Making of an Empire

Episode 9 - Unlocking Resilience With Hostage Turned Coach Jose Pereira

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The Help Me Unlock Podcast has been rebranded to Making of an Empire. Same magic, same awesome guest line-up, just a bit of that empire energy! 

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Some stories you don't read so much as sit inside. Jose Pereira spent five years held in a military basement, marking time he couldn't see, writing letters smuggled out with the rubbish. What he carries out of that isn't bitterness. It's a quiet, hard-won understanding of what people are capable of when everything is stripped away.

In this episode, Aditi sits with Jose to trace how a man rebuilt himself, and why he now spends his days teaching others to do the same.


Let’s Dive Into the Highlights

  • The phone call that changed everything: How Jose's life turned on a single call during a Saturday at the movies, and the idea that adversity so often arrives the same way.
  • The survivor plan: How six executives ran their confinement like a board meeting, built a daily routine, and gave each other something to stick to.
  • Leaders emerge: What crisis reveals about who steps up, and why bonds beat hierarchy when everything is on the line.
  • Connection across difference: Lessons from a career spanning Italian, Japanese, and Venezuelan teams on meeting people where they are. 
  • Retraining the brain: The decompression and trauma work that taught Jose recovery is a choice, and a process, not a finish line.
  • Finding purpose in the aftermath: Why Jose moved from supporting other hostage families to coaching leaders through adversity.
  • There's always a new process: Coming home isn't the end of the story; it's the start of the next one.


Behind the Breakthrough

Jose Pereira was one of the "CITGO 6," a group of oil and gas executives wrongfully imprisoned by the Venezuelan government between 2018 and 2022. A former CEO with a decades-long career in the industry, Jose was detained while travelling for what he believed was a routine budget meeting, and held in conditions he and his fellow executives nicknamed "the submarine."

He came home a different man. After trauma therapy, a military decompression program, and a long recovery, Jose found purpose in an unexpected place: resilience coaching. His program, LIFE PILLS FOR A SURVIVAL GUIDE (LPSG), draws on his career and the survival strategies the six built together to help business owners and CEOs lead through adversity. He's also writing about the experience, beginning with his book From Hero to Villain: The True Story of the CITGO 6.



The Guest Said It Best

"It's not about what happens to you in life, it's about how you handle the things that happen to you."

"You can teach anything, but you have to make your choice to really do it. Because the thing today is that your brain really can be retrained."

"When you create those bonds in your company, if something is going wrong... you can maybe understand his situation better and maybe can help him."



Key Takeaways

  1. Adversity often arrives without warning. Jose's whole life turned on a single phone call. You can't always prevent the call, but you can decide how you meet what comes after it.
  2. A plan turns chaos into something survivable. The six executives built a structured daily routine (work, exercise, reading, study) and assigned a "plan keeper" to hold them to it. Structure gave them focus, and focus made the time pass.
  3. In a crisis, leaders emerge, and bonds matter more than rank. They made it a rule that no one went down alone; if someone struggled, the others came. The strength wasn't in any one person, it was in the connection between them.
  4. Resilience starts with self-awareness. Jose teaches that people first have to understand themselves: the workaholic has to learn to stop, the poor communicator has to learn to connect as a human being, not a boss.
  5. Connection means accepting differences. Across a career working with Italian, Japanese, and Venezuelan colleagues, Jose learned that you connect with people by understanding where they come from and embracing how they're different.
  6. You can adapt, but you still need a plan. Live one day at a time, but have scenarios ready, and don't try to face them alone. Even the strongest leader has weaknesses, which is exactly why support matters.
  7. Recovery is a new process, not a finish line. People assume that surviving the hard thing means it's over. Jose's experience says the opposite: coming home begins the next process, and how you handle that matters just as much.



A Question to Sit With

Think about a difficult stretch you've been through. When it ended, did you treat it as "done," or did you give yourself room for the process that came next? What might change if you saw recovery as its own chapter rather than the closing of one?



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