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In this touching episode of The Mountain in Us, host Taran Singh interviews HR veteran Michelle Nyrop to share how her small-town Minnesota background influenced her impressive global career. Growing up in a town with only 100 classmates, Michelle describes her personality as ”Minnesota Nice”—not naive or conflict-averse, but driven by a natural eagerness to connect with others. Her parents, who rarely traveled, would take Michelle and her sister on Harley Davidson rides without a destination, often responding to ”Where are we going?” with ”We're going crazy.” This carefree approach to exploration laid the foundation for Michelle's outlook. At 20, she flew to England for her first study abroad experience, and upon entering her dorm, she ”flopped on the bed, cried for hours, and then sat up and thought, 'Huh. I can do just about anything.'” That moment of bravery empowered her to undertake future challenges, such as relocating her family to Hong Kong to work in HR within a different cultural environment.

Michelle's approach to wisdom and leadership focuses on observation, engagement, and learning from everyone she meets. She states, ”Wisdom isn't about being smart and teaching and telling, it's about being open and listening and learning.” Over her 30-year HR career, which has impacted 70,000 people, she made time each week to connect with individuals outside of immediate work needs, believing that ”those are the seeds that sow wisdom if you're smart enough.” She rejects the idea that her mentorship is purely selfless, asserting that engagement nourishes her soul: ”What could you want more in life than to be part of that?” Her Minnesota Nice personality has been both a strength and a challenge, as some mistook her warmth for weakness. She learned to use it to her advantage, noting that ”I can say complicated things to you because you trust me. Your guard's not up because I'm not coming at you without a relationship.”

A pivotal insight in Michelle's career came from attending a speaker series where a female government leader who had worked with dictators was asked how she could work with such awful people. The leader's response—”What if I hadn't?”—transformed Michelle's thinking about altruism and impact. She realized that ”altruism is the enemy of progress” and that walking away from difficult situations or people means they never improve. This led her to work with leaders who didn't align with her personal values, knowing, ”I can't fix that person, but I can make it better every day.” Her experience living in Hong Kong taught her another crucial lesson: ”I am not personally the arbiter of right or wrong, good or bad, rude, not rude.” She learned to expand her ”box of tolerance,” understanding that cultural differences require flexibility and that effectiveness demands moving beyond rigid altruistic ideals while maintaining core integrity.

Michelle's recent decision to step away from corporate life to travel with her mother to Ireland brought her journey full circle. Reflecting on the woman who once drove to the Minneapolis airport to see what it looked like before sending her daughter abroad, Michelle now creates experiences her farm-raised mother never imagined possible. Sitting together on the Cliffs of Moher with a rainbow appearing overhead, Michelle felt profound gratitude for ”those quiet moments where you remind yourself, 'Gosh, I'm so grateful for this moment.'” She closed the conversation with wisdom from a Chinese proverb she learned in Asia: ”A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not in the branch but in its own wings.” 

For Michelle, this captures her entire philosophy—don't worry about jobs or circumstances that will inevitably change, but rather ”focus on your flight. What's m

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