "unhooking" that belief actually meant. Saying you don't have to earn your value sounds good. How do you get yourself to believe it?
His answer involved outside help. He works with somatic coaching and thinks a good coach can help someone recognize a pattern more quickly than trying to untangle it alone. For this kind of work, he said he found it more efficient than talk therapy. That's his preference and experience. He hadn't simply thought his way out of the problem by himself.
And he was clear about something else: recognizing the pattern didn't mean it disappeared forever.
The weight of the world, and a surfboard
His next big idea was to build a retreat center for people like him. Stressed out. Overwhelmed. Needing a different way to lead.
Then, while building it, he noticed himself doing some of the same things again.
Well, that's inconvenient.
The new mission hadn't automatically removed the old pattern. What had changed was his ability to notice it.
He told me about working with his mentor, Katie Hendricks. When he described what he was dealing with, she suggested he might be unconsciously committed to struggling and working hard.
He didn't immediately have a neat answer to that. So she asked him to stand up and show her what it looked like.
He felt as though he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Then came a different question: What would he rather feel like?
He pictured himself kite surfing. Moving with the waves. Having fun. Smiling.
The exercise gave him a physical contrast he could recognize. When he caught himself carrying all that weight again, he could stand up, move, go outside, and practice a different response.
For him, the help was partly in having someone else notice what he hadn't been able to see. Then he had something to practice when the pattern returned.
He also had to reconsider how much of the world he was actually responsible for carrying.
What he means by somatic
At this point, I needed him to explain a word.
What does somatic mean?
He described it as working with the whole brain and body together, rather than treating everything as a problem to think through in your head.
In his own case, he remembered jaw tension, neck and shoulder tension, and other health issues before the larger hospital episode. He'd kept overriding the signals he associated with needing rest or a better way to express frustration.
His point was to notice what was happening physically as well as mentally. He was describing his own experience of repeatedly ignoring what was going on.
Then he moved to pace.
How fast do you speak? How fast do you walk? How fast are you trying to do everything?
He sees leaders multitasking and rushing without necessarily noticing that they're doing it. He contrasted that with children moving at a pace that feels natural to them, before adults condition them into something else.
He calls that an "essence pace."
The idea wasn't to see how slowly you could possibly do your job. It was to look at how much energy was disappearing into pressure, tension, and negative internal dialogue before you ever got to the actual problem you needed to solve.
He wanted more energy available for creativity, useful conversations, and the work itself.
Can you stay in the career and change how you live in it?
I asked how long he'd been living with all that tension.
The answer wasn't a tidy start date. He could trace parts of it back to childhood and college. But it intensified during the last couple of years of his corporate career.
He'd been a director of sustainability. Then the company bought another consulting firm and expanded into offices across the U.S.
He said the companies weren't aligned in their values. Communication wasn't good, including his own. He didn't have the tools he has now, and he was swallowing frustration and anger while blaming himself and other people.
That led to another question I wanted answered.
Could someone stay in a career like that and thrive without living the way he had?
He said yes.
Leaving the career wasn't the only possible answer. Learning to communicate consciously and lead yourself mattered too.
He talked about revealing information instead of concealing it, recognizing when you're caught in blame, and becoming more comfortable showing up as yourself rather than trying to fit into a box.
He also pushed back on the idea that you take a course, check the box, and now have yourself figured out.
People have different backgrounds and different patterns. He didn't have one prescription for everybody. He described a gradual process of becoming more aware and practicing different choices.
But what if stress is my superpower?
I was recognizing a lot of myself in what he was saying.
Oh, yeah. That's me. I think that way.
So I started posing objections.
What if I adopt the way of thinking you're describing and lose the superpower that lets me accomplish everything I've accomplished?
He turned the question around. How is all the stress and tension working out for you?
Fair question.
He doesn't think the pressure deserves all the credit we give it. He sees more possibility in being at ease enough to act from who you actually are.
He mentioned a book he was working on with the working title The Superhero Makeover. The superheroes he had in mind were people who spend their lives taking care of everybody else. Caretakers. Generous people. People whose attention is constantly outside themselves.
He wasn't asking them to stop being gracious or generous. He wanted them to notice when caring for everybody else meant ignoring what they needed.
His comparison was a phone after an update that suddenly drains its battery by lunchtime.
The phone may still be doing things. That doesn't mean the way it's running is working very well.
Self-care that doesn't require a retreat budget
I asked what kind of self-care was both neglected and accessible to everybody.
His first thought was internal dialogue. But I clarified that I meant accessible financially.
A retreat can be self-care. You can't always go on a retreat.
He said that depends on how you define retreat.
His own inexpensive version is a 15-minute meditation nap. About 10 minutes of meditation, followed by around five minutes of light sleep.
He likes doing it during an afternoon slump. For him, keeping it short helps him avoid waking up groggy.
He described feeling more optimistic afterward and estimated a 30 to 35 percent productivity boost for himself.
He connected his routine with research he'd read about afternoon performance and sleep inertia. His exact timing and productivity estimate were his own account of what works for him.
What interested me was the practical version of the idea. A break doesn't have to begin with buying a plane ticket.
There are still real constraints. Finding a place to rest depends on your workplace and its culture. A 15-minute break isn't equally easy for every person to arrange.
But he wanted the thought "I don't have time for self-care" to become a reason to deliberately make time, rather than an automatic end to the conversation.
Is burning out just a phase on the way to success?
Then I tried another objection.
Maybe successful people take on too much, stress themselves out, achieve a bunch of things, and learn to regulate later. Maybe I'm simply on that path.
I told him I wasn't presenting that as objectively true. I was trying to flesh out a thought.
Because if the thought stays in your head, it can keep making decisions for you.
He asked whether I thought it was true.
"Don't ask me that yet," I said.
He went back to his own experience. From the outside, it had looked as though he were getting somewhere.
But if he'd died at 37, would that really have been success?
No.
That was the trajectory he said he was trying to change.
He thinks a lot of leaders have never been taught the communication skills or self-awareness that would help them handle what they're taking on. So they keep focusing on the outside objective and putting everything inside themselves to the side.
In his work, he said, he's watched leaders become more excited about their jobs and move toward goals more easily as they change those patterns. Then their teams feel the difference too.
He wasn't describing a plan where you prioritize wellness and barely show up to work. He was talking about balance that lets you work more effectively.
He used his old habit of working another Saturday as an example. What if resting would have left him with more energy and a faster solution when he came back?
That's a different question from whether the work is important enough to deserve your Saturday.
Nobody gets my last 20 percent anymore
This was where the conversation got even more personal.
I told him I'd hit a couple of breaking points over a little more than a year, including two trips to the hospital where it felt as though my body shut down.
I'd been wrestling with how to think about all of this. I wasn't pretending I'd already arrived at the perfect answer.
One recent breakthrough was something I'd said to my wife: I'm done giving 100 percent. Nobody gets 100 percent anymore.
I'd been a 110-percent-all-the-time person. Any task could take everything I had.
The new way I was describing it was that the task gets 80 percent. The other 20 percent is for me.
Yancy wanted to know what I was doing with that 20 percent. If we were talking about the whole day, sleep would need a much bigger place in the calculation.
I joked that the 20 percent was for sleep. Then clarified that I was subtracting sleep already.
The number wasn't a universal schedule. I was trying to stop making every task a claim on all the energy I had left.
He mentioned that about 85 percent of the solo retreat guests at his center were women. That was his observation about his own guests. He connected it with a pattern he recognized in himself: waiting until something breaks before changing.
He kept returning to the difficulty of changing a pattern you can't see.
The inner pressure may feel normal because you learned it early. Your family may have learned it from the generation before them. And while it's happening inside you, the effects can reach your family and your team.
His work is to help people recognize those patterns for themselves, including what they feel like physically, so they can choose something different.
The story that only working harder can make you successful
I had another objection. And I was very clear that the statistics I was about to cite were made up.
I'd never looked at the statistics. This was what it looked and felt like to me.
People in flow don't become multimillionaires. People who destroy themselves do.
That wasn't a claim I'd established. It was the story I wanted him to respond to.
My point wasn't that becoming a multimillionaire was my life's ambition. I had goals I wanted to achieve, and working harder felt like the one variable I could control.
Yancy thought the belief itself could help produce an outcome I didn't want. If pressure and self-destruction are the only route I believe in, I may keep choosing them.
He also challenged the premise about flow.
I pushed him further. I didn't mean someone who got wealthy, crashed, and discovered a different way of living afterward. What about people on the way up?
He pointed to Steven Kotler's work on flow in The Rise of Superman, which discusses high-performing athletes. Then he offered Richard Branson as an example of someone he associated with creativity, unusual experiences, and enjoyment. He also mentioned his friend James Layfield and his experience around wealthy people who spend time in flow.
We were talking through a belief, and he was offering examples that ran against it.
Then he brought up his mentor Gay Hendricks and The Big Leap.
The phrase he wanted to work with was "zone of genius."
He meant work that fits your particular abilities, excites you enough to get you out of bed, and lets you contribute in a way you do especially well.
You might love doing it even without being paid. That didn't mean he thought you shouldn't be paid well.
His question for me was which parts of my work were outside that zone, and which stories I was carrying were adding pressure that didn't need to be there.
He described a measure he uses called "stress weight." He was explicit that it's subjective. Nobody is putting your worries on a bathroom scale.
As people recognize some of the pressure they're creating, he said, they can spend less energy carrying it. They can say no sooner and choose more of the work that fits.
He also wasn't suggesting you instantly rearrange your life so every minute is spent doing your favorite thing.
Maybe you're at 10 percent of your time in that kind of work. Could you aim for 50 percent by next year?
Some people need to explore what that work even is before setting the goal.
That connects to his book, Amplify Your Leadership. The starting point is the leader: what changes when you're operating from a more authentic, less strained version of yourself?
Where discipline fits
I had one more objection.
What about discipline?
When I look at kids, I want to identify what God has naturally gifted them for. But I also want to teach them to do hard things, or they may never develop those gifts.
Yancy started by distinguishing consistent agreements from punishment. I clarified that I meant doing something hard even when you don't feel like doing it.
He wasn't asking people to abandon that.
The way he described working with natural abilities was more about making thoughtful choices. Could a child's education support what they're naturally good at? Could you help them explore that earlier?
There was still room for boundaries and practice.
He used anger as an example. A child can be angry. That doesn't mean yelling at and blaming somebody else is the best way to express it. Parents can model saying what they feel without making another person the target.
Then we got to dishes.
Because eventually, even after you've found your zone of genius, the dishes are still there.
His answer was to get creative about how you do the necessary thing. Put on music. Listen to a podcast. Find a way to enjoy some part of it.
You still do the work.
And kids still need to learn the things they'll need to survive after they leave your home.
That distinction mattered to the question I was asking. Enjoying how you're built doesn't have to mean making discomfort the test for whether a task belongs in your life.
What happens at Casa Alternavida
By the end, I told Yancy that I actually agreed with what he was saying.
But if I nodded along without voicing the objections, those objections would still be living in my head after the call.
He understood. They were objections he'd had too.
Then I finally gave him some room to talk about the business and the book. We'd spent quite a bit of the interview turning it into a personal therapy session for me.
As of our September 9, 2026 conversation, he said Casa Alternavida had been open for about six years. Getting there hadn't been a neat process. There were hurricanes, a pandemic after opening, closure, and reopening.
It's a smaller retreat center designed to work with teams on communication, problems, and fine-tuning how they work together. It also offers solo retreats and hosts groups of leaders, including Entrepreneurs' Organization forums.
He likes going deep, but through adventure and time outside. The rainforest and the beach are part of the learning experience. Movement and being in nature are part of how he helps people notice things and practice a different response.
His book, Amplify Your Leadership, includes a conscious leadership assessment he described as taking about eight minutes.
The assessment is meant to help people notice where they may be less aware of their own patterns. He also acknowledged the problem with self-assessment: leaders may rate themselves higher than the reality.
So the point isn't to get a flattering score and declare yourself finished. It's to find something you can actually work on.
That brought us back to the same problem we'd been circling throughout the conversation. It's tough to change something you haven't noticed yet.
Questions to take into your own work
- What are you counting as success, and does the condition you're in get a place in that definition?
- When you keep pushing, is it because this task needs more work, or because stopping makes you feel less valuable?
- Which conversations are you avoiding while you swallow the frustration?
- What could a small, affordable break look like in the day you actually have?
- Which work brings out your best abilities, and what is one realistic change that would give it more room?
- Where are you treating discipline and caring for yourself as though you have to choose only one?
I didn't leave this conversation with a perfect percentage for work and rest. I did get to put the objections into words and hear somebody work through them with me. That's a useful place to start before the next task gets all 110 percent.
Watch the conversation and explore Yancy's work
Watch the full interview with Yancy Wright on YouTube
Yancy Wright: Amplify Your Leadership and his leadership work
Casa Alternavida: retreats and current program information
This conversation was recorded September 9, 2026. The links above lead to Yancy's current book and retreat information.