[00:00:00] Paul: It's challenging for my family to see me making all of these choices and changes and in several instances, giving up security, economic security, financial security, I gave up a tenured Professor position. I gave up a tenured diplomat position, and why do you make these choices you make these choices because you keep finding ways to have greater, deeper, more real, more authentic impact of the kind that you want to make.
[00:00:27] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. This week's guest is Dr. Paul Rivera, and he's a catalyst for positive change through his multifaceted career. In academia, diplomacy, international economics, and strategic coaching, he's the co-founder of Be Act Change. His mission is to spark profound growth and alignment in individuals, teams, and organizations worldwide.
He has a PhD in economics from the University of Southern California. He's a professional in strategic planning, visioning, and systemic methodologies. And he's also a first-generation American and proud Latino. Dr. Rivera is a polyglot and passionate globetrotter. We spoke a lot about what inspired him to create Be Act Change and what principles guide the mission.
And also we talked about how diverse cultures and languages shaped his views on leadership and collaboration. Why he loves to travel and what he's able to learn in those experiences. It was such a great conversation. I enjoyed it. And I think you will as well. Take a listen.
Paul, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to have you here.
[00:02:11] Paul: I am honored, and excited. I'm pumped to be here. I love the show. So it's a true honor to be here.
[00:02:16] Aneta: Thank you so much. And I just learned something new about you this morning before we hit record. You said that you are calling from the Dominican Republic. And so how long have you been living there?
[00:02:29] Paul: We've lived here often on for a little over seven years. I'm not Dominican. I'm Mexican Salvadoran and my wife is Nicaraguan. But we were posted here with work for a few years. And then we both left that job, but we loved it here. Our kids love it here. So we basically split our time between here and Miami, but we've definitely become tropical birds and, we have a lovely apartment here. I can see the ocean straight out here.
[00:02:54] Aneta: You're making me jealous.
[00:02:55] Paul: I should be. That's the point. It's pretty nice actually. And we've crafted our lives in a way that I've always wanted to, which is that everything basically for our needs is within about a five-minute radius for us. So, there's the shopping mall and the movie theater and the supermarket and the beauty salon and the kid’s school. Everything is within about a five-minute radius of us, which is lovely. Plus we have a great community here. So we've enjoyed being here.
[00:03:22] Aneta: That sounds so good. I love when people can design lives around what they want and the fact that you were like, we kind of actually like you here. Who says we have to live in the States?
[00:03:33] Paul: Which Is hard for my immigrant parents to accept, they left their countries. They came to the U S to create a better life for themselves and for their future children and all of that. And their ingrate son has decided to go back to Latin America. What was he thinking?
But as somebody who was raised as an immigrant, a child of immigrants in the United States. There's a lot of stigma that comes with that in certain areas and I frankly feel much more comfortable here. I feel much more like I can be much more authentic here. There's a lot of peace that comes with that. Yeah.
[00:04:06] Aneta: I'm first generation immigrant too. I came to the States. So I know what you're talking about. It's like you feel you're always reminded of your parents. Like we came here to give you a better life. We want you to be a, have a better life than we did. But then there's a little bit of control around what that looks like. I don't know if you experienced the same thing with your parents. I did with mine.
[00:04:27] Paul: Absolutely. They have certain expectations of what your life is going to look like and how you're going to lead it, and I was talking to some friends a couple of days ago, a friend from Nigeria, and we had such a commonality of experience because we both said, our parents told us that you could be an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer.
Those were the three acceptable things that come with being the child of immigrants, you have a choice. Look at all the choices you have. You have three choices, and we thought we had a nice conversation about the sort of burdens that we take on from our immigrant parents, as children of them, and how it's a process to come to the point of becoming your person.
And just living your truth and living in your authenticity and bringing that out into the world and slowly working with your parents and family for them to understand that this is how you bring value to the world, that this is how you bring your best self, how when we talk about wanting to have a positive impact on the world.
The best way for us to do that is in the way that's most authentic to us as individuals, and if we live in the shadow of the dreams that our parents imagined for us, that's not necessarily always going to be the path that leads us to fulfillment into the impact that we want to have in the world.
[00:05:40] Aneta: That's so true. And so how old were you or were you born in the States or did you come as a young child?
[00:05:46] Paul: I was born in the U S I was born in Los Angeles. It's an interesting story. My parents met because of my mom's father. And my dad's older brother worked in the same factory in LA. And so that's how my mom and dad met. So they're definitely an American immigrant kind of a story and they came through their pathways to the United States, but they met there, but it's the fascinating thing of growing up in Los Angeles, in the Latino community that everyone outside of school spoke Spanish.
I lived in what felt like little Mexico in a lot of ways, and that was the community that I was raised in. Those were the values that were around me some positive and some negative like anything, but it was very much an interesting way to grow up because I felt like I was in constant duality.
I was growing up as an American, but I was growing up as a Latino. And the one thing that I don't know how familiar you are with, like the Chicano experience in the United States, but there's a lot of feeling of not belonging in many senses that you are not sufficiently integrated into the home culture that when you go back to Latin America, you're seen as the American, even by your own family in some sense, so the one blessing on my end, at least, is that my mom worked for years as a translator for the Los Angeles school district. And so language was really important to her.
And so it was very important to her that her children learn to speak Spanish well. So that's been interesting for me and nice because it's allowed me to live in Latin America and not have people question my Latin. So that's been a blessing that my parents gave me that I had not fully appreciated really until I moved abroad. I've traveled a lot, but to live and function in a country as a resident of it is a different thing.
[00:07:34] Aneta: Yeah. I understand this duality that you're talking about because I also felt like at school, wanted to fit in so badly. Like my goal, there was just assimilation, fit in, excel studying what others are doing. Things that you wouldn't necessarily find in your household to figure out, okay, what does success look like?
How do I get approval? All of that. And then also being enough within the culture at home and at church. Whatever cultural events and also when you go back and visit, I also felt like then people are like, your accent is kind of funny. You don't speak like we do, or you've picked up certain habits or whatever it is.
So it always was this duality. And so at what age did you find that you suddenly were like, you know what, I'm going to define what this identity looks like, and it doesn't have to be one or the other.
[00:08:26] Paul: Yeah I will tell you that I have always been in my own family to this day. I would say an outsider. In a lot of ways. So I guess it merits a little bit of explanation. So my family, for example, my dad's a mechanic and he's a genius mechanic, just a brilliant mechanic. He's the person whom nobody else knows even how to begin to approach the problem.
Dad has an intuitive understanding of how these things function. And it's just amazing. And my whole family is sort of in that same vein. My grandfather, who was basically like a second dad to me was a heavy appliance repairman, like a refrigeration repairman. And so he worked on huge air conditioning units.
And so I grew up with them and so I grew up in a very, blue-collar sort of environment and the expectation that I would sort of follow suit in some way and that the value that you provide as a person, as a man is based on the tangible output that you produce.
So like my dad, I have such vivid memories of my dad coming home from work. And when we would ask him, what did you do today? He had such a clear understanding in his mind that there was this bus and it was broken and I fixed it. So just the great certainty of the value that he brought in that day and then that he created that value.
However, my skill, my talent, and my superpower in life have never been those things. I'm so thankful that I grew up with them because I know how to do a lot of those things, but that's not my talent. That's not the gift that I bring to the world. And that became evident at a young age, like a young age.
I was a fluent reader by the age of three. In both languages and all of this. And so I have always been that outsider a little bit in my family. I was always the kid who wanted to travel even as a small child. I don't know the sort of age range of most of the listeners, but my childhood hero was Jacques Cousteau.
Yeah, and I mean, I'm old enough that I remember that we used to watch his, he had a TV show every week. The underwater world of Jacques Cousteau. It was his boat, the Calypso, and he had his crew and he's the inventor of modern scuba. He invented the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus that people scuba in.
And I remember watching the show and I loved it, not even so much because of the ocean themes, but because you just saw that every week was a new challenge and they confronted the new challenge. And with Science and with optimism and something in them that drove them. They were passionate people.
But I always remember also that when he would go onto shore, I remember so vividly, actually the one where he was in Greece and he went onto shore and he didn't speak Greek. He was a French guy, but he was there and he was with all the people and enjoying the food.
And I saw the human connection that he had. And I remember feeling even as a kid that this was an image of masculinity. That I jived with. And it was so different from the masculine images that I had all around me. I mean, if you've seen Jacques Cousteau, he was a very thin French guy.
He wore a beanie. He wasn't a big burly guy or anything like that. And yet I saw him as so masculine in the confidence that he exuded in the kindness that he showed to other people. And it's really funny because, throughout sort of my growth journey, it took me a long time to remember that he was my hero.
And then as I look back in my life, I look back and I was like, I wonder why I learned French. I wonder why I learned to scuba. I wonder why I loved traveling all over the world. And you realize that these childhood influences come back and come back. So it's one of the great things I think about having a personal journey and having those introspective questions and seeing how your life has a coherence to it that oftentimes we didn't see or didn't expect.
[00:12:26] Aneta: Mm. So good. Of course, I remember Jacques Cousteau. It was just like adventure and it was so exciting to see like, where is he going next? And then of course just the sunshine and the boat and the water, like it was just so beautiful. So you mentioned that you learned French, but you speak several languages. So tell me what languages do you speak and how has that helped you in terms of being able to go and experience other cultures and to also travel?
[00:12:53] Paul: Yeah. That's great. So my first language is Spanish. So Spanish, English, French, Portuguese. And then I speak a little bit lower level German and Greek. So I love words. So for one, I think that words transmit so much about words and grammar and we can geek out about that at some other point, but the grammar of a language influences how the order in which people express a thought or an emotion to you.
And the order of it conveys a different feeling each time, which is fascinating. But even concepts as they change through language. Change the meaning a little bit. So for example, I give a workshop sometimes on purpose and thinking about purpose. And so if you think about it in Spanish, the word in Spanish for purpose is proposito and as you dissect it from its Latin roots, it means an intention that is put forward.
Your purpose is an intention that you put forward and that's nice. But neither English nor, Spanish are the only languages out there. And so for example, in Hindi, their version of the word for purpose, is uddeshy. And uddeshy means your higher place. So your purpose is your higher place.
And I love that analogy, that thought in your mind of your purpose is what takes you to sort of this celestial spirit level and something. Time and how you get there is by putting forth that intention. So all of these concepts mixed beautifully. So I've traveled to about 115 countries in my life, which has been sort of one of the best things that I've ever done.
I don't think I've ever felt like I've wasted money or time on travel because it's something that fills my soul. And the language thing is super important because it's something that I've found that anywhere I've gone in the world, it gives me the ability to talk to someone.
Which is huge. And I think having gone out of my way to talk to people, everywhere and I love talking to farmers and I love talking to taxi drivers. Everybody has a really interesting story to tell. And I'm a big believer in the idea that no one comes into your life accidentally.
This sort of synchronicity idea that everyone has something to tell you. And the greatest thing that you can do is be open to what it is that people have to bring into your life, and so for me, the language piece gives me access to a massive number of people that I wouldn't otherwise have.
And so what it's given me is a perspective on life and humanity, that there's so much more that binds us, that we have in common. Then what separates us and it's something that transcends language and it transcends geography and it transcends economics and it transcends religion.
There's just this common human core, and that if we learn how to relate to other people on that level and we approach people with that openness and that love and that commonality I think that there's no problem that we couldn't solve. know?
[00:16:06] Aneta: I agree with you. And I think that when we go to different cultures and different countries and we make an attempt, even with the basic salutations or to ask certain questions or say, please, and thank you, or excuse me, it softens people. It permits them to just lean back into you as well and to welcome you as the host of the country because you made that little bit of effort. And I've always found that to be the case. And anywhere I travel, I also always try to, I speak some different languages, but also try to connect with people in a way because it just always pays dividends, doesn't it?
[00:16:42] Paul: Absolutely. And what's fascinating is as part of our business, one of the things that we have done is that we've created a travel course for people. So we have a full course on basically everything from how you book it and when in the year you should book it and all these things and a whole massive module on packing and all these things.
But one of the things that we talk about is it shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes. It doesn't have to take you more than 10 minutes to, if you're going to a place just to spend 10 minutes researching, Googling about that place, I can't even tell you how many times just being able to bring up something in that country that is relevant to them, it shows that you took the time to learn about them, that you chose to engage them on something relevant to them.
I remember one time and it's sort of disconnected, but I was in Washington DC. And if you've spent any time in DC, you know that there's a significant Ethiopian population. And I've been to Ethiopia a couple of times. It's a beautiful country. And I love their cuisine. And I had this taxi driver who was driving me to the hotel.
and I saw his name and it looked like an Ethiopian name. And I asked him if he was Ethiopian, he said, yes. And I love talking to taxi drivers because almost anywhere in the world taxi drivers often are immigrants. And so you share a commonality of story with them.
And I asked him how long he'd been in the U.S. And I said to him, you must miss your mom's injera. Which is the flatbread that they use in Ethiopian food, right? I was like, you must miss your mom's injera. And the poor guy, he broke out in tears. You know what I mean? And
[00:18:14] Aneta: You saw him in that moment.
[00:18:17] Paul: Right. You make a connection with someone. And it takes nothing. You know what I mean? We talked about bread. It was a connection about bread, but it meant something so deep to him.
[00:18:26] Aneta: You're going to make me cry. I love it so much.
[00:18:30] Paul: I've discovered that as I've gotten older, it takes very little to make me cry. My emotions are much more at the forefront.
[00:18:37] Aneta: That means you have an open heart. I mean, I think we're just open and how beautiful that we can be touched by little moments, small moments, because you asked someone a very thoughtful question that made them think of their mom or their home or their culture, and you recognize them.
So I do want to learn more about your business because I just shared in the intro, that you have a very multifaceted career. You've got experience in academia, diplomacy, and international economics. You have your PhD in economics and coaching. So tell me more about your business, your career, and also you're the co-founder of the act and change. So tell us a little bit more about how you spend your days on your business.
[00:19:20] Paul: Yeah. With the benefit of retrospectives, I can say that my life has been about wanting to create a positive impact in people's lives. And, it's really easy as you say, as you look at my career, I've done everything. And actually, there's like 10 things that you haven't mentioned. I started out working in retail.
I became a lifeguard. I was a mechanic for a while. I worked for a headhunter agency for a while. I was a translator. I was an English, Spanish, and Portuguese translator. And then I went into academia and I went all these things through diplomacy now on to entrepreneurship. And it's challenging for my family.
We talked about my family. It's challenging for my family to see me making all of these choices and changes and in several instances, giving up security, economic security, and financial security, I gave up a tenured Professor position. I gave up a tenured diplomat position, and why do you make these choices you make these choices because you keep finding ways to have greater, deeper, more real, more authentic impact of the kind that you want to make. So that's been my journey.
I forgot to mention, I was an EMT for a while too, and loved that job. It was one of my college jobs. And I loved that job because it's a place where you very immediately feel. The positive impact that you're having on people's lives.
And I love that. And I always from that thought I would be a doctor. So I spent a lot of my life feeling like a frustrated doctor. And then I realized that what I wanted to do was always to help people. I wanted to have that positive impact. And so as I've gone through my life and retrospective analysis, I'm like, man, I've helped thousands and thousands of people, and there's a comfort that goes with that.
So, as you said, I have a PhD in economics and my specialty in particular is international economics and development economics, meaning the economics of developing countries and developing economies. And so that was what I taught as a professor. And I loved doing that. I taught at a school that was a brand new university.
So I got to be a founding faculty at that university California State University Channel Islands. If those of you are familiar with the West Coast it was a phenomenal experience. It's now an official Hispanic serving institution, which was the whole purpose of why the campus came to being and I love that I can still see my footprint there. That was super important to me. But I kept seeing a bigger potential impact for me. And that's when I went into the foreign service, the diplomatic core of the United States.
And I got the chance to work in about 26 different countries or so and posted in different places. And being a diplomat is such a fascinating thing because it requires A pretty broad range of skills to be effective. You need to have interpersonal skills. You need to have analytical skills communication skills and the ability to relate in some way to anyone.
Whether that person is the president, vice president, head of a ministry farmer, fisherman, or any, and everyone in between. And I always tell a lot of young Latinos, who wonder what their value is in a lot of ways because they have felt marginalized in so many ways.
I tell them, I think that my upbringing is what made me, for example, a very effective diplomat representing overseas, because of my upbringing that I had, and the way that I was taught and taught to appreciate the world, I have a very deep connection to anyone who works with their hands, who creates value based on their exertion and knowledge that they've acquired throughout their lives.
Whether that is, a farmer, a fisherman, or whatever, I also have the benefit of having an education, and that allows me access to talk to a Supreme Court justice, a high-level person. So I think it's given me a great deal of versatility that I wouldn't otherwise have, but our business is called Biak Change.
And it comes from basically being your authentic self, acting to live it out, and changing the world. And that's the perspective that we bring about and in our business, we work with individuals, with teams, with NGOs, really trying to do three things. And one is finding a mission, vision, and purpose.
And it's something that I think a lot of people don't ask themselves. It takes a lot of courage to, as an individual, ask yourself, what is my purpose? And especially high achievers who've been on sort of an achievement track their whole lives and suddenly get to a point where they're not sure if this was really what was for them and not sure they get to a certain point of achievement and find that the fulfillment that they expected.
Wasn't necessarily there, right? So it's helping people as individuals find that purpose and live it out. And then with teams and businesses and we work a lot with NGOs because that's sort of the community focus that we have as international development professionals helping them identify mission and vision and what it is that lies at their core.
And again, creating the steps to live that out. And then the third thing is resilience. It's one of the things that I think is missing in a lot of the coaching type world and consulting world that you need to acknowledge as your path moves forward. Life happens. Life gets in the way things happen to try to buffet you around.
And it's not about trying to make yourself invulnerable to it, but acknowledging that life happens and creating the tools and the techniques that you work into your every day to bring you back to that growth path, to bring you back to resilience. So that's what we do. And it's interesting.
Entrepreneurship is passionate work and terrifying work at the same time. But I would say that I work harder than I ever have in my life. And at the same time, feel so much more satisfied and so much more aligned with my purpose. Than I ever have before. So I couldn't be happier with the way that life is going at this point and it's a business that my wife and I run together and we created it together.
So it's a family enterprise and we're a package. We do a lot of speaking also at universities. Which is something that's a huge passion for us. And we've done something that I have yet to see anyone else really do, which is that we give joint keynotes.
We tag team keynote speeches and it's been wonderful doing that. So I hope we get to do more of that.
[00:25:48] Aneta: Yeah. What's the key to working with your partner successfully?
[00:25:52] Paul: I think having been married once before, I can tell you that, the key to not just working but creating a life with your partner is asking yourself some of those questions around purpose and legacy.
I think people look too much for the person who completes them. And we see that in popular culture. That your partner is the one who completes you. And I would say that I have a different perspective on it at this point, that I think you should be looking for the person with whom you jointly become more than either of you are individually.
So I'm a big believer in this idea of collective power and I apply it to communities and I apply it to organizations and groups, but I think that your family your nuclear family is also a kind of organization and that your goal is to not just support each other, but to make each other more. To bring out your collective power.
And that's a big piece of it because otherwise you get stuck in, for example, well, I'm not the same as you, or you were good at this, but I'm not, or we don't necessarily have the same hobbies, or whatever it is.
And I think it's not about any of those things. It's about how not only do we compliment each other, but we learn from each other and we do it without ego and competition, understanding that we are a team and that our whole purpose is to make each other better. And it's amazing because it allows, for example, the kind of conversations that I know that I wasn't able to have previously in my life where it's okay for me, for example, to say on any given day. I'm not okay today. I don't feel myself today.
I'm full of self-doubt. I have imposter syndrome today, and it's nice to have one to have that vocabulary to be able to voice it, but to have the safe space to be able to say to your partner. You know what? I have complete imposter syndrome about this or I feel shaky about it.
Whatever it is that you feel vulnerable about and being able to share that is something that is so deeply empowering. There are so many levels to that, it helps you on a personal basis. It helps your relationship. It helps your business.
As a Latino who was very much raised in a very macho, machismo kind of environment to be able to be in a situation where I can say to my spouse that I feel vulnerable is for me, something that breaks cultural and gender stereotypes. So I think it's a lot of those things, but it starts with asking yourself those questions about how your purposes align with each other.
How do your legacies align with each other and what can you do to support each other through those journeys?
[00:28:34] Aneta: So good. So true. First, you have to do it for yourself to be able to participate in that conversation, but the questions are just so important. How can people support you or where can they find you if they want to reach out and work with you to learn more about your services?
[00:28:49] Paul: Yeah, I appreciate that. One, we have a book, which if you're on the video, you
[00:28:53] Aneta: Oh yeah. Can you read it, what is the title of that book?
[00:28:56] Paul: Yeah. The book is called Creating Your Limitless Life.
[00:29:01] Aneta: I love that.
[00:29:02] Paul: The book is called Creating Your Limitless Life. So my wife, Esther Zaladan is the primary author of it. It's a really interesting book. It's half a memoir of her life. And she was born in Nicaragua and it's her immigrant story and all the struggles that she went through. And then the other half is our purpose methodology. And it's something that, as I said we've really, focused on making it practical.
So the actual practical steps of walking you through different questions and different exercises that guide you towards understanding your purpose and carrying it out in your life your relationships and your work. The book was just released in September of 2023. And we've had so much fun promoting it and talking about it.
We've had a tremendous reception to it. We thought that it was something that would appeal primarily to Latino audiences. And it turns out that the messaging is so much bigger than that. There are so many people, regardless of, culture and country and language who have resonated with it.
So it's been great. It's available in any of the major outlets, but the digital version we've kept at 99 cents for both of these. And actually, there's an accompanying workbook. That goes with it. And so we've kept both of them purposely at 99 cents, for us, access is really important and we've never wanted finances to be a barrier for somebody who wants to make those changes in their life.
So we've made that as accessible as possible. So that's the book. You can find us also, have a website, beactchange.com. You can find me on LinkedIn most immediately Dr. Paul Rivera on LinkedIn and Instagram, we have a nice Instagram page, which is Be.Act.Change.
[00:30:46] Aneta: That's wonderful. Thank you. And we'll include the book link and all of those in the show notes. And the final question I have for you is tied to the title of the podcast. And so what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:30:59] Paul: I love that question. So for me, the width of your life comes from, I would say, infinite curiosity. I did a few years ago, this values exercise. And I saw that what came out is it's a series of questions that guide you through identifying your values. And my values, what came out were growth and diversity of thought.
And so more than anything, I realized that for me, living the width of my life is doing everything I can always to feel like I'm growing, like I'm expanding and always being open to that diversity of thought. That's what gives me the opportunity and the openness to take on new things that I never would've thought about to make my life as big as possible, which is exactly what I want to do. If my goal is to have an impact on people that's where I want to be.
[00:31:52] Aneta: So good. Paul, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for the amazing work that you are doing in the world. And I look forward to reading the book. I'm going to download it and take a listen and wish you continued success.
[00:32:06] Paul: I appreciate this so much. This has been wonderful and the time goes by too quickly, but I appreciate this. Thank you so much.
[00:32:12] Aneta: You're welcome.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones, or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.