Interview with Gary Marcus Judge: the courage to choose to make life a continuous, wonderful adventure.
- Giovanna Maria Depriori
- Oct 27, 2025
- 17 min read
"So leave your past alone, start where you are. Ask yourself questions. What do you need? And go invest in yourself, because when you change your life, you see that everything around you changes."
Photographic material provided by Gary Marcus Judge
Writing this interview was an intense and deeply moving experience for me. As I gathered Gary's words, I found myself walking with him through his memories, his challenges, and his rebirth. It was like opening a window onto a life of courage and vulnerability, of difficult choices and extraordinary tenacity.
It recharged me, because I found so much of myself in her words: in the courage to look at the past without judgment, in the strength to choose to change every day, in the awareness that life is truly a gift to be lived to the fullest.
It wasn't just the story of a personal journey, but a true emotional journey that pushed me to reflect on what "change" really means, on the weight of the past, and on the power of reinventing oneself.
I believe that this interview can be an invitation for the reader to look beyond their fears, to find within themselves the courage to choose and to live life as a continuous, wonderful adventure.
Table of Contents
1- ROOTS AND BREAKS IN LIFE: where you enter is not where you will exit
Hi Gary, welcome to this space! It's an honor to be speaking with you in this, our first interview, and if you're up for it, let's get started right away, without too much preamble, because your story has a lot to tell.
To frame who you are, I would start from two fundamental points: where you started from and where you have arrived today.
Would you like to tell us where and when you were born, what context you come from, and who you are today?
<<Okay, let me start with who I am today: I am a smarter person. That much I can say. I am a little more aware, a little more conscious of the things I do today.
Where was I born? I was born in England, in Watford, a small village north of London, to Anglo-Indian parents. A village I left when I was very young and have never returned. I have to go back. In fact, a few months after my birth, my parents separated, and my brother and I, my brother was two years old, and I was a baby, two months old, went to India with my mother. My mother's family was from Bombay, which is now called Mumbai, and we went to live there with her family: her two brothers and my father. We also moved into a 40-square-meter apartment: my brother, my mother, and me; so there were six of us living in that space. We were given the balcony as a sleeping area. My mother, my brother, and I slept there, along with a bed on the balcony. And for the first five years, I somehow lived in Bombay. As a child, I grew up in a nursery with my brother next to me, while my mother worked.
After the first five years, however, my mother was struggling: working all day, she had no way to look after us, we were always abandoned, alone, and her family was busy with their own things. So, to protect us, she put us in an orphanage: my brother and I were far away, in a place called Goa, a former Portuguese colony, in this place run by friars, very strict. They beat us every day, we couldn't do anything, we lived in this orphanage, my brother and I, with other children. We lived in that orphanage for five years. You can imagine what it was like. We're talking about the 1970s, there was nothing, our health was really bad, the water and food weren't the water and food of today, 2025, the conditions were very poor. But when I was ten, my father sent three plane tickets and asked my mother to return to England. I knew nothing, I didn't know I had a father and I didn't even know what it meant to have a father. She shows me a picture and says, "This is your father."
Father? What is a father? For me, my brother was my father. I had never seen a father. My mother came to visit us in the orphanage every three or four months. So I didn't even have the concept of love. I only knew the feeling of abandonment; I was abandoned, and this has always followed me: the feeling of being abandoned.
Even today, when I receive rejection, I experience it as abandonment. It really hurts me, it brings me so much pain when I feel abandoned. And there, in England, in that situation when we arrived, I felt like I was in that place, abandoned, even though my mother parked us for our own good. So, this is kind of where I am now and where I started from. Okay. Next question!>>
In between is your journey, in general, not just a physical journey, but an evolution. In your book, "Free to Fly," you recount a good part of it. You tell us about experiences that took you from one side of the world to the other, about the importance of facing life's challenges and obstacles with determination and courage, and you offer us hope for building our own destiny. A book in which I found and rediscovered myself. What did this journey teach you?
<<Life is a great gift, a great game: where you come from is not necessarily where you will leave this universe.
Take my life: where did I come from and where will I go from there? I live in Italy today, far away from Watford, where I was born, or from India, where I spent my early years, or from all those places where I lived when I was a sailor for eight years.
Where will I leave this universe? It will definitely be somewhere else. Furthermore, what you enter this world with doesn't necessarily mean what you leave with. This is also important; it's a great hope for everyone. If you look at your environment, where you are right now, you can change it at any time. If you work on yourself.
If I think back to the past, to my life's journey, I see courage. I had a "determination." I like taking risks. That is, I want adventure. For me, life is an adventure, like a movie. If you put me at a crossroads, where on one side there's a road I already know, which I know is a sure way to get to my destination, while the other road is unknown, I'll take the unknown one. I don't know why, it's stronger than me.
How many times have I gotten lost in the mountains on my hikes! Who knows how many times my dog, who always comes with me to the mountains (poor dog), would like to tell me let's go left because we know this road well... but no, Gary takes the one on the right, because Gary wants to know. I'm curious. I've made mistakes many times, but I'm not saying I've always chosen the right path. It's not just in the mountains, but also in work, even in life; I'm like that. And my story, what you find in that book, is a series of experiences that follow one another thanks to this way of being, from abandonment to going away, always seeking adrenaline and adventure.
2-GARY'S TURNING POINT:
from a fast-paced entrepreneur to a conscious man
This curiosity, this constant desire to explore has not abandoned you even in recent years... I was reading the story of your life on your website ( https://garymarcusjudge.com/ ) and one thing in particular struck me: in 2017, after more than 25 years of entrepreneurial success, you realized that you were climbing the wrong mountain.
You've invested eight years in self-study and exploration, on a journey of personal growth, moving from mindfulness to emotional intelligence, from coaching to neurolinguistic programming, to learning and experimenting with holistic and spiritual practices, to arrive at a new mission. Can you tell me more about this exploration?
<<Yes, yes! That's exactly what my current project for 2025 describes: it's BEwell. The BEwell Journey, the journey. Just think, BEwell started for me in 2017, when my business was going well, my family was doing fine with three children, I was doing well, I was a successful small business owner, we were a wealthy family, there was nothing wrong... But it was on automatic pilot, I was just going along. I didn't know where I was going, I was just following one day after another, routine. Very different from what I experience today. Now I'm full of energy, full of desire, always, every day I'm doing something!
Anyway, let's go back to 2017. What happened? I had a conversation with someone, I'll say someone because I'm being honest, I don't remember who it was. This someone asked me, "What do you do?" Me: I'm an entrepreneur. He was also an entrepreneur, and he asked me, "What's your turnover?" Without going into details, I told him a few things, very proud of the results, and he said, "No, what are you talking about? You have a small company like this; if you want a serious company, you have to make 1 million." He planted this seed in my head, and then, since I was always up for a challenge, I said to myself, "Okay, what do I have to do to make 1 million?" First, I have to train, I have to figure out how to make 1 million, because I had never made 1 million euros in my life.
So I went to a 3-4 day seminar in Rome called Millionaire Mind, which is the mindset of a millionaire. I went and found myself in a huge auditorium with 1,000 people, all strangers, all there to make money, to understand how to make money. The trainers were on stage with music and lights. Wow, wow, wow, I'm in the right place. I did exercises, answered questions, and took notes in this notebook. After the course, I flew back to Verona, also because I had my own company to run; I had almost 30 people working for my business. After a few days, I looked at the notes and saw that they weren't talking about money, they were talking about enjoying relationships, about giving back something good from everything I had until 2017. Things I'd never thought of.
I was someone who considered himself a survivor. Life had put me in a distant place, with nothing, and I fought to get what I had. That's why I was a survivor. But all those notes I'd written told me, "You have to give back." You've had a good life. You have to give back, and now you also have to focus on relationships. You have no one around you, just your family, that is, your wife and children, but the others are the people you interact with only for work, for something in return.
The message was clear to me: you have to connect and contribute. You have to give back. That was the message.
But I'm just an entrepreneur, I'm Gary. But what more can I know to give back? First step: get to know yourself. Who are you? You know, those questions you have to answer... well, I'm Gary, I'm the owner of this company, I'm a husband, I already had all my labels, but the question was much deeper, I wanted to know something more.
So I signed up for a life coaching course because I wanted to understand what this "life" is, and I did a week of life coaching where there was a trainer who destroyed all my thoughts, all my "who I was," how cool I am, blah blah blah. He laid me bare like that. And I came away after that week thinking, wow, I am "limiting beliefs," the anger, the emotions, my inner self, everything. I was like a kid back at school with this trainer in front of me. Then, after a week, I realized I had to invest in myself, and so I started taking these various personal development courses you listed.
And what did they leave you?
<<What did they leave me? They opened my eyes, they lit a light in a dark room.
I looked around and was always in the dark. I couldn't manage my emotions, I had all my parents' beliefs, a poor mentality, my communication with others was always filled with anger, I always tried to exploit every situation.
I felt like a victim because I had nothing, because when someone said something to me, I said, but I was in an orphanage for five years, poor me. I mean, I already had the answer for myself, because I played so low and you couldn't say anything different because it was true. But it's precisely those same things that happened to me in life that are my energy today.>>
3-FOUR STEPS TO AUTHENTIC "FULLNESS":
how Gary took charge of his life - the D.O.T.S. method
Let's talk about who you are today... Mindset Mastery Coach! You founded the D.O.T.S.™ method, a structured approach to personal growth that guides people through four fundamental phases: Discovery (Discovering new parts of yourself), Ownership (Taking control of your life), Transformation (Change and grow), and Self-Mastery (Becoming the best version of yourself). What led you to found this method?
<<The method is my life. It's that path. In those moments when I sit and reflect, I ask myself, “What is all this? Why has everything suddenly changed? What happened? Why couldn't you continue living as you had until 2017?" The answer is because in 2017, it was all on automatic pilot! I wasn't there, I had nothing to say.
Here comes the Discovery: when I discovered something about myself, through various courses, through various instructors, trainers, life coaching, business coaching, mindfulness, emotion intelligence, NLP. I discovered that I was nobody because I knew nothing. Everything I knew was all someone else's knowledge.
That is, I was living a life that was already constructed by someone who had given me this information.
When I started taking these courses, however, I found these openings, and I began to take ownership of this thing. Now my life is mine. Okay, I said to myself, "Now you know," because I couldn't say no, it's not like that. Once you know, once you're aware, you can choose to put it into practice or pretend nothing happened. I saw things in those courses, and I could pretend nothing happened or I could say those things exist.
Okay, I said to myself, "Now you know this, and the way you were before can be changed, can be improved." And so I became aware of my limitations, of the things I didn't know, of my emotions, of my anger, of my way of being, of everything. I began to reflect and take responsibility.
I thought, "These are my things from now on, from 2017 onwards, this is me." And now I have to take charge of the situation and my life begins, without blaming my parents, blaming poverty or not having gone to college, not having had love, not having a hug, not having been abandoned. This is what I did, and this part would be ownership, the second phase.
Then there's Transformation: when you do those things, you change. I couldn't be the Gary of 2016 anymore because I knew things, I had started to put them into practice, from eating, to sleeping, to the way I spoke, to everything that followed in these past years. That's change, the transformation.
And the last one is Self-Mastery. What is self-mastery? Once you set out on that path, you can't go back. It's continuous learning. I do something every day, but not because I need to: I do it because I want to always stay on top of things. So I listen to a podcast, read something, watch a video, have a conversation like I had with you today, go to a retreat. This is called self-mastery because you never got there!
Every day you continue to grow, to learn something different and about yourself and this is D.O.T.S.: the D.O.T.S. Method, for a life lived to the fullest.>>
There's another aspect of this method that fascinates me: all the activities, workshops, outdoor experiential days, individual and corporate sessions, and BEwell Talks™ are conducted in English. You're a natural advocate for bilingualism, but how do you convince our readers (a predominantly Italian audience) to overcome this potential obstacle?
<<Of course, I'm working on it. Obviously, when I say that we'll do everything in English, the first responses are often “I'll come, but I don't know any English.” So I'm working, in this moment of transition, to do something mainly in Italian, but without losing the English aspect. Because I grew up in Italy, I've been here for almost 30 years, I've seen a new Gary grow up, an Italian Gary. The English Gary has always felt confident with his language: if we speak in English, I feel more confident and relaxed because I can somehow manage any conversation in English. When I speak in Italian, on the other hand, I am much more focused and very precise in my expression because concepts have to be explained well, otherwise you, as an outsider, say, ‘Eh, what is this guy saying?’. So when I speak Italian, which is not my first language, I am much more present.
When you speak a second language, you put more focus, more energy, more presence into that moment, because you can't be distracted, otherwise you make mistakes.
I can't be distracted right now. If I start thinking about something and you ask me a question in Italian, I'm done for. I'd say, "What? Repeat, please." You see, we're not connected like that anymore. So since the message I'm getting from multiple sources is that the activities have to be in Italian, I say, "Okay, we'll do it in Italian so we're all safe, but English will be part of the process." For example, we'll do some activities where we watch a video in English and you tell me what you understood in Italian or English, you decide what. We all have to grow. The English or Italian language is just a means to move forward.
4- PASSIONS THAT NOURISH:
tennis and the mountains as paths of awareness
Let's move on to lighter topics: hobbies and free time. What are the areas where you invest your time?
<<My passion now is tennis. I am a tennis player. I discovered this sport by chance, because I used to play soccer and five-a-side soccer. I got into tennis because one day I played with my aunt, who couldn't find anyone to practice with, so I went along, just to run around a bit, and then it became my passion.
And then there's an interesting aspect of tennis: when I play tennis, I'm always observing. I wonder what's going on? Let me explain:
When I step on the court, I'm not alone; there are two of us. I play against myself, because it's often my inner voice that defeats me, not the opponent in front of me. It's this voice that keeps telling me, "You're bad, you're old, you don't know how to play. What are you doing here? Why don't you go and rest?" For me, tennis isn't just a sport, it's a way of being.
Three or four times a week I'm on the court with a lot of players. And since I started this awareness journey, it's a way of playing, but playing consciously, meaning not just to win. I want to play, I want to be grateful if someone really pushes me to my limit, and afterward, even if I make a mistake, I have to say thank you because I didn't know I was capable of reaching that level of tennis. And even if I lost, I know I played great, so I'm looking for that kind of relationship. I'm not looking for a bad player because that way I can win and say I'm cool. That was the Gary of the past. Give me the corpse, I have to win now. No, not anymore.
My other passion is the mountains. I discovered them here in Veneto (Italy). I live near Lessinia.
As an entrepreneur, I never took a day off, only when the business was closed, but otherwise it was impossible for me to find a day off during the week without feeling guilty. I took my birthday off every now and then, once a year. Once a year I gave myself this enormous gift. Little by little I said to myself: but instead of once a year, take it once a month, take one day a month during the week, a Wednesday. Then I said, "Oh, why don't you take one a week?" Wednesday, always Wednesday, and I fought to keep that day off, no appointments, I wasn't there, I didn't answer the phone. Everyone suddenly wanted that day, and I said no, Wednesdays are busy.
And so I started going to the mountains every week, finding peace away from traffic, away from noise pollution. My dog and I spend the day walking alone. It's also a way to recharge and find answers. For example, I always have too many ideas in my head, but when I go there, there's clarity. When I come down from the mountain, I know if there's something to do or something not to do.
Sometimes when I get off I say, "No, I'm not doing anything right now, I'm waiting." Because when you're in the office, when you're working, there's always this urgency, you do, you do, you do, and sometimes you don't have time to think. Instead, that day gives me all the time I need to say, "Okay, there's nothing to do, you wait for the right moment, this isn't the right one."
5-THE ADVICE: Don't let your past define your present or future
Last question, the one I consider the most important in my portraits (the interviews): what's the best advice you'd like to leave to those who read this interview to the end?
<< Don't let your past define your present or future . What I did, my past was my present, but when I realized that wasn't the case, everything changed. That is, we can change things in the present. If we change the present, we also change the past. Because if I can be different, better, it means that there has been work, it means that I am transforming and I am doing well.
So leave your past alone, start from where you are. Ask yourself questions. What do you need? And go invest in yourself, because when you change your life, you see that everything around you changes.
Is there anything else you want to tell me?
<<Yes, life is short, but it is beautiful, it is very beautiful.
We don't live on automatic pilot, because death, let's say, the end, will come, but while we can, why not enjoy the game? The game will end. In the meantime, let's enjoy everything, even the simplest things, a coffee, an ice cream, a walk, not necessarily big cars, big vacations. It's not necessary; even the simplicity of a plate of tomato and basil pasta can bring joy. It seems like nothing, right?
We wander around looking for who knows what, but a well-made tomato and basil pasta, something simple like that, truly makes you feel like life is simple. We just need a little space, presence, time.
Let's slow down a little because we're always in a rush. Let's slow down for a moment and see what happens. And let's also be comfortable with the discomfort because that's where boredom will surely emerge, the feeling of guilt because you have to do something. So observe yourself and try to understand why you feel this way. Self-reflection.
I'd say that for me we can end it like this, with this beautiful final reflection.
<<Thank you, it's always a pleasure to share. Each of us has our own stories, and that's beautiful. Everyone can write a book, everyone can share this life because we are unique, we are not in conflict, we are not competing, because you are Giovanna, I am Gary, we can copy a little something from others, but in the end, the essence is that we are unique. We are different, and this comes out when we work on ourselves and when we talk to people. When we confront each other without fear, when we try to get to know each other, going deep inside, the true essence of ourselves comes out.>>
BIOGRAPHY of Gary Marcus Judge
Gary Marcus Judge was born in Watford, England (born 1964).
A few months after his birth, he was forced to move to Mumbai, India, where he spent the first five years with his mother and five years in an orphanage in Goa, India. At the age of 10, his family reunited in England, and from there his personal adventure began. He studied as much as he had to, but as soon as possible, he sought a path to independence through various experiences that took him around the world.
He arrived in Italy and in 1998, after several jobs, opened Green School Srl, an English school that he managed and developed for over 25 years.
Meanwhile, in 2017, he embarked on a journey of personal growth that, moving from mindfulness to emotional intelligence, from coaching to neurolinguistic programming, and finally learning and experimenting with holistic and spiritual practices, led him to define his new life mission: to help people, professionals, and entrepreneurs regain balance, awareness, and presence, eliminating the "automatic pilot" of emotions that unconsciously influence their choices and daily actions. In 2021, he published his first book, "Free to Fly."
Today he helps people, professionals, and entrepreneurs regain balance and awareness, eliminating the "automatic pilot" that conditions daily actions.
Disclaimer
The content of this interview reflects solely the personal opinions and experiences of Gary Marcus Judge. The information provided is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute professional, medical, legal, or other advice. Any mention of methods, brands, practices, or tools in the text should not be construed as advertising; the intent is to share the interviewee's personal experiences.
