Chief of Police Dr. Ron Camacho opens up about the immense personal toll of maintaining the “Iron Duke” persona—a mask of anger, ego, and fear of failure rooted in childhood trauma, which cost him his family and relationships, and led him to terrorize his own officers. In this raw and honest conversation, Dr. Ron shares the breaking point (an affair) that forced him into therapy, revealing his powerful four-step recipe for transformation: cultivating Self-Awareness, practicing Introspection (even when painful), developing Empathy, and relentlessly Suppressing the Ego. Discover how this new mindset of putting others first led to exponential blessings, significant reductions in departmental use of force and citizen complaints, and the key actionable step—looking in the mirror—that you can take this week to start changing your own life.
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The Cost Of Being The Man You Think You Have To Be With Dr. Ron Camacho
In this episode, we’ve got Dr. Ron Camacho and we talk about the cost of being the man you think you have to be.
Dr. Ron, so great to have you on the show.
Thank you, Daniel. Thank you for having me. I’m honored.
I can see that you are in the chief’s office over there, so where explain where you are and what you’re doing.
I’m in my office. I’m the Chief of Police of North Charleston, South Carolina. It’s the third largest city in South Carolina. Busy place. I have about 320 officers that work for me, a department total of 400 people. In the United States, that’s about a middle-sized department.
The Genghis Khan Facade: What Being The Strong One Really Cost
Yeah, that’s serious. We’re going to go get straight into it because you’ve got a absolutely fascinating story and what a privilege to have someone as accomplished as you working for society in in your role as a Chief of Police. I feel very honored. I want to ask you, you’ve had quite the career. What did being the strong one cost you personally?
Cost me tremendously. It cost me relationships, cost me relationships with my family. I didn’t talk to my parents for eight years. When somebody tells me that they’re stubborn, I say, “Beat that. Don’t talk to your parents for eight years and then talk to me about being stubborn,”
Now, that’s because of your stubbornness you’re talking about.
My stubbornness and also my journey to try to heal some of my trauma and work through my stuff. Cost me a marriage. It cost me relationships with people that I worked with. It really just cost me quite a bit of myself. I don’t like who I was when all this came out. When I look back at that portion of my career, and it wasn’t my whole early part of my policing career, it was it basically started in the middle part, like when I became a lieutenant and I had a whole bunch of responsibility and pressure put on me.
The pressure to affect change and the pressure to start getting results, it’s funny because there were a lot of people before me that had that position, and they became my bosses. All of a sudden, it was like, “You’re there, now I want you to get these results.” My thing was, “You were there too. They were the same people. Why did you not get these results?” However, because of the way I was raised and because of my father telling me I was useless, I was not going to amount to anything, and my self-esteem being low I had this drive that was in me to not fail. I had to put on this persona, this egotistical persona.
Mask.
Right, this mask to go ahead and to not fail. Also, I was very young when I was up there. I was a lieutenant at eleven years, and in the United States, that’s very rare. I was supervising people that I had worked with before. Many of these guys had 25, 30 years on the job, and so I had to put on this persona, this mask, in order to have those difficult conversations with them, to build up that bravery to be able to get them to change.
Okay, can you just describe the Dr. Ron back then? If I was to walk in and I’m reporting into you, I come into your office, describe the man, the leader that you represented, and I’m talking about the facade that you wanted to portray and obviously command respect, etc. I want you to talk about the facade, I want you describe the man, and I want you to describe the man behind the facade, what was really going on. Give us a taste.
For those that love history, and this is a men’s show, so imagine combining General Patton from World War II and Genghis Khan. Put them together, and that was my leadership style. I really was just in there and just had to get that that persona and in order to have those tough conversations. Many of those of those people that I was there had more years than I did, and they were very comfortable in their positions.
Normal ways to get them to change were not going to work. I was young. I had eleven years on. I was good at my job, I had had a decent career, but I was not spectacular, so I had to do something different. Again, there was always this fear in me of failure, a very big huge fear of failure. Part of this was anger mixed in with fear of failure. That Patton-Genghis Khan type anger in order to say, “You’re going to listen to me and you’re going to obey me or else.”
I forced guys that had 30 years on the job within 6 months to retire, I forced guys to leave the department. I put an incredible amount of pressure on people. I moved people out of positions that had been in positions for a while in order to make sure that the unit was successful. I ran the detective division. We had a lot of crime that we needed to address.
That was my main thing. I was going to be successful because of my insecurity. I wanted to be successful where others were not successful. Our drug unit, I wanted to make them successful. The before I got there, these guys were working drugs 8:00 to 4:00. That’s not the way you work drugs. These guys like one guy in particular, he would stop at 4:00 because he had to go coach soccer, football.
Before I got there, that drove me crazy. When I got there, I put an end to that. These guys were all over the place, and I pulled them back into the building and forced them to work to my will. It was very exhausting, and it was very stressful, and I took things very personal. That’s where the anger came in. Anything that was not to my satisfaction, anything that was against my orders, I took as a personal slight.
I’m one of those reporting officers and I am not I am not meeting your expectations. You’ve called me in, what would I have experienced with you? How would I have experienced you? Lie describe it.
As opposed to now, where I would have a very adult mentorship conversation with somebody, the conversation would be very much a drill sergeant type conversation without respect to their years in service, without respect to what they’ve done in the past, None of that would have mattered. What would have mattered back then was, “This is my order, you’re not following my orders, you’re not meeting my expectations, so you’re wrong.”
Would you be raising your voice, would you bring men to tears? What are we talking about?
Yes, at times, there was that. I would challenge their integrity. I would challenge who they were, I would definitely raise my voice. I was angry almost every day. Every day, I would walk into that office and I was angry. It became like almost a joke, and for those that were on my team, my workers, they loved me because I was very protective of them.
That was only about 20% of the people. You can’t run a unit, you can’t run a department with only 20% of the team. They loved me, but it was the other 80% that at times feared me. I tell a story where with my ex, my ex was a nurse at the local hospital. She was a baby nurse. Cops used to go there with their wives to give and they would have kids there. They would see the nameplate, and Camacho is not a very common name, especially there.
You can’t run a unit or department with only 20% of the team. Share on XThey would see the name and say, “Are you related to Captain Camacho or Lieutenant Camacho?” “Yes, that’s my husband,” my ex would say. “You’re so nice, how are you married to him? That guy’s a monster.” I’m the beast, I’m the devil. “How are you married? You’re so nice, how the hell are you married to this guy?” It became a joke. She would come back and she would tell me that. That was my persona. At some point in time, I was so sick in the mind that I liked that. I liked that fear. I liked that persona. It was not healthy. I know that now, but back then, I got some satisfaction out of that.
Internalized Stress: The Anger Rooted In Childhood Trauma
When we originally spoke, something that you said to me that which stayed with me, which was you would wake up every day angry. You’d get up and you were like fire. I want to dig a little bit deeper there and try to understand, did you realize that that’s not healthy? To be in that perpetual state of anger, especially anger with the world, the people around you including wife, kids, etc. They would have felt the brunt of that. Where did that all come from and how were you emotionally and mentally dealing with constantly being angry?
I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I never did a drug. All of that stuff was internalized. I did martial arts, I used to run, I used to rucksack, I used to do exercises, man, so I did a lot of that, but for whatever reason, I could never fully unfill my cup.
Right, you couldn’t get rid of that that feeling.
Yeah, right. One day we were at a SWAT call out. We were there for thirteen hours, a guy shot at us, He was barricaded in a house, shot at us, I was the internal team leader, so I was responsible for the internal team. He wound up taking some shots at me and my team there. We wound up killing this guy. I was on my feet for thirteen hours and I was running the internal team there. Incredible amount of pressure on on me.
We’re going to a debrief, and every time we’re debriefing, I’m crying. That’s not me. Nowadays, I cry at anything. I’m more in tune with that. Back then, that was not me. We’re having a debrief and my men are looking at me like, “What the hell is up with this guy? This guy, that’s the Iron Duke, he doesn’t cry.” That’s telling me, “My cup is filled.”
That was my body telling me, “Your body is letting that stress out and you can’t control it. It’s in there and it’s letting it out. You got to start doing something about it.” I didn’t beat my wife, I didn’t abuse my wife, I didn’t abuse my kids, it wasn’t anything like that. What I did was disassociate. We grew apart and I disconnected with her. I was very much involved with the gossip of the world, like I was more connected with friends and was mixed up in the politics of what was going on in in the department and outside the department. That seemed to be where I got some joy. It was silly, it was stupid.
It was weird. I would come to work and the slightest things. When I moved up in rank to a captain and I was in charge of operations, where I had the patrol division and detectives that reported to me, about 90 officers that reported to me, something as simple as somebody not showing up to court. It’s business. You should handle it as business. I would take that as a personal affront. That would be something as simple to trigger me and to get me angry.
What would happen?
I would be mad. Sometimes my rule was if you hit my radar three times, you were coming to see me and that’s often where I was going to apply pressure. We were going to have those really tough talks, but those tough talks were not going to be in a fatherly, mentorly way where I was going to try to affect change in a positive manner. I was going to try to break you so that you would not do that again. It was a sick way and that’s where a lot of times there would be officers, grown men, that would cry in my office.
You didn’t care when they cried.
No, and a lot of times, that had to do with me challenging their integrity. In police work in the United States, truthfulness is a huge thing. You can get fired for being untruthful. If I would question their integrity and they knew they couldn’t lie, that was a huge thing. You might be skirting around the truth and if I’m questioning that, that’s a big thing. It was a sickness. Looking back now, very embarrassing to me, and I’ve tried to make amends anytime I run into somebody from my time back then, I think I’ve done a lot of work.
Where did the where did the anger come from?
Insecurity, 100%, low self-esteem, 100%. When I eventually went to therapy, it was trauma from my childhood, It definitely was. It was my relationship with my father, a guy telling me I was not going to amount to anything and just that constant chopping down of your self-esteem that just was not addressed at some point in time.
It wasn’t physical, it was just mental. At times, you go through life and some people can work through that. I was not able to work through it. It hit me a lot harder than maybe some other people and it affected me. When you combine that with the stress of the positions that I was in and if you look at my career, I promoted up very quickly.
Why? I was trying to prove something. I was trying to prove I’m not useless, I can be successful. I guess somewhere deep inside, I’m still trying to do that even though after therapy, I come to the realization I don’t need to prove anything to anybody anymore. I’ve had a great career, I don’t need to prove anything to anybody.
The Breaking Point: Seeking Validation And Starting Therapy
Do you think do you think it was the search for external validation that as a kid, you were told so much that you’re a loser, you’re like you’re never going to get anywhere and it was just drilled into you that you were so determined to prove your father wrong that actually you were seeking external validation to tell you, “Ron, you’re okay.” Going down that path, you’re never ever really going to get there because you’re always going to look for someone else to tell you you’re okay without you actually being okay with you.
Take us to the breaking point of what made you wake up to the fact to even be aware and acknowledge that that was what you were dealing with and then I want to hear about once you woke up, what did you do to change everything around because you have significantly changed things around and gone to much higher heights? I really want to get into that.
I had an affair, and my ex-wife said, “We’re going to go to counseling.”
Is this pre-affair or you’d already been caught?
Right after when I got caught. She said, “We’re going to go to counseling,” couples counseling.
She was willing to take you back?
Yeah, we went to couples counseling, and when we went to couples counseling, right away, the counselor, she got my anger. She hit that. Within a couple of sessions, she said, “We can’t even work on the marriage until we work on you.” It changed from counseling to therapy. The poor counselor, she was trying to do both and it eventually she started seeing me on my own and working on my stuff. You know you’re screwed up when you make the counselor cry, when you when you’re telling her stories of your childhood and you tap into her emotions, when she’s feeling bad for some of the things you tell her.
You know you’re really struggling when you make the counselor cry. Share on XFor a General Patton-Genghis Khan, tough as nails man, I think there’s often a huge challenge to also accepting, “Dr. Ron, you’ve got a problem and the problem is with you and you need to work on your problem.” Now that’s not often an easy thing to hear. When you were told you got a lot of issues, did you resist the going to do the work, did you like, “No, I’m not the one with the problem, it’s like everyone else is,” how did you respond to that?
I think the first session, I was like that, and then maybe the second session, she was really good, she was able to poke through. By the third session, I was in it and I was spilling my guts and I was crying and she tapped into me. I will tell you that those sessions, I felt like I was running not a marathon, but an ultramarathon,
I would come home totally exhausted mentally, physically. They just wore out. I think deep down inside, I was ready. I was ready to get all this stuff out. I was ready to stop being angry. I was ready to change my life. God said to me, “Let’s go, let’s start ending this bullshit and let’s start changing your life.” I started dealing with this.
The Three Pillars Of Change: Self-Awareness, Introspection, And Empathy
Okay, so give the audience let’s say the recipe that you applied to turn your life around. Give us the the actionable things that you did that you put into practice etc.
For me, it was about six months of this therapy counseling. Now, I will say, it didn’t save the marriage. I don’t know if anything could have saved the marriage. My ex-wife and I, we get along fine, we have two great kids together. My son just graduated from college, which when we talked, I was in Pennsylvania for his college graduation. We were successful there and I broke the chain.
My relationship with my kids is very different than my relationship with my father. Score one for me that I broke the cycle there. My kids are not afraid to talk to me or to ask me for things the same way that I was afraid to have that relationship with my father. That’s number one. After that, I started doing things on my own, which is very important. Self-awareness. Huge thing. You got to know what you are and who you are to the rest of the world. It’s amazing that many of us don’t know who we are to the rest of the world. We don’t look in that mirror and we’re not having that honest conversation with ourselves.
You have to know who you are and how the world sees you. Share on XTell me why.
I think it’s painful for people to look in the mirror and say, “Who am I?” Introspection, having that deep conversation. I don’t know, those are two things that I did a lot of research on and I really started working on and having those deep conversations with myself and making sure that the person that I am, the person that’s in that mirror is the same person that everybody else sees. It’s funny because in my life, I live my life that way to make sure that who you see is who you get and who you see is who I am at all times.
When you’re saying you’re having those conversations with yourself and the same context that it can be painful, when you’re engaging with yourself, what are the painful parts of doing that?
I’ll give you a perfect example. I got admonished one time by a boss. At first, I didn’t think it was right. I didn’t think the admonishment was right. I’ve been a boss myself for a while and I went and I took that admonishment and I went home. It hurt because here I am, I’m a boss. I’ve been a boss for a while. I’m a pretty good boss. I have all these successes that I have under my belt.
I started having that conversation with myself. I started using empathy. I started putting myself in my boss’s place, in his shoes, looking at the problem from his angle and diving in deep. This is a skill that I’ve developed and an incredibly important skill that’s helped me really get to the next level of leadership. This took me like a weekend.
I’m mowing the grass, I’m having these conversations. I’m driving the car, I’m having these conversations. I’m walking the dog, I’m having these conversations. I’m talking to my wife, I’m having these conversations. Thank God she’s been a great vessel, my current wife, to help me work these things out. By the end, I was able to figure this out and say, “He has a point.” I looked at it through his lens and was able to make this fit and say, “He’s got a point. He’s the boss.”
I was able to look at the problem through his lens, I was able to understand where he was coming from and let the hurt go by and really work that out and make peace with this and be able to move forward. Where somebody else might have taken this slight and might have been really hard, a hard wound that might have been there forever, there might have been a lot of resentment there might have been multiple things that have occurred with that and they might not have been able to deal with it.
They might have run away from that. That’s your ego. Your ego is telling you they want to move away from that. It wants to move away from that pain, from that correction because I’ve done the work so much and nobody beats themselves up more than me. I was able to work this around and by that Monday, I was good to go, I understood where they were coming from and I was able to work it into my way of being, adjust, move forward successfully and continue the mission.
To me, that’s an issue that leaders have not tapped into a lot. The ability to really look at things from other people’s perspectives and adjust. I’ve seen all the time. Those are my big three things that I preach, self-awareness, introspection, empathy, and the fourth one which is a huge one is the ego, suppressing that ego in order to let you do all those other things.
One thing many leaders still struggle with is seeing things from other people’s perspectives and adjusting accordingly. Share on XEvolved Leadership: Putting Others First For Exponential Blessings
Now, you run a quite a substantial operation where you’re chief and I’m wondering if I was to ask the reporting officers into you now how they would experience you, how do you think they would describe that experience now?
Yeah, I’m happy to say that we have high morale, they appreciate me because they know that I care about them. I don’t know if I said it before when we talked the first time, during my journey, when I started putting others before myself, the world changed. The blessings came to me exponentially.
When you say you put other people before yourself, that was a big change for you. What does that mean?
I just started thinking about others before me. I just started changing my mindset. I just started helping others and it was about others before me. I that’s if you want to say if I play a sport, it’s helping others. My phone’s constantly ringing with somebody asking for advice, asking for help, and that’s what I do. I help others whether it’s giving them leadership advice, letter of recommendation, somebody wants to run something by me,
Whatever that might be, I’m there and I’m helping them in some way, shape, or form. Making a connection, it doesn’t matter. Weekly, sometimes a couple of times a day, somebody is calling me for some help. It just it makes me happy to do that. To see somebody go to the next level. I bring that philosophy here. I’ve only been at this department for a year and a half, and I brought that philosophy of development.
I dove really deep in very quickly to develop my officers. Get them well trained and start getting them ready for the next level of command, their next level of wherever they want to go in their department, and even where they want to go post-career, Lot of chiefs don’t even talk about that. I’m talking to them about that.
“Where do you want to be when your police career goes? How can we help you now when you want to retire? What can we do here internally for you when you want to retire?” if we develop our officers here to the best of our ability, the product that they give the community is going to be very high and the community’s going to be very happy. That’s what all this is about, making the community happy and making sure that our officers are engaged with the community at a high level.
If we develop our officers to the best of our ability, the community will feel the impact. Share on XIf I was to ask you, like if we go back to you personally, what was everything that you experienced, what would you say was the hardest truth you had to face about yourself?
I will tell you one thing that the therapist told me and a great piece of advice. During one of the sessions I said, “I feel guilty,” and this was having to do with my children who were young at the time. I said, “I feel guilty.” She said, “No, you feel shame and you need to sit in that shame. You need to feel that shame.” I thought about that and I sat in that shame.
It was powerful. I didn’t understand it at that time, but I did it. I let that shame of breaking up this marriage, having an affair soak in. My daughter, who’s the youngest, who’ll be graduating high school here soon, she’s 18 going on 40, she’s an old soul, later on, when she was 12, 13 years old, she started asking some hard questions like, “What did you do? How did you do this?” she started asking questions about the affair and the breakup
The kids knew about the affair?
Yeah, 100%. I was able to answer those questions because of living a life of integrity and because I had already lived in that shame. I was already out and had lived with it. I was able to answer those questions because I lived in that shame before, I was able to answer those questions. It was hard, don’t get me wrong, but it would have been a lot harder had I not lived in that shame before. I thank the counselor for doing that.
From Iron Duke To Buddha: Handling Pressure And Sitting In Shame
With regards to how you lead now, how do you deal under pressure the way you are now compared to old Ron?
Yeah, so remember Genghis Khan and Patton put together? That guy turned into Buddha.
How does Buddha deal with pressure? You would be exposed to a lot of pressure. Your responsibility is much greater. Your responsibilities much greater given the size of your department now. It’s more pressure than you had in the past. I want to understand how you respond to it today compared to before.
When I was a chief before, we didn’t get to talk about that. I was a chief for eight years of a department in Pennsylvania of about 40-person department to 320 officer, 400-person department. There are pressures back then. The key is doing this work. I’ve done this work, I’ve seen this, I’m well trained, I’m educated, and I have this experience, and I lead with compassion and I lead with caring.
I do care about my people, I know that the old ways don’t work. Believe you me, I am not perfect. I talk about ego all the time and I have this saying, “You win the battle with ego about 85% of the time, you’re doing good.” There are times where I slip up and my ego my ego comes up and I puff my chest. That’s where that introspection comes in, that’s where the self-awareness comes in.
That’s where surrounding yourself with good people comes in where you have some people around you that can pull your coattails and say, “That might have been a wrong decision.” I’ve always looked to surround myself with good people to be able to feel comfortable enough to say, “That might have been a mistake.” I’m that secure in who I am to be able to take corrections.
My wife, she’s really great at letting me know, “That might have been a mistake,” and I’m smart enough to know, “Yes, okay, that was a mistake.” I’m always evolving, always adjusting, and I don’t have many hobbies. I hike, I have three dogs but I’m obsessed, and this word that is leadership and I’m obsessed with getting my department better and making sure that my officers and the people that surround me get to the next level.
Whatever way I can do that, I’m doing that. If I have to spend five minutes with somebody, giving them a lesson on how I screwed up and don’t step in the landmines that I stepped on so that you can have success, or if that’s an hour or if that’s teaching a class. One summer, I taught my whole department the sergeants and above, I taught them introspection, self-awareness.
Detectives and corporals and below, I taught them ego suppression. I basically dedicated my whole summer to teach the whole department and make sure we were on the same page as far as these concepts. The reward for me is when an officer comes in and we have a conversation and they say, “Yeah, that’s my ego talking.”
You’re like Chief Woo-woo.
No, these methods are working and I love that. We had reductions in use of force. I’ve had a reduction in the amount of discipline that we issue out. I’ve seen a reduction in complaints with the citizens. Some of them a use of force got cut by 50%. That tells me that this work. That we’re speaking the same language. Those are the things that that make me happy. Those are my touchdowns. I don’t follow sports teams, so that’s my World Cup. When an officer comes in here or a sergeant comes in here saying, “ Yes, I have an ego issue,” or “That was my ego talking.” and it’s not me alone. We brought in a company to do coaching, that’s part of my development, company called Performance Protocol, they do coaching, very new concept in policing.
That has been great for the department. Again, it shows them I care about you. I want to see you get to the next level. Here’s a tool for you to use to get to the next level, I can’t be there on my own. Here are coaches from all over the United States. We have even Canadian coaches. There might even be some people from Australia, I don’t know. These are the experts in their fields that can help you with different problems get to the next level.
Final Takeaway: The Mirror Does Not Lie
If you were speaking to my readers now, and you could tell them if there was one thing that they could action this week to get that process going to reflect and suppress ego and all the things, give as the one action thing that they could do for themselves?
Simple. Look in the mirror, have a deep conversation with yourself in that mirror. Don’t look away, look into your own eyes in that mirror, have a deep conversation. Have a truthful conversation. Be alone so that you don’t feel weird. Give yourself 20 minutes, half an hour, 5 minutes, however that is, have that truthful, honest conversation with yourself looking in that mirror about whatever bullshit it is that you need to work on.
Most powerful tool that you can use is that mirror to let you know what’s going on with you, what you need to work on. The mirror does not lie. Do that. Eventually, you won’t need the mirror. You’ll have an internal mirror, like I do. I don’t need the mirror. I can in my mind is my own mirror and my mind tells me, “Let’s have this conversation, let’s analyze this decision, let’s talk about this.” for those starting off that really want to make this jump, look in that mirror, have that conversation with yourself and really know none of this works if you’re not honest. If you’re not honest with yourself, then forget about it. Looking in that mirror can start that that honesty path.
Dr. Ron, I just want to say thank you for giving us your time and hearing and being so open and honest and transparent with us. When I finish off my interviews, I always ask my guest I’ve got five rapid questions and I just want you to give what your most honest instant response. I don’t want you to overthink it. My first question to you is, who would you like to say sorry to given the chance?
Can’t pick out one person. I’ve said a lot of sorrys, but I’m sure some officers from my department. There are a couple that I probably need to apologize to. Can’t pick out one, but a couple.
What are you proud of being or doing in your life?
I really am proud of what I’m doing now, that I’m changing lives. I’m very proud of that.
When did you receive kindness while needing it most and expecting it least?
I guess I would say some encouraging words from some mentors that I’ve had just out of the blue. I’m thinking one in particular where I was going through some stuff. An email came from one of my mentors saying, “I haven’t heard from you in a while. Hope you’re doing well, you’ve been off the net it’s time that that you start getting back into the net.” this was pre-therapy, just reached out, out of the blue. This guy was super famous author, written a lot of books, him and I had become very close. I’ve paid it forward 1,000 times, but emailed out of the blue when I was going through some stuff.
What did your mother or father teach you that you frequently remind yourself of?
I am a rule follower. We grew up upper-middle class and my mother taught me to follow rules, which is funny. I’ve reconnected with my parents and I’ve researched into what made my father tick. I’ve reconnected and have forgiven. Now that they’re older, it’s funny that they don’t want to follow the rules. I’m a rule follower and I got that from my mother.
Finally, what’s your superpower?
I can pick out people that have ego issues right away, and I’m just really good at picking out and in some other world, I was Freud’s right-hand man. I’m a junior psychologist in some way, for whatever reason. I always teach my people look at the psychology of things when we’re dealing with people. Just look start looking at some of these decisions when you’re dealing with people. I’m always looking like 2 or 3 steps ahead when we’re dealing with people. It’s not the surface, you got to ask three questions in to get to the root of the problem and I think I’m pretty good at that.
Dr. Ron, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. It was great.
Daniel, thank you very much for this opportunity. I appreciate you and the work you’re doing. Thank you so much.
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About Dr. Ron Camacho
Dr. Ron Camacho is a Chief of Police, leadership advisor, and speaker whose work focuses on ego, emotional intelligence, and leadership under pressure. With more than 30 years in law enforcement—including roles as a SWAT commander, trainer, and senior police leader—Ron built a career in environments where toughness and control were often mistaken for strength. But behind the success, those same patterns were damaging his marriage, relationships, and personal well-being. What began as an attempt to save his marriage became a deeper reckoning with trauma, anger, and the role ego was quietly playing in every area of his life. Today, Ron combines his experience leading high-pressure organizations with deeply personal lessons about vulnerability, accountability, and self-awareness. Through speaking, coaching, and his upcoming book, he helps leaders and men better understand how unchecked ego impacts judgment, relationships, and culture—and what real personal change actually requires.
