In this episode, Gary Acevedo shares his transformative journey from emotional struggles to becoming a leadership and personal development coach. He discusses the importance of space, safety, and recognizing positive intent in leadership and personal growth.
Gary Acevedo can look at a room and tell you what is about to go wrong in it. Not the strategy, the thing underneath. He has spent forty years on this, starting from a first year of college where he was brilliant, capable, and a week from a nervous breakdown. What pulled him out became the work. He founded Rise Leadership Group and The Awakening Retreat around a claim most founders resist on instinct. The business is stuck exactly where the founder is stuck, and effort does not fix that.
The résumé is real. AT&T hired him on the spot after forty five minutes. He has taken a client from a million a year to seven. But the useful part is what he learned along the way, which is that everyone runs one of two theaters in their head and most people live almost entirely in the one built from fear. That is where the ego lives, and the defensiveness, and the procrastination you cannot explain to yourself. Jennifer pushes on it from the brand side, since Bright Marketing renamed their whole system to brand therapy after realizing the blocker was never strategy. It was leaders too afraid to pick one.
Gary gives the tools away here. Three of them stuck with us.
1️⃣ You get scared, you get busy, and it makes everything worse
When pressure hits, the instinct is to push. More effort, more hours, more grinding. Gary spent decades watching that reflex tank people's productivity instead of saving it. His fix sounds soft until you try it. Three breaks a day where you do something that actually lights you up, because you come back to the problem as a different person. Skip it and you keep solving today's problem with yesterday's exhausted brain.
2️⃣ You are not afraid of failing. You are afraid of what success would prove.
Everybody says rejection is the big fear. Gary says that one is nothing compared to the fear of success. Push hard enough and you start pressing against the story you made up as a kid about what is wrong with you, and some part of you does not want to find out it is true. That is why smart people stall out right before the thing they say they want. If you keep almost getting there, look at what you would have to believe about yourself if you actually did.
3️⃣ Criticism does not fix anyone, including you
There is a parent and a child in your head. When the parent is critical, the child does one of three things. Caves, rebels, or freezes. Jennifer named the version she sees in companies every week and called it functional freezing. Teams stuck in analysis, leaders who cannot commit, everyone waiting for permission. The move is turning that critical voice into a compassionate coach, because all pain is just asking for a correction. Keep criticizing and you will keep wondering why nothing changes.
Timestamps:
00:00 Welcome to Hello Chaos
01:18 The breakdown that started everything
04:46 Flyers around town and no idea what he was doing
05:30 Why selling feels gross and enrollment does not
07:09 The coaching that took a client from 250k to 70k a month
09:07 The invisible thing every room has and most leaders ignore
12:17 The two theaters running inside your head
13:23 Working harder is why your numbers are down
14:44 Three recesses a day, even for the busiest people
15:02 The answer is never in your circumstances
16:36 Build the ending first, then everything else
19:39 How to melt your favorite jerk
20:37 The stranger he refused to let off the hook
25:35 The exercise that changes a sales floor in five minutes
29:38 The workshop nobody would leave
33:57 Why Jennifer started calling it brand therapy
35:37 The fear that is bigger than rejection
36:37 The parent and the child living in your head
39:01 Criticism is the fastest way to keep yourself down
41:35 Five to one, and seven to one at home
42:31 The teenage nightmare who got into seven PhD programs
45:06 How to hang up the phone on a bad thought
48:57 The one skill that moves you up in any company
52:11 What still moves him after all these years
56:53 One word for the whole journey
Gary has spent forty years helping people get out of their own way, and this is where you go if that sounds like something you need.