#330: Finding Love in Unexpected Places: How Did Sean Come to Find Love, Writing, & the Sea?

He's opened up his own garage, working on cars, all because, well, he got the news that he's about to have a child.

Fast forward a while.

And Sean Donovan, he's back on top.

He's thriving as a successful real estate investor again.

He is living on top of the world.

And yet, then it's the 2008 recession.

The floor drops out from under him.

Hes lying on the floor of the gym bathroom.

Hes broken in every form of the word.

Financially, physically, emotionally.

Hes done.

And yet, from these devastating lows, Sean Donovans story takes an inspiring turn.

A turn that makes this a comeback story that you, my friend, cannot afford to miss.

I've given you the highlights.

You, though, are about to discover the details, the full story told by Sean Donovan himself.

So, my friend, I'm excited to welcome you to what is episode 330.

Yo, are you ready to flip the script on life?

Cause those bad days, they're just doors to better days.

And that's exactly what we do here at grit, grace, and inspiration.

Your host, Kevin Lowe, he's been flipping the script on his own life, turning over 20 years of being completely blind into straight up inspiration, motivation, and encouragement just for you.

So kick back, relax, and let me introduce you to your host, Kevin Lowe.

What's up?

And welcome back to another awesome interview here on great grace of inspiration.

Today.

I am blessed to be in the studio with a guy I have been so excited to get to talk to.

And that is none other than Mister Sean Donovan.

Sean, welcome to the podcast.

And Kevin, thank you so much for having me here today.

I'm really looking forward to this, and you're such an inspiration to so many.

And I'm just blessed to be a part of this process and this podcast with you.

Oh, man.

Well, thank you.

And Sean, I'm excited to unpack this story that you've been on.

And I figure the best place to start is when you kind of look back at this journey you've been on.

What do you feel like?

Was that, that moment, that experience, that really kind of shifted everything that's ended up leading to where you are today?

Two things come to mind Kevin, without a doubt, the birth of my daughter, which was very unexpected and unplanned and it happened at an early age.

I was a 21 year old father and my daughter coming into this world changed the trajectory of my life.

I went from this fun loving, partying, lifeguarding, bartending kind of guy to all of a sudden, whoops, I've got another human being that is counting on me and looking up to me for inspiration and guidance and financial support and all of those things.

So that probably more than anything changed the trajectory of my life.

And although it was unplanned, I called my daughter.

Sometimes jokingly, I follow my greatest mistake.

But the most positive things have come out of that, including an eight year old granddaughter that I have now.

So my daughter is 28 and my granddaughter is eight and what a beautiful family we have.

And it all evolved out of an oaksy.

So sometimes those things happen.

Yeah.

I would say the second thing, the most probably pivotal moment of my life was 2008 and real estate bubble bursting.

And the financial situation that ensued from that really put me at a low .2 thousand.

Eight was the worst year of my life.

Lost two businesses that I had poured a lot of blood, sweat equity and hard work and tears into over a ten year period of time and I lost both businesses and found myself just struggling to figure out what was next and in the moment how it was going survive.

But it really caused me to take a hard look at my life, what I was doing, how I was spending my time, and it caused me to make some drastic changes, including moving to Florida.

Yes.

So a lot of positives came out of the toughest year of my life.

It was tough to make it through at that point, but the end result was a much happier, more fulfilled life.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely understandable.

Well, talking to the first point about finding out that you were having a child, where were you kind of at in life?

I mean, were you in, I think you were maybe in college at that point?

I was, yeah, I was a junior in college at Old Dominion University up in Norfolk, Virginia.

I was lifeguarding on the beach there at Virginia beach during the summertime and you know, working security and bartending and waiting tables and all those other odd jobs in between to help pay my way through school.

And you know, I was just having a really good time.

I was in, I guess you could call full on Playboy mode.

At that point in my life I was just, you know, it was all about having fun and, you know, wasn't, wasn't thinking a whole lot about the future.

It was.

I was just enjoying life to its fullest at the time.

I'm glad I had those experiences.

I got a lot of that out of my system at the time, but I was absolutely, positively not in the mood to have a child.

I aspired to have a child one day.

That was a dream of mine, but I just.

I didn't think it was going to happen that way, and certainly not under the circumstances I was in financially, and maybe with a different person as well would have been nice also.

But it is what it is, and we made the best out of the situation.

I love my daughter to death, but she did change my life more than anything at that point.

Yeah.

What I can't help but think of is that quote that people say is that life is what happens when we're busy making other plans.

And I listen to you with that, and I think that definitely rings true now, career wise.

You talked about being in real estate coming up in 2008.

What led to that?

I mean, you said you were a junior in college.

What happened from there?

Well, I had to drop out of college when I found out I was having a daughter.

That was the first thing that had to happen, and it was unfortunate.

I really didn't have my heart and soul in college at the time.

Anyway, I thought I knew what I wanted to do when I went to college.

I wanted to be a mechanical engineer.

I quickly learned that math was not my forte, and I had to change my major over to environmental sciences, which I enjoyed learning about.

I had dreams of maybe traveling, studying rainforest and coral reefs and all these cool things and adventures in life, and then all of a sudden, ooh, now I got a daughter, and I probably shouldn't be going all around the world.

So this major that I had switched into my sophomore year now became sort of irrelevant to me.

Again, I didn't have aspirations to.

To become a doctor or anything like that.

I always have more of an entrepreneurial mindset.

So I made the tough decision, considering how much time, effort, energy, and money I already put into college, to withdraw from college and start a business.

And I had really been into cars since I was a kid.

I tinkered with cars with my grandfather, and he was always taking apart a lawnmower or working on something mechanical.

So I thought, well, let me do something I love and, you know, figure it out.

So I had a 66 mustang that I was halfway into restoring, and I, my first car with triumph Spitfire necessitated me becoming a good mechanic just to keep that thing on the road.

So I got quite good at it.

So I said, let me try my hand at business.

I hadn't taken any business classes in college, unfortunately.

And so I made every mistake in the book, starting what I called on site auto service in Virginia beach back in the mid nineties.

So made every mistake, hired family members, hired friends to work for me.

And in spite of all of my mistakes, at the end of the day, I was financially successful with that business.

But I got burned out after a couple of years.

I was doing literally everything.

I had developed some trust issues because of experiences I had had with the wrong people I had hired.

So I was the guy that was crawling underneath the car in a parking lot, changing the oil.

I was the guy doing the accounting and invoicing.

I was the guy doing the sales.

So I was wearing a lot of hats.

And this working on cars thing that I had really loved started to become feeling a lot like a job and a chore.

So I made the decision to close that business down.

It was tough.

My last month in business, keep in mind, I'm in my mid twenties.

I think I made about $7,000 that last month.

And I just didn't have the foresight or the business acumen to think, well, why don't I sell this book of business that I built up to a competitor?

Nope.

I just closed the doors one day and decided, I don't want to do this anymore.

And then I went into a brief stint in corporate America and quickly realized I didn't want to do that either.

So I thought, okay, if I can restore a car, maybe I could renovate a house.

So with some of the money that I had made from the auto repair and auto restoration business, I bought my first condo.

I did some restoration and improvement to it and sold it a couple years later and made a pretty decent chunk of change for myself at that point in time.

It was certainly the largest chunk of money that I had made in my life up until that point.

And I thought, you know what?

This is kind of nice.

So I went and got my real estate license, and I started practicing real estate in 1998, and I had a ten year plan that was supposed to culminate in 2008, 2009.

Worked my butt off, Kevin, 16 hours a day.

Three or four years into real estate, I built up a little portfolio of investment properties.

I'd scrimped and saved and moved into a place and renovated while I was living there.

So I lived 90 days without a kitchen.

One time I ate out a whole lot.

I lived in a house for 30 days with no bathroom.

And luckily I had a gym membership to a gym that was just a couple blocks away.

So I shower there and, you know, do all my bathroom kind of business at the gym in the interim while I was working on the house.

And then I'd flip the house and move out into another one, or I'd rent the house, etcetera.

So that's how I got into real estate and contracting, and it was a learning curve for that as well.

I made a bunch of mistakes early on, cost myself a bunch of time and money, and I finally got everything on the right track.

The machine was running smoothly, so to speak.

I was hitting on all eight cylinders.

I was making money, I was living a good life, and I was very busy, but at the same time, it was very rewarding financially.

And then out of the blue comes 2008.

Bam.

Rug yanked right up from underneath me.

That was a very tough thing to face.

And it happened at a very inopportune time for me as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, when 2008 happened, as far as, I mean, you weren't only just a typical realtor, but you had all these investment properties.

How did it end up happening for you as far as, did you have to sell those?

Did everything basically get taken?

I mean, what, what exactly went down for you at that point?

I was so ingrained in what I was doing.

I was renovating an old victorian home that a partner and I had purchased.

I had a couple of renovation projects going on for clients at the same time, I was overseeing the management of 1200 residential units in Richmond, Virginia.

Our rent roll range from 250 a month up to $3,500 a month.

So we were dealing with just a whole spectrum of renters and all different financial situations in different walks of life.

I didn't see it coming.

For some reason, I should have.

I didn't see the bubble busting.

All the junk loans, the arm loans the banks were making and stuff were just.

It was not on my radar.

I was doing my thing, working with a lot of first time home buyers and investors as well.

So I was working with people who were getting FHA loans and I was working with investors that were paying cash and everybody in between.

And I had my own thing going, but I was in the middle of this victorian renovation.

I had put a lot of my own cash into it, and I had a lunch meeting with my banker.

We were getting close to the point where we're going to refinance the property, pull some of our own money out, get ready to list it for sale and move on.

My banker comes to the lunch meeting, and he looks rough.

And this was a guy who was usually well put together, so he looked like he hadn't slept in days, and he just didn't look like himself.

I thought he was sick, or maybe he was going through some personal stuff at home.

And before we had even ordered lunch, he proceeds to tell me that you can't do the refinance.

And at the time, I had a 800 plus credit score, and I've done multiple loans with this bank and him.

And I said, well, why not?

What's wrong?

What did I do?

So it's not you.

The bank has just made a decision that we're not going to do any of these investment refis anymore.

And I said, well, that's your bread and butter.

And he said, and that, my friend, is why I haven't slept in the last week.

So that was my first indication that something major was going on about to happen.

And it happened quickly.

And the transition for me was extremely tough.

I had been living a pretty good life up until that point.

I've been working very, very hard, but I've been enjoying the spoils of my labor.

And it stopped very, very abruptly.

I went from making a whole bunch of money to making no money in a very short period of time.

And to compound things, a lot of my renters, some of which who had been with me for years, and personal investment properties that I own, they found themselves in a position where they couldn't pay rent.

My employees who were working for me in the contracting company, I was still paying them, but their wives or their spouses had gotten laid off, and now they were in a different financial position, looking at me for overtime and things that I just wasn't able to give them at the time.

So it was a very rapid onset of change, and it was extremely painful.

I think back, and I reflect back now, a lot of the tenants that rented from me and a lot of the investors, they either worked at or owned a lot of the restaurants in Richmond, Virginia.

I used to always get an invite to go to openings of these restaurants, and I was on a guest list sometimes for special events at the museum, which I was a member of, and different things.

And all of a sudden, all of that went away.

And I went from not looking at prices on things in the grocery store to shopping so frugally.

At one point, things got so bad, I was living off of an avocado and a mango and water every day.

Man, what an adjustment that was.

Kevin.

Yeah, I know some people are thinking, oh, poor Sean, blah, blah, blah, but it's easy to say until it happens to you.

And it happened to me, and I was cautious.

I had savings, I had contingency plans in place, and it was amazing how fast all of it came unraveled.

I had $120,000 sitting in a reserve fund for maintenance issues on properties, and I watched it evaporate in one year.

It was unbelievable.

What that taught me was that even sometimes when you think you're prepared, you can never underestimate what can be dealt your way in a very short period of time.

So that taught me to have contingency plans for my contingency plans to have not just a plan a and a b, but plans a through z.

Wow, how rough.

Now, out of my own curiosity, kind of, what was that kind of ground zero moment during this time?

Like the lowest of the lows that maybe sometimes it seems like we have to hit rock bottom and then maybe even find a floor below it before things can kind of start to change for us.

Well, it's funny that you said rock bottom and a floor below it, because that.

That definitely brings up a story, and I think this was rock bottom for me.

I had been dealing with a lot of the stress from the financial burden that was put on me in 2008 by going to the gym and working out.

I was working twelve to 16 hours a day, six days a week and a half a day on Sunday.

And, you know, it was finding time somehow, even if it was 910, 11:00 at night, to squeeze in some gym time.

And I was doing that six days a week as well, just to blow off the steam.

And one night I was in the gym doing my normal workout, and I wasn't feeling that great, but I pushed through.

I had a good workout anyway.

I got into the sauna, which I always ended all my workout sessions with the sauna.

I'd go in, do a little bit of meditation, yoga, stretching, etcetera, get some of that detox going.

And in the sauna, I started feeling really dizzy.

I got tunnel vision, my ears started ringing.

I was the only one in the locker room.

It was late at night, the gym was about to close.

I had the wherewithal and luckily, the ability to get out of the 140 degree sauna.

And I literally remember crawling across the tile floor of the gym, over to the shower, and in the floor of the shower, which I always wore flip flops in the shower, just because you know a little OCD about germs and the gym floor, but here I am sitting on the floor.

I got the cold the shower on the coldest water I could possibly get, just running over me to cool me down.

And I thought I was having a little bit of heat exhaustion.

So I remember that very, very well.

It was a vivid memory for me.

I remember getting up out of the shower after I cooled down.

I remember the gym worker vacuuming the locker room, kind of waiting for me to leave.

I remember walking out of the gym to my truck.

What I don't remember is driving home.

My house is about 3 miles away from the gym.

So the next thing I remember was waking up in the floor, a hardwood floor of my house, in a very uncomfortable position.

The dogs were in the next room whining and pawing at the door to get to me.

And I woke up and I could hear my heartbeat beating in my eardrums.

I just felt terrible.

I felt like I had the worst hangover of my life.

Hadn't drank anything in days.

I mean, I didn't have money for alcohol at that time, so there was nothing like that going on.

And I thought, oh, my God, first of all, how did I get him?

Secondly, did I have a heart attack, a stroke?

What is wrong with me?

So I managed to get up out of the floor, and I look out the back of my house, and the garage door is wide open.

And I lived in an area in Richmond.

It's a nice area.

I was living in my home office at the time.

I was fastidious about closing the garage door even for a minute.

I had a bike stolen, had some tools stolen out of the garage in broad daylight.

It's downtown in the middle of the city, and here I am, middle of the night, the garage doors wide open.

Somehow I got my truck in the garage perfectly straight without hitting anything.

And I know that I, under normal circumstances, would have not left that door open for a minute, but it was probably open for about 4 hours or so.

So I let the dogs out, and I just took a long walk, and I had to calm my nerves down.

I got back, I sat on the couch, I watched the sun rise out the window, and I thought, man, this is it.

This is my second chance.

This is my wake up call, and this is my second chance.

Like, I don't know how I made it home especially safely, but I just.

I thought right then and there, if I don't do something, if I don't change the course that I'm on, this train's about to hit a brick wall, and I might not be around one day to see my daughter get married or to see a grandbaby or to get married myself.

And I decided right then and there, I made a firm promise to myself that I was going to make some drastic changes in my life.

So that was the most pivotal moment.

That was the rock bottom moment that catapulted me into some change.

Oh, and by the way, I didn't even mention at the time, I was going through the absolute worst breakup of my life.

So I'm going through the struggle financially with my businesses that I've had for ten years.

At the same time, I've got a broken heart, and I'm trying to weather the storm pretty much on my own.

So that was the low point.

But I said, you know what?

There's better things out there for me.

I've gotten as far as I've gotten in life.

I can do it again, even if it means starting over.

So I made some commitments to myself and made some drastic changes from that day forward.

Wow, that is really powerful.

From that point forward, what, what would you decide to do?

What, did you have a plan in place as far as what you were going to do next and second and third?

Or did it kind of just come as it went?

I wish, Kevin.

I wish I did.

I was so ingrained in finishing the projects that I had on the table, somehow making payroll on Friday, getting the bills paid.

I was in survival mode.

I didn't know what was next.

Next for me was like, okay, I gotta make this call.

I've gotta go to this job.

I've gotta buy this material.

I wasn't in a position where I could step back and look at the big picture.

But fortunately, I knew someone who could help me with this.

I had had a business consultant who had sort of become a life coach.

Back when things were going good, I had a different set of problems.

I had the money, I didn't have the time.

So organization, focus, strategies, systemization, all that was very important to me.

And I had this wonderful life coach business consultant who had helped me streamline my business, get on track, and she attributed to a lot of success in the business.

So I find myself now having to humble myself and call her I and ask her for help.

And I was not in a position at the time to afford to pay or anything.

And she graciously stepped up and helped me out of the kindness of her heart, and she came over and sat down across from me, and I hadn't had a session with her in a little while now.

I had been off and running on business.

Everything had been good, and we didn't have regular contact, like our weekly meetings we used to have.

So she engages with me now, and she's sitting there across the desk, and she's just looking at me.

And I'm a very different person than I was when she had left me in a good position a year or two prior.

And we talked about things out of control.

That happens, like the global economy.

I didn't do that.

I was running my business as usual.

I didn't make any mistakes.

And it was just very hard for me to grapple with that.

These things out of my control were happening.

And she drew a circle on a piece of paper in front of me and put a bunch of dots in it, and then she put a bunch of dots outside the circle, and she said, what is this?

I said, I have no idea.

It looks like a planet with some moon, stars around it, whatever.

She goes, no, this is you, the circle.

And everything inside of the circle is what you can control.

Everything out the side of the circle is out of your control.

So let's focus on what you can control, what you can do.

And I said, yeah, but.

And then she said, I don't want hearing these yabbits.

There's no yabbits here.

They're not allowed.

She said, we're gonna going to have some really heart to heart talk right now.

We're going to get to the brass tacks of things.

And she asked me, well, first, and this is crazy, I had these stacks of bills on my desk and stacks of proposals and estimates and all these things on my desk, and I was distracted by them, admittedly.

And here she is sitting across from me, giving me her time, which I had once paid her, I think around dollar 120 an hour for.

And she's here giving it to me for free.

And she could tell I was distracted.

And she stood up, took her hand in one fell swoop, and swiped all these folders and estimates and proposals off my desk.

They went flying, and I almost had a heart attack.

I mean, my OCD went through the roof.

And I'm like, what are you doing, crazy woman?

She goes, Sean.

She goes, stand up, look me in the eye.

She goes, forget about that mess.

Forget about those pills, forget about those proposals.

Forget about it all.

Look at me in the eye right now and tell me, if none of that existed, if none of that mattered, what would you do with your life right now?

Where would you be?

Who would you be with?

What would you be doing?

And I said, well, I would be somewhere sunny and warm with palm trees, hopefully close to an ocean sailboat I would be close to my daughter, who had moved to Florida a few years prior, and she grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, and she goes, Sean, you live once.

She goes, don't wait until it's too late.

Do it now.

And then she pointed to a license plate that was hanging on my wall right next to my desk that said, uliv.

One se.

Personalized license plates were very popular in Virginia, and that license plate said, you live once.

And it was on a car that was very special to me.

It was a 2003 Mustang cobra.

It's my baby.

I had to sell that car.

It was a chip that I had to cash in in 2008 just to make payroll.

And it was very painful, but at the same time, it was just a car.

Told myself I'd replace it one day.

And when she pointed that license plate, I thought, wow, here it is right in my face.

I've been there all the time, sitting right next to my desk.

You live once.

Like, if today was your last day, if this was your last shot, what would you really be doing?

How would you be spending your life in a meaningful way?

What would you be doing with your time?

Who would you surround yourself with?

And that reflection caused this ripple effect in my mind, and to be honest, that burnout effect that I had experienced in my first business with mobile auto repair and auto restoration, it had crept back up on me over the last ten years that I had been in real estate and contracting.

I was making great money.

It was very rewarding to renovate an old property and.

And, you know, the residual income off of rentals was nice.

I just.

I built a nice little enterprise for myself there.

But was I happy?

Not really.

My time wasn't my own, Kevin.

I was spending all my time making other people's schedules and other people's plans and apologizing for shortcomings of contractors and this and that and trying to solve other people's problems.

And it just.

It was not resonating with my soul anymore.

So my life coach that day really snapped me into a different mindset.

I said, yep, you know what?

This is not just some pie in the sky.

Oh, what if something happened?

What if I wasn't here tomorrow?

No.

My brain kept going back to that moment in the floor that night after the gym and how thankful I was to be sitting there and how thankful I was to have this conversation and have this opportunity and have this potential for the future that could have easily been taken away from me in that moment.

So that's.

Does that answer your question?

In a very roundabout, long form way.

No, I mean, dude, what a powerful story.

I mean, when, when you were talking about her swiping off everything on your desk, I mean, literally I got goosebumps.

Because, yeah, I mean, angry first and then I got goosebumps and then I got the realization of, yeah, you know what?

She's right.

Screw all this folders.

It doesn't matter.

My health, my time, my life, my future, my family, all these things needed to be at the forefront of my mind in that moment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, well, let's first acknowledge, give it up to the life coaches and.

Yeah, that is so amazing.

So at that point, you only live once, but you still have this business, even if it's, it's drowning.

What do you do at that point to start making moves?

Yeah, I broke down some commitments on paper during that life coaching session and after I set some new goals and expectations for myself, my priorities shifted from, well, we got to finish this project so we can pay these bills, to this, do this, that and the other.

And I looked at the big picture where I wanted to be and it was very hard, Kevin, because I was deep down in the hole.

They say when you're in the hole, you gotta step out of that hole somehow, but somehow you can't even see the top of it.

You're so deep sometimes.

And then they say, well, think outside the box.

Well, thinking outside the box is great, but what if the instructions on how to get out of the box are on the outside of the box and you're boxed into the box?

So having that life coach, having the outside perspective gave me some clues and some immediate directions and steps I could take to get out of that hole I was in to get out of that stress depressed, just struggle mindset.

And I'm a big proponent and fan of Tony Robbins.

I've been to his seminars in the past, read his books, lots of self help books, Jim Rohn, John Alexander, all those John Maxwell, all those famous gurus, then following them all through business.

But now, when I needed to follow the advice the most, for some reason, I just found myself so deep in the hole, so deep into survival mode that I couldn't.

So I envisioned the end result.

I wrote down what it was going to look like and feel like, just like when she grabbed me and shook me by the shoulders and she said, where would you be right now?

Don't think, just tell me.

So I made my goal.

I'm going to move somewhere where it's not cold.

Half of the year, I want to be close to my daughter.

She was in Florida.

That kind of made sense.

So I said, all right, you know, I come to Florida and visit her over the previous several years, and I really liked it here.

And I'd envisioned buying a winter home here one year in the future, but, you know, I didn't know how in the world I was going to do it.

I mean, I couldn't pay my gas bill at that time.

I was taking cold showers.

So you think, oh, let me just pack up and move to Florida yet.

It sounded outlandish.

But the outlandish thing was to continue on the same path I was on.

What do they say the definition of insanity is to continue doing the same thing the same way and expect different results.

I had to think completely different.

I had to think big.

I had to put myself, my mindset into Florida.

Now I'm thinking, okay, I want to move to Florida.

I want to be close to my daughter.

I want to own a sailboat one day.

Where's the most sailboats in the east coast of the US?

It's in Florida.

Warm weather year round.

All these things that I wanted were not where I was living.

I wanted control of my time.

I wrote that down.

I didn't want to have to worry about employees.

I wrote that down.

So sometimes I discovered through this exercise that it's equally as important to identify the things that you no longer wish to have in your life.

And by doing that, sometimes it opens up your eyes to new possibilities and things that you didn't know that you could have in your life.

So I had a list of all the stuff I wanted.

I listed all the things that I no longer wanted to do.

And then I started to really study and think about this list constantly.

I would take walks.

I would just noodle on the possibilities of what if somehow I could get out of the hole I'm in and get to Florida?

How would that feel?

How would that, you know, vibe with my soul?

Like, what differences could I make on a different level?

And then I started to reverse engineer it and come up with a step by step plan.

Not just to get to payroll on Friday, would get way beyond that.

Payroll was just one little grain of sand along the path of this big picture that I was now thinking about and creating in my life.

So I had to make some very tough decisions.

I sat my father down.

I had lunch with him every week, and he knew I was going through it.

And I told him that I was planning on moving to Florida.

And he just about jumped out of his seat and strangled me.

He said, you worked so hard for everything you done.

You've got the highest level of certification you can get as a real estate broker.

You're a class a contractor.

It was very difficult to get that license.

Please don't let it all go.

Don't move to another state where there's licenses are useless to you.

And I said, dad, I appreciate your sentiments.

Thank you for sharing that.

But here's the thing.

If I don't do something drastic, those licenses aren't going to matter because stress might get the best of me and I might not be here tomorrow.

So I have to think beyond that.

I have to think past the ten years investment that I've already got in this, and I need to think about how I'm going to invest today for the next ten years of my life.

And when I put it to him that way, there was a mutual understanding and agreement there that that was probably the right thing for me to do.

Yeah.

You know, so many times, the right thing to do is rarely ever the easy thing to do.

So funny.

You said the right thing to do.

Let's foreshadow what's coming here in this conversation shortly.

I'm sure.

Absolutely, absolutely.

I love it.

I just got it.

I just got it.

It took me a few.

Oh, my goodness.

So fast forwarding a little bit.

Let's talk about it.

What?

When?

How?

First, I'm kind of curious how long it then took before you had everything in place to pursue that dream.

This life coaching session happened sometime in early April of 2019.

And I'm happy to say after a whole lot of uncomfortable decisions and a whole lot of sacrifices and a whole lot of work, I moved to Florida on September 17, 2019.

So I'm coming up on my.

Let's see.

Oh, no, sorry.

2009.

I'm off by ten years.

So I moved to Florida September 17, 2009.

So I'm coming up on 15 years of living in Florida.

And when I moved to Florida, I had no idea what I was going to do.

I had a list of what I didn't want to do.

I had a list of my expectations for life, big picture goals, etcetera.

Had no idea how I was going to get there.

So I thought, well, let me just tap into something that I enjoy doing and do that for a little while until I figure things out.

So I had some very introspective conversations with myself and started thinking about, what am I good at, what I really enjoy doing, what do I love?

And I realized I had been writing for fun, for hobby, for passion, since essentially the third grade.

I had entered a young authors contest back in elementary school and won first place.

And it was just so cool for me back then.

I thought, oh, man, it's awesome to be able to take these stories, these thoughts, these feelings and emotions out of my head and crystallize those words into some tangible medium on paper that I could then share with other people.

So I still have my third grade, fourth and fifth grade young authors books, you know, the construction paper and Elmer's blue covers that I made, and then the handwritten, hand illustrated books and stories.

And I literally dug those out of storage and looked at them, and I thought, you know what?

I've been journaling, especially when I did find time to travel during those busy years, I kept a journal when I traveled.

Didn't usually have time to journal on a daily basis because I was too busy with all the minutiae of the business.

But I thought, you know, let me get back into this.

I had taken a trip years prior, back in 98, when I first got into real estate to Taedi, and I had literally come up with this whole storyline for epic adventure novel that I've just been pecking away with at a little bit at a time over the last ten years.

I thought, well, let me get back to writing.

Let me finish that book.

I had another book that I had been working on called Health and Happiness, and it was just a collection of notes from my own personal experiences of dealing with my own personal health.

I had become a vegetarian years and years ago, and at first, people had ridiculed me for that.

And then people started being inquisitive, and then people started expressing issues with their health to me and asking how I managed not to have these problems.

So I had done research.

I had a health mentor who had shared a tremendous amount of his time and energy and knowledge with me.

And I had taken very good notes, and I had shared those notes with a friend of mine who was going through a health challenge, and she found them incredibly useful.

And she told me, sean, you really need to put this into a book.

This would be great.

So when I moved to Florida, all of a sudden I had a lot of time on my hands.

I went from working twelve to 16 hours a day, six days a week, plus half a day on Sunday, to now.

I got nothing but time and sunshine, no money, but, you know, had a lot of time on my hands and a lot of desire.

So within three months of moving to Florida, I had finished writing, and I had published health and happiness and owner's manual for the mind and body.

And I had also was well on my way to finishing and publishing the trip novel, as luck would have it.

Actually, I define luck as when chance meets opportunity and, you most importantly, recognize it and take actions to capitalize on it.

So luck had steered me in the right direction here in Florida.

When I landed here, it was just as my life coach, shed, she had told me right before I left, she said, shawn, maybe, just maybe, things weren't going right for you in your business in Richmond, Virginia, because it was not where you're supposed to be.

You are not doing what you're supposed to do.

You are not surrounded by the people you're supposed to be with.

She said, when you land in the right spot and the timing is right, all the right people, all the right opportunities are going to present themselves, and you're going to find yourself in a very different situation.

And that is what happened to me.

When I moved to Florida, I got in a totally different mindset.

I started spending my time doing something I enjoyed, like writing.

I started going out to networking events and socializing and doing things on a low budget, granted, but doing things that I had not been doing previously in my business, because I was either in survival mode or I was in high production mode.

So I met a few people, and one of the first people I met was a gentleman with a sailboat.

He was about 20 years older than me.

He had a sailboat that he wanted to take out, but he didn't have any crew.

And I got the honor, pleasure, and privilege of being a crewmate on his boat.

I got to do a bunch of sailing.

Turns out he was a business consultant as well.

So I got a lot of business advice, networking advice from him.

He introduced me to a lot of key players in our community here that I was brand new to.

And it was just.

It opened the world the doors of so many possibilities.

And it was so crazy how I got introduced to this gentleman with the sailboat.

It was because another new friend of mine had overheard me talking to somebody else about wanting to go sailing.

And he said, hey.

He goes, I heard you talking about sailing.

Come over here.

I want to introduce you to somebody.

And then the whole thing unfolded, and it was all because I was projecting into the future.

Now here I am.

I don't have two nickels to rub together.

I'm wondering what I'm going to eat for dinner that night.

And I'm talking about going off and sailing on some yacht, you know, crazy talk, right, Kevin?

I mean, come on, Sean.

Round yourself.

Get your head out of the clouds on the ground.

Deal with what's in front of you.

Today.

No, I'm out there projecting to the world, I want to go sailing.

I want to be a captain.

One day, I'm going to own a sailboat.

Somebody overhears it, and next thing I know, that very next weekend, I'm out on a sailboat, somebody else's boat, not mine.

So I never specified in my dreams necessarily.

It had to be my vote at the time.

I was happy as heck to be on somebody else's and to be contributing in a meaningful way.

You know, whether it was, you know, tying up a line, whether it was jumping the sail or whether it was swabbing the deck.

I just felt useful because I've been in such a helpless stage in my business due to the economy.

It was nice to be in a different mode.

Now I'm not too proud to swab a deck.

I was happy to be on a boat at the time.

I was happy to be doing a mindless job that I had total control over.

It was so liberating, and it was so free, and it just felt so good.

The more I wrote, the more I started to get in the flow of writing, the more I started to enjoy it.

So I thought I would just write a little bit until I found something else to do.

Well, turns out I found a couple of publishers of local magazines who were looking for content, and I got hired to do piecemeal articles and do some freelance writing for some magazines.

Next thing I know, I'm writing biographies and web copy for people.

My health and happiness book caused me to interact with a very successful gentleman here in town who had made a fortune off of marketing, and he was looking to transition into something different, youth athletics, coaching, and character building type of stuff for young athletes.

So he found my book very fascinating.

He took a liking to me, took me under his wing, and gave me, shared with me some very valuable advice on launching and marketing and promoting the book.

And part of that advice was to put it into some sort of coaching program, give my book away for free.

I'd been struggling to sell this newly published book, and I was making about $10 profit at a time selling this book.

And in my first year, I sold 1900 books.

Kevin, that was a very difficult way to make $19,000, and it was a drop in the.

The bucket.

I mean, that was my restaurant budget for the year in my former life.

You know what I mean?

So not to.

Not to sound.

That's a brag, but I had made a lot of money.

I'd gone to making a very little bit of money, and.

But the difference was, I was so proud of that $19,000.

That was my payroll in a week back in Virginia for my contracting company.

But, you know, I produced this book.

It was an evergreen product, and now I can, you know, promote it to people and be proud of it, et cetera, et cetera.

But this marketing genius here in town said, sure, put together something different to build, you know, more on that brand and to have a bigger opportunity for profit and bigger potential for future offerings.

So I took his advice and followed it to the t, and I ended up making a career out of writing.

I got into health and wellness coaching for a while, and I found myself.

Now, some of the best ways to pull yourself out of a low place is to help other people out of theirs.

So I was helping coaching people and using a lot of that life coaching expertise that I had gotten from my life coach in Virginia.

When times were good and how she helped me through my tough times, I was able to help apply to other people.

So that was kind of that path how I got into writing full time now for the last 15 years.

Wow.

You know what I love about this is it's almost like this amazing story of life was just waiting on you to make a choice.

You had been living your whole life in this one area of the world.

You'd been doing this one thing, chasing, chasing money, and it was like the whole world was just waiting on you to finally make a choice.

And it's almost like you moved to Florida, and it's like you opened a door to a whole new world where your perspectives on what matter changed.

Everything was just happening, relationships being built, things that you did enjoying, no longer focusing on the money, but really just on living.

Absolutely.

One of the things that I loved more than anything was traveling.

So back when I was in high production mode in real estate and contracting, I was earning money hand over fist, and I wasn't able to fully enjoy it.

I wasn't able to break away and take a vacation for a week.

It was a month long proposition for me to take a one week vacation.

It was a week or two of prep for me before I left on vacation to make sure everybody had what they needed, that everybody knew what was going to happen, that there were contingency plans in place for unforeseen.

And then the whole time I was on vacation, Kevin, guess what I'm thinking about?

I'm not thinking about the palm trees and the sunshine.

I'm wondering what's going on at home.

Is work getting done?

Is, you know, are my workers milking the payroll?

Are there problems at hand?

I'm checking my email.

I'm looking for text, all these things.

And then when I got back, then the reality hit me after vacation that, yeah, my fears were accurate.

A lot of things went wrong and a lot of things didn't happen the way I would have liked for them.

So it was a couple of weeks of catch up when I got home.

So it really took the enjoyment out of vacationing and traveling for me during that period of time, I had created an enterprise for myself that was successful, but at the same time, it wasn't delivering me the quality of life that I wanted.

My time was not my own.

I didn't feel like I had freedom.

I would have had more freedom in a nine to five corporate job because I would have been able to quit at 05:00 and go home and turn it off, turn off the work, focus on family, focus on dating.

Now, I was single through this time, and part of the reason I think maybe I lost that relationship and went through that tough breakup in 2008 is because of all the time that I was investing in work and what I was not doing on the personal side of my relationships.

So, you know, I think at the time, I was blaming her for leaving me because, oh, I'm not making the same amount of money.

I can't provide the same level of luxury and living.

And I kind of felt like maybe she left, like a rat leaving a sinking ship kind of feeling.

But when I look back on it, it was a combination of a lot of things.

I changed as a person.

I probably was not a pleasant person to be around during the.

During that hardship time.

And so, you know, looking back now, yeah, I can't blame her for leaving.

I mean, she.

That was her big move.

Like, I moved to Florida, she moved out of the relationship and moved on.

And, you know, we're cordial.

We stay in touch from time to time.

Now, I don't have any hard feelings there, but, man, it was.

It was just really tough at the time to go through it like that.

But, yeah, it's a different life now and one wherever.

Money is not the end goal.

I think money is a great tool.

It gives us the ability to have freedom, gives us the ability to do the things that we want in life, but it's not the end all, be all.

So if you're focused just on making money, you're probably not going to be real happy.

They say money doesn't buy happiness.

Well, I disagree.

If you're using money as a tool and you're using it correctly, it can buy a lot of happiness for you, provided that you allow it to.

Provided that you allow time in your life to do those things that you enjoy, that money can deliver for you.

You can't let the pursuit of money just consume you.

And you can't let the lack of money devastate you on the flip side of that coin either.

Yeah, absolutely.

Back to Florida, I guess.

Kind of more moving up into present day.

You tell me which came first, the boat or the wife?

The wife definitely came first.

I started to really envision what I was looking for in a partner.

And I started dating again when I moved to Florida.

I met someone shortly after I moved here and got into a long relationship with them.

That relationship evolved and we grew in different directions and it had an expiration date on it.

But I invested a lot of time and a lot of emotion into that relationship.

But I was much better equipped to leave that relationship and move on, having gone through what I went through in 2008.

So when I got out of that relationship, I thought, I'm still not where I want to be as a person.

And I took squarely half the blame for the failure of that relationship.

If I am not the person that I want to be, then how can I be everything to somebody else?

I was trying so hard to please this other person.

At the same time, I wasn't completely pleased with myself.

I was much happier than I was after 2008.

I had come a long way since then, but I still wasn't where I wanted to be.

Thought, let me take some time for myself.

Let me focus on myself.

I don't want to date.

I don't want to really meet anybody right now.

The timing is not right.

I'm going to just, you know, lick my wounds, enjoy being single, and keep focusing on the things that are going to move me forward.

And you know what's crazy, Kevin?

Right when I made that commitment to myself and said, nope, not going to date, not going to look for anybody, someone found me very unexpectedly.

It was a Christmas brunch that some mutual friends of me and my wife had put on and I.

And they invited me to go.

And I just.

I wasn't.

I don't know, I wasn't feeling it, but I talked myself into going anyway.

I hadn't seen some of those friends in a while.

And so I show up to this brunch and there sat my future wife.

I didn't even know it yet.

So she heard my voice.

It got her attention.

We talked briefly.

She gave me her card.

We left brunch.

We both ended up over at the ocean deck later on for karaoke with the same mutual friends plus some others that had joined us.

And, you know, we talked very, very briefly that day.

Again, I'm not in the mindset that I want to date anybody.

I was actually splitting my time between Virginia and Florida at the time.

I had gotten a consulting gig up in Virginia, so I was going back and forth.

But you know what?

Sometimes those least expected things end up being some of the most important discoveries in our lives, and I just could not stop thinking about this girl.

So, lo and behold, a mutual friend of ours had, you know, kind of pushed and followed up with us and ended up connecting us, and we sort of did a long distance back and forth thing.

I was in Florida half a month and Virginia half the month, and we saw each other when we could, and we kept it very casual at first, but she quickly became my best friend, and she was an artist.

And, you know, I was considering myself an author at the time, so I thought, oh, the author and the artist.

She paints pictures with paintbrushes.

I paint pictures with words.

You know, this could be a great thing.

Great match.

She's from Brazil, so there's a lot of culture there and exotic ness to her character.

And I thought, man, this is somebody that I could see myself with long term.

So we started dating.

We moved in together, and then she ended up proposing to me, Kevin, which is crazy.

I had my own plan, but she's a very determined and very strong woman who knows exactly what she wanted.

And she beat me to the punch, if you can believe that.

So we ended up, let's see, we got engaged on her birthday back in November of 2019, and then we ended up getting married in the middle of COVID We got married October 10, 2020.

1020 20.

So I enjoyed four wonderful years of marriage with her, and I plan to be with her until the day that I die, hopefully many, many decades from now.

But she's a wonderful woman.

She's an artist.

She's from Brazil originally, as I said.

She owns a local art gallery here in Ormond beach.

And she's just this really positive beacon of hope and positivity and love and laughter and life all rolled into one person.

So I'm just blessed to have her in my life and blessed to be able to live with her and work with her and renovate a house with her now together as well.

Yeah.

Wow.

What an amazing story.

Again.

Again.

Man, I just go back to this idea of life was just waiting for you to open a new door, and it's amazing to see what lied on the other side.

I mentioned a boat because sailing, that's continued to be a love of yours, correct?

Yeah.

Oh, I got off on that long tangent.

You asked me if the wife or the boat came first.

The wife came first.

I shared with her my dream of sailing.

I got to take her on some sail trips with me as a crewmate on my friend's boat that I had been sailing with for years, since I met him when I first moved here.

So we got to go through the keys.

We got to go through a bunch of different island chains in the Bahamas and a bunch of local trips here as well in the intercoastal and around coastal Florida.

That was super cool.

So she fell in love with sailing and the idea of ultimately buying a sailboat as well.

So crazy story, too.

There's a whole bunch of other side stories and nuances.

But just for to make a very long story short, as a result of COVID we had a bunch of trips booked for 2020.

Deposits already paid.

Some of the trips were paid for.

My mom had owned a travel agency, and she had passed away in 2018.

I had taken that business over.

We had plans to run it as a part time business and incorporate it into our other businesses.

Well, when all of those trips that we had booked got cancelled, we found ourselves with a whole bunch of refunds from the cruise lines.

And so we had some newfound money that had come back to us, and we thought, you know what?

Our honeymoon cruise was one of those trips that got cancelled.

And we said, well, this is not acceptable.

We're going to have to do something about it.

And I said, why don't we take this money?

But as a down payment on a boat, maybe try to buy a boat outright if we can afford it and make our own honeymoon, make our own travel plans.

So we started looking around.

We started shopping.

It was right before all the boat prices and everything.

Car prices went through the roof due to Covid and shortages.

But we found a boat we loved.

It was in our budget, and we pulled the trigger and bought it.

And we ended up, instead of going on a one week cruise for our honeymoon, Kevin.

We ended up having a 30 day cruise from Daytona beach all the way down through the keys.

We were able to rotate our own friends and his crew, so we had a rotational crew of friends on our honeymoon sail.

And since then, we've sailed all over.

Last year, I went.

Sailed from Daytona beach all the way up the coast into Virginia, sailed up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, sailed up the James river past Jamestown and Williamsburg, all the way up to Richmond, where I'm from, and hit about 32 different ports along the way.

Also had a rotational crew of friends, so we just.

We've had a blast, and that's developed into a little bit of a business.

We lost the travel agency as a result of COVID unfortunately.

So we.

We decided, well, let's.

Let's try to keep it going in some way.

Let's make the boat profitable so that it pays for itself and it's not just a liability.

So we've started doing day charters and weekend charters here locally in Florida.

St.

Augustine is one of our favorite runs from Daytona to St.

Augustine.

We also go down to Cocoa and Ogalley and sometimes incorporate a rocket launch or something into that trip as well.

So we've had really just an excellent opportunity with the sailboat to do what we love and also incorporate a business plan into it as well.

And we get to pick and choose who we bring on as crew, who we take on as paying passengers, and how we spend our time, and that's just a wonderful thing.

Wow.

How amazing.

How amazing.

Guess what?

I do sailing all the time.

What?

I write every single day, I write.

I keep a really detailed captain's log and journal while I'm writing or while I'm sailing.

So every single day I write, you know, where we're at, what the weather conditions were, where we're headed, any issues with the boat and who was on board, etcetera.

So it's kind of what you're supposed to do as a licensed captain anyway.

And then I take it a few steps further and add in a bunch of detail, and I think to myself, this is something I'd love to share with your listeners here.

What if you had written one sentence every single day for, let's say, the last ten years of your life?

That's 365 times, you know, ten.

That's 3650 sentences that you would have about every single day.

And this is an exercise that can happen really quickly.

Hey, today it rained.

I didn't leave the house at all, and I wrote six pages in such and such a book.

Or today I went to the grocery store and found a great deal on shampoo or whatever it is to be able to go back.

I love reading my captain's law and my sailing journals.

It's really, really cool.

It's one thing to look at pictures.

Those are phenomenal, too.

A picture says 1000 words, but when you've actually written about some stuff and how you're feeling and maybe stuff that you didn't capture in pictures, that is super exciting to be able to go back and read and to share with others.

My granddaughter is eight years old now, and I share some stories with her.

And one day I want her and her grandkids to go back and read grand dudes captain's logs and to experience what I experienced.

So I would challenge your readers to start journaling.

Just take three minutes, five minutes, and write one sentence about your day to day.

And I guarantee you at the end of the year, the end of the month, ten years from now, whatever, you're going to be so glad that you did this.

Wow.

What a powerful, powerful kind of a mission we've given to all of us.

I love that idea so much.

And it's that mindset, Kevin, that took me into my most profitable business I have right now.

From the first two books I wrote, health and happiness and the trip, the more I shared these books with people, and the trip was just pure entertainment.

It was an action adventure, epic adventure, epic adventure novel.

Health and happiness was more of a self help health and wellness book.

But the interesting thing is, no matter who I shared these books with, people would express interest in writing their own books.

It was half the people that I talked to were shocked that I had written and published a book and they expressed interest.

Oh, man, I've got a story.

Well, it made me realize, hey, we all have stories.

Every day is a new chapter in our book of life.

So I started helping people share their stories.

I started helping other people write their books.

I'll never forget the first day I got the first copy of my very first book in my brand new mailbox here in Florida.

And it was such a good feeling.

And I thought, well, I only experienced this once.

You know, you only get to write and publish your first book one time.

But guess what?

Now I get to help other people write and publish their first books over and over and over again.

And I get to share in their joy and excitement of receiving their first book.

So that has really just been super fulfilling to me.

I get to work one on one with people and have in depth discussions like you and I are having right now.

Like I've had with my life coach in the past.

Health and wellness coaching was great, but I really niched it down to helping other people tell their stories.

Part of being able to tell a good story and to really communicate effectively is to have your mind right.

A good way to have your mind right is to have your body right and to be in good health and to focus on those things that you can control.

All those little bitty steps, all those little bitty things that I did to dig and claw my way out of that deep hole that I was in back in 2008.

It applies not only to fitness and losing weight and health and wellness and business and finances, but also writing a book.

It's a step by step, take it one day at a time, break it down into bite sized pieces while still envisioning that end result.

So when I engage with a new author coaching client, one of the first things I ask them is, what does this book look like in your mind?

Describe it to me.

Is it a six by nine?

A five by eight?

Is it a pocket sized book?

Is it an eight and a half by eleven book?

What's the size?

What colors do you see on the COVID What do you envision the title being?

What are your expectations for the book and how are you going to feel when you accomplish those?

So as an author or an author coach, these are the kinds of questions that I asked to get the project rolling because I know it was this line of questioning that helped me through some very tough times and helped me recreate myself in this whole new career that I'm in right now.

Yeah.

So amazing.

Now, for anybody interested in possibly working with you or even finding the books you've written or even maybe planning a trip to Ormond beach in Florida and want to go sailing, is there any way that we can send them where they can learn more?

Absolutely.

So I'm very active on Facebook.

My handle on Facebook.

I'm author Sean Dawn.

A u t h o r s e a n d o n.

I have a website, actually, I have a few websites, but my main website is sean Dawn.com.

that's s e a nde d o n.com.

and you can find all kinds of information about my author services.

You can find links to my books on there as well.

There's one book that's not on my website right now that I'm super excited about.

It has its own website.

It's called Dear Beer and Dear, dear beer.com.

so they can go there and learn more about the Deerbeer trilogy series as well.

So I'm really excited about that project and putting a lot of time, energy and effort into promoting that right now as well.

Yeah, I love it.

Well, I will be positive, man, that everything you just mentioned is all in the show notes for anybody, uh, interested in getting in touch with you and learning more.

Sean, I got one last question for you today to wrap things up is, um, sure.

I know your granddaughter.

She's a big part of your life.

She's, I think you said eight years old.

What do you, what do you hope she remembers about you?

What do you hope?

Is that that one takeaway when she thinks of you when she's old, what does she remember?

Man, that is a fantastic question, and it's a very important question to me because my grandparents were so influential in my life.

I would like her to remember me as a man of my word.

I always did what I said I was going to do.

I think a lot of people have the someday symptom where they're always going to do something someday, someday, and that someday never comes.

But I want to be remembered as someone who did what they said they were going to do, no matter how outlandish and crazy and ridiculous it sounds.

I want people to know, particularly my granddaughter, that anything is possible if you put your mind into it, no matter how deep and dark the hole is, if you say to yourself, I'm going to get out of this, I'm going to put myself in a better situation, it is possible.

It may take a ton of hard work and sacrifice and different levels of thinking and different actions, but it is possible.

And if you say you're going to do it, do it.

I think the easiest person to let down is yourself.

But the most important person to not let down is yourself, because if you have those expectations and if you have integrity and you're a do what you say you do kind of person, you'll find a way to make it happen.

You'll find a way to succeed in spite of those outside circumstances that you don't have control over.

Absolutely.

Sean, dude, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for being here.

For, likewise, Evan, and thank you for everything that you're doing.

I love your podcast.

I love your story.

You've been an inspiration to me as well as probably thousands, tens of thousands of other people who followed you and listen to your podcast.

So keep up the good work, brother.

Oh, man.

Thank you so much, dude.

And for you listening today.

My hope, as always, is that youve heard something today that didnt just entertain you, but more so, maybe as you looking at your own life, maybe from a new perspective, maybe youre in a place right now where youre not happy and youre thinking to yourself, wow, maybe I just need to be brave enough to open a new door like Shawn did and see what awaits me on the other side.

Kick that door open if you have to, man.

Kick it open.

You have to.

I love it.

I love it.

Until next time.

This is great grace of inspiration.

Get out there and enjoy the day.