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Amidst the chaos and darkness of the world, let positivity and attitude be the light that guides you towards excellence. In season 3 of the Get Attitude podcast, host Glenn Bill is determined to ignite your mind, heart, and attitude with some of the biggest and greatest coaches in America. In this episode, Glenn welcomes Gary De Rodriguez, CEO of Peoplelistic, to discuss how you can become excellent at what you do. With over 30 years of experience in psychology-based systems of success, Gary has coached some of the most successful people in the world. And today, he’s going to share the gold nuggets with us, too. Gary touches on trauma, and how it is the root to our behaviors and unhealthy patterns that deny us our legacies. He talks about seeing ourselves in our core, and working our way towards the path of personal and professional success. He talks about the journey of finding our purposes and pursuing them, including the frustrating stumbling and failing parts. Gary shares many wonderful insights on life and his perspective on how we can all live better lives because we deserve them. Gary encourages people to get the attitude to start taking control of our lives. Tune in and learn how to ignite your heart, mind, and attitude.

Go to https://garyscourse.com/ and use promo code: EMPOWERED100 for $100 off the course.

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Listen to the podcast here

Building An Attitude Movement: How To Become Excellent At What You Do With Gary De Rodriguez

You better buckle up because we have one of the biggest and greatest coaches in America that is ready to give you some wisdom, especially your people who are leaders. A lot of you guys are like, “I’m not a leader.” Trust me, you better be leading yourself. When this gentleman is talking, he has coached some of the most successful people I have known in my life. He has been recognized and is an internationally acclaimed expert in the science of human excellence and is known as the People Mechanic.

Gary De Rodriguez has many years of career in designing and integrating the most effective models of psychology-based systems of success in leadership, human behavior, communication, and team dynamics. If you are an employee, employer, team member, or if you are curious about how to become excellent at what you do, I’m going to deliver for you, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Gary De Rodriguez. Welcome to the show.

Glenn, how are you?

It is good to have you here. We are excited to have you and tap into the wisdom that I know you are going to bring. We always love to start our show by asking simple questions. What is your definition of attitude and who was your first attitude coach?

My definition of attitude is to stay focused on what you are choosing to create rather than what has been created in the past. If you stay focused on where you are going, you take all the neurological connections in your body, all the trillions of them, and directionalize them towards that particular end result. It is important to focus on where you want to be, not where you have been. Wisdom from the past, bring it forward, collapse it into now, and focus on what you want to create next. If you stay there, you will begin to achieve amazing results.

Are you staying focused on the present?

Absolutely. From this point, you have to know where you are first before you can determine where you are going to be. Define this first, which is all the wisdom from the past, and focus on what your legacy is going to be and where you desire to evolve from who you are now to who you desire to be.

Tell me about who helped create this guy, Gary De Rodriguez. Who was your first attitude coach when you said, “I’m in the place that I need to be?” This was several years ago. How did you get there?

I’m going to share a bit of a personal story because I didn’t get here through an attitude coach. I got here by finding something intolerable. Many times, when you are looking for your purpose, people are like, “What is your passion? Where do you want to be? What is your dream?” That is true, and purpose can be defined by what you find intolerable. I launched my career at the onset of the AIDS community and the AIDS crisis.

When that all occurred, I found it intolerable that no one was doing anything. I put together the first AIDS educational seminar and brought down legislators from Sacramento and immunologists from all the major hospitals. We began to do free events, educating the general public on what was known at that time. I ran a rebirthing program. I taught a spiritual support group called The Course of Miracles. That turned into an organization called HARP, which became federally funded across the United States.

Tell us a little bit about HARP. What does it stand for? What did it do?

Holistic AIDS Response Program. We offered multiple free services to people that were infected, their friends, and their families to lend them support. That is how I launched. My whole thing was, how do you get people a resolution in a short period of time? If you were diagnosed, you were a skeleton in three months. How do you get people a resolution in three months? They did not have time for psychotherapy. They had to get results fast. The fastest way to do that is to work with a subconscious mind. I launched my career studying accelerated change techniques to get people results quickly.

What are some of the keys, maybe a 1, 2, and 3, on how to accelerate your results?

I was teaching a class to some international students of mine. They asked me this question about setting your mindset and your language. We understand that. It is about setting your goals and going forward. I said, “If you are trying to shift beliefs and you have lots of evidence gathered from multiple experiences throughout your life, this one limiting belief has years of evidence that your nervous system has gathered about it.” You go, “I’m going to shift my belief because this is what I would prefer.”

My premise was you could not shift a limiting belief by claiming it and doing affirmations. It won’t work. It is like laying silk over a pig. It is not going to fly. We go into a process called some modalities, which is how to begin to start creating, using the language of the brain, and how to start being able to create deep belief change work using that particular system. You have to go to the next level down, Glenn, which is, how did that belief get formed?

Think about it this way. From the beginning of our lives, we had key significant experiences that happened. Sometimes traumatic, sometimes not traumatic, but key significant experiences. From those experiences, because we are meaning-making creatures, we create a constellation of beliefs around each one of those experiences. That begins to formulate from birth to seven, this deep unconscious aquifer on how we see the world, the perceptions we carry, and how we interpret the world around us based upon that.

When you start looking at how we created us to be us, it is like opening up the owner’s manual. You have to go first to, if those key significant events are loaded with unresolved negative emotions, what impact is that going to have on my life? Am I carrying around this luggage behind me that I don’t even understand anymore because it is unconscious and created long ago, but it was a foundation of what created you to be you? A lot of times, people will run toward their goals. They don’t achieve them because there is so much luggage they are dragging behind them that has self-sabotaging patterns that occur.

A lot of times when I work with people, it is like, “Let’s do a little bit of cleanup before we start running towards the finish line.” We can get there much faster and cleaner with less drama and trauma because no one likes to stumble and fall running towards their goal. They stumble and fall oftentimes because they are self-sabotaging patterns in action. Those are always because of the incongruency between what you got and what you are carrying with you. I have this thing of, “Do the cleanup first.”

What are the three most important questions that people should ask themselves?

Number one is, what is my purpose? What am I here to do? That defines everything. The next would be, what has been stopping me? The next is, how important is it for me to achieve this? What are the results if I do not?

What is your purpose? How do you help people find their purpose? My guess has many years in the coach’s chair. They go, “This is my purpose.” You go, “It is not your purpose. We got to do some more cleaning up.” How do you navigate through that question, “What is your purpose?”

Life leads through the circumstances that are presented before us. There is this great, incredible matrix rolling itself out. We find ourselves in certain positions in our conscious mind, like, “I’m not choosing this.” The end result is, if you look in hindsight, it has a certain level of perfection to it all along.” If I looked at my life, I grew up in a highly dysfunctional family with a bipolar mother that was alcoholic and drug addicted. I had a lot of trauma as a consequence. I spit my life looking at, “How do I heal myself?” I went through a long period of drug addiction. There were rape, molestation, and drug addiction in my life. I thought, “How do I heal from this and create what I know is percolating inside of me?”

As I looked at all of the pain and anguish that I watched my family live through in myself, I began to start looking that I had to find an answer to how to unravel this and what caused that back there. While I went on the quest to do that, and the AIDS crisis happened, I went like, “Here is a whole other demographic of folks that are being completely thrown to the side. They need desperate help.” I could not go and be a tech guy or a professor at a university. I had to look at what my life had molded me to experience and start looking for answers there.

I believe life leads us. I’m in the process of writing a book that is all about how to heal trauma because that is the birthplace of our limiting beliefs, all of our blockages, and even our core values. When we are able to get to the core of it and begin to start working there, what happens is we start to be able to discover not from like, “This is what I’m choosing my purpose to be. However, this is what life has led me to undeniably see and begin to start going, ‘This is what my heart unequivocably wants to devote itself to. It is how to help people crawl out of that particular space.’”

When you talk about HARP, it is a nationally-funded government program that started with you.

There were four of us.

Did you think that was going to happen, or did life lead you? Many people who are reading were like, “I got the idea. I’m going to change the world. Me and my three people, we got to help X and Y. We know we can do it.” You are a guy that did it. What is the difference? What do you say to those people who have a noble idea that may be well thought out but feels like, “I’m not getting the traction and not everybody thinks this is cool as me?” What was your advice to you several years ago?

My advice to me years ago would be, “You never quit.” I will go a little 1960s on you here. Your purpose is something that is more of a spiritual purpose. If you look at Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs, the top human need before he died was a level of spirituality. What I mean by that is not religion. It is like, “Where and what do I belong to that is larger than me? What is my impact in this larger system in which I belong?”

When we start asking those questions, it is vitally important that we look and how we begin to start moving that forward and define it for ourselves and have it be more of something that we can’t live unless we do that. Unless we have that thing accomplished, how can we go on? How can we feel any sense of satisfaction and deep reward? Most people live a life that, at points in life, they are looking at and going, “There is something missing.”

Everyone in the audience now asks themselves, “Are we doing what our heart is here to do? Are we doing what we feel our actual spiritual purpose is? Are we doing it?” It always is going to revolve around, “Are we helping other people?” That is where it revolves around. My premise is that if you feel in the depth of your soul that this is something that you must do, that is undoubtedly either part of or is your purpose. If you are relentless about it, you know you are not doing it for your ego or finances, and you are doing it because you would do it for free, that is when you know that you are on target and it is something that you will not stop doing because you are not expecting a reward. The reward within itself is the actual action of doing the purpose.

As you are living in your purpose, you brought up something. Number one, how many people are reading or in any sample that you would take are a product of trauma? I would be curious if there is a number of what you would guess it to be. That is question number one. As we are going through and fulfilling our purpose and things are happening, the big word that I love that is appropriate for this show is this thing called self-sabotage.

It is like, “I’m doing it. It’s great. We are rolling.” All of a sudden, you go out and do an eight-ball of coke or you drink a bottle of bourbon and you screw up while you are all jacked out. I want to touch on how many people come from trauma and whatever insight you have on that. Let’s get into people that are killing life. The next thing you know, they screw it all up because of this thing called self-sabotage.

This will be an unusual answer. Everyone comes from trauma. Trauma is different. There are different aspects. There is acute trauma, compounded trauma, and generational trauma. There are all these different types of trauma and there are more traumas as well in the definition. However, when you think of trauma, it is not like, “I got in a car accident. I was beaten up by this gang over here.” They have even proven that the look on a mother’s face will cause PTSD in that infant.

We have to start looking at every single one of us who has minor, acute, or complex trauma. These are compounded small memories that end up being traumatic over time to us. What these things do is they cause us to create beliefs not out of joy, expression, and freedom but out of fear. Every one of us is running those particular patterns. When we look at self-sabotage, that becomes a place where people begin to fall down.

The bottom line is most people are dissociated from their core values because core values are quite unconscious. When we have our core values defined as the top five drive behavior, we create our own personal mission statement from that. That is not our purpose statement but our mission statement. When we define that for ourselves, we have an anchor to guide our choices. When we don’t understand what our values are and we haven’t defined what the anchor is for us, we will do behaviors and rationalize them. As we do those behaviors, what begins to happen is our self-esteem starts to plummet. When they’re contrary to our unconscious values, our self-esteem drops.

I have never known anyone in a conversation with a group of people where they all talk and smack about one another or about one person in particular. I have never known anyone who walked away from those conversations going, “I feel inspired. I feel great.” You never have that. People walk away feeling a little self-righteous, guilty and agitated, or even annoyed, but they don’t walk away inspired. What happens is that we have patterns that we program the subconscious mind with that we don’t understand what we are doing. The subconscious mind takes a language literally and personally. Seventy thousand words a day are coming either out of your mouth or in your internal dialogue. Every word your subconscious mind is taking as it is about you.

There are lots of different ways that we sabotage ourselves, lower ourselves, and put ourselves into a victim position through the words that we use. When we speak ill about anybody else, our subconscious mind takes it about ourselves. We have these self-sabotaging patterns that lead to, “I’m going to do an eight ball of coke. I’m going to drink a cask of whiskey. I’m going to do something that is going to lose diet because I have too much good. I have to sabotage it because I don’t deserve it.”

How do you reverse that trend? Is it a straight-up pattern interrupt? Do you have something you can tell yourself? Is there a Coach Rodriguez?

I’m not going to bullshit you here, Glenn, because a lot of people would take that and go, “Yes, I have a process.” You are going to be like, “It is the worst miracle.”

It is called ass.

Here is the deal. If you built you, over how many years you have been alive? In addition to your nervous system creating neural pathways that are from repeated thinking, thoughts, and emotional states, your thoughts are electrical charges that flow down the path of least resistance. The more that you have patterned those particular habits of thinking and speaking, the dent to that neural highway is. It means it is formed a pattern that unless you starve that pattern off and you stop it, you will start to dwindle that neural pathway. Through habit, you build a new one. It is not an overnight thing, but it is something you have to understand the biology of how you built you to be you so that you can start building it differently. That is the first one.

The next thing is that I’m going to the most applicable thing for the audience. There are tons of stuff that you do in the process of helping to unpack that and program this for the future. The thing that needs to happen is you have to change your language. There is a little thing called the drama triangle and the creator triangle. In the drama triangle, there are three positions. There is the victim, villain, and hero. Oftentimes, we go into a victim. We don’t take full ownership of the reality and the emotional states we are creating. When we don’t take full ownership, we get weaker, go victim, and blame someone else or something else for the way we feel. We generally look for some hero. That hero could be a six-pack of beer or a line of coke.

That could be the hero. We were like, “Save me from this feeling, or we will look for someone to do that.” The main place we get to is where our self-esteem starts to rise. Here is this little thing that is a Law of Gravity. You only attract to you the level of success you feel worthy of receiving. It is an important thing I said. If you are betraying your values, your language dysfunction is there. If you speak ill about other people, have done harm to other people, and haven’t cleaned it up, because your subconscious mind is a highly moral being, what happens is inside, you don’t deserve to be successful.

No one knows this but you. This is why you can bullshit everyone else. You can hold up fabulous masks of I’m the best guy ever or the best girl ever. Look how successful I am. I rock here. I rock there, but eventually, you sabotage. If you don’t sabotage yourself in your business, you are a dumpster fire in your personal relationships.

This is where we have to become congruent and authentic about what it is we are doing in leadership and what we are doing as far as wanting to be successful entrepreneurs. The greatest level of success is to be able to earn enough money to do good out in the world. Make some contribution to the community in which you are serving to be able to say, “I got a scholarship program if you can’t afford me. Here is an online program you can go do, and you go do it for free.”

You start building this place where your heart, spirit, and purpose can actualize itself across the boards in every demographic because everyone deserves to know how their biology of emotions works. They can begin to turn around in the direction of where they are choosing to succeed and leave their legacy. No matter what demographic, socioeconomic, or demographic they are in, they deserve the right to know and actualize.

You have coached over 11,000 people. What I want to know is this. Which one of those 11,000 had the most profound impact on you after working with them? You can use an alias, but that is a lot of people. Many times, most coaches know that sometimes we coach because we learn more from the people that come to us than they are learning from us. I’m guessing that you have had 1 or 2 folks that have sat in that chair across from you that you went, “Either we did a great thing and complete reversal.” I love to hear that story. What is the lesson for our GAPers here with that interaction with that person?

I love working with C-Suite executives primarily because they have the biggest impact on most people. I had an executive fly in from Hong Kong. We made a leadership breakthrough intensive with me, in which we locked ourselves into my office for 3 days, 12 hours a day. I drilled down to the core issues that were destroying this company. It was a relationship that had gone way south. She was treating him cruelly. He could not understand it. He was heartbroken and could hardly function.

This is a good-looking guy. He is off the cover of GQ. He is a multimillionaire and had a chauffeur drive his Rolls-Royce. He is no schlep, and this young lady broke him in two. We went through the process. We got down way deep. I’m not going to talk in detail, but he realized those deep changes that needed to happen in him. We did a lot of belief change, trauma resolution work, purpose work, and him getting online with what his legacy was going to be. By the time we parted, he was 100% better than he was when he walked in. He was like, “How did we do that?” I said, “A lot of it was your willingness because you have to be willing to sit for 12 hours a day for 3 days with me. You have to have some balls to do that.”

About a week later, he called me. He goes, “I need you to fly to Hong Kong. We are going to roll out all your leadership training through my management team. I need you to fly to Elkhart, Indiana, where our sales and showroom are. I need you to train everybody there. Here is a coaching package. I want you to coach every single one of my executives in the Elkhart office.” I was like, “We will do it.”

That created this reverberation through the company. They eventually sold the company. He is busy starting another one in Dubai. The whole process was the leader had to make an evolutionary change. When the leader makes the evolutionary change, everyone underneath them models them and does something similar in values, attitude, and how they treat one another. We shifted the culture of the company to both Hong Kong and the USA.

We are here with Gary De Rodriguez. If you like what Gary is talking about, you need to check out his website. He got a new online program called Creating Incredible Relationships. By being a GAPer and reading this, you get $100 if you enter the promo code EMPOWERED100. I promise you that if your relationships are struggling and you find that you are a person that doesn’t know how to have a healthy relationship, going to Gary’s website would be a smart thing to do.

Let’s talk about incredible relationships, Gary. Maybe you want to talk about the program and say, “Here is what we work on.” On a practical matter, you say, “Here are a couple of things you guys need to know about incredible relationships and gals.” When they are done with this show, before they go see your online course, they go, “I can use that stuff.” Talk to us about incredible relationships. What is that mean? What are some helping points for us?

It is in two modules. One is you have to be able to be in an incredible relationship with yourself. That is the first one. We go into values and a lot of the cleanup we need to do. It gives you and puts you in a much better place, less projective, less in the drama triangle, and less in that whole aspect of, “I can’t have conversations that are effective.” We first work there.

The second module is all about how to begin to start developing a mission statement for your relationship by identifying both you and your partner’s values, coming together, and creating why the heck out of all the genealogical possibilities we could have been partnered with, it is you. What are we supposed to create together, which gives them the relationship a higher purpose other than you please me, and I will please you? You provide this, and I will provide that. It is more like, “What is our purpose? Why are we doing this together? What is it that we both as individuals can do more powerfully together than we can apart?

If you have a partner, you should both be going through the course, not one of you. That would be ideal. Does each of you pay a separate fee? How does that work?

There is no way to monitor that.

Most people share and cheat.

All I want to do is get that information out. You got one person in. Do I have to buy another one? No, watch it together and begin to start working towards it. With life training that I have done, especially throughout Australia, they are like, “What is in this course?” Every single person on the planet needs to know because it is revolutionary about the changes it makes and the quality of your conversations and relationships, and more importantly, in the relationship with yourself. It makes a radical change because there is stuff in there that is not being taught in the relationship space.

I have been teaching for many years. Several years ago, I was one of the worst examples of how to be in a relationship. I couldn’t get a relationship to work to save my life. When I hit about 45, I thought, “I better start teaching what I need to learn.” I started developing the relationship courses and went, “Oh my God.” Finally, I got well enough, met someone at 50, and we have been together for 23 years in 2032.

Speaking about your life, I’m not sure if you have read many of ours, we always love to conclude our show by letting people get to know you more and walking you through your life in an exercise that is unscientific and created by me called Knowledge Through the Decades. What we do is we walk you through your life and we ask you what the attitude lesson was at each stage of your life. We had some fun talks. I like to do that with you. None of us remember childbirth, but I have a feeling that birth is something you could probably speak to well. What do you think the attitude lesson is of being born, reborn, or being zero?

For me, it is to buckle your seatbelt and remain curious.

I’m going to take you to being ten years old. We would love to know what grade school you went to and if you remember your teacher, but was there a time when you were 10, 9, or 11 that stuck out or changed it for you? It could have been bullying, you were a bully, or you peed your pants in the middle of a classroom. I don’t know what it was, but what was the attitude lesson at ten? What was the story that sticks out to you, being that ten-year-old Gary De Rodriguez?

I love this part of my life because I was a horrible stutterer as a child. I could barely speak. I had all these learning disabilities because of the trauma, and I couldn’t speak because I had such a bad time expressing myself. I made this little family of seals on a pink iceberg. My teacher, I always remember his name, he was Mr. Bowerman, came up. This little family of seals was way above what any other kid had done in that class. It was realistic. It was well-proportioned. It was good. He looked at me and said, “You are talented.” He enrolled me in the La Jolla Museum of Fine Arts Summer School Course for Talented Artists. That was the first time at that moment that I went from, “I’m ashamed of myself. I can barely look at anyone,” to, “I have got something to offer that is uniquely me.”

Mr. Bowerman, I’m sure he is no longer with us, but he was the savior because I have a Hispanic last name, and I was the only Hispanic kid in my school district. There was a lot of prejudice in my neighborhood. Kids would throw rocks at me and the parents were telling me to walk in the gutter because I was a dirty little web pack. Here was this Mr. Bowerman going, “You are a rockstar.” I’m like, “Someone has finally seen something about me.” That turned my life around. This is why whatever you can do for a kid to increase their spectacular uniqueness, do it because it could change their life.

Although you call yourself a coach, you are probably Mr. Bowerman in disguise. Let’s go to twenty years old. You are either in college or not in college. I don’t know what you were doing at twenty, but do you remember being 20 or turning 21? What was going on in your life? What was the attitude lesson when you hit twenty?

The attitude lesson for me at twenty was I was quite inspired by art. I’m a frustrated artist at the end of the day. I use my clients’ life as my canvas. I helped them paint a different picture for themselves to represent their purpose and life differently. What I did then was I was a full-on full-blown artist. I was making a living at it. I would finish all of the different aspects of the final projects for my courses. I would have the other department heads come and buy my pieces. I had shows on Madison Avenue at Fir Tree Gallery for the Arts. I was good at what I was doing. I adored it and loved it. That is who I was at twenty.

Were you a painter or sculptor?

I was a sculptor more than anything else. I had lots of different mediums that I worked in. I also was a painter. I did a lot of mixed media stuff. It was inspiring to be in the art community because a lot of that creative stuff would come out of me.

Was the seals your best sculpting? What was the one sculpture, number one, you created that you love? What is the story behind that? Number two, was there a sculpture you saw in person or on a picture that took your breath away, and you went, “How did he do that?”

I took this textile class. I wove these three-dimensional series of different insects in mixed media. It had gold stingers, horns, and cellophane wings. I wove them all together. It was all mixed media. It was cool. That is what I exhibited at the Fir Tree Gallery. My favorite sculpture was done by my best friend. He was this Renaissance guy. He was teaching the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics at the age of eighteen at the Museum of Man in San Diego. He was the Head of the Historical Society for San Diego. He was a phenomenal artist. He did a lifesize human sculpture. It was spectacular. It was like something Michelangelo would have already done on bronze. It was amazing.

I didn’t mean to go over to do that, but I was too curious. I had to figure it out. Let’s go to age 30. Do you remember your 30th birthday? What was going on in your life? What was the attitude lesson that you learned at 30?

I got married at 18 and divorced at 27, as you do if you married at 18. At 30, I was a wild pony. I’m not going to go into details on wild phoniness. You can paint that however you want to.

Experimentation growth and these types of things were the attitude lesson for you.

Yes, I was also a naval architect at that time. I was designing firefighting systems for the hangar bays and flight decks of two of the aircraft carriers in the US Fleet and lots of other ships. I was doing that whole gig, flying around internationally and working on Navy ships.

Are you a veteran?

No, this was through the largest Naval architectural firm in the world, which was a company called Bruce Rosenblatt & Sons.

That had to be something, but unfortunately, we don’t have time to dig into that. That was incredibly tedious but the marvel of an aircraft carrier or something else. Let’s talk about being 40. What was happening at 40? What was your attitude lesson there at 40?

I woke up around 35 and said, “What the hell am I doing with my life?” I feel this ache to do something bigger. The AIDS crisis wasn’t in full swing. I started studying. I celebrated the change in technique. I studied hypnosis to learn how to work with the subconscious mind. I got introduced to neurolinguistic programming that evolved into another process, which is an evolution of NLP called Humanistic Neurolinguistic Psychology.

I made a point to work with indigenous elders all over the world because they knew how to work with a subconscious mind. I lived in India for a period of time. I was initiated there when I was 22. I continued that meditation process until now. I still meditate on discipline. I was a sweat lodge keeper for medicine women for ten years. I traveled down to Australia and I had the great good fortune to meet and work with the Aboriginal law keeper down in Western Australia. I worked with Kahunas on the Big Island and in the Sacred Valley of Machu Picchu.

I studied the mystical teachings of Christ through A Course of Miracles. Thetford, the man who co-wrote the book, was a mentor of mine. I have had a lot of exposure to a lot of different belief systems. I can find this golden thread that runs through all of them, which is more the truth. I believe this is how people change at the deepest level. They find that purpose that is self-defined by them so they can go forward and meet that legacy they know they are here to do.

One of the gifts of working with the gay community and AIDS community was I got to sit at the bedside of many people who had died. What I learned from that is some people clotted their sheets to stay in their bodies, and some people danced out of their bodies. The difference was the people that danced out of their bodies knew they had done what they came here to do. There is no more denial at the time of death. You either know you did it or you know you didn’t do it. I have seen too much regret. I’m not going to die that way. That is an inevitability for all of us. My premise is, let’s build ourselves up so that we have no regrets when we dance out of our bodies. Let’s look back on the planet and see millions of lights lit by something we have individually done.

Les Brown’s famous speech, “Live full, die empty. Don’t die full of your dreams. Don’t die full of your potential. Die empty.” Put it all out there.

Live your life to the fullest because you only have a number of breaths to breathe.

For 50, you gave us a little insight. You got everything figured out. It sounded like you went on an incredibly spiritual and educational journey in your 40s, and you met the woman of your life to whom you are still married.  

I met the man of my life. We are still together.

Congratulations. Did you get married at 50?

No. For me, it is not important to be married or have a license like that. There is a commitment of the soul, and that is what is the most important to me.

Tell me, what is the attitude lesson at 50?

The attitude lesson at 50 is the clock is ticking. Get off your ass regardless of what has been stopping you. Do whatever it takes to break through that. Get to the absolute other side of it and run, don’t walk to make the contribution you are here to make.

I can’t go down that rabbit hole because it is too damn good. Talk to me about 60.

At 60, gather the right team around you to get support because you do not know everything. If you gather the right team around you, you can do exponentially so much more. If you are committed to being successful and leaving that legacy, you have to gather the right people around you. That is what I did. That was a lesson I had.

I have incredible people around me in my organization. There is a lot of love in our organization. We believe in the mission and the purpose. We see many miracles happen, especially when they come on like a new team member. They see what we are doing. They experience some of the live events I do. They go, “I have never seen anything like this before.” I’m like, “This is what we are up to. Be part of this because you being part of it is about holding up one of the best and most essential pillars to being able to get this work out into the community in a way that is going to change, in my mind, millions of people’s lives.

How many live events do you do in a year? Does it depend on the year?

It depends on the year. For quite a while, I was deeply involved in working in organizations. Now I’m doing more public events. I’m in the middle of doing group coaching. It is called the Ultimate Mindset and Group Coaching Intensive. We are about to the halfway point of that particular group of people. I’m going to start another one in June 2023. We do this incredible work within that. People are like, “The change is deep and pervasive. I would need more of it.”

At the end of August 2023, I will do a Trauma Memory Resolution Certification. That is to train people on how to work with trauma effectively. The change is permanent. I can’t go into it much because I’m sure we are running out of time, but I can sit with you for fifteen minutes, and you can have an event that destroyed your life when you were ten. In fifteen minutes, it will look like a black-and-white photograph and a photo album. It will be neutral. It is a permanent change. I am not puffing myself. I have thousands of people I have worked with like this, and I have trained hundreds of coaches to do the same.

What is that technique called? My brother is a guest and does a lot of counseling work. He explained this same thing to me. What is it called again?

The Trauma Memory Resolution Technique. I developed it. You can only get it from my organization.

I’m going to send you what he got. I would be curious to see what you think.

I would love to see it, but there are lots of different ways of working with trauma. This one historically, people have told me, especially veterans, it is the only thing that has ever worked with their war trauma.

Is it known as TRT?

No.

I will be curious to see what you think. That is 60, and you turned 70.

The clock is ticking so loud that I can’t even sleep anymore. I got the energy of a 35-year-old. I’m down to it. Get to the gym, do 3 or 4 days of working out, come here, put in a good 10-hour day, see your clients, develop your products, and get your book done. I’m pedaled to the metal. My life is bigger and fuller than it has ever been. I’m still speaking at conferences, doing workshops, and doing certifications. At the end of the year, I will be doing a 2 and 3-month coach certification. We coach for the deeper self. That is going to be where I teach everybody to coach as I have coached. I would teach people how to create deep breakthroughs fast.

The attitude lesson at 70 is what?

I know it sounds hysterical, but someone said, “Gary, when are you going to retire?” I said, “I feel like I’m starting. I’m in my flow right now.” I got at least 85 before I’m going to get all tattooed and moved to Maui.

Season three is called Carry the Light. Gary, you shared so much with us. You were personal and insightful. I know that you helped some people that were reading in.” Thank you for your authenticity, care, and message. It was beautiful. One thing we always love to do at the end of our episode is to give you an opportunity to share your message of hope with the person that is sitting in their car crying because they have suffered from trauma. They came to the show, looked you up, and said, “I need to get an hour of this guy, the person walking on the beach, or the person alone in their hospital room.” I would love you to close our show with your message of hope for them and your message of attitude for the GAPers who are reading.

My message of hope is the past is only represented by our memories. Our memories are only a series of pictures, sounds, and feelings. What holds that all together and makes it still feel painful is the meaning that we have wrapped around that experience. It is a construct that we created, not good, not bad, but the best thing we could make up at the moment. We have a choice. We can create it completely differently to where it is a cheering section for your future and who you have come here to be.

Each one of us is a thread in the tapestry of humanity. The more we awaken, the more we shine brighter. The more we shine brighter, the more complete that tapestry of humanity becomes. It is in our trusted care to actualize ourselves, pay it forward to as many people as possible, and give that gift of our special unique gift that only you individually can give. You are meant to touch others and walk hand in hand into whatever we consider heaven to be. We have to walk hand in hand with each other. We can do this by personally actualizing our own self and living from a place where everything that has happened, past, present, and to come, is gently planned by a power that unconditionally loves each and every one of us. Choose to see perfection rather than what is not there.

Gary De Rodriguez, God bless you. We loved having you. If you liked what you read, go to Gary De Rodriguez’s website. You can Google it. Creating Incredible Relationships and a $100 discount. Hit EMPOWERED100. We have it up there. If you are on our blog, that was powerful and wonderful. Gary, thank you so much for being on the show.

You are very welcome.

Important Links

• Gary De Rodriguez
• Creating Incredible Relationships
• Bruce Rosenblatt & Sons
• A Course of Miracles

About Gary De Rodriguez

⏰ Is it time to awaken the leaders within your organization? I can help!

As a compassionate and devoted professional, I have consulted and privately coached +11,600 people throughout top organizations worldwide. With +35 years of experience in executive leadership roles, I am a motivated and influential subject matter expert. As an internationally acclaimed coach, trainer, and speaker, I’ve been recognized for my ability to instill value and motivation in teams.

My commitment to making a positive difference in organizations and people’s lives is what drives me. Known to clients as “The People Mechanic”, I believe in people and their abilities, and I help fix what’s broken to support them in leading smooth, efficient, and meaningful lives. I love to witness growth and breakthroughs in individuals and teams to overcome long-standing issues and propel forward.

Throughout my career, my work has focused on people-centered organizational development. While businesses can copy products and services and undercut prices, the one thing that cannot be copied is their culture. I believe that investment in human equity is the differentiator between ordinary and extraordinary businesses. By educating and improving team members’ lives, businesses are always rewarded with employee loyalty, innovation, brand promotion, and dedication, giving them a competitive advantage in their market. I have committed my career to transforming leaders who impact and inspire their teams by realizing the human potential.

I believe in giving back to my community for similar reasons. A few of the highlights from my volunteer work include:
♦ Forming support & volunteer groups for the Holistic Aids Response Program
♦ Assisting veterans in their recovery from PTSD for the F.A.R.M. veteran group
♦ Serving as head of educational development for Wisdom for Warriors

Additionally, to increase my efforts and organizational support in blending leadership, strategy, culture and team building, I co-authored a book alongside my fellow CEO’s of Peopleistic in Australia and the UK, Humanistic Business: Profit through People with Passion and Purpose aims to show how ethical companies are succeeding as they create an environment customers want to be in, staff members want to work in, and suppliers want to engage with. As we explain in the book, doing the right thing has never been more profitable.