Michelle Nyrop on Minnesota nice, Grounding wisdom, and the Leaping flights.

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 making you strong

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Transcript

The Mountain in Us Podcast

Guest: Michelle Nyrop

Host: Taran Singh

Taran: Welcome to The Mountain in Us, a podcast where the journey gets its voice. I am Taran Singh, your host. Here we greet the thrill, the courage, and the sense of our uncharted adventures. Today my guest is Michelle Nyrop, a lucky girl with wings, dreams, and an insatiable desire to do good. Welcome to The Mountain in Us. We are grateful to have you here to share your remarkable trails, triumphs, and detours with us.

Michelle: Thank you, Taran. I'm super excited to be here and spend some time with you. I love that we get to talk about things that are really near and dear to me—my Minnesota Nice, and how that's led me on this incredible journey filled with grit and grounding myself in wisdom along the way.

Minnesota Nice and Early Adventures

Taran: We're going to dive right into Minnesota Nice. I know you left your small town in Minnesota at age 20 to study abroad. Where did that wanderlust originate? What made you leave that small place?

Michelle: I grew up in a very small town—there were a hundred people in my graduating class. I've traveled a lot, but it all started with this desire to get outside of my space. When we talk about Minnesota Nice, it's not about naivety. Don't ever confuse Minnesota Nice with naivety. It's also not about being afraid or fearful of conflict. To me, Minnesota Nice is this innate desire to engage. I'm the one walking down the street saying good morning and hello to everybody. It's this desire to learn from people, to talk to people.

My mom and dad never traveled far when I was a kid—we never left the Midwest. But they would put my sister and me on the back of their Harley Davidson motorcycles and off we would go. I feel like that wanderlust came from that desire to get on the open road. We would ask, "Where are we going?" And my mom and dad would say, "We're going crazy," which was so annoying as a kid because you can't ask "Are we there yet?" if there's no destination.

What I've reflected on as I've grown up is how important that concept of "we're going crazy" has been to me. It's this open-ended desire to go somewhere—the destination doesn't even matter. Get out and experience, get out and explore.

Two weeks before I left to study abroad in the UK, my parents drove to Minneapolis to see what an airport looked like. We didn't have a lot of money, we didn't travel, so that was a really big deal. They drove to the airport to see what it looked like before they put their eldest daughter on an airplane and sent her off.

That began my never-ending quest to get out into the world and engage with people. I'm blissfully married to a Minnesota Nice husband, and still to this day, we're the two walking in the streets of Tokyo or Hyderabad or New York City, smiling and engaging, saying good morning to everyone, chatting up the cab driver, the bartender.

When you think about wisdom, it's not about being smart and teaching and telling—it's about being open and listening and learning. It's amazing what I've learned from cab drivers, from bartenders, from someone sitting next to me on a bench in a park.

Taran: Do you think that growing up in a small town where everybody knows everybody shaped your outlook? That when you expanded your world, you didn't care how big it became—for you it was still your small town?

Michelle: I think so. It's always about your parents—you would treat the person busing your table at a restaurant as well as you would treat your pastor or teacher or boss. They're my community, and you can't unlearn that. That's just who you are.

I always feel bad for people who boast about traveling the world. You can be a tourist or you can be a traveler—they're very different things. If you're a tourist, people are there to serve you. That's not how I see people. When I'm out in the world, I see them as people I want to better understand, people I want to know.

As an HR professional, that served me exceptionally well. You're not necessarily smarter than the people you coach and support, but you've seen more patterns—patterns of human relationships. You watch the patterns, see what works and doesn't work, and use those learnings. Wisdom is about experiencing the world, paying attention to what you're seeing and hearing, putting it in your pocket, and knowing what those patterns look like. The genius is knowing when to pull out what, knowing what to use when to support the people you're coaching.

The Journey to HR

Taran: As you were flying out of Minnesota, looking down at all those 10,000 lakes, were you seeding your dreams? Were you always in HR? How did that journey come to life?

Michelle: My career choices happened later. What that flight did was seed the skills I was going to need. It also made me a little fearless. I remember flying away from Minnesota—exhilaration, excitement. I loved the idea of reinventing myself. Then it turned into fear. I thought, "What have I done? This is a very different place." Look, England is about as not different as you can get to the US, but for a 20-year-old, it was a big deal.

I took multiple planes, a train, a bus, finally made it to my dorm room, flopped on the bed, and cried for hours. Then I sat up and went, "Huh. I can do just about anything." I hadn't really been tested before. The beauty of a small town is it's a pretty safe little place.

What that experience did for me after I chose HR was help me say yes when someone said, "Would you like to go do HR in Hong Kong?" Without that experience, I wouldn't have had the courage to pick up my family and move to Hong Kong and try to do my craft there.

I fell into HR because I realized I could have a bigger impact than in any other job—you can touch more people. I've been able to touch 70,000 people as an HR professional. To test myself in Hong Kong where everybody was different—all those patterns I'd learned were different now. I had to learn a different language of connections. We didn't listen to the same music, we didn't understand the same humor. In order to connect with people there, I had to learn new things.

I rely on stories and I'm a pretty funny gal, but none of that was going to work there. I had to figure out how to connect with people, how to get them to respect me, how to better understand them so I knew how to motivate them.

Building Resilience

Taran: Talk to us about the tough moments. HR can be brutal when you have to make tough decisions. How have you built that resilience and still maintained heart and not become an autocratic HR person?

Michelle: It's not easy. I've had a love-hate relationship with my Minnesota Nice my whole life because people misunderstand it—they think I'm not tough, that I can't do hard things. You actually have to work harder when you have a demeanor like mine to make sure people know you can make tough decisions and deal with difficult people.

There's a saying that perfection is the enemy of progress. I think that's true, but I also think—particularly as an HR person—altruism is the enemy of progress. You start as a young person very altruistic about how the world is and should work. There's right and wrong, good and bad. I've had to continually reroot those things in my life.

You start with a box of tolerance of what you think is okay. Over time, if you don't shift that box, you become deeply ineffective. My experience in Hong Kong taught me that I am not personally the arbiter of right or wrong, good or bad, rude or not rude. My ideas of what those things are aren't the world's ideas. When you're living in someone else's culture, you have to understand there are different shades of what things look like.

In order to make an impact, you've got to be less altruistic. It doesn't mean I don't have high standards for myself and for integrity. There are still lines on that box, but the box has expanded.

Taran: Is there a particular story that changed your perspective?

Michelle: I was at a speaker series where we had a senior female leader who'd had a big, difficult job for the government working with dictators and difficult people. Someone asked, "How could you work with those people?" almost in an accusatory way. Her answer was brilliant and stuck with me: "What if I wouldn't have?"

If you're so altruistic that you can't work with those people, you walk away, and the situation never gets better. I've had times working with really not great leaders—people I didn't look up to, who didn't meet my personal values—but my job was to support them, and they impacted tens of thousands of people. I would walk in knowing I can't fix that person, but I can make it better every day.

That grit and resilience has really looked like: How can I keep making it better? Whether it's a person, a problem, an organization, or a situation—can you go into it with the notion that you're going to make it better?

My Minnesota Nice helps because I can say really difficult things to you because you trust me. Your guard's not up because I'm not coming at you without a relationship. I'm going to lower the hammer and have a hard conversation, but you'll know it's rooted in honesty and care.

I've had people say they wouldn't give me a job because they need people who can break glass, who are tough. That's okay. But most people figure out I'm tougher than almost all of them—it just doesn't look the same as everyone else. Coming at the end of my career 30 years later, I'll say it's been way more blessing than curse.

Creating Connections

Taran: We met at Gap, and you brought people from different threads together to create an environment where we could do more than we imagined. How did this magic develop in you?

Michelle: If only I knew! It's funny you say selfless, because I always say: be wary of the mentor who thinks it's a selfless act, because it's not. Someone told me last week, "I feel like I'm getting so much—what do you get out of this relationship?" I said, "You're wrong. It's probably selfish if anything." What motivates me is the engagement. I get as much out of it as anybody else.

For at least the last 10 years of my career, I've carved out a particular percent of every week to meet with people I don't currently need to get my job done. You could easily fill your calendar with people you need to transact with, but I always find time to meet with people—you're sowing seeds. Maybe someday they'll help you get work done, but that's not why you're meeting with them.

Sometimes you help them solve things, sometimes they help you solve things, sometimes you just catch up and talk about the weather. At the end of the day, you're extracting—that's where wisdom comes. Those are the seeds that sow wisdom if you're smart enough. You don't have time when you're just transacting because you're just getting stuff done, not taking time.

I'm pretty Type A. If I'm transacting, I don't want to talk about the weather or your kids—I'm pretty efficient. But I want the engagement. I want to carve time out and have it just be about that. The things I've learned from people doing that are pretty significant.

I love that there are people I can point to doing things they never would have done—a merchant at Gap who's now the head of diversity and inclusion for a massive global company because of conversations we had. What could you want more in life than to be part of that? That feeds my soul. There's nothing selfless about that.

Traveling with Mom

Taran: You recently traveled with your mother to Scotland and Ireland. How was that feeling—now traveling together through those gates you once passed through alone?

Michelle: It was one of the biggest reasons I decided to step away from corporate life and spend more time with my family. My mom always says she lives vicariously through me. She's been able to travel because I've lived in different places around the globe. She's been to the Taj Mahal even if she's never been there, because she was on my phone. I love to bring her with me because so much of who I am I get from her.

She's the most willing, wide-eyed participant. She doesn't take herself too seriously, she doesn't have an agenda—she's just ready to hop on the train and come with me. Experiencing it through her is such a blessing.

I love the spillover effect. I feel so fortunate for the career and life I've had, and what that's meant for people like my mom, who's gotten to experience the world when she never would have otherwise. For my son, who speaks fluent Mandarin because he went to school for a few years—that spillover effect keeps growing.

My mother grew up on a farm, went to a one-room schoolhouse with first through eighth grade all together. If I think, "Wow, I never expected my life to turn out like this," imagine what it feels like to her. It was absolutely a blessing.

Taran: Was there a particular spot or moment that you'll remember forever?

Michelle: It took me a while to learn how to slow down. I've really come to appreciate the very quiet moments—not the big moments. Sitting on the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, you just feel like a tiny speck with the sea and the cliffs and the waves. Just sitting there quietly, the sun came out for a minute, there was a rainbow. We were sitting on these beautiful cliffs together, and I remember feeling really grateful.

To me, it's not the splashy stuff—it's those quiet moments where you remind yourself, "Gosh, I'm so grateful for this moment."

Final Words of Wisdom

Taran: Before we close, anything you'd like to share with the audience?

Michelle: I never have regrets because if anything had gone differently in my life, good or bad, I wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation with you. And I would hate that—I love where I am right now.

But I wish I would have been better at not worrying so much earlier in my life. A good friend turned me on to a Chinese proverb when I was living in Asia, and I'll paraphrase: 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.

The bird doesn't care if the branch can break—it will fly to another branch. The world is always changing. Your job can change, your situation can change, but just focus on your flight. Focus on what's making you better, what's making you stronger, what's preparing you, what's giving you strength.

Don't worry about your job—jobs will come and go. Worry about your flight. What's making you stronger? What's giving you more utility? What new experiences can you have? What new people can you connect with that will make you stronger? All of those things will make you not worry.

The minute I stopped worrying, the freedom that came with that—I was doing the best work of my life, I was a better partner, a better parent. I think about my journey now like a bird flying from tree to tree. Some branches I landed on were strong and wonderful, and the hard part was leaving them because they were comfortable. Some were scary—I got into situations where I thought, "I'm not good at this, I don't think I can do this job." And it was okay too.

Taran: Thank you for gracing us with your wings, dreams, and grounding perspective. It was so nice to have you on the show, and I look forward to further conversations. Thank you, Michelle.

Thank you for joining us on The Mountain in Us podcast. Each episode is crafted with love, adventure, and reflection. We hope you enjoyed this one and welcome your thoughts. If you want to be on the show, feel free to reach out.