Why Every Entrepreneur Needs to Do This Retreat in Iceland
In a world that glorifies hustle, stillness feels like a risk. But that’s exactly why this Iceland retreat hits different. It’s not about escaping your life—it’s about stepping far enough outside of it to see clearly. With glacier hikes, cold plunges, and deep breathwork, this is less a getaway and more a wake-up call.
There’s no reception, no roles to play, no inbox to check. Just the wild, your breath, and the stuff you’ve been avoiding. The physical challenges aren’t there to break you—they’re there to strip everything back. What’s left is focus, clarity, and a version of you that’s been buried under the noise.
For founders, creatives, professionals, and anyone chasing something meaningful, this isn’t just a retreat—it’s a recalibration. It reconnects you to your vision, purpose, voice, and the energy to actually build what’s next.
You’ll know this retreat is for you if…
You’re crushing it but starting to feel burnout or emptiness creeping in.
You’re leading under pressure, knowing this can’t last without hurting your health or relationships.
You feel stuck and unsure how to get to the next level.
You’re always “on,” but missing presence, connection, and real energy.
You’re hitting big goals, but missing a real crew to celebrate with—where are your people?
If this sounds like you, this retreat was made for you.
Every retreat starts with a crossing. This one takes you back to yourself.
🌀 Inside the Breathwork Sessions: Where Clarity Replaces the Noise
Led by Joren de Bruin, our expert Lead Facilitator and Co-founder, who’s guided thousands of breathwork journeys and over 65 international retreats, the breathwork sessions here are next-level powerful.
The breathwork on this retreat isn’t about chilling out—it’s about getting real. Lying side by side in a quiet room, with immersive musical soundscapes setting the tone, you breathe fast and steady, clearing the mental fog. Before long, raw emotions start bubbling up—grief, frustration, fear, even sparks of creativity. No small talk, no ego. Just pure, unfiltered presence.
The breath cuts through everything you usually rely on to keep it together. For entrepreneurs, it hits especially hard. The need to control outcomes, push through fatigue, or constantly stay ten steps ahead—those patterns start to dissolve. What shows up instead is clarity, and often, a deeper sense of intuition. You stop thinking your way through and start feeling what’s actually true.
Afterward, group work builds on that momentum. You reflect with the whole crew, then dive into laser-focused hot seat coaching in smaller circles. It’s about connecting the dots in your own experience—and lifting others up as they do the same.
When co-founders or team members attend together, the dynamic changes fast. You don’t just talk about business—you see each other without the mask. In small breakout groups, you talk through your patterns: how you show up under stress, where you shut down, how you lead, how you show up in your body—tight shoulders, shallow breath, always bracing for what’s next. That physical awareness often lands first, especially for people who’ve spent years in their heads.
The reflections from others—especially those outside your usual world—hit deeper than expected. You’re not being fixed or judged. You’re being seen. That shifts everything.
The walls come down. Communication becomes real. There’s more trust, more listening, and a lot less performing. People start leading from presence instead of pressure—and the ripple effect goes far beyond the retreat. Some return home and shift how they run meetings—slowing down, listening more, leading with clarity instead of urgency. Others reconnect with family in a way they haven’t in years—more open, less reactive. For many, rushing and reacting too quickly with their significant other has created distance and a lack of intimacy. Slowing down and embracing stillness during the retreat becomes a bridge to deeper connection at home.
And it’s not just about teams. On an individual level, people break out of their own stuck cycles. The burnout loop. The pressure to constantly perform. The habit of reacting without pause. That’s where journaling comes in. It helps surface the deeper thoughts—the quiet truths that get buried in the chaos of daily life.
That’s where the breakthroughs happen. Not through grinding harder, but by finally creating space to hear what’s been there all along.
You don’t think your way to clarity. You breathe your way there.
❄️ The Physical Challenges That Strip the Ego
At first, the physical experiences feel like tests—cold plunges that knock the air from your lungs, glacier hikes with wind slicing across your face, and sweat lodge rounds so hot they bring people to the edge. Most come in thinking strength means powering through. But that mindset breaks fast out here. The cold doesn’t care how tough you are. The mountain doesn’t reward ego. These challenges strip away the need to prove anything.
Instead of pushing harder, people start listening. You learn the difference between discomfort that helps you grow and pain that disconnects you. Entrepreneurs used to grinding past their limits begin to tune in. They slow down. They start moving with intention. Not just with their own bodies, but with those around them. You notice who needs support. You check in instead of compete. What starts as a personal edge becomes a shared experience—one that rebuilds trust, strengthens awareness, and teaches you how to lead without force.
The cold breaks you open. The group holds what’s left.
🌍 The Power of the Environment
There’s something about Iceland’s raw landscape that hits immediately. The silence. The space. The way the wind moves through valleys with no signal, no traffic, no noise. It’s a sharp contrast to the everyday grind—notifications buzzing, calendars packed, decisions nonstop. This retreat is mostly phoneless, and that alone shifts everything. Without the constant pull to check in, you start checking in with yourself instead.
The cold sharpens your awareness. The remoteness forces you inward. Without digital distractions, thoughts get clearer—and so does your creativity. When you’ve been living in constant overdrive—burnout, imposter syndrome, and decision fatigue—this kind of stillness is a shock to the system in the best way.
Ideas that felt stuck suddenly resurface. Patterns you couldn’t see before start making sense. The land doesn’t ask anything from you, but it reflects everything back. It creates just enough pressure to stir something real. You don’t have to perform. You just have to be—and that’s where things start to shift.
Being immersed in untouched nature strips away the layers most people didn’t even know they were carrying. There’s no pressure to curate, respond, or stay “on.” You’re not reacting to the next thing—you’re present with the current one. That presence builds clarity and capacity. Entrepreneurs leave with more than insights—they leave with space. Space to lead better, create more intentionally, and actually hear themselves again.
You don’t just see the landscape. You feel yourself in it.
🧠 How Nervous System Regulation Unlocks Better Leadership
Most entrepreneurs operate with their nervous systems in overdrive—constantly scanning for problems, putting out fires, jumping between tasks, and reacting under pressure. This retreat shifts that baseline. Through cold exposure, breathwork, and presence-based practices, the body learns how to regulate. You practice staying grounded while sitting in glacial water. You slow your breath instead of panicking. You hold discomfort without reaching for distraction. And over time, that regulation becomes instinct.
The retreat centers your nervous system by pulling you out of constant reactivity and into embodied presence. It starts with removing the noise—no phones, no nonstop pings, no packed schedule. That alone helps your system begin to settle. Then come the structured physical practices: cold plunges to activate and calm the stress response, breathwork to move you from fight-or-flight into grounded awareness, and hikes or sweat lodge sessions that push you to feel fully present in your body.
Some of the most powerful nervous system shifts happen in the moments of total uncertainty—like sitting in the sweat lodge for six hours with no clock, no idea when it ends, and no way out but through. Or hiking through the cold with no map, no layers, and no clue how far you’ll go. Leaders who are used to rigid structures, set agendas, and controlling every variable are forced to surrender. There’s no optimizing, no predicting—only learning to be with what is.
It’s not about relaxing—it’s about learning to stay with discomfort without spiraling. You begin to feel what calm actually feels like in your system. And that carries over. You stop operating from urgency and start making grounded decisions with clarity. You don’t snap when plans change or freeze when things get uncertain. You communicate more calmly. You actually listen. Nervous system regulation doesn’t just make you feel better—it makes you lead better. You become someone who holds more, with less chaos. Someone who leads from presence—not pressure.
Regulate your nervous system. Lead with clarity—not chaos.
🌊 Emotional Range = Leadership Range
Most entrepreneurs are taught to lead with logic—stay focused, stay composed, keep emotions at arm’s length. Physically present—at work and at home—but emotionally distant. But if you can’t feel your own emotions, you won’t know how to support anyone else through theirs. This retreat cracks that open. Grief hits during breathwork. Fear surfaces halfway through a freezing hike. And in the sweat lodge—where the heat feels unbearable and silence stretches—someone might suddenly start laughing. Not because it’s funny, but because something deep has been let go.
As emotions move, something else opens too: your intuition. The part of you that sees clearly—not from stress or overthinking, but from presence. That’s where real leadership starts to shift. You move from leading with a reactive mind to leading from clarity, grounded in your body and guided by something deeper.
And once that happens, everything shifts. You stop treating emotions like a problem and start meeting them with presence. You learn to recognize what you're feeling instead of pushing it away. And when someone else gets overwhelmed, you don’t shut down or try to fix it—you stay. You know how to walk someone through their emotions because you’ve finally faced your own.
Emotional capacity and range don’t make you soft—they make you steady and available. You develop the capacity to stand in the fire and hold space for what’s real. It helps you navigate hard conversations, support others without losing yourself in the process, and make clear decisions when everything feels uncertain. You become someone others can lean on—not because you have all the answers, but because you’re not afraid to feel what’s real.
If you can’t feel it, you can’t lead through it.
🔄 Rewriting the Pattern of Doing More = Being Worth More
For a lot of entrepreneurs, self-worth is tangled up with output and performing. If you're not building, solving, or producing—you feel like you're falling behind. This retreat challenges that completely. There’s no schedule packed with tasks. No goals to hit. No one to impress. Just space. At first, that stillness can feel like failure—uncomfortable, confusing, like being stuck in survival mode. But eventually, you start to see what you’ve been avoiding by staying busy. From there, you can shift out of chronic survival mode and into a new baseline of authenticity, self-value, and empowerment.
You realize that staying in the freezing water the longest doesn’t make you a stronger leader. Sometimes, leadership means noticing someone else is struggling and getting out first to help them. Sometimes, it’s slowing your pace on a cold mountain hike so someone else doesn’t fall behind. You stop chasing what looks impressive and start tuning into what actually feels right. You focus on what feels best in your body, not what your mind says will earn praise or prove something to those around you.
The constant stress to prove yourself starts to unravel. You stop measuring your value by how much you endure—and start recognizing the power of presence, empathy, and choice. Slowing down doesn’t make you less effective. It makes you more intentional. You begin to see what actually matters and what’s just noise. And from that place, your leadership becomes clearer, steadier, and more deeply felt—by everyone around you.
Sometimes the bravest move isn’t doing more—it’s slowing down.
🫀 The Shift from Self-Reliance to Interdependence
Most entrepreneurs are wired to do it all alone. You build, solve, lead, and carry the weight—because that’s what’s worked. It felt safe. It got you here. But at some point, you start to feel the limits of doing it all alone. A part of you wants to grow—but another part keeps holding the reins. Asking for help often feels like failure, or at the very least, a risk. But on this retreat, that pattern unravels fast. After a freezing plunge, your hands barely work—and someone’s there, wrapping a towel around you. On a mountain hike, someone slows down so you’re not left behind. No one’s rewarded for pushing through. People notice, care, and quietly show up for each other.
And the roles you walked in with? They fall away. No one cares if you’re running a company or in between roles. In the lodge, on the hikes, during group work—it’s just people being real, and it gets more real with each new day. You see someone lend a hand in the kitchen without being asked. Someone else offers a song in a sharing circle. You provide for each other in different ways—sometimes through action, sometimes just by listening. That kind of mutual care isn’t forced. It’s natural. And it’s rare.
You learn that being part of a group doesn’t mean giving up your strength—it means using it differently. You offer help without fixing. You receive it without guilt. You stop performing. You stop hiding. And that shift—from self-reliance to interdependence—isn’t just supportive. It’s healing. It rewires how you lead, how you connect, and how you move through the world after you leave.
No one gets through it alone. And out here, you don’t have to.
🎉 Remembering How to Play
Yes, this retreat goes deep. But it’s not all breathwork breakthroughs and cold plunges. In between the intensity, something else shows up—fun. And for people used to chronic stress, burnout, and decision fatigue, that’s medicine. Someone throws on music after dinner, and suddenly there’s dancing. No agenda. No planning. Just movement, laughter, and people letting go. One night it’s a snowball fight under the stars. Another, a quiet soak in the geothermal hot tubs with new friends who already feel like family. Sometimes we gather for dance circles or someone picks up a drum or guitar and the whole room joins in.
Something shifts in those moments. People start bonding like they’ve known each other for years—hugging after a hard breathwork release, dancing like lifelong partners around the fire, cracking jokes in the kitchen while cooking dinner. You don’t just come for inner work. You come for human connection—the kind that doesn’t require a pitch deck or performance
This isn’t just downtime—it’s regulation, recovery, and reconnection. For entrepreneurs stuck in overdrive or young professionals feeling the weight of imposter syndrome, joy can feel risky. But out here, it’s safe to let your guard down. To be silly. To rest. To feel good without needing to earn it. You come to do the work—but you leave lighter, looser, and more alive. Because real leadership doesn’t just come from grit—it comes from being fully human.
Not everything has to be intense. Sometimes the breakthrough is just a shared laugh.
🪞More Than a Retreat—A Return
This retreat doesn’t hand you answers. It holds up a mirror. You come face to face with your patterns—how you push, how you lead, how you avoid. And instead of numbing out, you drop in. You feel more, speak more honestly, and finally stop performing. It offers an ever-evolving space—one that challenges you, deepens your self-reflection, and supports you in finding your own clarity and insight.
You leave with less armor and more truth. Not because the retreat fixed anything—but because it gave you the space to see what was underneath the noise. It helped you unlearn what no longer serves you—and return with the kind of courage and quiet confidence that lets you embody who you really are, and what’s possible from that place.
This isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about remembering who you were before the pressure, grind, insecurity, and the constant doing. And from that place, everything real begins.
The landscape holds still, so you finally can too.
