PALABRAS: Author Daniel Gutierrez Teaches Value of Honesty, Peace, and Spirituality

This article is part of "Palabras," the Latin Post Latino Author Series.

Daniel Gutierrez is a motivational speaker and the author of the "Stepping Into Greatness: Success Is Up To You" and "Fifty Lessons I Learned on my Path to Peace and Tranquility." Beyond that, the humorous, charismatic and painstakingly honest thought leader has made openness and transformation his life's work.

Gutierrez was born in Midlothian, Texas, a one-horse town resembling Mayberry from "The Andy Griffin Show," and it quite possibly had more cows than people. There, he watched his mother grow tomatoes in a field, and he often asked himself, "Is this it?" From a young age, he had grand aspirations, he want to see Michael Angelo's David and he wanted to travel the world.

"I was in a small Texas town with big dreams, big aspirations and I didn't know how I was going to make it happen. I really didn't. I just knew that I was born with something in me that needed to be expanded upon and expressed upon, and I set out to do that," Gutierrez told Latin Post.

When Best Buy was just a "little bitty company" and had 50 stores, he joined their team as an executive and helped to build the company. He was a successful at developing stores across the nations. Nonetheless, he wanted to do something else. He was a student of motivation, positive thinking, si su puede and yes I can. He put in his two weeks' notice and called his mother and told her, "I'm going to be a motivational speaker." His mother, who had always been proud of his success, didn't speak to him for a long time after he quit his jobs.

Success as a motivation speaker was not immediate. Following his departure from Best Buy, he burned through his money quickly and nearly became homeless. At that time, Best Buy reached out to him and offered him his job and benefits, but he refused. He thought, "How can I look my child in the eye and ask him to pursue his dreams, if I'm unwilling to do the same." He firmly told them no, and continued toward his dream.

"Eighteen years ago, when I started in the field of motivational speaking, there were no Latinos doing it. There was no one to go to for mentoring, there was no one I could go to and say, 'How do you do this?' So, I had to do it my own. I remember telling people, 'I'm meals on wheels; if you feed me, I'll speak.' I think we have to go to the bottom to get up," said Gutierrez. "Today, I'm one of top paid motivational speakers in the industry. I went from working for food to $50 an hour to $10,000 an hour. I still remember the first time I got a check for $25,000 for 45 minutes of work. But, it was never about the money. I really enjoy helping people.

"Without being religious, I realized really early own in life, that if I was serving people, I was happy; if I was serving myself for money, I was miserable because I never had enough. I'm 52 now, I've been doing this a long time and I love what I do. I go in front of a big group of corporate people and I tell them, there's more to life than just chasing money."

While Gutierrez has been a poet since the age of 7, he never set out to be a writer. In high school, a teacher called him a shmuck and told him that he would never amount to anything because of his accent. He didn't have a firm grasp on the English language, particularly vocabulary. When he went to college, he had an opportunity to write a paper on William Blake for his English class, and the paper was returned to him completely marked with red ink, but it had an 'A-' on it. He asked, "Why do I have an 'A-' and you basically used a whole pen on my paper." She responded, 'You're an excellent writer, you're ability to convey a message is powerful ... and your grammar is horrible. Fortunately for you, you can always hire editors.'"

"Writing then became a very strong tool in conveying a message. When I'm doing a radio interview or a speech, I'm given a very limited amount of time to convey a message. As a writer, I can really work with the ideas and the messaging. I'm a story teller. I grew up telling stories because that's the way people learned to listen and share since the beginning of time. It's always about stories," Gutierrez explained. "Our community, we're great story tellers. ... We might embellish a little too much, but we're great storytellers. When I write, I'm able to convey messages a little deeper, a little clearer."

His book "Stepping Into Greatness" was written for several reason, one being that he wanted to explain to the public what qualifies him to advise other. Rather than feign perfection as a speaker, he utilized honesty and experience to connect to people through their humanness. The book is raw and honest and it doesn't claim that life has been rosy. Instead, it says might suck, but that's okay because that's just part of being human.

"I wrote that book because I wanted the world to know that I'm not perfect, I had a hard life. I wanted the world to know that I didn't just wake up one day and decide I wanted to do this; this was a process of continual working, growth. When I was at Best Buy, a kid who was working for me, looked at me and said, 'Oh it must be nice being you, you must've been fed with a silver spoon. You wear your $700 dollar suits, you come in here, bark orders and you go home.' So, I took him to lunch, and I told him my story ... and I got tired of telling that story, so I decided to write the book," said Gutierrez. "I always felt that I needed to let people know that I wasn't perfect because I felt that, in leadership, people always want to look back and see how they can bring you down.

"So I said, I'm going to tell it like it is. When it's all on the table, no one can question if I inhaled or if I didn't inhale. No, I inhaled and I liked it, but it wasn't good for me. At the end of the day, I wanted to be honest, I wanted people to know, 'This is Daniel Gutierrez, and this is what I did for me.'"

Gutierrez also wrote the book because his father was killed in a car accident when I was just 5 years old. He never knew him, and he found that to be tragedy. So, when he had his own son, he was scared. He wrote his book because he wanted his son to know who he was in case something happened to him.

His sophomore book, "Fifty Lessons," came to him as he sat on the couch following his 50th birthday. He was alone, with the exception of his dog, and he laughed as he thought about his age in the face of mortality. He never thought he would live to be 50. His father had died at 25, his two brothers in their 20s and his grandfather had passed. Aside from his son, he was the only man in his family tree.

"I'm sitting laughing, thinking to myself, crying almost, I made it. I'd sought all of my life, peace and tranquility and I was there. Then, I wrote "50 Lessons" in one day. I've been a photographer since I was in high school, so I finally decided I'm going to take my pictures and I'm going to put it together to share my journey. And the path was not pretty, but I'm here and I'm living my dream," said Gutierrez. "I set out not to work hard with my hands like I saw my mom do. I wanted to do something with my life and create something different. Life isn't always great, but we have the power to overcome anything when we choose to, because thoughts are powerful. The book includes the 50 most powerful quotes, poems and statements that I've used said throughout my entire life; I hung on to them, like it was my only thing to hang on to."

Today, it's all about peace and tranquility. He advises people to do live freely and travel because one day you may realize that you don't have much time to live. His next bestseller, "Dancing in the Chaos," which will straddle the world the corporate world and spirituality, will discuss peace, tranquility, understanding and forgiveness.

"I like to leave people with things that provoke thought. We live in a world where people are constantly searching. We're all seekers of something. The question is, what are we seeking? More important that what we're searching or what we're seeking is what are we avoiding? If we can figure out what we're avoiding, which is usually ourselves, we can find ourselves living much happier lives than the ones we have," said Gutierrez. "So, it's not what we're searching for that's killing us, it's what we're avoiding that's killing us. People say, I'm going to go find myself. No, you're avoiding yourself. How do you go find yourself, look in the mirror. You're already there."