About
Mike James
Creator of CRAVE
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, 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.
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’ve led
- Building a business from the beginning, including my own
- National mergers, bringing separate organizations together
- Selling a business built over years
- Periods of high growth, and periods of reduction
- National strategy for growing organizations
- Outside sales, inside sales, retail, and small teams
Practice & 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
That range runs the full distance: the people directly in front of me, the people I influence without authority, territory I lead without daily contact, and national strategy that has to work in every market.
The plan was there. The practice was missing.
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.
CRAVE is the framework. Simple Healthy Life is the organization behind it, providing the legal and organizational home for engagements, agreements, and payments.
What matters enough to practice for?
You may be preparing an organization for meaningful change, helping new leaders grow, building a team, or pursuing a personal goal. The goal gives you direction. The moments show you where to practice.