Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Sonny Von Cleveland. Sonny, welcome.
Thank you, pleasure to be here.
It’s a pleasure to have you. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure my name is Sonny Von Cleveland. I am the director of Itopia Coaching and Consulting, a motivational speech and mindset coaching company, and the general manager of frisky business, Palm Springs Cat Cafe, the upcoming cafe in Palm Springs California. I’m from a small town in Michigan. I’m a childhood sexual abuse survivor. I was abused by four men from the ages of five until I was 10. I was convicted of my first felony at the age of seven. I went to prison at 16 and I spent 18 years incarcerated in the Michigan department of corrections. At which point I spent a little over 19 months in solitary confinement and just over 14,000 hours of self-mastery study to teach myself that there’s nothing you can’t get past in your life, there’s nothing you can’t get through, no walls you can’t break down, and there’s no reason to not live the life of your dreams every single day.
And so I took all those experiences and taught myself to propel forward and now I use that to teach other people that I come into contact with my clients. I helped get them unstuck from the rut that they’re stuck in developing empowering beliefs and eliminate sabotaging behaviours. That is one hell of an intro, Sonny. Right? It’s been one hell of a life. I mean, when I first did the prep and our we say our conversation, I was like 2, 2 feelings came up for me, one was like, I’m so sorry that you had to go through all that, like, my heart hurt on your behalf, and then the other side of me was like, just blood boiling in terms of how you could be exposed to that sort of thing. I mean, you mentioned in your in your introduction that you’re using it as a way to let’s say prove to other people that they can get past it.
How long did it take you to come to that conclusion? Well, I mean, it was definitely a process. I was given a five-year sentence in the whole but ultimately because of the self-work that I was doing and the essays I was writing in the workbooks that I was doing. I was able to get that reduced down after 19 months and get released. but I would say It took a good 3-4 months before I was able to completely break my I had to go through every emotion known to man, I had to face everything that I’ve been through. I had to go through the faces of blaming myself, of blaming my victimisers, of determining in my heart whether or not it did still bother me. Was I a bad kid. Did I like it? Did I enjoy it that I bring it onto myself? You know, you go through all of those emotions and It took probably God say good 30-60 days, maybe three months, probably 90 days, to really break that down and then realize that here I am, I’m in this space where nothing exists but myself and every emotion that I’ve experienced, I’ve worked through in process.
I’ve cried my eyes out, I’ve been stressed, I’ve been depressed, I’ve gone through everything, been angry. And then at that point, that’s the true rock bottom in life to where you can now rebuild. You can either get up and just continue on or you can build and I come to find in that moment that I have the ability to shape my personality to the way that I want to and I can be whoever I want and accomplish whatever you want life. And that started to show through and the 60-90 days you said, is that pure time of doing only that. Yeah, I’m only spending time thinking on that. Well, I met a Muslim man named Mallory Bay who was across the cell from me. So the way the solitary confinement works is it’s a hallway with cells on either side and they’re kind of just off balance each other a little bit, they’re not directly across.
So they’re just, they’re kind of staggered down the line and I’m at the very end in this particular instance of the hallway and then right across the hallway, just out a sliver of the window. You can see the guy across the hall and it was a Muslim man named Mallory Bay and for the first week or so he would yell over there every day would call over to me and I was so angry and so mad, I would cuss him out and shut up, leave me alone block cussing him out. But he kept doing it every day and finally I just, you know, you start getting bored and you get lonely, so I’m like what, what do you want to talk about? And he hit me with like what is your passion in life? And to me it was like what, what do you care, what do you care what my passion and like but I couldn’t answer the question, I didn’t have a passion And he, over the course of the next 60 days to 90 days, helped me break that down and you know, he would, he would talk about something important in my life, bring up the emotion, talk about the victimisation. I have nothing to lose.
You know, you might as well talk about it, get it off your chest if you actually speak the words that make you feel better. So, I mean, I basically dumped my whole life on this man and he helped me to exercise the emotion of it. You know, I would tell him something traumatic, one of the incidents with my uncle or one of the other men that molested me, and he would say, all right, I’ll go sit down and think about it, cry, work it out, and then he’d leave me alone. He wouldn’t talk to me for a few more hours. So I’d go sit there, I’d get the emotion out, I’d cry or whatever and be angry and blame something. I’d yell, I’d scream, I’m in there, there’s nobody here, so you go for it. And yeah, man, he, the dude really showed me the way to doing that and then started sending books over for me to read like, oh, here’s the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Read that. Here’s Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Think that here’s John C. Maxwell series, read that. So it’s almost like a form of therapy in a way, right?
And the funny thing, he didn’t like me. We’re, like, we didn’t like each other normally. You know, he just, he was a very magnanimous human being and saw an opportunity to instil the wisdom and knowledge that he had picked up over his life and helped me to learn the same techniques and maybe it was just an experiment for him, but he saved my life. He absolutely gave me the keys to unlocking that, to rebuild myself. Well, one of the thoughts I’ve had about prison, I don’t know why, but you have these strange thoughts about, you know, if ever I ended up in prison for some reason, how would I be, how would that look? And my thoughts were that you kind of have to be in order to survive you’d have to have to be a different person than you are now. Is that an accurate depiction or you know? Nowadays you don’t, nowadays, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s a double-edged sword because if you were armed with the knowledge that I have going to prison, you’d be fine.
But in order to acquire that knowledge, you kind of have to go to it to do it. So when I went in there, I was 16. I was this skinny kid from the country. I didn’t know anything about jail life or being locked up or gangs or any of that. Um, and so, I mean I’m covered with tattoos. I have tattoos all over. Uh, and you would think that I like, like tattoos and I’m a tattoo aficionado, but it was a defence mechanism and a protective shield because the first week I was in prison I was raped and it was that moment I said, all right, I’m never going to be a victim ever again. I’ve been victimized as a child my whole life. This incident just happened and something to be broke. I think something in me snapped at that point and I just started to get tattoos, whatever they were. I want them everywhere that they’re really visible so people can see. I need to put on this demeanour.
I started working out. I got very violent, got very mean, joined gangs. I put aside any fear for my own physical safety and just I had resolved that this is what my life is going to be. And the only way I’m going to not get hurt anymore is to hurt everybody around me. So that was the mindset that I took on and it’s an unfortunate thing because a lot of people that go to prison aren’t necessarily bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not like convicts. We distinguish between inmates and convicts. Inmates are people that just go to jail. They don’t really know what they’re doing. Convicts are seasoned criminals that you know, that know how to navigate this. And so a lot of times you’ll see guys that are just there at a child support case or something down like a probation violation or something and they’re just, they’re not cut out for prison life. I was not cut out for prison life and this is the result of taking a child and that is not cut out for it and putting them into it.
I was the result of that because I did five years and they let me go when I was 21. They just opened the doors and like good luck, go for it. Gave me $75 and three condoms and like good luck. Like what do you think is gonna happen? I was 21, violent as hell. Had the world against me carried all this anger and hate and shame and, and now I programmed myself to be this really violent gang banging individual that cared nothing about the world or anything but myself for what I could get. So when I’m out at 21, I’m reckless and I was only out for maybe 22 months. I started to rob drug dealers, uh, committed a lot of crimes and eventually that caught back up with me. And this time they were like, well, apparently you didn’t learn the first time. Well, your perception of the obvious is amazing. I didn’t learn anything. Of course I did. And I was 16. I had no family, no friends, no support, nobody teaching me anything.
You just threw me in here and wished me luck. And uh, so they gave me 12 more years, and I went back for those 12. And through that time that’s when I went to the hole and you know, things turned around, I’m so sorry sonny, it’s okay if everything that had ever happened in my life hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now Thomas, why wouldn’t the position I am in life, which is a pretty good position whenever anyone comes on the show and they say that they’ve been through some serious hardship. I mean, not quite the same as you, but I always have to ask if someone was either going through that or was about to go through that in the instance of prison. So both, what you experienced as a child and then also perhaps about to go into prison. What do you tell them in terms of either advice or something that you can share with them? Uh, don’t panic. Um, read, read, read, read, take advantage of the situation that’s coming.
The prison can it is, it can be a horrible place, but it can also be a, a land of education and opportunity if you learn how to take advantage of it. And, and the United States has, I’m not going to say the worst prisons because there’s some really horrible prisons in some other countries, but it has, it’s one of the more harsher sentencing countries in the world. Most other presidents, like countries like Canada or the UK or, or Finland for example. Finland has an amazing president system. Um, you don’t go for half of your life for a crime. They, you know what I mean? The United States, it’s a cattle farm. All that is here is a cattle farm. It’s a money grabbing financial gains institution. That’s all it is, uh, they don’t care about the person, they just put them in as long as they possibly can because they make money every day that you’re sitting in that cell.
So you go in with that knowledge, I understand that you’re just a number and you’re a, you’re a paycheck for all the people that work for their own the presence and take advantage of it. There’s a library there for your use, stay the hell away from people, mind your own business. and don’t they’re not going to come attack you for no reason. Most times when somebody gets stabbed, beat up, jumped or gets there as whooped in prison, something happened to cause that and that’s sometimes there are innocent victims, there are innocent people that did nothing and they do get assaulted and they do get attacked. That’s just the law of the land. You’re in the jungle. So just keep your head down and keep your keep focused and don’t panic. It’s not Shawshank Redemption. huh. What do you think of that film? I thought it was a great film. I absolutely loved it. I watched a lot of those prison films in the county jail.
The guys are and they’re trying to prep you for it and oh man, this is gonna happen. So let’s watch this movie, let’s watch this movie. And so you take that then and it scares the shut out of you and then you get there and you’re like, well this ain’t so bad. I mean, it’s not that, but it does have its moments. It’s if you’re not, if you don’t pay attention and you’re not aware of your surroundings, that’s when things can get bad. for me it was, I don’t know gang politics, I never knew how to do time. So I’m a curious kid every time I go in, if I see anybody in a conflict or an argument, I want to watch it, what’s going on over there, I’m like a train wreck, you can’t look away, which is a big no, no in prison, you don’t stare off into somebody else’s conversation, you don’t watch them because dad’s going to invite them to what you’re looking at you know about and it’s not shocking, but Shawshank was a great movie. So in terms of when you got the books, the self-development books, I always, the way I phrase it in terms of how self-development changes you is like you’re changing your immersing yourself and you’re changing yourself as a person to the point where you change your attitude and your outlook towards things.
How long did that take for you and what do you recall anything about how you were influenced in that time? Well, I think, I think it’s a never-ending process to be honest. I think you we never stop growing, we have an infinite capacity to learn. and so I learned new things every day. but I think I think probably six months into being in the hole is when I really, I had pounded through some some solid books. The L Factor – I think it was called the Fred Factor by Mark Sanborn. I think my biggest problem is I don’t remember a lot of the books that I read, but I get there. I think about six months in is when I started to write the essays, which my first thing my first project that Mallory Bay had given me after I read the litany of books that he sent me was to write my own obituary.
And that’s where I started to really break down things. Because if you write your own obituary and you take a serious approach to it. It took me I think three weeks in like five different writings to get it right. But if you write it down, you’ve given yourself a road map to your goals in life. If you write it from the perspective of five people, your partner, your kids, your parents, your co-workers and your best friend, what are these people going to say about you at your funeral? When did you die? What are they gonna say about you? That gives you a road map to what you want from life and why don’t you do that now? You just you see the goals? So you re engineer them the reverse engineer the goal all the way down to where you’re at right now and you have a road map to how to get there. And then I started to see that and so I started to write essays on it. Like I’m sitting in a box in the middle of nowhere, just a little speck on the earth and I’m making an intention to do something and I intend to get out of this hole early.
I intend to teach people what I’ve already learned and try to make a difference in the world. And it even started to manifest as I’m sitting in the hole because then I’d go to the shower and have a quick conversation with somebody, have dual showers and they shower you in groups of two and I go down there and have a quick shower with somebody and he’s having a problem and I’m like, oh man, I just read about this in the whole 15 minutes that we’re having our showers, I’m kind of counselling them and I see that it’s making a difference. I’m like oh man, he’s actually getting that. And then I started to write the essays and I would send them up to the special activities coordinator and then she sent me one back at some point, I’d say this was probably 6-8 months in. She sent me a note back and said I’m really impressed by the essays that you have, do you mind if we send them to the local library? I said not at all, I’ll write even more if you’d like. So I started writing topical essays on certain things and sending them out to the library and I want an award from man is Steve Michigan from the local public library for one of my essays which then they started to allow me to rent books from the public library.
And that started to come in. And then over a few more months, the special activities director came to me with this new program that they have. It’s called thinking for a change. And said, hey, if you study this course, master this course, write me an essay on it. That shows that you have an understanding of it. I will get you out of the hole to teach a class. And as long as you do well, we’ll let you out of the hole. And to me, the first thing I thought was wow I just manifested that because I had just told myself a couple of weeks ago I’m going to get out of the hole early and now here’s my opportunity to do just that I just manifested that. So to me, the power of my intention speaking it, believing it, knowing that it’s going to happen, just made it happen. And so I did. I started studying the course. I mastered the course. They put me in protective custody to teach the course. And it was life changing with the class. Did amazing. I met some amazing people and chose to stay there for another year and a half.
After they released me from the whole, I chose to stay there because I saw the difference I was making here and the people that I was meeting. So I stayed there and when I was released from that life got bad because I was a gangbanger who stabbed people. And then I went to the whole when I came back and I’m a completely different person. And the gangs don’t like that. The gang did not like the fact that I don’t want to be a part of it anymore. I’m not your flunky. I’m not your puppet. I’m not and that got really bad. So yeah. How did you? I was actually one of the things that I was going to ask you in terms of once you’d developed yourself for lack of a better term when you then get out, when you get your freedom, what happens then? Well they expected me to pick up where I left off and I had sat him down and had a conversation like listen it’s not me anymore. I want a better life. I’m a better for myself so I’m not going to be involved anymore.
Well, you know that that’s not how it works honey, you can’t just quit. Well, I am, so I mean you guys can do what you gotta do about it. And they started to jump me all the time. I mean, I would go use the bathroom at 3:00 AM because you have communal bathrooms in the lesser security levels. Get jumped at three o’clock in the morning just using the bathroom. Boom started getting hit. I was eating lunch once in the chow hall and they it’s called a pumpkin heading. It’s where they take locks. So I’ve got some good old scars and dents up on my head, but they take locks and they put them on a sock and I’m eating lunch and four of them came from four different directions and just started, you know, hitting you being in my head up. And they probably went on for God probably about a year. They kept jumping me all the damn time. And I told him you got to knock it off, man. You don’t stop. It’s gonna get bad. And if it did, I eventually had to do some not very happy stuff, but I had to do that because I was forced into that situation where if I want peace in my life, there’s a, I’m a big believer of the north.
I follow the north Pantheons. It’s called Aussie True, the religion of the Vikings. And there’s this thing called veered or frith and frith is a state of peace in the community, through an act of war. It’s the way to get to peace through an act of war or conflict. Uh, and I’ve seen the manifestation of that in this situation because the only way I was going to get to peace is to engage in war. Uh, so really nasty violent altercation took place. It got the point across they left me alone. And for the last few years of my bit, I was able to focus on nothing but helping people. Uh, and I’m even in touch with a group of guys today that I helped mentor and get out there. All business owners, homeowners, uh, they’re doing really well in life. So everything has ever happened. I’m very thankful for good. I mean thinking when you’re describing all that, I feel like I am a movie of your life could be made based on the drama and how gripping it is.
But have you had any thoughts there? Well, yeah, we’re, we’re currently in the book writing process. So you’re doing that? I haven’t just done spoilers, have I? No, no, no, no. Trust me, there’s a whole lot more. I’ve been out for 5.5 years. Life doesn’t just get easy for people just because you’ve gone through all that. You know, I got out in 2016 in August of 2016. I started working demolition in the Union in Cleveland. Ohio. Um, and started to grind my way up from there. I knew that successful people work really, really hard. And that’s why they’re successful, I knew that I had a passion in life and a goal to attain and I started working on it immediately. I became a musician. I got signed to a label really quickly because I have a passion for music. I was a rap metal vocalist in a band called grim trigger in Cleveland Ohio, we got signed to ferocious Records relatively quickly started headlining shows in different states across the country.
And all within two years of being out, all this started to happen. So this is a whole new dynamic on my life because I’m trained in self-awareness, transformation and self-mastery. But I’m also a kid that spent 18 years of his life in prison and I’m 35 years old and I have the adoration of fans all over Ohio, it shows that I’m putting on and that kind of that kind of impact on somebody’s mind can take you off focus and you know, it can shift you off. And so I lost focus of motivating and helping and focused on music for quite a while which if you don’t live your intention life is going to the world, works how we want it to how we ask it to how we tell it to. So when my intention was this is what I’m gonna do, everything I wanted manifested and when I strayed from that path while I was still enjoying the music life and everything was going good over there, things started to fall apart over here because I wasn’t living my intention.
And so then after the music, after that stopped, I reassessed and I’m like, okay, I need to do this. I started going into prisons and talking to inmates and trying to motivate them, working with local law enforcement, working with police officers to try. There’s a huge dynamic from the moment a cop arrests somebody. There’s a, there’s a life-changing moment right here that can take place if the, if the officer is armed with the appropriate mental knowledge and emotional awareness, you can change this person’s life as you’re arresting them. So you have the ability to see that they’re going to continue to be a criminal or you’re going to change their life right here. And so that’s something that I love to work with law enforcement on. and I went into a staffing agency to get a job and I met the owner as I’m in there, the owner of the staffing company and we sat down and had a very real authentic and opening on his conversation and to this day, he’s one of my great friends names, mike Donato.
And then he gave me a career on the spot. Like I mean, I want you to come work for my company and next thing you know, I got $100,000 a year, corporate gig with my own office in suits. Like I manifested that because I always said this is where I’m going, this is not where I’m gonna stay, this is where I’m gonna go. So I took advantage of that opportunity and started helping people get jobs. I was a staffing specialist now and I saw that opportunity to, okay, I can do job fairs and prisons and I can cross these two, these two things, getting people jobs and motivating them. So I started to do that very successful with it and then Covid hit, which Covid has messed up a lot of people’s lives and I was included because the staffing agencies really took a hit. So I got laid off in February, I think of – what was that 2019 when Covid hit and I was like, well what am I gonna do?
I got to do something, I can’t just sit here. and then I, I saw a reaction video on YouTube and I’m like, man, I can do that. and so I tried one and very quickly I blew up fast on the on view tube, I got 10,000 subscribers in the first couple weeks and I was like, oh crap, this is something and then over the course of the next six months I built up to like 50,000 subscribers, built a global fan base, started really drilling it in, in the moment. You gave me a stage. I started speaking on motivational stuff and self-help and how to help people out. And so I started the show called The Morning Through uh, and the Daily Check ins, I want to show on E 3 60 tv called holding the rope. I submitted a video for that uh, and 11 season and holding the rope is all about finding normal everyday people that have done extraordinary things in spotlighting that. So that experience was amazing for me. We started to really help people.
And then my relationship, I realized I was really happy in one spot, but I wasn’t happy in my relationship with the woman that I was with. We had just had a son. He was a little over two years old. Um, and I can’t talk about authenticity and speak about being authentic and receiving your intention in life if I don’t live that and here I am in an unhappy relationship not being authentic. It’s not fair to her. It’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to the kids. So I sat her down one just out of the blue like, hey, this is over and she went ballistic, things got broken. Like, wow, what is happening? Uh, and then it was, it’s funny because it was almost one year ago today That this happened. It was actually December 12 of last year and this day, one year ago, I was homeless. I had nothing. I had nothing. I had to buy a new car. I was staying at a friend’s house in Florida.
And I worked my way back. I saw it as an opportunity. A lot of people might look at that as like all my life’s in shambles, blah blah blah. I saw it as an opportunity to show people what I mean, that you can lose everything, your life can go to shit and you can get up and keep moving forward and now I’m gonna show you how to do that because I don’t have a pot to piscine watch this. And here we are, one year later just moved in yesterday to my new home in Palm springs California. It’s an amazingly beautiful home. I have an amazingly beautiful partner. We are opening businesses in California and things are just going as happy and amazing as possible because I was honest with not only myself but her and everybody around me and I’m living my intention. I said I’m not going to take this anymore. And from this moment forward, I’ll live out my intention and here we are.
Congratulations. Thank you sir, Tell me about your business is at the moment and your motivation. s people when we when we moved on. So I met my, my now partner on a podcast actually. and she was in England and I just fell in love with her the moment I saw her. I’m like and we were in just chaos in our life. She was on the end of a long marriage that she was unhappy with and I was freshly single out of that relationship. Although I had been out of that relationship for a long time. We met we started talking every day 78 hours a day on facetime for months and decided to come to California to live together. And we got here and we’re like okay we got to create a business, what do we do? We’re not independently wealthy, what can we do here?
And then she came up with the side, she said she had visited a cat cafe in Virginia And we come to discover in the Coachella Valley in California there’s 2000 cats. they have a catch neuter and release policy here because it’s a no kill zone. They don’t want to kill the cats. But the cats migrate here the same reason everybody else does because it’s freaking paradise. So we’re both huge animal lovers. I love I have two cats of my own. And she said let’s do a cat cafe. I said I’m in and here we go. I just seen this. This is the article that was in the PS. I love You magazine for Frisky Business Palm Springs Cat Cafe. But she also pushed me. She is the founder of Itopia Coaching and Consulting. She designed the entire program. I mastered the program and took over that because I didn’t want to die because it was a company that she built in the UK. But coming here to be an American, she couldn’t bring that with her. So she had to start her own business over here and I’m not gonna let all her hard work and her vision die.
So I mastered the program and now I’ve taken the director, the spot of the company. Um, and we’re getting a lot of traction in the eye. Topia coaching as well. We’re making a lot of moves. We’re going to seminars. Uh, we’re going to these luncheons where I’m meeting a lot of people and we’re starting to lock in clients and we’re starting to get that going at the same time. Getting the cafe going. We’re running into some red tape on both spectrums as to be expected when starting a new business, but everything is pretty much falling into place. Like it’s supposed to. Um, we have changed, we didn’t change a law. We got an exception for a law in Palm Springs. There’s an overnight kittling law in a commercial district that it’s not allowed. And she was given an exception for that. Uh, because of all the good that she’s doing. So she a cat cafe for those who don’t know it’s a coffee house. That has cats and we’re partnered with the Palm Springs animal shelter to provide the cats for us to help get them adopted to visit. The visibility for cats is so much more in a cat cafe in their chances of adoption are so much better.
These cafes, there’s 125 in the United States, 12 in California were the first and only one in the Coachella Valley and they average about 1000 adoptions a year out of these places, which is so great for cats because cats are like therapy animals and all animals deserve a chance to live. Everything on this planet deserves a shot at life. Uh, and we, we were horrible. We can’t go into an animal shelter because we’re like, okay, well we’ll take that one. So we now have four cats and uh, we’re, it’s, it’s going great man. There’s challenges. But we, we look at challenges like their opportunities to put everything we’ve ever learned on display, to conquer those challenges. And I’ve never met somebody that partners with me so well, we hunker down together if our muck down, I guess is what you guys would call it and muck in. We muck in together. Um, and it’s great man.
It’s truly incredible when you meet your soul mate who is on the same page as you know, we just work so well together and it’s, it’s amazing what the universe will give you when you live in tune with it. It’s incredible the great answer to the question and no, I did not know what a cat cafe was, but it’s the businesses, the coffee and the causes the adoption for the, for the cat’s room, right? Pretty much so. It will be a big like coffee house and we’ll have this big glass encasing in the middle where the cats are because you’re not allowed to have the cats in the same place that you serve the food. People can take their food and drinks and go in, but we’re not allowed to prep or serve them in the same area. So being a glass case, which works out in case you are allergic to cats, you can sit on the outside to watch them. We’re working with the autism society to help bring in some autistic kids that that can cuddle with cats because they’re therapy animals. That could really help. Um, Senior nights, I’m gonna have all kinds of events.
It’s gonna be an amazing thing. And regarding, do you say utopia it is? Who’s your client who’s typically given you money there? We have everybody from corporate CEOs, their employees that are not performing up to par, I have a 10-year-old gangbanger who thinks he’s a gangbanger right now. He’s 10. His dad is on my softball team. I played on a softball team, a national team here and Palm Springs. And he has a 10-year-old son who wants to be a crib. So I’m working with him? 16-year-old girl out of San Diego. Once I work especially well with teenagers in that zone, the 15-16-17-year-old zone because that’s where my life drastically changed and so I can relate to that really well and I think that they can relate to me because we both have been there and I think I think it’s difficult when you have booked trained psychologists or psychiatrists or even motivational speakers or life coaches or mindset coaches, whatever who have your wisdom and knowledge comes from reading these books and not actually living it.
So it’s the same thing with alcoholics anonymous for me when you have You know some 24-year-old kid up leading these courtly the alcoholics anonymous trying to teach people. It’s like dude, you’ve never had a drinking problem with day in your life, how can you relate to these alcoholics? You can’t and it’s the same thing with these kids that most of these kids aren’t gonna listen to somebody in a suit that got a Harvard education coming in, trying to tell them the problems that they’re having in life and how to deal with it. But when they see I’m I wish you once and went through the same shed, they can relate to that. And I think it’s I think it’s more effective that way. Is there anything that I should have asked you today? What am I drinking in my cup, You learn that it’s not English tea. But uh, no, I think you probably nailed all of it, man. It’s pretty good, Sonny. What your goals to change the world, man.
Honestly, dad, I want to leave an immortal legacy. I want people to look back at my life and say that dude endured a lot of ship simply to change a lot of people’s lives. Yeah. You know, my goal in life is to leave that legacy. I want to change as many people’s lives as possible. I want to give people the opportunity, to enjoy their best life and live the life of their dreams. We got a lot of goals. I want to open businesses. I want to be financially secure for my kids for as many people as we can help. And yeah, I want to live out my days with my partner here in Palm Springs. That’s a goal, you know, so well thank you so much for telling your story and being authentic is something that comes through. So, um, and I, you know, I wish you all the best and congratulations on everything you’re doing so well done. Thank you so much, man.
If you want to follow more, you can check us out at friskybusinesspalms or friskybusinesscatcafe.com or you can also go to sonnyandclaire.com and follow all that. But we’re on all the social media platforms, you guys can find all the Sonny Von Cleveland anywhere. Utopiacoaching.com. We have the website there to follow us anywhere, connect, change your life.
I’ll do that, Sonny. Thank you very much.
I appreciate you, my friend. Have a beautiful day.