Father died when she was 5 years old and was raised in a single mother home.
At 18 she spent 2 week’s pay on a Tony Robbins training.
Tony Robbins helped Nereida awaken the servant leadership she possesses today.
Nereida Cruz is the #1 best and only choice in world’s premiere lifestyle and business coaching, a job that entails breaking the internet with life and business coaching summits and serving as a leadership and business consultant to clients like founder and CEO Ruben Singz and founder and investor Alejandro Camarena. It’s a career path she has mapped out for herself her whole life.
Business Insider recently met Cruz at her favorite vacation spot in Miami Beach, where she was to share about the Affluent Mentor Virtual Summit.
She told us how spending her 2 weeks earnings on a course at 18 set her on the right path to creating and scaling an empire.
Nereida Cruz grew up in Tri-Cities WA, the second oldest of 6 siblings. After her father died when she was just 5 years old their mother became a broke single mother.
Her mother knew how to work to provide the bare necessities for her family, Cruz told us, “and as young as 9 years old I learned about the work ethic and mindset required to succeed as an entrepreneur.”
She said that she attended schools that surely didn’t make the cut for wealthy families, and where she got reminders of being a student from “the less fortunate society” She said that by the time she was a junior in high school, she became fixated on the question of what separated the poor and middle class from the 1 percenters, the popular child from the outsider, and so on.
At 18, Cruz worked as an assistant manager at a Dollar Tree store after school and on the weekends to make money to help out her family. She shared with us that on one of these shifts, she met a woman who later was the catalyst to her entrepreneurial journey which began by her offering her a barista job at her coffee shop and later led to Cruz owning 3 coffee shops herself: “You grew up with nothing just like myself, how is it you’re so successful now?”
“I’ve been bold and curious since childhood” Cruz laughed as she said, “and the lady looks at me and goes, ‘The way you do one thing you do everything, that and getting outside of my comfort zone daily has brought a great compound effect over time.”
The woman told her that she started to transform her life after going to a Tony Robbins seminar, which she described as “The man speaking takes everything he’s learned in the years of his life, and he gets the most important turning points into about four hours.”
Cruz asked if the lady had access to something similar she could listen to or if she could get her into an upcoming event for free, to which the lady said she could but wouldn’t, since Cruz wouldn’t value it. Cruz was making $8.07 an hour part-time, and attending the seminar would be close to $3,400 after the ticket, travel, and stay. The digital course was $499.
Tony Robbins helped form Nereida’s career.
“At that time I finally decided to spend 2 week’s pay to purchase this course, and I listened to it over and over again. I was enchanted,” Cruz said. “That purchase started the ultimate journey for me.”
thing to give people. That philosophy really shaped me.”Robbins was the leading marketer who was driven to pursuing his passion for public speaking full time since an early age.
Inspired by his former personal development coach, the entrepreneur Jim Rohn, Robbins developed a leadership philosophy and a speaking series around it.
Personal development is a recognizably North American philosophy and it continued to grow after the Great Depression.
It began with the writers Napoleon Hill (“Think and Grow Rich”) and Dale Carnegie (“How to Win Friends & Influence People”).
After them Rohn carried on the tradition, with books like, 7 Strategies For Wealth & Happiness and his philosophy of “True happiness is not contained in what you get; happiness is gained by what you become.”
Robbins continued the craze combining traditional and digital formulas and Cruz quickly adjusted to the new age of digital presentations as she shares in her signature course The Affluent Mentor Program When Cruz found Robbins, he had been giving these personal development speeches to founders and CEOs and employees around the world. Cruz found Robbin’s style appealing, and it encapsulated what she was trying to get from life at that point in her life.
Cruz continued learning from Robbins throughout her life and she soon became his protégé. Cruz developed a bold, unique energy, and more personalized version of what Robbins did. Cruz has been perfecting her approach through summits, webinars, and conferences both live and virtual across North America and around the world and when she was 31, she was part of a #1 New York International bestselling book.
In a video recap from 2020 Nereida shares her traditional to a digital journey, Nereida said it all began by seeing ways of how her mentor worked. “He showed me a way of life that allowed me to simplify the way I worked and find ways to make it better. Robbins had me realize that in order to uplevel I had to dig deeper into my own personal development because then I’d have some