LeadersConnect Presents Life Lessons from Three Adventures

From cycling across continents and summiting the world’s peaks to navigating remote Arctic roads, our speakers share powerful stories of resilience, curiosity, and leadership. Discover how lessons from the world’s wildest places can guide us in business, life, and community.

Brook Black - Has spent most of her adult life traveling. She’s worked as a long-haul truck driver, a housekeeper in Denali and New York City, a lunchlady in Antarctica, and a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher in Malawi. She’s also thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and the Long Trail, ridden a bicycle across America and around Ireland, and traveled through all of the lower 48 in a Ford Transit with her husband. She’ll discuss her “memoirette,” 8 Continents, which tells the story of how she rode a bicycle on every continent.  

Michael Samuelson - Michael Hayes Samuelson is an award-winning author, photographer, entrepreneur, and global mountaineer whose work has been featured on ABC, CNN, and in The New York Times and The Lancet. A cancer survivor and U.S. Air Force veteran, Michael has summited peaks on five continents—adventures that inspire his leadership framework, The 10 Steps to the Summit. His career includes university teaching, health policy advising, and leading population health companies, earning endorsements from leaders like President George H.W. Bush and former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. Michael’s talk, Life Lessons from a Life of Adventure, combines gripping stories with practical insights to help audiences tackle their own “summits.”

Dr. Eric Fretz - Recently completed a month long road trip in an off-road vehicle, traversing 11 states and 6 Canadian provinces, on some of the most remote and challenging “roads" on the continent, to reach the northernmost inhabited settlement in North America, and swim in the Arctic Ocean. Tuktoyuktuk is an Inuit settlement that has been on the Arctic coast for over 1000 years.  It has had a road to it for only the last few years. Dr. Fretz will share lessons learned and amazing photos from 12,000 miles of rustic animal-filled adventure.