It was evening in Paris, and through my screen I could see the Monterrey skyline bright and sunny behind him. We were in one of our monthly mentoring sessions, and I had been pouring out my anxieties for the past ten minutes. I wasn’t booked on enough stages. Other speakers were moving faster. The relentless competition for visibility on social media felt suffocating. I was all anxiety and very little rational thought.
Then came “There is no tiger,” and I laughed. The truth of it landed somewhere deep. I had been running from tigers that existed only in my imagination.
What Jesús de la Garza, my mentor, has offered me over the past year of working together: awareness. The recognition that most of the answers are already within me, buried under layers of imaginary threats and unnecessary urgency. I’m working hard to put it into practice daily.
When I asked him recently what his first impression of me was, he said: “Thirst for learning and legacy.” I’m still sitting with that. The thirst part I recognize. The legacy part I feel deeply, but to have him recognize it and put it into words was meaningful. I felt seen.
How We Met
I first met Jesús in the fall of 2023, during one of the hardest periods I can remember. The October 7th attacks in Israel had just happened, and like many people around me, I was struggling to process the grief and the fracturing of relationships along political lines. Within the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, where I’ve been a member for years, two WhatsApp channels had formed, one pro-Israel, one pro-Palestinian, and people I cared about were on both sides, hurting and unable to hear each other.
A small group of us decided to try something different. Eight people willing to have a dialogue despite high emotions and opposite points of view. We called it Forum Hope. We met virtually every two weeks for two hours, entrepreneurs and CEOs from around the world, all of us actively involved in helping our communities deal with the crisis. No one wanted to facilitate these sessions. Jesús saw it as a challenge, a chance to prove that we have more in common than we think. He didn’t pretend to be an expert. He was humble, and that humility created the atmosphere that made everything else possible.
Every session felt like open-heart surgery to me. It took all my energy to focus for two hours on seven other people pouring their hearts out, sharing their deepest fears with incredible honesty and courage. I poured my heart out too. And through it all, Jesús held the space with a quality I can only describe as grounded calm. I trusted him immediately. It felt good to open up about fears and values with him facilitating.
The Exercise That Changed Everything
During one session, Jesús asked each of us to share the biggest fears the conflict had stirred in us. We spoke one after another, Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims and Jews and Christians. And we were all shocked to discover that despite standing on opposite sides of this horrible conflict, despite coming from different countries and cultures, we all had remarkably similar fears. Fears for our families’ wellbeing. Fears of not belonging fully to our own group. Fears of becoming so angry we might be insensitive to others’ pain. Fears of being misunderstood or dismissed.
When the last person finished, the virtual room had transformed. We saw each other more clearly. We respected and trusted each other. We actually felt love and care for everyone there.
That exercise, that simple question about shared fears, has stayed with me. I go back to it now when I see that respect or connection is missing in a group, when people are getting defensive or not truly listening. I’m still learning how to use it well.
Jesús calls this kind of work “resonance.” Instead of repeating what someone said, participants share what resonated with them. It’s a gentle approach to what he calls the blind spot in the Johari window, the things others see about us that we can’t see ourselves. The sharing becomes multidirectional rather than one person giving feedback to another. He describes it as weaving a safety net, like the protection net in a circus. The performers know it’s there if they need it. The lack of threat makes difficult things easier to hear. There’s randomness to it too, a freshness, and nobody feels locked into a predetermined role.
Humility Learned the Hard Way
Jesús is 63 years old, with 38 years in the steel industry, including 31 years representing TATA Steel. He holds two master’s degrees, one in business and one in counseling and group counseling. He has been in psychoanalysis for 20 years, working in five-year cycles, and recently began his fourth. He has facilitated over a thousand sessions with more than ten thousand participants. These are impressive credentials, but what draws me to him has nothing to do with credentials.
“I learned humility the hard way,” he told me recently, “through losing a marriage and breaking businesses.”
The divorce was a turning point. He had a cattle business at the time, and he was trying to be stone, rigid, unchanging, forcing his business to continue as if nothing had happened. He lost money because he couldn’t adapt to the new reality. The lesson he took from that period became a cornerstone of how he works: be like water. Water is patient. Water carved the Grand Canyon. Water finds another way around obstacles.
“The mountain doesn’t move,” he says, “but our perception of it changes.”
What I notice about Jesús is how he holds humility. For him, it seems to mean recognizing that our view is limited, that we might be wrong, that peak moments are temporary. We both hike, and he uses the mountain as a metaphor: when you think you know it all, you’re at the peak, but that’s only half the journey. The journey finishes when you touch base again. Some people touch bottom the hard way, through addiction or disease. His work is helping people do it more consciously, more purposefully. “Humility is the door of entry for the relationship of help,” he explains. “Without it, the relationship would be very limited, because the person feels they don’t need anything.”
Gentle Confrontation
He calls his approach “gentle confrontation,” asking direct questions with care and respect. The goal, as he describes it, is to present challenges in a way that doesn’t trigger the brain’s threat response. “Maybe this is worth exploring,” he might say, rather than telling you what to do. He compared it once to gaining a puppy’s trust before touching its belly. You create safety first, and you take your time. Gentleness always prevails.
What makes his sessions work is hope. If you leave a conversation with something to think about, something that engages you, you come back. He creates a playful environment where change feels possible. That’s the difference. Not pressure, but possibility.
“I go where the client chooses to go,” he says, “because I trust their capacity to find what they need once awareness expands.”
I’ve worked with coaches who have the answers and want to teach them to you. Jesús operates differently. He seems to believe most of the answers are already within us. His work, as I understand it, is creating enough awareness for us to recognize our own truth.
Let the Shovel Go
One of his clients was a 67-year-old entrepreneur with a long record of failed ventures and financial stress. When they began working together, Jesús told him one thing: “Let the shovel go. If you hold the shovel, you keep digging the same hole. The first step is to stop digging. Once you stop, you can see how deep the hole is and understand how you got there.”
They looked at every failed attempt and searched for what they had in common. The client saw the same pattern repeating and decided to change it. That single adjustment changed his results. For the first time in about ten years, he built a business that works. It wasn’t a home run, Jesús says, but a solid hit that put him back in the game. What made the difference was humility. He stopped chasing quick results and let go of the pride and ego that had kept him from facing what needed to change.
The Imaginary Tiger
The imaginary tiger framework keeps showing up in how I think about my own anxiety. Jesús explains that these tigers, these unfounded fears, usually appear when there’s a lack of information. The brain goes to worst-case scenarios as a preservation mechanism. “The brain needs information to avoid worst-case scenarios,” he says. “Gathering information helps dispel imaginary tigers.”
He does twice-daily checks of his own thoughts, catching imaginary tigers early before anxiety builds. He asks himself: “Do I have all the elements to confirm this is a real tiger?” If not, he either gathers more information or makes a conscious decision. Even deciding not to decide, he points out, is recognized by the brain as a decision. It helps manage the anxiety.
From Competition to Joy
I dance Argentine tango, and for years I went to marathons and festivals wanting to prove myself. I wanted to be one of the best, to dance with all the top dancers. It brought confidence and validation but no real joy or satisfaction. Through working with Jesús, that changed. Now I focus on joy and pleasure, on play and improvisation. The competition mindset has faded. I look forward to every event as an opportunity to connect and have fun. The joy has returned.
Head to Head, Heart to Heart
I used to complain to Jesús about dinner parties. Everyone around the table talking head to head, analyzing, debating, competing intellectually, and no heart. I would leave exhausted and resentful. I’m much more of a heart person, and I couldn’t understand why these conversations drained me so much.
He taught me his framework. “Differences come from the head,” he explains. “Commonalities come from the heart.” In his research, people have approximately 60,000 thoughts per day, speak 15,000 to 20,000 words, but experience only about 27 emotions. “We have more emotions in common than different thoughts,” he says. Our thoughts are different, but our feelings, more likely we share something.
Once I understood which type of conversation was happening, everything changed. I learned how to gently inspire people to move from head to heart, or, if they weren’t ready, just staying aware of the dynamic removed my resentment. Understanding brought kindness.
He prefers the word transparency to vulnerability. Vulnerability, he says, carries a connotation of weakness. Transparency is cleaner. In Forum Hope, he told us, everyone has a scar. We know everyone has one, and yet we’re still afraid to show ours. The work is taking off the layers, being mindful of the scar, and letting others see it.
How He Lives
Jesús practices intermittent fasting, going 16 to 20 hours without food most days, and does 48-hour fasts quarterly. He avoids caffeine and processed foods. He uses physical notebooks rather than software because it forces him to slow down, to process rather than just consume.
He’s flexible about routines though. “Let the day surprise me,” he says. This flexibility is itself a form of humility, accepting that the day has something different for him than what he planned. He studies philosophy continuously, currently Taoism, before that the Stoics, before that Spinoza. His morning reminder to himself: “I want to change the world.”
Where I Still Struggle
After our recent session, he told me I was “blossoming and sparkling,” more aligned with my purpose. I’ve moved from imposter syndrome and constant rushing toward something more grounded. When I gave my TEDx talk recently, he pointed out that the argument I’d had with my son about competition and preparation was actually the first step in my preparation. I hadn’t seen it that way. I thought I was having fun. He saw me getting ready.
I still struggle with the tiger framework daily though. Noticing the imaginary tiger early enough to become rational before anxiety takes over remains a work in progress. We return to it almost every monthly session.
What continues to surprise me is how often the same lessons need to be relearned. “Nobody is chasing you,” Jesús has told me more than once. “What’s the rush?” And yet I find myself running again, and he gently brings me back. “Dress me slowly because I am in a hurry,” he quotes – Napoleon’s famous paradox.
A Quiet Calm
The other day, I was in the Paris metro during rush hour, people pushing, the usual chaos. And I found something inside myself that wasn’t there a year ago. A quiet calm. I wasn’t running from any tigers. I was just there, present, aware that whatever urgency I felt was probably imaginary.
Jesús believes that purpose doesn’t need to be found, it needs to be activated. We cover our purpose with layers of societal expectations, and his work is helping people remove those layers to reconnect with what was always there. “When people speak without connection to their purpose,” he says, “they appear hollow.”
I’m more aligned than I was. I still run from imaginary tigers some days, but now I have the awareness to catch myself, to ask the question he taught me to ask: Is this a real tiger?
What tiger are you running from that isn’t actually there?