Transcript
Luke Acree (0:00)
Welcome to the Stay Paid podcast where we help agents and entrepreneurs master the latest business trends to unlock growth and create a life of freedom. Brought to you by Reminder Media.
Joshua Steich (0:11)
Welcome to Stay Paid. My name is Joshua Steich.
Luke Acree (0:13)
And I'm Luke Acree.
Joshua Steich (0:13)
And today we have joining us Stephen Acree and Cody Smith from the Acree Brothers Realty team, the number one team in Lynchburg, Virginia, soon to be the worst.
Cody Smith (0:22)
All right, welcome, gentlemen.
Joshua Steich (0:24)
Special guest today is Rocky Garza. Rocky is a transformative keynote speaker, executive coach and advisor to eight figure CEOs with over a decade of experience. He is renowned for his ability to foster authenticity in high stakes environments, creating spaces where individuals feel empowered to step into their true selves. His work with major companies like Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Zillow and Microsoft has helped thousands of individuals and leaders break through their limiting beliefs, align their strengths with their values, and lead with vulnerability and confidence. Rocky, welcome to Stay Paid.
Rocky Garza (0:54)
I appreciate it. Gentlemen. I'd go through and say one by one, but there's a lot more of you. There are me. So gentlemen, thank you for having me.
Luke Acree (1:01)
It's great to have you. Rocky, I got to hear you speak at 8% there and you're an incredible public speaker, can capture an audience, can really create an intimate moment, I would say, which is very hard to do in public speaking. I would love to hear from you. Like, how did you get into like the, you know, self discovery, motivational speaking, working coaching? It's just such a, an industry that feels like everybody and their mom today is an influencer. How have you cut through the noise? How did you get into it and gotten to a place where you can do it for a living?
Rocky Garza (1:34)
Yeah. Yeah. So I, let's go in reverse order of your questions. Number one, yes. Everyone and their mom most. I love looking at a 23 year old life coach because they have done so much that they have so much to tell us. That's, that's, that's fine. I'm 41. I feel like when I turned 40, I finally hit a moment where I was like, you know what? I'm going to stop apologizing for what it is I have to say. And I think at this point 40 years is a little bit of gusto. I have some things I don't have to get on stage and sort of give you this long show of why you should or should not believe me. But I think really what switched for me and I promise this will tie together was there was a moment where I realized, and I sometimes I say this out Loud as soon as I get on stage. More as a reminder for myself than anybody. But if we get done with whether it's, we're leading the team, we're doing a keynote, we're at a conference, if you know more about me by the time we're done, then you know about you, then I failed you, because I'm not going home with you. And so I think oftentimes, both as a speaker, as a coach, as an advisor, we can. I say we. And I'm going to include me in this. That's why I say it, because I say it for myself. We can get so wrapped up in the fact that we want people to think that we are valuable and important and experts that we forget the people who are in the chairs who are longing to change their life. And so if we walk away going, everybody love me. My guy, like, they love me. It was pretty good. And we did it again. And your life doesn't change. You should have just got on YouTube and everybody saved their money. So what can you do to provide something for somebody they cannot get on YouTube? Not knocking it. Think it's a great resource. However, there is something there that is irreplaceable that led into the question. You said, how did we arrive here? I have, without being that person that says you're a singer, how long you've been singing your whole life. It's like you haven't been singing in your whole life. That's a dumb answer. However, the majority of my life, I have been on a pursuit to discover who I am and where I belong. Long. My parents got divorced when I was young. Never lived with my dad growing up. My mom's been married and divorced five times. So I went to 13 schools where I graduated high school. And so I say all that not, not like, sad woe is me, like 41, been to a lot of therapy, feeling pretty good. Okay. So I say that more as a. As a. As a space to go. From the moment I can remember, I've been looking to see where I fit. Like, it wasn't until I was 27, married to my wife and we had our first Christmas at our house that I was like, in the same home for Christmas more than two years in a row. It wasn't until I was 30 years old, had our son, it was his first Christmas, and I invited my mom and her husband, my dad and his wife and my grandparents who raised me all to come to my house for Christmas. And I. That was the first time in my entire life, my whole family had ever been together on Christmas in a place that I was. And so when that for me is sort of the foundational thing that I have been. I graduated college, I was in full time ministry for about eight years. Vocationally realized that really wasn't the route I should have been in. I needed to be in for the rest of my life because I was an asshole. I'm pretty sure we can cuss on this podcast. And so I was more concerned with you loving me than I was learning about God. And that's a really crappy reason to be a pastor. And thankfully there was somebody who was gracious enough to me to let me see that and know that. And so when I got offered a teaching pastor job at a church of 5,000 at 26 with one tattoo, I said, hey, I don't think this is for me. And so my wife said, then let's start a photography business, because that makes sense. And my wife had been an architect. She quit her job. It was our hobby. No kids, no debt. 2010, Instagram and Pinterest weren't invented yet. Let's go. Why not? So we actually started a wedding photography business. We did that full time for about five years. Really for us. We both spent five years in therapy. We spent five years building a business. We sort of rode the wave of personal branding and online and sharing images and total out of being ignorant, naive. This is not rocky. As a media expert. This was, we should do something fun and people should pay for us to travel. Weddings are not terrible. So like that. That was about the extent of our, of our. What we said we were going to do. We did that for about five years and loved it. It found out we were pregnant with our son back in 2015, so about 10 years ago and realized, I don't want to shoot weddings the rest of my life. And so my wife said, if you could do anything, what would you want to do? I did not say it this eloquently, although today I like to believe I did. I said if I could be an expert at anything, by the end of my life, I'd want to be a people expert. How could I help people find and discover the clarity around who they are? Because my whole life had been built on what I could produce. And the capacity to produce was directly synonymous with the value I carried on a daily basis. And I want to be clear, I'm not telling you not to produce. Get after it, chase it, get a B hag, do the whatever Jesse Itzler says you're supposed to do. Once A year, some Japanese thing where it's like this big. Whatever they are, we all got something we're supposed to go and do. I'm all for it. Get your 90 day plan out, let's crush it. And if we're going to spend the duration of our life and that being a single metric for our value weight and a capacity to influence, we are going to be severely disappointed. And after a long time of being disappointed for hoping people would see me for what I was doing and realizing there was to no effect, I said there has to be something different. And so the last decade has been as much of a self exploration as it has been the ability to engage with individuals. Somehow I found myself in the business space, oftentimes in the corporate space. I joke. I'm the only corporate keynote speaker that's never had a resume. And that's because I don't really have a desire to get up and talk about my expertise in your business. I have a desire to get up and talk about my expertise in you. And if I can help you see you in a clear way, I believe every aspect of your life will get better. It is not predicated on my capacity to actually do something for you, but rather your ability to sit with yourself long enough that you might be able to discover the single thing that you're missing that everybody else can see.
