Max Schneider shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Hi Max, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
The first 90 minutes of my day are sacred. It’s my time to be slow, ground, and check in with myself free of distractions and inputs. So my mornings start with the sound of a physical alarm clock – not my phone. This way, I’m not rolling over and seeing notifications as soon as I wake up. I brush my teeth then start my morning mindfulness practice in my office, which is a quasi workspace/mindfulness room. I open my journal and write for 5-10 minutes every morning, jotting down whatever is top-of-mind. It’s a way for me to take inventory of where my mind is at in the morning, noticing the thoughts and emotions that are most present. After journaling, I meditate. Our experience of life is so dependent on where our attention is at any given moment, so meditation is my tool to train my attention every morning, which allows me to be more aware of how I choose to experience the rest of my day. Following my meditation practice, I do some dry brushing to wake up my body and tune into what it’s experiencing. Then it’s downstairs to open the house and begin preparing my breakfast. I’m super intentional with how I approach this part of my morning so that I engage each one of my senses. I open the blinds and greet the sun, I light incense, I turn on music, I pour a glass of water, and I listen to the soundtrack of it all. After I eat, I shower and get dressed, which brings the first 90 or so minutes of my day to a close. At that point, I’m fully tuned into myself and the day, ready to look at my devices and more mindfully engage with whatever is waiting for me.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I work with executives and leadership teams to live and lead more mindfully.
In a lot of ways, it feels like everything I’ve done in my career has led to this work. For the first 10 years of my career, I was in management consulting. It was a crash course in business and leadership. I was flying 200k miles/year, getting to work closely with senior leaders in huge corporations. Then, at the end of 2021, I burnt out hard. Shingles, anxiety attacks – the whole nine yards.
I took time off work to recover and it was my mindfulness practice that helped me the most. With that as inspiration, I started a company, Sand and Salt Escapes, where we run mindfulness retreats in Nosara, Costa Rica. As that work grew, I had leaders from back in my consulting days reach out and say, “Hey, what you’re doing is interesting – could you do something like that for our team?”
So we started running mindfulness retreats for leadership teams in 2022. After a couple years, it became clear that our corporate work needed its own space to properly grow, so I split it into a second company – Ritual Retreats – in late 2024.
Ritual Retreats curates mindfulness retreats for executive and leadership teams to connect with themselves and each other as human beings – which truly transforms how teams work together. We don’t do any strategy planning on our retreats. It’s not “team building” either – we don’t do things like trust falls. Instead, we’re engaging in things like grounding mindfulness practices, reflective conversations, and space to relax. We stay in stunning villas, bring in private chefs, and thoughtfully handle every detail so teams can simply show up and be present with themselves and each other.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What part of you has served its purpose and must now be released?
A lot of becoming who we are requires unlearning. From an early age, we’re told who or what we’re supposed to be. We tell ourselves stories that oftentimes are self-limiting. But underneath that societal conditioning and the stories we tell ourselves is who we truly are. For me, one of the biggest things I’ve had to unlearn is the idea that I have to “push” through everything. To be tough. To not show emotion. To suck it up and move on. Therapy has been one of the best tools for me to learn how to do that. I’ve learned how to actually tune in and feel things and how helpful it can be to do that. I’ve learned that when things aren’t going your way, the strongest thing isn’t pushing through, but slowing down and sitting with the hurt or pain. That’s where the growth happens.
Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
When I started Sand and Salt Escapes, I was starting a business from scratch in an industry I knew virtually nothing about. There were so many tough moments the first 18 months that pushed me to the edge. In particular, there was one retreat in 2022 that only had three people signed up just a week from the retreat starting. I didn’t know how I was going to run a retreat with three people. I remember lying on my bed, overwhelmed by anxiety, contemplating if I should just call it off. Thankfully, my wife believed in me even when I didn’t. Instead of folding, I dialed up our ad spend, made some changes to the copy, and we had multiple sign-ups in the week leading up to the retreat. It was such a good lesson that I’ve carried with me. In those moments when I want to give up or change course, I now have the confidence to go all-in – and that’s changed my trajectory more than once along my entrepreneurial journey.
Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What would your closest friends say really matters to you?
Relationships and intimacy. I don’t care for small talk. I like going deep and talking about the things that truly matter to people. I think it probably makes me a bit much at times, but that’s ok. I’d rather have fewer, deeper relationships than a lot of surface-level relationships.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. When do you feel most at peace?
In silence. We have so many distractions in today’s world that we rarely get prolonged time to stop the inputs and tune in – to ourselves, to the moment, and to life. So it’s important to me to create these settings consistently. I do it in small doses daily with my morning practice. I do it bigger chunks weekly by hiking 20+ miles or biking 50+ miles every weekend. I do it in 7-14 day trips a couple times a year by going to places like Joshua Tree, the Alps, or Nosara and fully disconnecting in nature. These periods of silence from the outside world help me stay grounded an in touch with myself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thisisritual.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwelaschneider/
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