Mike James
Creator of CRAVE
From Mike
I created CRAVE because I believe you can practice how you want to show up.
Most people I meet care deeply about something.
They want to lead well, build meaningful relationships, accomplish important goals, support the people around them, and become someone they can trust when life asks more of them.
The challenge is rarely a lack of information. The challenge appears in the moment when fear, pressure, resistance, emotion, or uncertainty becomes part of the experience.
I created CRAVE because I wanted people to have more than an idea they could remember. I wanted them to have a framework they could use, tools they could carry, and practices they could return to when the moment became real.
You do not have to become someone entirely different. You can strengthen the human skills you already possess. You can learn, practice, apply, receive feedback, refine, and repeat.
Over time, each repetition creates evidence. Evidence that you can begin. Evidence that you can recover. Evidence that you can have the conversation. Evidence that you can be present. Evidence that you can call on the skill again.
My hope is that CRAVE helps you show up for the big moments, the small moments, the difficult moments, the beautiful moments, and the moments that matter most to you.
The moments are already here. Let’s train for them.
Mike James · Creator of CRAVE
Where this comes from
I have led people through the moments I now train people for.
Two decades of leading and building organizations, alongside a practice life of wrestling, yoga, breathwork, and mindfulness training. CRAVE is what happens where those two meet.
What I have led people through
- Building a business from the beginning, including my own
- National mergers, and bringing separate organizations together
- Selling a business they had spent years building
- Periods of high growth
- Periods of employee reduction
- National strategy for growing individual organizations
- Outside sales, inside sales, retail, and small teams
Practice and performance
- Certified yoga instructor
- Breathwork practice
- Completed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, UMass
- Wrestling background
- Coached youth and adult sports
- Founded Simple Healthy Life in 2016
- Created and opened R_Labs, a contrast therapy location
Leadership, at every distance
Direct
The people in front of you
Indirect
The people you influence without authority
Territory
Teams you cannot see every day
National
Strategy that has to work in every market
I know how a small business actually runs, and how a large national organization actually operates. They ask different things of a leader, and they ask the same thing of a person.
Every one of those is a Gap. A merger is a plan on paper until someone has to tell a team what it means for them. A reduction is a spreadsheet until someone has to sit across from a person and say it out loud. Growth is a forecast until a new leader has to hold a room they have never held before.
I watched talented, committed people arrive at those moments with the strategy in hand and nothing prepared for the human part.
The plan was there. The practice was missing.
On a mat, in a gym, or on a breath, nobody expects a skill to arrive because you understood it. You drill it. You get corrected. You do it again tired. So I asked a question I could not put down. What if we trained human skills the same way?
CRAVE is the training I wish we had walking into those rooms.
The organization behind CRAVE
CRAVE is part of Simple Healthy Life.
CRAVE is one of the training experiences offered by Simple Healthy Life, which provides the organizational and legal home for the work.
Organizational engagements, individual training experiences, agreements, payments, and privacy practices connected to CRAVE are all provided through Simple Healthy Life.
CRAVE is the framework. Simple Healthy Life is the organization behind it.
The conversation continues
What matters enough to practice for?
You may be preparing an organization for meaningful change, helping new leaders grow, building a team, pursuing a personal goal, strengthening a relationship, or learning how to become more present for the life already happening around you.
Whatever brought you here, the next step begins with recognizing what matters and the moments that may shape what happens next.
The goal gives you direction. The moments show you where to practice.