Rocky Garza
Appearances
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Success doesn't happen overnight. No. Well, and I think not only does success not happen overnight, but success is not a destination. Like, I think that's why. Did that make you sheltered? Yeah. I realized about the age of 30.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Yeah. I realized about the age of 30 that I was very good at disclosure and very bad at vulnerability.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I was very good at giving you what you thought was vulnerability, but for Rocky, it was simply disclosure. I was, I could recount my story for the first, for the first, probably five or six, seven years as a keynote speaker. Every, no matter what keynote I gave, every keynote started the same. So I was born in 1983.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I was born in Kansas only the other part of the week, came back to Dallas and I, and I would recount my history because I felt like if I couldn't recount everything that occurred, I didn't have the credibility to be on a stage for you to hear what I had to say. Cause I didn't think I had the credibility or expertise in my credentials and, or my resume. Right.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I always joke I'm the only corporate keynote speaker that's never had a resume. Why? Well, because that wasn't my life. My resume is not the certifications I have. Not knocking a certification. They're wonderful. Your boy didn't have any. Why? Because I didn't know that was a thing for me to do at the time when I should have or could have done it because I was in survival mode.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I was in disclosure mode. I was in tell the same thing you need to tell to make them go, man, that guy is open while making sure you don't tell them anything because they will use it and they will get you. And so I think as the kid that moved around a bunch of kid to go into school, like vulnerability now is my number one personal value.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
It's another one of the values in our organization, our business, not because Rocky's an expert at it, because if I don't do that, I know what life will become. Because if I'm not committed to saying I create the opportunity to see and be seen by others, I will make sure you don't see me and I will absolutely see you. And I've lived that life before. And it was lonely. It was isolating.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And as much as people in my life loved me and cared for me, it wasn't until I got married and had my own children that I was at the same house for Christmas more than one year in a row. Because there wasn't a house. Because one year was with grandma. One year was my aunt. One year with my mom. One year with my dad. One year back with my grandma. And I'm not good or bad around it.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I'll be very clear. I love my family. And... There was no such thing as tradition. There was no such thing as a space where you belonged. You just went where you were allowed. And I think even today, I think there's a lot of folks out there listening. I would encourage you to ask yourself, do you currently live a life based on the going the places that you think you're simply allowed?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Or have you begun to build a life where you are creating the spaces because it's where you belong? And that's both personally and professionally. That's in corporate and that's in our community. Pick a category. But I think for me, that was an absolute clear understanding that I've had to come to grips with over the last decade is, are you disclosing or are you being vulnerable?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Because one allows you to be seen and the other one keeps you hidden.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Rocky, how you doing today, brother? Man, I'm doing wonderful, Mick. Thank you so much for having me on the show. By the way, if I can grab that record, I'm going to take that with me to my next keynote. And when they say they're going to read my bio, I'm going to say, hey, no, thank you. Just play this instead. I'm going to let them play that.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Yeah. Yeah. Great question. Number one, and some of you are not going to like this answer. You start by recognizing that you're probably not the person that has the vision. So let's, let's throw out a number, right? In your area, there's a hundred businesses. Let's say every one of those businesses at minimum, which we know is crazy, has a hundred employees, right?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
So that's 10,000 people that are employed within a hundred businesses. So out of 10,000, a hundred of those are asked to be the visionary. That's even if assuming the CEO is actually a visionary, he may, he or she, they may actually be an integrator, which means the visionary may be some other role, which is not the CEO altogether. They may not even actually have a vision.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And I'm going to walk right on the stage to Bad Bunny or something. I think I just got my new intro.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
They may have gotten, okay, we won't belabor the point there because y'all got me fired up. Number one, you may not be the visionary. So the reason that you are stuck in inactivity is because you are attempting to be something that you were never made and designed to be because you think it will be sexier for you to be the person that has the vision.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
But out of about 100 companies and there's 100 employees, 99 of those are executors, integrators, make happeners is what their job is because they were made and designed to do that. And for whatever reason, there is a singular, maybe two if we're getting wild.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
people who have a vision and their job is to empower and equip people to take said vision and then go execute it because they don't know how.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Now, the difference between you and I in those instances is that we chose the path of most resistance, which was let's be visionaries and then figure out how in the world we're going to make it happen until we can make enough money to pay somebody else to actually do it for us because we realize we don't know what we're doing. And so that's just a part of what we would call entrepreneurship, right?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Well, my newest Bad Bunny song is the new one out. It's on his brand new album. Nueva Evol is the brand new one he just came out with because I can't get enough. He did a bit with Jimmy Fallon that they do in the subway and that people just lost their minds. But it's like throwback roots to a song called
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Now, we chose the path of most resistance. So for most leaders, it's identifying Why don't I back up a second? What is the path for you of least resistance? It is to let go of the mentality that you think you are supposed to carry a vision and discover how can you use your unique gifts and skills to execute the vision. Even inside your own organization, my job today is to take the vision we have
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
to best highest use of Rocky's time and everything else somebody else should be doing. Not because I'm selfish, not because I'm arrogant, not because, oh, I think I'm somebody that I don't have to. You don't want me to be in charge of the schedule. You don't want me to plan the curriculum. You don't want me to create the most dynamic booklet we're going to need to really get you.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
If you wouldn't get one, we wouldn't have a booklet. That's a bad use of my time because I'm not good at it. So I think for leaders to take a step back on number one, you don't own the vision. Now, if you're listening, you're a business owner and you do own the vision, you should ask yourself this question. Am I actually a visionary or do I just have a good idea? Two very different things.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Ask that again. What's that question, Rocky? Are you a visionary or did you just have one good idea? I know a lot of integrators who have great ideas, but they're not visionaries. An idea is something that we haven't done yet that's going to solve a problem. A vision is something that most people can't see that changes a generation. Which of those spaces do we want to be in?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Not good or bad, not right or wrong. One is not better. One is not worse. What does it make you more valuable? One doesn't make you don't put yourself on a chart, comparing yourself apples to fish. It doesn't work.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
historically that lots of folks know and then he sort of took that and remixed it into his own so when you hear it there's like a whole tick tock thing right now like the older generation here and they're like oh i love it they're dancing and then it like breaks into his part and everyone loses their mind so i'm a big bad buddy fan so we are brothers from another mother right i can't tell you one bad bunny song bro
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I want you to imagine if you're a leader currently and ask yourself if visionary and integrator rubs the wrong cord with you and you're thinking, don't tell me what I am, what I'm not. Let's give it an analogy sense because we all like a good analogy. CEO has a vision. Let's say they, in fact, are the visionary. Wonderful.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
CEO gets together with all their SLT, ELT, vice presidents, whatever your company calls it, and he casts the vision. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's what we're doing. Now, in that environment, that visionary is tasking all of you in that room to become architects. Go to your unique departments. Go to your areas and draw, create, show them the plan.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I'm talking CAD renderings, electrical, plumbing, where it goes, how it stays up, what's the foundational aspect. You've been given the vision, but your job in operations and sales and management and HR and people in training development, your job is to go architect now the drawing for your people to execute on. So that they can then go and say, let me get the plugs. Let me get the wire.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Let me go find the electricians. But here's where it breaks down. You walk away from that meeting and you say, I'm now going to go to my team and I'm going to go be the designer. And I'm going to see if they can become the architect.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Yet we've created a system of accountability, whether you're in Rockefeller Habits, you're in EOS, you're in pick whatever it is, the systematic way that you're going and you're approaching your business. Many of us, number one, aren't the visionary to begin with, and we're trying to cast a vision that doesn't work. Let's assume that you are.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I'm going to ask you to go ask your key leaders, the top five, six, seven people in your circle. Are they leaving your office and trying to go be the designer next? Or are they leaving your office to go do their job, which is to go be the architect?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I guarantee you, if you will skip that layer and go to your senior director level and ask them if their leaders are coming to them with plans or with thoughts, 90% of the time, if you have a problematic organization and you're not growing the way you think, it's because your leaders leave the meeting with you.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
They go into a meeting and they take your plan, your dreams, they turn it into their own dreams in their own way. They're not actually building plans. So your directors have no idea what to do. and the lack of communication, the lack of lateral leadership, and so on.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
So I could not agree with you more that we want to hold the cards because we think it's going to make us important when we have to ask ourselves, are we willing to play the hand because ultimately we're trying to win the game? Do you want to hold the two aces ready to go so that whenever you need them, you can play them?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Or are you playing the card so you can win the hand so that at the end of the day, we can actually win the game? One of those requires for you to trust the people around you. making sure you put your bets in the right places. One of those says, I'm going to keep myself safe. So if all else fails, at least I know I will be okay. One of those creates really healthy culture in teams.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
One of those that is not. Because culture in your organization is not what you pontificate. It's solely based on what you tolerate. I would ask you to encourage yourself to ask yourself, just you with you, what are you tolerating in yourself?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I was very good at disclosure and very bad at vulnerability. Was that a Rocky feeling? I was very good at giving you what you thought was vulnerability. But for Rocky, it was simply disclosure.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Okay. Now I got you locked in there. The 90s, hip hop and R&B, I'm dialed in with you. That was like all I listened to in that range. 80s, there was like a period of my life. Maybe we'll get to it later. A period of my life, there was not a lot of pop culture for me in the 80s that I...
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Yeah, totally. Let's go back to our phrase earlier. Culture is not what you pontificate. It's what you tolerate. That's Rocky's fancy word because I like rhyming. Culture is not what you say it is. It's what behavior you do you allow. Now, I think in order for us to sort of go to that place, let's redefine the definition of tolerance, meaning what do we tolerate?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Because I think oftentimes we default to tolerance. Tolerance is the lowest, least common denominator. What will I tolerate? That's the least amount of effort. Well, as long as you, I've never been inside a thriving organization. I'm not talking about just top line revenue. I'm saying thriving culturally, community driven, giving back. People want to be there. A low attrition, high retention.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Pick a category that we want to say we measure a company's success. I've never been to one that was doing that where what they tolerated was the bare minimum. What they tolerated was excellence. So like, even if you and I, and because we're kind of the same, not really people who are like, I don't need to celebrate a win. You know why we won? Because we showed up today, my boy.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
That's kind of where me and you are. But the average person, right, is not that way. And so like, if that's the case, do you tolerate celebration? Is celebration tolerated? Or is celebration the level of tolerance by which we expect? See, I think we need to take the same word and it's the way we use it to go. We don't tolerate that or we only tolerate.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Oh, wait, all of a sudden, one just became terrible and negative and the other one just became empowering. Hey, just so you know, we're an organization that we absolutely tolerate celebration. we tolerate excellence. We tolerate meeting our metrics. We tolerate daily behavior, daily activity. We tolerate, we only tolerate you being on time. That's what we do here.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
We expect you to join us in that because this is not just who we say we are. You should be able to tell by the actions of people in our organization, this is exactly what we do. And so I think so often times to your point, we go to places and we go on to the next one. Let's get to the next thing. All right, we crushed that project. What's the next project we have to do? And in all of that,
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I'm not wanting to slow us down at all. I love a good metric at KPI. What gets measured gets accomplished. I mean, we've heard a million times you can go see a thousand memes on today. We understand that. And A-N-D, not but, get rid of that word. A-N-D is the third or fourth time I've spelled that word out for us today. If you're listening, I hope you caught on here. And do I check the box?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
gravitated to just because life for me in the eighties wasn't, was kind of more survival than it was pop culture references and so on. I kind of, I grew up fairly quick, uh, early on in my life, but nineties hip hop I'm with you. And only reason let's be honest that I know that is because there's a couple other bad money songs that I really liked.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
of tucking my kids in bed because they have to go to sleep? Or do I only tolerate the behavior in myself? It is to lay in bed with my son, to tell him how proud I am, to remind him that his father loves him. And no matter what happens, dad is always going to be in your corner because that's the behavior for myself that I will tolerate nothing less.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
One of those says, good night, son, go to bed, click the light. One says, this is the level by which I operate because I will tolerate nothing less in my life.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And I use an example about kids or family or wherever you are in your life because I find we so often, especially as coaches, especially as speakers who spend a lot of our time in the business space, we are so quick to use a business example that is forgotten. But if you can use a personal example, it will almost always translate into business.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Because I can tell you what I think about most days, not business. my wife, my kids, my grandparents, my community, my family, my neighborhood, myself, for being honest. So in our point of cultures and what we're doing and what we look like and what, ask yourself, what's the behavior you tolerate when you wake up? What's the behavior you tolerate when you go to bed?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
What's the behavior you tolerate with your kids? What's the behavior you tolerate in the kitchen? What's the behavior you tolerate with dinner? What's the Tonight, I'm going, of all things, and as we get to know each other more and more, Mick, you'll know how funny this will be. I'm committed to go to my daughter's school's dad's pickup basketball game tonight. I hate basketball.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I hate playing basketball so much. But I'm going because I want to tolerate the kind of behavior that says, when invited by another group of dads who have children at the school that my kids go to school at, who want to engage, that I know how they feel because my job is to talk to them daily. I already know the kind of conversations that we're going to have tonight.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And I already know the kind of freedom I'm going to be able to feel when I'm on the basketball court making terrible shots because Rocky doesn't do things he's not good at. That's not because I'm good at everything. I just don't do very many things. I just don't like the things I'm good at. But I want to tolerate the kind of behavior of trying new things. My kids know I hate basketball.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Part of the reason I'm going to basketball is because I want to tell my son, dad's going to play basketball. And he laughed. All right. We have a Google doc that my kid is on that he shares. So when he gets in one of his classes, he can get on the Google doc and we can type to each other. And I told him I'm going to do that.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
His words, my dad, can you make, he wrote back to me, actually, question mark. Because he's like, bro, you don't play basketball, my guy. This is a bad idea for you. Well, that's because that's the kind of behavior we want to tolerate. And I think the same thing applies in our work environment.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And then that just led to, I'm a, I'm a, when I pick something and like it, I kind of just stay there. Uh, my wife makes fun of me all the time. Cause she knows about all kinds. She's way smarter than me. And she knows all kinds of, and then references and not just pop culture, but in life.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
No, I'm putting the Icy Hot on before I get there. I'm telling you that. I'm going to do preventative measures.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And so I could, I could, unless it's like, unless it's Jay-Z or maybe Kanye, like, unless outside of that, if I walk by you in the airport, like, I'm not going to recognize you. Like, I don't really know who you are. You know what I mean? And so like, I, I just, I gave all my pop culture knowledge. I just gave it to you after that. Don't ask me anything else. Cause I got nothing else for you.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Thank you. Thank you.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Episode done. There we go. That's right.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that, Mick. I think it's something I am learning and probably will the rest of my life. Two things. Number one is to say thank you. I tend to not want to say thank you, not because I don't appreciate it, because that means that I might acknowledge that it's true. And I think oftentimes in our lives,
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Our hesitation to accept a compliment isn't because we don't believe it. It's because we're the unknown that comes from what if we do. So I'm learning that in myself. Hey, Rocky, just say thank you and trust it. Nobody's got a reason. If you think someone is spending enough energy to lie to you, hey, I think you're giving yourself too much credit. So I think that's one.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And I think the second part of that is trust. You know, it's been a work in progress, just like you. It's taken decades to try to really hone in on what is that. And I'm just now, probably now more than ever, which I hope I get to say this for the rest of my life. Just now, I feel like I'm really dialing into what it is I can bring to the world that I can do.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
that allows me to stay in my lane, to trust my gut, to do those things while simultaneously creating environments for other people to do the exact same thing and recognizing that the overlap of the Venn diagram is so small if we'll stay in our lane that we can create a picture collectively that we could never just do by ourself.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I want you to imagine if you're a leader currently and ask yourself if visionary and integrator rubs the wrong cord with you. And you're thinking, don't tell me what I am, what I'm not. Let's give it an analogy sense because we all like a good analogy.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
No. Well, and I think not only does success not happen overnight, but success is not a destination. Like, I think that's why most individuals stop or even you and I occasionally have the moment we think we should stop or we think we might stop. Why? Well, because we are obsessed. And I say we like collective human beings.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
In my experience, we are obsessed with the idea of arrival that we think if we could get there and if I can get there faster than you, then I could stop quicker than you, which means I could have more time to do what I want because I don't do what I want now. Therefore, if I could get to the place I could do what I want, then I would finally have arrived. And so we call that success.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
We call the ability to stop doing the things that are necessary, even if we enjoy them, success. And I think there's a moment where if we allow ourself to note that to your point, the only thing that I can guarantee that happens tomorrow within my capacity of unhuman understanding is the sun's going to go down tonight and it's probably going to come up tomorrow.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And when we wake up tomorrow, everything you did today will either have been a block added to the home you are building or it will have been a hammer to the block previously that will be gone. That's it. There is no in-between. I'm not trying to make it too – we're not trying to get too ethereal here or make anybody sad. But the reality of both what is possible and what is true – is today.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
That's what present is. Present is all the possibilities of what could be and what is actually occurring. That's today. That's the actions that we take today.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
So I think if we can remove the idea of success from being singular, if we can remove it from destination, if we can remove it from the idea of this mountaintop, and if I could just get to that mountain, then the view there will be so great that will, you know, will be so great after that view and your cliff bar and your sandwich and the photo you take and the Instagram you did,
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
You're going to walk down the mountain, my guy. You're going to go back to the valley and life is lived in the valley. But the valley is not sexy. The day-to-day is not sexy, right? Coaching the team and going to practice and coordinating 14 nine-year-olds and their families to get together isn't sexy.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
But three decades of doing that and getting a message from somebody that you talked to 20 years ago when you coached their
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
when you were in college and they were seven years old and now they're 35 with a family and they leave you a voicemail and say, I remember what you said when I, coaching and WhatsApp messages with 14 parents isn't sexy, but life lived in the valley decade after decade and it paints an incredible landscape for what life could really be.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
if we're willing to remove success as a destination and instead allow ourself to commit to what we're doing daily, because that's actually the life that we really want.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Yeah, totally. Culture is not what you pontificate. It's what you tolerate. That's Rocky's fancy word because I like rhyming. Culture is not what you say it is. It's what behavior you do you allow.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Yeah, you know, today, 41-year-old Rocky is, yeah, it's the seven-year-old Rocky that was like looking for a place to belong. You know, I love, let me be very clear when I start, love my mom, love my dad, love my grandparents, love my family, aunts, uncles, cousins, everybody who was a part of the process. And, okay, A-N-D, it's a very powerful word.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And like you can live a life where you have all of your material needs and recognize that there are many things in life that are missing. My parents got divorced when I was young, right before I turned two. Never lived with my dad growing up. Loved my dad. Had the best relationship with my dad today I've ever had. And I could spend my whole life without him.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
My mom's been married and divorced quite a few times, four or five times. So I went to 13 schools before I graduated high school. Most of those pre-seventh grade because I moved in with my grandparents in seventh grade and I actually went to the same junior high and the same high school. So all those schools are happening pre-seventh grade.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
You know, I didn't realize the term first day of school didn't mean first day at a school until seventh grade. I didn't realize it was a time of year. I thought it was a phrase that we use because this is our first day at this school, which I was always confused why that seemed to happen for everybody else only once. And it seemed to happen for me two or three times. Right.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And so I say all that again, this is not sad, not a sob story, not a woe is me. Like I'm 41, been to a lot of therapy, have a lot of coaches. Like I'm feeling, I'm feeling okay today. And A-N-D, we're going to come back to that again. And where I sit today is both a result of every day stacked up over the last 41 years.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And I think we all have a decision daily with work, with practice, not in isolation. We have a decision to say, will I make my past pain a mechanism to protect myself from people or I use my past pain as a mechanism to propel myself in the direction of my purpose? And I think that's a question we have to ask her. That's a question I have to ask myself daily, today, daily.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Been married 16 years, got a nine-year-old, got a six-year-old, good friends, a great community, spent a lot of time, effort, energy building friendships. And I have to ask myself daily, the guy that gets on Instagram every day and says, you got this, let's go, let's do it. I have to ask myself daily, Rocky, why did you not express to your feelings to your wife?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Is it because you are trying to protect yourself because you're afraid if you're honest, she will leave like everyone else? Or are you going to express how you feel because you want to propel yourself in the direction of your purpose, which is to build a committed relationship with someone unlike anything you have ever physically witnessed in your own life? But that's a decision I have to make.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
That's a question I have to ask myself. No one else is responsible for that other than me. And so I think we look back, I look back on my life and go, why was it always so much easier to find value, worth, and fulfillment from strangers than it was from the people that I love most? Is that a problem with them?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Or is that a result of my inactivity and my inability to allow myself to be present and fully show up without having the fear that they were going to run away? And I think all of those are parts and pieces of the questions we sort of have to ask ourselves, at least me regularly, maybe for somebody else, you only have to do it quarterly. I tend to have to do it daily to go, what are those things?
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And so as I look back over my life, I graduated high school, I was going to go play football. And then I realized like right before I graduated, like, I don't even like football. I'm about to go do this for four more years. This is a terrible idea. And so then through a few events and I'm going to junior college for a couple of years and I transferred to Texas A&M. I graduated from there.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I went to a place out in East Texas called Sky Ranch. It's a summer camp for kids. And I worked there for four years. I came back to Dallas. I joined a staff, a pastoral staff at a church for about four years and did that. So I was in full-time ministry for about eight years right out of college.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
realized that I was a jerk and that I was way more interested in you liking me than I was teaching you about God. And that's a really crappy reason to be a pastor. And so I don't know if I had it. I don't know if I could tell you that that clearly, but I could tell you I was a jerk. So God offered a teaching pastor job in 2010.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
Big church, a few thousand people said, hey, 26, one tattoo, faux hawk. You think you're God's gift to people. Why don't you teach 25 weekends a year? And I said, why don't we not do that? Because that sounds like a bad idea. And so I said, no. They said, what do you want to do? And I said, you know, of course, I want to be a wedding photographer.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And that was more like it was a hobby my wife and I had. She had just quit her job. We just got married, had an apartment, no debt, no kids, one dog. Let's start a business. Why not? This is pre-Instagram. This is pre-Pinterest, pre-personal branding. Like we got so lucky. So we rode that wave, sort of our entrance into entrepreneurship. And then I started this business about 11 years ago.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
We found out we were pregnant with our son. And, you know, my wife said, if you could do anything for the rest of your life, what would you want to do? And I did not say this eloquently, although I do like to recount that I did because it does make me feel better about my career choice.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
As I said, if I could do anything the rest of my life, if I could attempt to end my life, having attempted to become an expert at anything, I would love to be a people expert. If I could marry my life experience, which is like the reality of what was.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
with eight years of ministry which is the reality of the care deeply caring for the human being for people and at this point now marry that with 15 or so years of entrepreneurship or we'll call that business or commerce right if you could marry history in your past and you could marry that with a deep care and desire for for a human with the capacity to take that into the market to say what then what shall we do if i could marry all those things together
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
If I could be an expert at anything, I'd want to be a people expert. How could I do that? And so a little over a decade ago, started coaching individuals and saying, hey, I had this business. Do you want one? They're like, oh, I'd love to have that. I was like, I'll show you how. And inside, I'm like, how are we going to show them how? I know it's never going to work.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
And you fast forward a decade and you go, I get methodologies and identity mapping, the confidence method, the influence appraisal, all these sort of ways. And I think for me, what has helped me in all of that, Mick, is for me to say daily, with my clients. And every time I get on stage, I start every keynote the same. Hey, so glad you're here. Get a pen and paper out.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
You're going to need something to write with and write on. If you came to a conference, you don't have anything to write with. I'm asking you to ask yourself. I'm not sure why you're here, but you are here. So get something out to write with. And as we get going, let me start it with this. If you leave today knowing more about me than you know about you, then I failed you.
Mick Unplugged
Rocky Garza on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth in Leadership
I'm not going home with you. You're going home with you. So buckle in, do the work, show up for yourself. I guarantee you can leave here with something that might actually change your life. Let's get going. because I have to have that reminder for myself. Otherwise, I will think that I am your hero and I am your answer. And I am not.