Rocky Garza doesn’t measure success by titles or achievements. For him, success is about understanding who you truly are. The Dallas-based leadership coach and keynote speaker has spent over a decade helping individuals and organizations discover the unique intersections of personal conviction and professional ambition.
“I’ve never met a person [who] didn’t want to be seen, known and understood,” says Garza, who specializes in helping people gain clarity about their identity. This simple yet profound insight forms the foundation of Garza’s approach to leadership development and personal growth.
Shifting priorities
Garza’s journey to becoming a sought-after leadership coach wasn’t exactly conventional. After eight years in ministry, he and his wife Sarah launched a successful wedding photography business, traveling the world to shoot around 40 weddings each year.
“She quit her job in ’09. I quit my job in 2010, and our parents thought we were crazy,” he recalls of the business’ early days. “This was pre-Pinterest, pre-Instagram. Those things all came about while we were in the throes of wedding photography.”
The turning point came when the couple learned they were expecting their first child. “Personal conviction said, ‘I don’t want to travel 40 times a year and have a kid. I don’t want to be gone every Saturday and have children. That’s not the kind of father that I want to be,’” Garza explains.
“If I could do anything, I’d want to help people know who they are,” he continues. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out what that means, and it’s only been identified by the role I play personally or the title I carry professionally. And surely there has to be more to who I am than how I’m going to be identified at a networking event.”
Personal conviction led to professional reinvention. Garza began helping creative entrepreneurs build businesses that aligned with their values—a service that eventually expanded to include team coaching and keynote speaking.
Discovering your true self
At the heart of Garza’s methodology is a process called “identity mapping”—a four-hour journey of self-discovery for individuals and an eight-hour workshop for teams of 15 or fewer. Unlike standard personality assessments, identity mapping doesn’t tell you who you are based on someone else’s rubric. Instead, it helps you extract and articulate what you already know about yourself but may lack the language to express.
“I believe every person knows who they are; we just lack the language to describe it such that it’s understandable to anybody else,” Garza explains. “I think we struggle with the right questions and the right curiosity and the right environment to get that out so that we can look at it and then we can understand it.”
The process helps participants identify three key elements: their core values (why they do what they do), their strengths (how they do what they do) and their identifiers (words like “strategizer,” “analyzer” or “caregiver”).
Creating meaningful collisions
Garza says there’s a critical distinction between being a contributor on a team and being what he calls an “impact player.” While everyone contributes something, impact players approach life and work proactively rather than reactively.
“Impact, meaning that I am fully aware of what happens when my life, my world, who I am, collides with somebody else,” he says. “The best players are proactive. They wake up in the morning and they say, ‘I know exactly what I’m going to do today. I’m gonna control what I can control.’”
This shift from reactive contributor to proactive impact player forms the basis of Garza’s leadership development program, The Path. This 24-step process includes identity mapping, the confidence method (addressing fear, doubt and impostor syndrome), the influence appraisal (developing the self-awareness to lead with maximum impact) and strategies for creating lasting habits.
With a growing following across platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok, Garza uses social media to create what he calls “significant disruption.”
“I love talking about things on LinkedIn that go against typical business knowledge,” he says. “Not because typical business knowledge is bad, but I just want to break the monotony. And not because I want to be right. I just want to make sure that what you think is what you think.”
His content aims to help people recognize their uniqueness, receive affirmation for that uniqueness and believe they can use it for good in the world. This stands in contrast to the typical professional world, where value is often reduced to titles and responsibilities.
“The reason so many folks professionally feel tired and burned out and whipped and distraught is because we have taken that… uniqueness… and we have diluted it down to the title and roles and responsibilities,” he explains.
Living his values
Garza practices what he preaches. When introducing himself at the start of our interview, he began not with his professional achievements but by talking about what matters most in his life, his family: his wife of 16 years and their two children.
“I made a commitment to myself a couple years ago when speaking started picking up again, and I was on stages in front of thousands of people,” he says. “I will not get on that stage and tell you to pursue who it is that you want to be and make sure you don’t sacrifice who you are while sacrificing who I am.”
Through his coaching, speaking and media presence, Garza continues to challenge leaders to find their own path to impact—one that honors both their personal conviction and professional ambitions. In doing so, he’s helping reshape how we think about success, leadership and the meaningful life we all seek to create.
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of SUCCESS® magazine. Photo by ©Afritina Coker/courtesy of Rocky Garza.
