My mother raised me on her own and she did an exceptional job. That is not the line people expect, but it is true, and I will not let anybody blame her for what I did next. My father was not there, and the hole that left is the thing I went looking to fill. I filled it with a gang, with drugs, and with every stupid, dangerous, available thing a teenager in Las Vegas can find.
School went first. Then most of the people who cared about me. By fifteen I was somebody my family was afraid of and afraid for at the same time.
I did not go willingly. Nobody does. But somewhere in that stretch I learned the only thing I have ever really had to teach: you can program your own brain, on purpose. Your defaults are not your personality. They were installed, mostly by people who were not paying attention, and they can be replaced by somebody who is.
Before Mexico I was drifting aimlessly like a feather in the wind. After it I lived strategically — with purpose and intention, on purpose, every day. That phrase sounds like a poster. For me it was the difference between two completely different lives.
Here is the part most people leave out of the redemption story. I came home and relapsed. Straight back to the old crowd and the old habits. Which means I did not get saved in Mexico. I got shown the door, and then I had to walk through it a second time, on my own, with nobody watching. That second choice is the one that actually counted, and it is the one I look for in the people I coach.
I went at real estate because I wanted two things badly: money, and to be around people. Real estate is one of the only businesses that pays you for both. Galindo Group Real Estate started as me, alone, with a phone. It is now a brokerage of more than 200 agents. Along the way I have flipped roughly 1,300 homes — still around a hundred a year — and kept 80+ rental properties that feed my family whether or not I get out of bed.
I have been married to Krystal for twelve years. We have four children. She fought breast cancer and won while all of this was being built, and if you want to know what mindset actually looks like under load, it is not me on a podcast. It was her.
I do this coaching for a specific reason. I was a kid nobody would have bet on, and one structured environment with people who refused to let me drift changed the entire arc of my life. I am not going to pretend I can do in six months what Ensenada did in sixteen. But I know exactly what it looks like when somebody is capable and stuck, because I was that, and I know the way out is never more information.
I take a small number of people a year. I turn people down, including people with the money, when the timing is wrong. If you are done drifting, tell me where you actually are.
