Exclusive Interview with Scott Gates: Educator of the Year 2025
Best Holistic Life Magazine: Scott, your work centers around empowering first responders, veterans, and men seeking transformation. What led you to make coaching and NLP your life’s mission?
Scott Gates: Many times in our lives, doors are opened, new paths are shown to us, those we love or simply bump into create a ripple in our lives. These can become a wave that carries us or we ride off into a new direction, and if we are ready and open to it, changes us.. The first moment started with a little note, a challenge, and a shove from Jana. It simply said, “Here is your hotel reservation and ticket for the event. Put yourself in the most uncomfortable position you can, and grow. I have a feeling this will be good for you. I love you either way.” Love Mom. Jana had just finished her first NLP course when she wrote. So there I was, sitting in the middle of the conference room, which, like most of my clients would understand, terrified me. I spent the first day willing myself not to get up and maneuver to a better tactical position. I was rubbing my hands so badly that I tore the skin on them. I don’t remember what the instructors said during the first half of the day. On the second day, Dr. Matt called me up on stage, along with another gentleman, for an exercise. Afterwards, he pulled me aside and said, “You have a real knack for connecting with people. Ever thought of coaching?” By the third day, I was full speed into their coaching program. A year later, I was a certified coach helping those who serve adjust and become the best civilian versions of themselves. Sometimes it’s a gentle suggestion, others a hard shove. Thanks to Mom for loving me enough to shove me when you had to, and to Dr. Matt for recognizing the spark and opening a new door for me.
Best Holistic Life Magazine: You specialize in NLP coaching for first responders and veterans. How does NLP uniquely support those who have dedicated their lives to service and now face reintegration challenges?
Scott Gates: All growth starts within. First off, it makes us better listeners, not only those around us like our family, but more importantly, to ourselves. The techniques and the mindset of NLP can be a fantastic tool for helping us change how we walk through our world. Those who have been called to service. Have been through a lot of training that takes time and incredible amounts of effort. They don’t think, they react, they create intense habits as ways to complete, endure, and survive their missions. The habits are not right or wrong, better or worse. They are necessary for their environments. Now, their environments as civilians are just different; their habits and skills are still helpful, yet the intensity and times to deploy them are sometimes very different. Our habits are programs in our minds. Now we all experience trauma. It’s a human experience we all share, yet we experience it differently as we are unique to each other. Combat can be intense, yet, to someone who can’t turn left in traffic, due to an accident they experienced decades ago, it can be as intense, or even more intense, to them than combat. It’s not what you go through, and it’s how your unconscious brain interprets the experience and determines how it will control your reactions to it. Your unconscious mind wants you to stay alive, period, and it will come up with all kinds of distorted ways to make you accomplish that. Think of our unconscious minds like a radio in your car always playing in the background. We can turn the volume down, change channels, and put in a new playlist. These NLP techniques help us control and modify it.. Your mindset work you do can then reprogram how you reinterpret how you want it to affect you. You have heard the saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Instead, think Post Traumatic Growth. Let’s take control and grow from the experiences in our lives.
Best Holistic Life Magazine: In your work, you emphasize that strength isn’t just about muscles or endurance but also about mindset and emotional intelligence. How do you help your clients redefine what strength means to them?
Scott Gates: How we define words has the power to define our perspective of our world. They program our unconscious default operating system. It’s our default mode of doing things and how we react to our personal reality. Most of us go through our lives completely in default mode. Why wouldn’t we? No one ever showed us how we could do otherwise. Ever thought or said, “It’s just the way I am, or built, or I’ve always been like this. My mother was like this, I get it from my father, my family has always done this.” Stop for a second, and re-read that, go ahead. Now, are you really going to tell me that you have no control over your life? How do you get better at something? You practice, over and over, learn something new, incorporate it, and then practice that. You grow out of who you are and what you have experienced to become someone better. We are human, we all can do that. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, YET, we can do it. Ok, let’s take the word tough, how would you define it? Do you imagine muscles, height, character, meanness, dominance, intensity, or a material like steel or concrete? Your unconscious brain shoved its interpretation into the first image you had. It’s your survival mode. In my family, our older generations told us we were tough. Never really thought about that much growing up, until recently. We lost three aunts and uncles in 2 weeks. Half of the older generation we looked up to is gone. Our families were rocked hard down to our core. Yet when my cousin said, “We’re Gates tough, I realized then what I needed it to mean in those moments. Not to be a mean or control others, it’s the ability to withstand and overcome. Post Traumatic Growth.
Best Holistic Life Magazine: Your journey, especially your experiences with your parents, has profoundly shaped your mission. How have those experiences influenced the way you coach and mentor others?
Scott Gates: Tampa was in the Marine Corps, and Pop was in law enforcement. Both high calls to service. Now, as my father’s son, I obviously see things differently from my sister. Not better or right, just unique to me. What I saw was both the weight and toll it took for them to do what they did, for my Dama and Momma to endure and support them too. Just as those who serve have a way of talking and being heard to each other, those at home have that too. Remember, not better or right than the others, just unique. Just as words have power, how we speak when we communicate, especially the words, perspective, and direction we use, matters. In my coaching, I use a lot of NLP techniques to reframe how you see the world, so you can communicate with others in a way that more closely aligns with the person you want to become now. It’s not about fixing something in you; you’re not broken. Just as you had to acquire new skills when you were called to service, you have some new skills to acquire when you return from service. You have grown from the person you were before you went in. And now you must grow from the person you were when you served.
Best Holistic Life Magazine: One of your coaching focuses is helping men confront ‘the man in the mirror.’ What are their most common internal struggles, and what mindset shifts help them break through?
Scott Gates: First, let’s agree that everyone is different, and their experience is unique. We all look in that mirror, and we all struggle with it in our way. Try to allow yourself to not think in terms like harder than, more like, as good as, and not compare people. I know we all do it, just be aware when you do it, it’s a healthy comparison of what you need to change, not what is wrong with you. I’m not a therapist, counselor, Psychologist, psychiatrist, or mentor.
Best Holistic Life Magazine: As the 2025 Educator of the Year, you’re profoundly changing lives. What legacy do you hope to leave through your coaching, speaking, and writing?
Scott Gates: Legacy, now that’s an interesting word to me right now. It’s been 7 months since my father passed. He was one of my heroes for sure. As I step in to lead the family, it’s my watch now. He spent 40 years in Law enforcement, and for 20 years after he retired, his unwavering support for his community, the legacy he left behind there, here in our family, and the legacies that were left to him. He said something to me before he passed that echoes in the back of my head now and then. ‘I never wanted you to fill my shoes, or follow in my footsteps. You got some big damn shoes you need to fill for yourself. I think legacies are like reputations; they are beyond anyone’s control, and people will believe what they want to believe. However, your character is not, and you have control of that.
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