In this powerful episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez welcomes Yancy Wright, founder of Casa Alterna Vida, to dive deep into what it truly takes to design and deliver transformational retreats that create lasting impact. Yancy brings a unique blend of experience, insight, and purpose to the conversation—shaped by a journey that took him from burnout in the green building corporate world to leading over 500 retreats focused on wellness, connection, and transformation in Puerto Rico.

Yancy’s background includes a decade in sustainable construction, during which he held leadership roles and directed large-scale green building projects. His career was high-powered, but also high-stress—until a life-altering health scare led him to reevaluate everything. That awakening gave birth to Casa Alterna Vida, a retreat center that has become a hub for personal transformation, executive leadership reset, and corporate wellness. Yancy now partners with companies like Interface and the Ken Blanchard Companies to deliver results-driven retreats that blend emotional intelligence, nature, and conscious communication.

In this episode, Yancy breaks down the real strategy behind filling retreats with personal connection and corporate partnerships. He shares candid stories of how relying solely on ads and networks of friends simply isn’t sustainable—and how trust, authenticity, and leveraging existing relationships helped him build a thriving retreat business. Event leaders will appreciate the clarity and wisdom Yancy brings on how to create a full roster of ideal clients through meaningful engagement.

Next, Yancy and Rudy explore the art of designing transformational events with nature as a partner. Yancy reveals how nature is not just a backdrop—but a co-facilitator. Drawing from scientific studies and his own experience, he explains how environmental design, daylight, open-air spaces, and natural elements can improve memory retention, emotional resonance, and physiological outcomes for attendees. If you're designing events that aim to be immersive and impactful, this portion of the conversation is a goldmine.

Finally, Yancy speaks to the importance of driving long-term impact through conscious communication and sensory engagement. He details how activating all five senses—from scent to acoustics to touch—can elevate a retreat experience into something unforgettable. He also emphasizes the role of co-creation and shared dialogue during events, allowing participants to fully engage and internalize what they learn. Yancy’s approach doesn’t just change moments—it creates momentum that lasts far beyond the final day of the retreat.

This is an episode for retreat leaders and event visionaries who are ready to deepen their impact, expand their reach, and truly transform the way they facilitate experiences. Tune in to learn how to elevate your events into meaningful, high-converting, and high-retention journeys.

Want to connect with Yancy?

The Benefits of Integrating Nature into Team Retreats (blog): https://www.casaalternavida.com/post/the-benefits-of-integrating-nature-into-team-retreats

Website: https://www.casaalternavida.com/

LinkedIn (personal): https://www.linkedin.com/in/yancywright/?locale=es_ES

LinkedIn (business): https://www.linkedin.com/company/5011103/admin/dashboard/

Facebook (personal): https://www.facebook.com/yancy.wright/

Facebook (business): https://www.facebook.com/casaalternavida/?locale=es_LA

Instagram (personal): https://www.instagram.com/yancywright/?hl=en

Instagram (business): https://www.instagram.com/casa_alternavida/?hl=en

All right, welcome to today's episode. We have a special guest with us. Mr. Yancy Wright. Welcome, sir. Excited to have you on with us man and for those people who are watching the video, you have a lot of green behind you and I think that's intentional because you actually are in a retreat center that you are the CEO and owner of called Casa Alterna Vida here in Puerto Rico and you've done over the last 10 years. You've led over 500 various types of events and retreats for some pretty big names, including some big organizations like the CBRE which I had to ask what that was. It's like the world's largest real estate companies, one of the world's largest real estate companies, money group entrepreneurs, organization, young presence organization and the list goes on and on and on. You personally have also been certified in a variety of modalities. But this wasn't your whole life. For 12 years, you were actually a leader in the green building industry and you had a career burnout and almost had a near-death accident that changed your path into what you're doing today. So I think you have a really unique background and life experience and I'm super excited to have you as a guest and to get to learn your experience and best practice when it comes to leading highly profitable and impactful live events. We were talking in the green room here and one of the things that our audience tends to really lean into right away is, one, how do people fill events, and I know you've learned a lot in this area, a lot of lessons learned and you run very unique events in the sense where you have a retreat center.

You have corporate clients. I think it was virtual at the time, but drink over, you're working like Tito's Vodka and their clients. It's their customer, their employees and keeping them inspired. You have other corporations that bring their teams to your retreat center and you also have facilitated, led, which is so very unique and distinct things, but specifically the corporate side I think is really interesting, unique because people that run events often they don't think about like, hey, how could I get a corporate sponsor or corporate client to bring their team in? I think that would be really interesting if when you're ready to share that with us on this episode, but let's start off with maybe just hearing a little bit about what happened and what was that? That near-death experience that you had that put you on this path.

Thanks, Rudy. Yeah, it's interesting if any of the listeners have ever had a burnout experience. It's often that we don't realize we're burning out until we're already burnt. That's kind of what happened to me. I ended up in the ICU. My heart was stuck in atrial fibrillation and I was able to bring my heart rate down. But they weren't, I wasn't able to get it to reset. I stayed overnight and the next morning the doctors’ handing me a sheet of paper and she says, hey, we're gonna have to stop your heart. It may not restart. Sign here to not hold us liable. And I'm like, how the hell did I get to this place? Like what prompted this and so that was part of my wake-up call. I mean, obviously I'm still here. It shocked me once the heart stopped. They shocked me again. The heart was still stopped in the third time. It restarted. Obviously. I was not conscious. I did ask to be conscious for it, but they said I was crazy. That wouldn't be a good choice and you know, the reality was that I was working a lot of hours and probably the main culprit was the amount of pressure I was putting on myself to be able to perform. I had worked for, I was part of an owner in a very large construction company in Seattle and within that company, we started a smaller company based on the work. I was doing some green building, training, consulting work and just one thing after another things weren't going so well. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself. My inner critic was running really strong. I didn't have the right skills to be able to communicate consciously around sticky or difficult issues. So I was swallowing a lot of my frustration and just kind of communicating and leaky, unhealthy below-the-line ways. So in essence, I was self-induced because the doctors didn't have any other reasons other than because they're like, are you drinking a lot?

Are you doing any crazy drugs or like what's going on? What, because this is something that happens to them, typically in someone in their 80s and then the doctor's like, well, are you stressed out? And I'm like, I don't know. I mean nothing more than normal, but I think I had a lot of stress going on. It was many years of just working really long hours and not ever turning off. So that's kind of what got me into the burnout. I also lost a couple of loved ones unfortunately to cancer right around that same time period. So I took a sabbatical and during that time frame I just had this vision of like, wow, what would it be like? Because I had trained thousands of construction workers about green buildings and the importance of building more sustainably and trying to build that bridge such that it wasn't like an environmental agenda, but it was more about like, hey, how can we live more in harmony as humans within the environment that we have so that we're not destroying it? And I just realized that people ultimately don't care that much about the environment until they start to care or take better care of themselves and then see the intrinsic nature or intrinsic connection to nature which is it without it. We're not going to have fresh air without it. We're not going to have clean food sources without it. We're not going to have fresh clean water or our ability to survive. So I thought, well, wouldn't it be great to just create this place where people could disconnect from their stress and worries and they're overwhelmed and connect to themselves and connect to nature in a way that rejuvenates them? When I had that vision, I didn't really realize the level of depth that I would get into or the transformation process that I would go through in order to create what I finally created, but that's kind of how it started.

Holy smokes, man. That sounds like when it rained, it poured for you. It looks like you turned the corner on that one and then you moved in a different direction with your life and your business. Tell us a little bit about how you got into running these events, and one more thing I want to see for our audience here, in the green room we talked about the the power of nature, how you've been able to integrate nature along with events, and how that background in building those green spaces for your education, your career, how that has impacted your event business that you have now. I think that's just super unique and interesting. So kind of tell us about where that change took you and tell us a little bit about the events that you're currently doing. In a moment we'll talk about the lessons you've learned when it's come to filling your retreats and your events

Yeah, thanks. I had already been doing a lot of events in the green building industry because I had written some of the first curriculum for like green building safety, green building contractors. So I was already writing curriculum, creating educational events, and based on my background and based on working with contractors, I knew that they needed to be dynamic. Otherwise, they're just gonna check out. Kind of literally fall asleep because these are people that work in the field that build buildings. The last thing they like to do is sit for eight hours in a classroom. So I knew I had to make them super dynamic and interactive. So a lot of times I would create these trainings where we're doing them at a green building and we could actually walk around and look at the systems, like what is a living machine? Well a living machine is something that actually treats the wastewater that comes from the toilets through natural pools of water and plants and all this stuff and so rather than talking about it as a concept, we would use a place like island wood outside of Seattle or other facilities where they could see it and interact with it, or maybe they were buildings that we were actually building because we built a lot of, we built like first green, I worked on the first green buildings for Microsoft, the Amazon headquarters, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a lot of the first green healthcare projects in the pacific northwest like Seattle Children's Hospital, a lot of them really the first university projects as well so we could show them firsthand. From that when I started to think well, what about creating a retreat center for people? I started just doing retreats. My first retreat was probably 12 years ago now, maybe even 13 years ago, was in Seattle and I pulled together people and and what I learned is like the first few retreats that you do, the first in-person events that you might do, it's easier because you get your critical mass of your friends that want to support you.

But after you've worn them out a few times, it's then harder to get to continue to get people to show up. So those first people that came it was more about exploring this vision like what's it going to look like? I had this really big vision for it and so over time that vision sort of pared itself down because we had, that's a whole nother longer story, but I moved to Puerto Rico at some point and then started moving down the pathway of creating this physical space. But in the process just continuously doing events doing retreats, one retreat after another, to just keep learning from the process. But then I noticed that's where it really got hard to fill the retreats later on. After the first year or so, that difficulty I found was like, one, retreats are an extremely personal choice. There's a lot of options out there and people choose based on a personal connection. So if you're not maintaining and developing a personal connection, just running google ads, it can get you some interest but it's harder for people to want to commit to that from a cold perspective versus if they've heard from someone else or if they know you personally. So I realized over time that I needed to continue to build that momentum from that angle and just really give some deep opportunities for the people who did come to be able to spread the word and share and refer others to us.

Yeah, so I think you're hitting a couple points, big points here. One, when you get going, it's easy to kind of fill with friends and family. But it sounds like after a year, you kind of hit that wall of like having to figure it out and the importance of keeping that personal relationship and networking. You've done a phenomenal job. I mean, you've had some pretty major corporate clients. You're actually doing a retreat right now. I know you stepped away. You're supporting a retreat right now. I’d be curious if you can share with us about your experience and how you got into getting corporate clients and filling your retreats with corporate clients. I think that's a unique thing, experience that you've had that could be helpful for our audience to hear.

Yeah, thanks. That angle I would say came because that's where I was coming from. That's where I had the burnout from. So it's easy for me to attract people like me that have had a similar experience or have gone through a similar experience and then working with the corporate clients themselves. I was already doing quite a bit of consulting for other green building product manufacturers and I was already known in that interest industry. So some of my first clients were from that industry. Interface is one of the largest carbon tile manufacturers in the world and I've done I think about 26 or 27 retreats for them in Atlanta, Georgia, and so like it was because of those relationships. That's one of the things I always recommend for people wanting to branch out and shift their career. It's like, leverage what you know already. So that's what I did. I leveraged my relationships in the green building industry, I leveraged my experience from having a career burnout and then really focused on wellness. So for example, for Interface, I created this concept called a Healthy Lifestyle Design and that is like framing because they were bringing their customers, architects and interior designers, and I wanted to frame their lifestyle as if it were a design project where there's a project conception. There's like, schematic design, design development, construction documents and then construction. So I framed a lifestyle and put like little scenarios of people and in the aging process said, how many of you are intentionally designing your lifestyle as if it were a design project? Nobody ever said. They raised their hands and yes, but it was like, you should be, we should all be, because time runs out and that was my big wake-up call. After my career burnout is if life is short, how would I design my lifestyle different? So I curated and customized a retreat for this company such that they had like a 12X return on investment because those clients felt so deeply engaged with that experience and that shared experience with their salespeople, that their loyalty, their brand loyalty and their desire to continue to work with that company went way up.

Another interesting thing about that is just last, like three weeks ago, I ran into a guy and he's like, hey, you know what? I met you eight years ago in Atlanta and this guy lives here. He has a really successful architecture firm. And I was like, yeah, really? Okay. So tell me, what was it? He's like, remember the retreats you did and for Interface? He's like, I still prioritize buying their product over the competitors because I went to competitor events that they did, but yours was so deep and transformational that it just helped me feel more connected to that company. So there are so many different ways to move into corporate. I think what it is, is like I said, leverage your personal relationships because those are the relationships that people trust you and will let you try because this was definitely an outside the box thing. Because they trusted me, we did it and it worked really well. Then also, just maintaining your own personal experience that ties back to corporate. So corporate, they don't want to be having their people burning out, stressing out, like leaving. They want to retain their people if they're good people. So we've done a couple case studies as well with Blanchard. Blanchard is a learning and development company out of California,fairly large. They're known around the world. Ken Blanchard wrote a book called The One Minute Manager in the 1970s and they've got tons of other books, lots of really great curriculum that they teach mid-level managers. Well they were willing to do it. I've been doing executive coaching for them and some of their leadership development retreats, and they were willing to send a cohort for a case study of folks that applied, that might have represented some kind of stress, overwhelm or potential burnout. We did like a survey ahead of time and then we did one a couple months later.

But during their time here in the retreat, we also measured the physiological results. So a five-day retreat, we saw a 78% reduction in stress weight. What I mean by that is, like what's the invisible stress weight you're carrying? So 78% was reduced in five days. We saw a 44% improvement in cortisol levels which that rarely ever happens just from like a solid fitness and stress reduction program. We also saw an 8% reduction in blood pressure which again, that kind of reduction in five days is not typically seen. You can see a four to five percent reduction in a six-month mindfulness program but we're able to do that because of what we're combining. We're combining access to nature every day, a full-on wellness theme so they're eating really healthy, sleeping well, they're exercising, they're getting out in nature, and then the final layer which I think is the biggest, is teaching them conscious communication skills. The skills that I wished I would have learned so that when they do go back, they're able to move through that stress and overwhelm much more quickly, for them to see what they're not seeing about themselves and understand how they're creating their own experience so they can be more intentional about creating a different experience when they get back to work. So we did a return on investment analysis on that based on the survey information and we saw a pretty, I think there was a 7x return on investment based on what they spent to send their people out and what they were able to receive on worker retention, productivity innovation and collaboration. So those are a few examples of how to work with corporate in a unique and different way and now Blanchard sends a group every year and now they're talking about sending some of their own clients our way. So those, a lot of them are kind of a long game, but they're also clients I love, like I like working with them.

I feel really close to them and so it makes it easy to maintain those longer-term relationships and keep innovating and giving back to them so that the result of the retreat, not only it sends them people that are super fresh and and excited to come back to work and value their company, but the result is significant in the physiological benefits and the return on investment.

That's phenomenal, man. Thank you for breaking it down on that. That was big. I'm glad I asked that question because you've worked with some, not just corporate clients, but you work some very, very large corporate clients, are very reputable, The Five Minute Manager. It's a very well-known title. Blanchard's a very well-known name and clearly you're doing something right to not only have them come in as a client, but also to have them keep coming back year after year. So it sounds like you really created a great experience for people. So this is wonderful. I think this is worth note taking for anyone who runs events and they're figuring out, hey, how do I get some big corporate clients to potentially bring their teams to my live events for my retreats or my masterminds? Depending on the format that they're running. So I think this was gold. I'd love to transition a little bit more now into talking about what you do uniquely there at your retreat center. I know it's strategically placed in nature and one of the big opportunities that event leaders face, especially when running retreats, is how do they maintain engagement ultimately? How do we create the biggest impact possible in the time that we have with our attendees? So love for you to connect the dots. Share with us here how you correlate nature and your experience and how you integrate all that to have people get the biggest impact possible so they keep coming back year after year.

Yeah, so engagement based on impact, right? What I've noticed is I often think about all the events I go to and what made them boring, what made them an event that I wanted to leave. So my green building background would tell me, well, the space is everything. To begin with, how often do you walk into an event space and you just feel tired? Could be air quality, could be there's no windows, there's no doors. It could be a dark space. There's a lot of reasons why I can go into a space and just be like, how long do I have to sit here now? So the space is everything if you don't have daylight and views. So many people think oh, but they're gonna get distracted. No, they're gonna get more distracted if they're on their devices because they're checked out because they're not engaged. So the things that nature gives us, like there's all kinds of science. It shows how much being connected to nature increases endorphins, increases retention, increases the ability for people to create more meaningful connections. There's plenty of science that proves it's the opposite. I actually went to a high school that thought that windows would be a distraction. So there's like one window behind the teacher and no windows anywhere else in these classrooms and so at some point when I make enough money, I want to go back to my high school and sponsor putting windows back into the classrooms. In fact, if you look at Scandinavian health care systems, there's a two times faster patient recovery rate in the hospitals there and all of them have access to daylight and views and operable windows. So imagine fresh air, nature, a view. It sounds pretty simple, but it makes a big difference even for an event to have access to nature now.

The other part of your question was around engagement and what I like to do is engage, literally to ask questions. To ask like right off the bat, especially if I'm feeling nervous, I'll just let them know, wow, I'm feeling a little nervous and I'm curious. I want to get to know you a little better and I just drop a question because if it's a shared learning journey, then they're more engaged because they're actually owning part of the learning process. Through the interactive response to a question, and I know that for me personally, I get a lot more engaged if there's the back and forth rather than someone just standing up there speaking to me, speaking at me for an hour. I like to engage them and then even give them opportunities to interact with each other around the table. So I mean that's, it's oversimplified, but in a lot of ways like I would say, hey, how if you're putting together an event, how much are you engaging all the senses? Sense of smell? What I mean by that is like, is it a musty room that has bad air quality or is there like a simple simple essential oil that kind of calms everyone down? Or it depends on the theme of the retreat, but you can start to think about all the senses. How are people gonna feel in that environment? Is it super cold? Are the sounds too loud, or there's all these elements, are there nature sounds in the background that actually calm people down when they come in? Versus like, how up is the music or is there even music? I mean, I'm surprised often at how often you walk into a cold room and there's like no music going on. Music is a vibration

It sets the tone and it synchronizes the people that come in. So there's so many little elements that people forget that are part of engaging the senses that then cause people to be like, wow, that felt really cool. That was up asking appreciative inquiry questions so that the engagement is leaving on a note where people are excited and want to learn more. There's so many pieces to the engagement but the number one most important for me is my partner in nature because if I'm at the beach teaching a concept about getting people to be in their essence, or if I'm at the beach working with a team and helping them connect to their emotional intelligence and being able to feel more comfortable expressing emotions in front of each other as a team, and doing that in the waves in the ocean, hands down they're going to remember that so much better. I think The Institute Of Noetic Sciences created a study and they found that less than 20% of people will change a major behavior based on something they hear or read versus more than 80% of people will change a major behavior from a transformational experience. So that's what I'm up to. That's what I love doing is leveraging nature for transformational experiences that sink into the body, not just the head that people are learning from, their whole physiological experience.

That's awesome, man. Thank you for breaking that down for us here and I know that you're working on a book that should be published by the end of the year called Amplify Your Ripple Effect. Can you tell us a little bit more about that book and what people can, is something like the main points that you're making in that book, and how it associates with events?

Yeah, I have put together a book of a lot of the lessons learned, I'm sharing. Each chapter has a layering of personal story, nature as metaphor and then the science and research behind some of these things. But in essence, it's really about how can we become more conscious about the ripple effects we're creating just through our thoughts? People don't understand that just showing up and the thoughts that you have in your head are creating an invisible ripple effect and I'll break that down in the book around, how can that be proven through science? One example would be the music piece. There's a study that came out of a symphony and they hooked up the heart monitors to all the people playing in the symphony and they found in a short period of time they were all synchronized, that their heart rate variability or their heart rates were all synchronized together. Then they thought, well wonder what happens to the audience? They also found that the audience starts to get synchronized. So our thoughts create ripples, the sounds create ripples and we can either intentionally synchronize or we can intentionally create disruption and division and so I'm really interested in helping people learn and so this first part of the book is about you as an individual leader, what's the ripple effect you're making, unraveling a lot of the unconscious commitments that tend to block people from achieving what they really want. Middle part of the book is about how that ripple effect impacts a team or a culture and how to get more intentional about that and how entrainment works of bringing the synchronization into a process that entrains the team towards a shared purpose and movement. Then the third part of the book is helping people be more strategic about what I call ripplefication, the amplified ripple effect that lives far beyond us as individuals but inspires change that brings more harmony to the world, more kindness and reduces division. So that's kind of the purpose of the book. It's a leadership development book to really take people deeper into the subtle energy of how they show up.

Excellent. Thank you, man. Thanks for breaking that down and as we're kind of coming to a close on our interview here, for an audience who wants to learn more about you and about your retreat center, what is the best place for them to find you?

Yeah, I would just go to our casaalternavita.com website, casaalternavita.com. That website has, we've got some blogs that have decent information in there. I'm usually putting stuff up every to probably a month and then we've got the breakdown of the different types of retreats we do. If you're a retreat leader and you want to use our space or collaborate with us that's an option, or if you're just wanting to see what upcoming retreats we have or come as a solo retreat, we do provide solo retreats for executives in need of a reset.

Awesome, very cool. So we'll include the link to that website here with the show notes or somewhere around this recording. Also on the website, we'll include a link specifically to a blog post in there that you were recommending. Something along the lines of the benefits of integrating nature with team retreats. Want to say anything about that briefly?

It's just a short short article or blog but it just gets into a little bit of the science of like why take people out in nature because there's, like I said, there's so much misinformation about how it might be distracting or whatever, but it actually can really help people bond, especially around the idea of adventure and play.

Yeah, so that's going to be right here near the recording. It's about a four minute read. I highly recommend if you're considering running a live event and whether you're going to do it yourself or maybe even will reach out to Yancy or someone like Yancy who has a retreat center to do it, I recommend reading the blog and and think about the benefits of running your next event somewhere in nature and how that could increase not just your show up rates and your engagement, but also your sales or your retention, which is also a form of sales like keeping the clients you already have or the team members you already have if you're bringing a company. Yancy, as we wrap up here, rather 30 seconds or less, any final words of advice you have for our audience?

Just keep going. Keep going. It's worth it. If you're passionate about this work, just find that angle and stick to it. Keep going.

Appreciate it man. Thanks so much. It's been a great interview. It's been wonderful to have you.

Thank you, Rudy. Really appreciate it.