The Achieve Podcast - Gary de Rodriguez (Peopleistic)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner, and today we're excited to have Gary D. Rodriguez with us today. He is the CEO of Peoplelistic. Gary, we're excited to have you on the show today.

It's really good to see you, Jesse. I'm really happy to be here and excited as well.

So our audience can get to know you a little bit, tell us a quick backstory of your business. What do you do and, and how did it all get started?

Well, what I do is, um, as you know, AI is becoming quite, um, a business disruptor. So I have had the great good fortune— I sit on the board of directors for the C-Suite Coaching Council, and, uh, it's just a group of high-level coaches and consultants And within that, that we have access to a closed AI system, which is the culmination of 25 of the greatest thought leaders that ever lived from 2,500 years, starting with Aristotle all the way up to the latest research in neuroscience. So what I'm doing right now is I'm working with leadership teams, especially around the relationship dynamics in the C-suite. We want as much cohesion in the C-suite as possible because as we know, upper management models the C-suite's culture. Mid-management models upper management. Team leaders model middle management and all the way down the line. So when we have alignment, value-driven, purpose-driven alignment at the top, we have cohesion and a natural cultural improvement throughout the entire organization. What this process does is it takes a deep psychological analysis of everyone in the C-suite and shows how to begin to start creating and dispelling the unconscious patterns that are running between the personalities. So we get cohesion, understanding, and most importantly, alignment. Makes business run far smoother, decisions far faster, and with better thought processes included with that. So I'm doing that currently. Um, how do I get started? That's a long story, but I'll be brief. Okay. I have this great passion, um, for helping people stop suffering in the real estate that is 7 to 6 inches between their ears. Uh, what happens for most people, especially in a leadership position, although they may have the academics, they don't always have the people intelligence and they don't always have the communication or the emotional intelligence to be highly effective in a leadership position. So what I began to do was studying, started studying the deep psychology, but where I began was working with, I know this is going to sound odd and off course, but it's actually not, working with death and dying during the beginning of the AIDS crisis back in the '80s. So I jumped in, ran the first AIDS educational seminars in Southern California, brought down legislators from Sacramento, immunologists from all the major hospitals,. And we did open forums to educate people on what they knew, at least at that particular point in time. What that got me interested in was how do I develop quick behavioral change processes? Because you were diagnosed, you were a skeleton in 3 months in those days. How do you begin to get people to resolution with their lives in a 3-month period of time? Talk therapy was never going to be able to accomplish that. So I began the deep dive into what I've all called deep psychology and behavioral change work.. And that took me down many different avenues of being able to create accelerated change for people. I think at this point in my life, I've probably coached more than 30,000 people worldwide in a 37-year career. And I've trained in multiple organizations. I remember this one, I don't want to sound like I'm puffing. I'm not, but this is just one of the comments that was made to show the distinction between what most people view as leadership curriculum and training to what the deeper dive in the deep psychology of what drives human behavior, what the differences are. So I was asked to speak at Shell Oil's International Leadership Conference down in Australia. And I went down there. They flew me down. I got up on stage. I did my talk and my presentation. The head of Shell Oil Australia got up, put his arm on my shoulder and said, this guy just presented the missing piece of every leadership training we have ever taught in Shell Oil. And I was like, okay, well, I must be doing something different. And, but where the difference is, is, I don't know. I don't know if you have ever heard these stats, but Stanford University's Advisory Council on Leadership did a study. Which was trying to figure out really what was the most essential element in developing leadership in anyone. And what they concluded and voted on unanimously, that it was self-awareness. So if you step back from that and you say, okay, then what's self-awareness? What drives self-awareness? It links very closely to emotional intelligence. Most of us don't understand why we behave the way we do, why our beliefs will be the filter in which we'll put a cap on our ability to rise further in an organization or to accomplish more. What we will limit ourselves by is generally just a belief. And then you have to look at, okay, well then where do beliefs come from? Where do they get generated from? Where are they born? And they're born from key significant events that carry unresolved emotional states. The more unresolved emotionally our past is, the more the limiting beliefs we will carry. And that'll be the lens in which we can see our possibility or lack of possibility. Those would be the lids that we place on our performance that says, no, we can't do that. So a large part of my work is going in and help people do a much deeper dive into their own self-awareness, especially when I'm doing coaching for a leadership team. What is it that they have to do? What are the individual elements that they have to overcome in order to reach that next level of excellence and performance?

Gary, when did you start your company? How long you been doing this?

Oh my God, so long. From the mid-'80s. What I found was I started doing a lot of public seminars and I called my trainings at that time Tools for Life. And as I taught the public seminars, there were people from a variety of different companies that would hear about them and the results we were getting, and they would show up in the public seminars and then they would ask me to come in and train in their organizations some similar curriculum to what I was training for the general public. So that's how, you know, the corporate work began. It began very organically. I didn't go out and search it out. I didn't go out and hit on, knock on doors and, you know, say, I got this great proposal here. No, they kind of came into my public trainings and then invited me into the organizations. But I've been doing this since mid-'80s.

Is it Just yourself? Do you have a team? What is your company?

Oh no, no, I've got a team. Our head offices are down in Australia. I was living, I've lived in Australia for, geez, I don't know, 4, something like 4 years, but trained down there for 14. But I lived down there for 4 solid years. And in that time I met a very, he's like a Mensa guy, you know? He's like the most intelligent person I know. And I always say, if you're going to do business with someone, always do business with someone smarter than you. So he has a whole other level of academia that I admire. And we became fast friends when we met. He would come to my public lectures, and we became really close friends, and we'd hang out together down in Australia. And then one day I said to him, you know what, we should, we should combine our talents and do something radically different. Because he was like head of the International Society for Project Management. He was very big into systems. I was very big into developing people. He was very big into workflow analysis and systems and project management. And so we thought this would be a great team. So we did our DiSC chart to make sure that, you know, like our DiSC assessments. He was a DC and I was an IS, and we thought we have all the skills we need, and we launched. And we've been together in business now for, God, going on 15, maybe 18 years now. So it's been a really good alliance.

Well, congratulations on the success you've had so far.

Yeah, it's been great.

How big is your team today now?

We have about 10 people total.

Okay.

We run— we really run lean. And I'm still doing the principal amount of training in the United States because, you know, I don't know, maybe it's because I don't think anybody will do it as good as I'll do it. So I'm going to go in there and do it until I just decide, you know, I've had enough. But I love what I do. This is kind of like my, my purpose in life, my spiritual purpose is to help people evolve. And so I'm committed to that. And why would I ever retire?

So, so it started with you and your partner in Australia. Uh, now you, you service globally now then? We do.

We do. Yeah. We work throughout, uh, the Southern Hemisphere and I work more in the Northern Hemisphere. So it's, uh, it's been a, it's been a great alliance. We don't go to Europe too much because it's such a bloody long flight for him anyways, and we have more trainers down there. I've got one trainer up here with me, and that's how we have run it.

Great. When you look at growth, sales, marketing, outreach, where are you seeing traction? What's working for you?

I think I want to speak to that because, you know, there are a lot of organizations that are doing their best to incorporate AI. And but what seems to be occurring is they're investing a lot of money in AI, but the, the adoption of it is beginning to show signs of cracks because the human element in learning AI and bring AI into the workplace, they're starting to find that there is a resistance in the adoption of it by the workforce. There are people who have an underlying belief that AI is going to replace them. So why would they want to adopt a system into the workflow when they feel like that system's going to replace their job eventually? So there's, there's lots of different elements. There's overwhelm elements, there's, there's techphobia elements, then there's job displacement elements. And that is starting to influence the profit that organizations thought that they could make with introducing AI. So that's not, you know, the only issue with AI. I think AI is inevitable. I think it's powerful, but I also think it needs to be human-forward AI, meaning that you don't just trust AI carte blanche. There needs to be a human element, especially in designing the prompts and especially in being able to train the, uh, the adaptation of it into the workforce. There's always going to need to be a human element involved in the incorporation of AI for streamlining operations and for marketing.

So are you using AI today in sales and marketing, or what are you doing today to actually grow your businesses?

Definitely, definitely. We're utilizing forms of AI now. I have a team that does that. I can't do everything. So I have a team that does that. And we also go in and help organizations make adaptations. I go in and do all the sort of the human elements of incorporating AI into organizations as well.

Okay. Well, you know, you've been at this for quite a while, right?

Yeah, I'm an old dog here.

A few bus years, it sounds like, since the '80s. What are some of the constraints that show up as you try to grow? Is this a time, a people, capital? Where do you see the actual constraints in your business?

The constraints right now are— I think there's one word that sort of encapsulates it. It's uncertainty. People right now seem to be very uncertain on the course of the country, the course of the world, the tensions in the world between a variety of different countries. And they seem to be— I won't say they're not expanding because they are, but there is this underlying tension within that I'm seeing within the culture right now. And I don't think it puts a tremendous amount of constraints on business. Depends on what the business is, but it can put constraints based upon the increase in cost of goods, cost of services, cost of materials. All that is putting a strain. And with the introduction of perhaps more tariffs, it's going to put even a larger financial strain on small businesses and the general public. That's where I'm kind of seeing like uncertainty because people don't know and things have already increased in price-wise if across the boards. So people are a little more cautious.

Do you feel that uncertainty in your own business as you're trying to grow?

Not as much because of first of all, the credibility and the experience and being AI forward in our business as well. And we teach a completely different style of leadership training and leadership development that actually begins to work at the root cause, which very few leadership trainings actually go to. What is the root cause of my stuckness? You know, so people don't do that. I remember I was working in a company because I get hired a lot to come in and work with, organizations because a lot of the C-suite members right now are retiring. You know, the boomers are retiring and we have to bring up people into the pipeline. So this was the circumstance in this particular company. And they had a candidate that was just superlative. They all loved him. They thought it was great. But then they said, there's something off and we don't know what it is. So they hired me to coach him for about 10 sessions. In the course of that, what emerged out of that, and this is what I mean about the, the adverse childhood experiences. He's sitting in a room of multiple PhD-educated, highly academic members of the C-suite. What his background was, he was tremendous at operations, like a genius. He knew the company inside and out, every bolt and nut he knew. And, but in his mind, he grew up as a kid without running water and without electricity. He would get on a bus. He said, Gary, I would smell so bad because I didn't have running water. I had to go wash in a stream. And if the stream wasn't running, I couldn't clean myself. And I was like, okay. And he goes, so, and oftentimes he said, I didn't even hardly have shoes. And my clothes were always filthy because we didn't have water to wash my clothes. So his, his level of internal shame, and this is important, the internal shame and those core significant events impregnate the nervous system so that when he has to bring himself forward. It's not that his mind doesn't know he's great. His mind knows he's great. But what happens is the neurotriggers of being under pressure and not feeling enough sends off neurosensitivities like crazy. He gets— his amygdala gets hijacked. He dumps cortisol and adrenaline into his body, goes into fight, flight, or freeze. And what you have is a person not running out of choice, but running out of reaction. And it's a biochemical process. And the only way to begin to resolve that is quiet down the nervous system from the memories he carries without any emotional regulation or emotional resolution. When we did that deeper work, he became like, like chilled out. And I remember the HR head says, what did you do to him? Because he's 'Totally different.' And I'm like, 'We did the deeper work.' This is how organizations, if we do not start to invest in the most important asset that they have, which is a human equity, you can't really grow. And I will always say this, it begins at the top. If the top is fractured, the— it's like it turns into a crack at the top. It's like the Grand Canyon at the bottom. A little ripple at the top, tsunami wave at the bottom. Because the breakage there breaks all levels of the organization, just becomes wider and wider and wider. And people wonder, "Oh, why is my culture so bad? Why aren't we highly performing? Why?" And I'll tell you why. It's the incongruency between the word, thought, and action from the top. Filters down to upper management. They give lip service to the values, what we stand for as an organization. Goes to middle, goes to team leads, and then the employees pushing the product out or customer-facing. What they do is they go, 'This is bullshit.

I don't trust these people.' So, So Gary, you obviously have a lot of experience here. It sounds like you've worked with a lot of different business owners at a high level. What, what advice would you give to these leaders and entrepreneurs who are listening to our podcast? What advice to get to those business owners who are kind of in the middle of all this?

If you don't increase your self-awareness and your emotional intelligence, which means if you don't do the deeper work You will rise to the level of what you feel worthy of receiving, and that will be it. If you're having trouble generating, because there's trillions of dollars everywhere. If you're having money, money issues or operational issues, or you can't find the right people, it is very important that you reflect on what are the internal blockages that you have. If you don't do the internal work, the external circumstances will never change. You have to change here before it changes there. I know people don't like to hear that, but the truth is that is the truth. The external world's a reflection of your internal world. And if you don't shift there, you don't change and you'll struggle your entire career.

Last question for you here, Gary, is as you think about the future and kind of the next stage of your business and kind of what you're seeing, what are you most excited about?

I'm excited about the future of human beings with technology and keeping it human-centered and human-focused and human-forward in the utilization of a technology that has never been on the planet before. And personally, most people are always going to destroy humanity. There are a lot of millions of possibilities. It can also create massive wealth for trillions of people and start to equalize the ills of our societies by bringing everyone up and actually becoming more human and having more opportunities for more and more people. This is going to have to happen at some point. And I really do, I have faith in human beings. I have faith in the human heart. And I really do believe that we can make something that will be something that will change humanity forever. For the better, not for the worst, but for the better. But it's going to be the heart of the people running it. That are going to make the difference.

Gary, I really appreciate you sharing your story, your insights with us today. Um, it's fantastic. For those listening, if you want to learn more about what Gary is building, I invite you to visit their website, peoplelistic.com. And, uh, that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. Gary, again, thank you for joining us, and a big thank you to our sponsor, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing business businesses. If you enjoyed today's conversation, invite you to follow the show, share with another entrepreneur who'd also find value in it. And again, thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast. Gary, thank you so much for joining us today.

So welcome, my friend. Thank you so much.