Gary started his whirl-wind of a life that was almost a fairy tale. As a child, he was actually raised in Kingston, Jamaica where he was born. Growing up on a beautiful tropical island, learning to swim in rivers, playing in the waterfalls that come rushing out of the mountains, fishing, and spending weekends on a coffee farm that his father had bought was an upbringing that he just can’t forget.
His family has been in Jamaica for over one hundred years and is still there to this day. He tries to get back home at least once a year or more. People often wonder why he doesn’t have a strong Jamaican accent. He is what they call in Jamaica, ‘Jamerican’—half Jamaican and half American, if you will. When he is with his family and in Jamaica, the accent is back in full swing.
What brought him to the United States was the unfortunate divorce of his parents. He is one of four siblings. His sister and he stayed with their mother, while his two brothers stayed with his father. His mother remarried and life changed dramatically after that. Her new husband was very jealous of their close relationship, and the mental abuse by him was almost unbearable. This was Gary’s first lesson in dealing with someone who played mind games with others.
The lifestyle he had in Jamaica and the life he now lived with her new husband were so different—a culture shock for sure. With his ‘new life’ he saw the usual struggle to work for a living and living from paycheck to paycheck. His mother’s husband was in his late fifties and worked as hard at that age as he did when he was a teenager. Gary personally did not want to live like that. When the man died of cancer, he was penniless, which left Gary’s mother in a financial mess.
Gary learned some interesting lessons from all this. Most of the men on his father’s side of the family were very successful financially. Their thinking was different—and so were their attitudes. Gary started his first business when he was 11 years old and his second business when he was 15. His second business was in the jewelry trade. By age 17, he had his own fine jewelry store and was making over $100,000 a year.
At a very young age, Gary discovered that he had a passion for teaching. He loved to teach and transfer his knowledge or skills to others. He loved what he was doing so much that he nearly dropped out of high school. He had developed techniques in the jewelry trade that were unprecedented. He was able to teach someone who had no experience as a jeweler to repair gold chains in less than an hour. They were able to repair jewelry better than a jeweler who had been doing it for years.
He knew he had developed an acute ability to teach others and shave days, weeks, or years off the learning curve. Gary's success was short-lived though. After he got married, his wife told him that their baby really wasn’t his. His father was murdered. He also lost his $100,000-a-year business. He couldn’t cope, nor did he know how to, as he was overwhelmed with all those tragedies.
This is only half of his story. He was an emotional wreck—on medication and at times drinking very heavily. He had hit rock bottom. Gary chose to become his own ‘Doctor and Patient’. He wanted to learn to play games with his mind instead of letting it play games with him—if he could only get a grip on his thought process.
One thing he knew: the negative feelings and emotions he had now were different from those he had before all those tragedies. Why? There is one reason and one reason only. He had been a product of his past experiences, which he had allowed to affect his thinking, mind, feelings, and emotions. He had experienced in three years what most will never experience in a lifetime.
With his faith and a desire to move ahead, Gary started making strides. He said, “If I could be successful once, I could be successful again.” Gary had fears—fears of falling in love, of being around people. He was scared to even think of trying to be financially successful again, for fear that he would just lose everything anyway.
Step by step, he made changes. He opened his curtains to let the light in. He changed his ‘friends’ and threw the medication away. It’s a mindset that has stayed with him to this day. He’ll be the first to tell you that moving forward is still often easier said than done—but he has learned a lot.
He began consulting with people who wanted his advice. From this point, he worked on getting his message and information out to people through his CDs and seminars. Gary soon received attention from national television producers—one show after another—and things started taking off. His work was getting in front of millions of people, and lives were being changed.
For some, it may be a strategy or technique that he had shared with them that improved their lives. For others, just knowing that he had been through so much serves as an inspiration to keep reaching toward their goals. He served as an advisor to CEOs and millionaires alike in his quest to teach and share how to make dramatic, consistent changes in their lives and organizations—whether it’s to increase sales, potential, or self-esteem.
He serves as a resource in showing others how to live an extraordinary life with lasting results by demonstrating how to change negative cycles of thinking into positive programmed conditioning. One of his key abilities is curing phobias. He teaches how to overcome the fear of cold calling, fear of rejection, or procrastination, to name just a few.
Gary’s work has been seen and featured on many national and local talk shows such as The View, Inside Edition, Fox and Friends, and he was regularly featured on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, Oprah’s program, The Nate Berkus Show, Success magazine, Selling Power, as well as numerous other national newspapers and magazines.
Gary has shared the stage with top speakers such as Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and Jim Rohn. He has been featured in magazines such as Success, Selling Power, Network Marketing Lifestyle Magazine, Sales and Marketing Management, The Enquirer, and Networking Times.
However, Gary Coxe does not consider himself a motivational speaker—even though he is a powerful motivator. He believes that people do not want to get pumped up for just a short time but want to learn how to stay pumped for life. It is Gary’s earnest desire to teach others how to condition themselves for ultimate success as he shares his self-mastery techniques.
When he’s not traveling to seminars, he likes to take time and unwind in the Caribbean with close friends and family. He is very fortunate to be able to fly himself to his speaking engagements, which gives him the ability to manage his schedule and maintain the pace that he does. He has accumulated nearly 5,000 hours of flight time. He enjoys flying everything from Lear jets to helicopters, and he is a certified flight instructor in both airplanes and choppers.
Who knows? Maybe one day he’ll get to take you flying to the Caribbean or to one of his events. It’s truly Beyond First Class!
