Hello, everybody. Welcome to this edition of the SunLeaders podcast. I’m your host, Eric Nutting.

I’m the owner of the Growth Coach of St. Petersburg, Florida, and we offer affordable group coaching to entrepreneurs. We also help with personal growth, business growth, and organizational growth, as well as specializing and working with couples in business. I’m excited to introduce our guest to you today, but first, I want to give a shout out to my buddy Josh Naman, who’s sitting off to the left of me.

He is running the soundboard today. Just as a quick note, Naman Creative is the producer of the SunLeaders podcast. If we kind of wander into those, down those paths, we can tell you more about that as the day goes on.

But today, this is the exciting part. My guest is Carol Hasbrouck with Luxury and Beach Realty. We’ll chat a little bit about Realty, but today we’re going to spend a fair amount of time today speaking about a book she wrote.

And it’s grounded in this remarkable journey that I find really exciting and very inspiring. So, Carol, welcome to the show. We just met fairly recently.

Yes, about a week ago, I think. Thank you, Eric. And here we are.

You’re a fellow Sun Leader and you are entering our Sun Reader program. So this book that we’re going to talk about is going to. We’re going to feature in our third quarter and I’ve not read it yet, but we’re going to learn a lot about it today.

Good. So the first thing I want to ask you is what do you want our listeners to know about you specifically? What, what do you think is a good intro for them to know about you so specifically? I am a people person. I live to connect with people.

I love to connect with people and live to connect with people. And I do that in various ways. But my purpose on this earth is to share my story through writing and teaching.

And I can’t do that unless I connect and just connecting. I learned so many stories about other people that teach to me I find very interesting. And I have a big heart.

I’m full of love and I like to spread the love. So that’s like me in a nutshell. So I already have little tinglies because you’re talking about purpose, which connected with me immediately.

This is one of the things I do in my coaching, is I beg people to dig into what that means. Why are we here? Why are we breathing air? What are we supposed to be contributing? And that’s really what you’re talking about to your soul, isn’t it. Yes, absolutely.

And once I figured that out, it changed everything in how I present myself, how I navigate, how I reflect on myself, and am I fulfilling that purpose or am I moving in the other direction, which is not what I want to do. As much as I love selling real estate and helping people make memories, my real goal in life is to share my story and hear other people’s story and do that through teaching and writing. So you said once you figure that out, how long did that take? When did you figure it out? About
a year and a half ago.

I mean, I knew it, but I didn’t have a label on it. I didn’t really create the concrete image of who. Of why I’m here.

Not image. It’s not an image. The purpose of why I’m here.

And about a year and a half ago, I took a class and it helped me come up with my one word. And my one word is share. And I do that through teaching and writing.

That’s awesome. Share. All right, now let’s talk about this book.

Share this book with me. Tell us the title. There’s a story behind the title and there’s a story behind this book.

So tell the. Tell the listeners what the book is. Sure.

The book is titled 10,000 Miles of Miracles and the subtitle is Dame’s Gone Wild Summer Service Adventure. Helping People, Pets and planets. And in 2012, my good friend and roommate at the time and I took a leap of faith and we just.

I just gotten laid off from a job. She was in a dead end job and we just chucked it all and started traveling the United States. We ended up traveling 10,000 miles over three and a half months.

And we did volunteer work. I chuckled as I was doing research for this because, I mean, obviously you and I spoke a couple times, but I read up a little bit. And the way this story goes as it’s presented online was you wanted her to stay behind and kind of watch.

Yes. What do we. Did we have animals that she needed to watch? A cat and a dog.

Yes. And she said, oh, no, no, no, no. This is.

This sounds too good. I’m going on this with you. Yeah.

So the first thing, the first question is, who watched the cat? My son and his wife. Just as Providence would have it, needed a place to stay. Okay.

So they stayed at our place for the summer and took care of the cat and the dog. All right, cool. I feel so much better because I was worried about that.

No, they were taken care of. Then how important was it in. In hindsight to have a partner in crime in on this.

Well, I wouldn’t have done it alone. I just didn’t know who I was going to do it with. Gotcha.

And. And partner in crime is a good way of putting it. Joyce and I are completely different people in many respects, and we both have a heart that’s full of love and compassion for others.

She’s from the Bronx, I’m from St. Pete. There’s a world of difference between those two places of growing up. And she’s got the accent to go with it.

And sometimes I don’t even understand what she’s saying. But in the end, we had our challenges along the way. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever spent 247 with someone for three and a half months, but I sure never had.

Not even my husband. Not my kids, not my mother, no one. And so we had our challenges and we got through them.

And today we’re still good friends. It took a little bit once we got back. Well, let’s get that one out of the way.

Yeah. Because I hadn’t anticipated talking about that. What was the biggest challenge? Well, I had my way of doing things and she had her way of doing things.

And the radio. Okay, the radio was the biggest challenge. She liked the 50s and 60s and I liked the 70s and 80s.

Oh my gosh, that’s funny. But the idiosyncrasies too. Sure.

And we ended up having to sleep in the same bed sometimes. I mean, we weren’t used to that. Right.

We ended up who got the couch for the weekend that we were staying somewhere and who got the bed and just, just a lot of time together and yeah, it was interesting. I know some of the, from our conversation, I know some of the, the background behind this and you mentioned that kind of working a job that you thought, man, I don’t want to do this anymore. And this is round about the so called Great Recession.

Things were shifting for a lot of people. You and I were included in that. And a big part of this story is really a leap of faith, isn’t it? Oh, yes, yes, yes.

So I had gotten laid off of the mortgage business. I had been in it 23 years and it was 2012. Yeah, 2012 when this happened.

And, and we thought that the business was back enough that it made sense to hire they. The bank thought that it made sense to hire me. And then after a year, they realized there just wasn’t enough business out there to make it make sense to have me on.

And so they Let me go. And I was devastated. I had never been let go from a job before, and.

And I was already in financial dire straits because of the crash, and on some investment properties I had purchased. And so I just. I cried and I cried, and.

And then finally I took a deep breath and I said, okay, well, so if you could do anything and time and money didn’t matter, what would you do? And the answer was, oh, that’s easy. I would travel and help people. Or travel and help people.

Yeah. And that’s what this is all about. Yeah.

But I’d never seen a job description like that, other than the Peace Corps. I was a little old for the Peace Corps at the time. So you created it.

Well, so I went and bought a newspaper that Sunday, and I don’t read newspapers or watch the TV news, so I don’t know what compelled me to buy a newspaper that Sunday. But anyway, in the paper, in the parade section, was an article about a father, single father, and his two sons traveling the world doing volunteer work. And I’m the type of person, if I see somebody else doing something, and I think, well, gosh, if they can do it, I can do it.

And I thought, well, that’s what I’m going to do. Only I’m going to do it in the US I don’t want to travel abroad, and I’m going to do it here. And they were going for a year.

I’m still in touch with him. His name’s J.D.

lewis. He’s a wonderful. He’s an actor.

Lab out in California. Very cool. Um, but that.

That was my inspiration. Okay, so how much prep time did it take from the idea to actually putting it in motion? So I got laid off in January, and we left in June. Oh, wow.

All right. And you left, if I recall, with $500. We left with $500 in our pocket.

Yeah. That’s a leap of faith. Yes.

Right. And that’s really what this whole book ends up being, right? It is. All right.

It is a leap of faith because we were following our inner guidance. And, you know, sometimes we don’t trust that as humans, because that’s the human part of us. But we.

That’s what we were following. We knew we had. We had to take this trip.

It wasn’t a choice. I talk a lot about. And I really like the fact that you bring that up.

Intuition, listening. How do we get better at tapping into that? And how do we differentiate between intuition and paranoia? Well, I took some classes on it. Okay.

You know, I took some Classes here locally. And it helped me develop my institute, my institution, my intuition. And then I just paid more attention to what that voice sounded like.

I really paid attention to my gut. Like, what’s my gut telling me here? And if it’s ego, the gut isn’t at peace with it. And really, we have.

I believe we have two voices in our head, okay? We have the voice of love or the soul, and we have the voice of ego or fear. Okay? And so if it was fear, I knew it wasn’t intuition. I knew it wasn’t coming from my inner higher self.

And. And Joyce and I made a pact that we would always follow the voice unless it didn’t feel right. So there were some crazy things this voice told us to go do, and.

And we did them when they felt right, and they always turned out beautiful. Tell me, in context of the book, what you would say. The craziest thing that intuition was telling you to do.

What is the thing that surprised you the most? Is there one thing? There is. And just going on the trip was a big part of it. But the thing that.

So about. I don’t know, two months before we were getting ready to leave, the voice says to me, and people are going to think I’m crazy, but that’s okay. They have a voice, too.

They just can’t hear it yet. The voice says to me, you’re going to write a rap song. And I said, oh, that’s crazy.

Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even like rap. I’m not writing a rap song.

And. And the voice just keeps saying, you’re going to write a rap song. You’re going to write a rap song.

I’m like, oh, that’s just stupid. Go away. And about two weeks later, I looked at Joyce and I said, I’m not sure what’s happening here, but I’m going to write a rap song.

I’ll be back in a bit. Oh, my gosh. And I took my journal and my pen into my bedroom, and I had to turn on a radio station just so I could hear the beat and the.

Sure. All of that. And my son told me later, mom, that was hip hop.

And I didn’t even know the difference, but out came the rap song. And it’s in the book. It is in the book.

It is in the book. And we don’t have any music put to it, so maybe someday we’ll get some music put to it. Oh, my gosh.

That’s cool. Yeah. So.

But you wrote it with a beat. I wrote It. Whoa.

Absolutely. And I. And I read it with a beat. I’m not sure anybody else reads it the same way I do in the book.

You know what’s so funny is I asked if you would be willing to read something from the book today. Had I known that ahead of time, I would have made you do the rap. Well, I could do that, but.

Well, we might have time for both. How long is the rap? It’s not long. It’s probably seven, six.

Seven verses. All right, I’m going to give you the choice. You want to start with the rap or you want to start with the story about Manny? Oh, the story about Manny will make me much more comfortable.

So here’s the cool thing about this intuition thing. And I got chills when you’re telling me the story about Manny. And we’re going to get into that now.

We hear a voice, we follow intuition. And this amazing story that you’re going to tell us about in just a second, we had this. This result that shouldn’t have even happened.

And I’m going to let you either just jump into the read or set it up, whichever you prefer. But this is pretty amazing. Yeah, so I’ll go ahead and set it up and then I’ll read about it.

And we were about three weeks into our trip and we didn’t have very much money left at all out of the $500. And we were completely donation based. And so we were about three weeks in, we were in Chicago.

It was 106 that day in Chicago, which is extremely high. And we went to a senior living center and where we were volunteering. We were going to play games with the seniors at their happy hour, which I didn’t realize is a big deal in the senior center.

But we did that a couple of times and they love their happy hour. And so we’re standing there talking to the volunteer coordinator and my partner Joyce says she’s very curious. She asks everybody questions and she says to Gabby, the volunteer coordinator, she says, so Gabby, who’s your oldest resident? And Gabby says, oh, that would be Manny.

He’s 101 and at 96 years old, he took up wood carving and he carved a 4 foot by 8 foot plaque of the Gettysburg Address by memory. And we’re like, oh, come on. And of course, at that very moment, Manny.

The elevator doors open and there’s this small, didn’t look a day over 80, well dressed man named Manny walks out. So he introduces himself, he’s so proud of his Gettysburg Address. And he invites us into his apartment.

So I’m going to go from there. So we get in. So, as we’re getting ready to leave the apartment, we looked at the.

The pictures on the wall of his family, that kind of thing. And as we’re getting ready to leave, I noticed some small wooden plaques on a chest of drawers. One of them had the name Carol on it.

I said, manny, that’s my name. Oh, it is, he replied. Would you like to have it? I stared at him, somewhat dumbfounded, and at first said, no, I couldn’t do that.

To which he looked back at me, equally confused. Why wouldn’t I accept his gift? He must have been thinking. I quickly agreed to take it.

At this point, Joyce was feeling a bit left out and started looking at the plaques for her name. She noticed they all had words on them, but no names. She kept looking, and in the very back was one with Joyce on it.

Unbelievable. Joyce exclaimed. It looked different from the others because Manny had not even had a chance to stain it yet.

Manny. That’s my name. Joyce said.

It is? He calmly queried, then please take it. I made it just last night. Manny, who told you we were coming? She asked.

He looked at us as if that were an odd question and replied very matter of factly, well, God told me, and I always do everything God tells me to do. We thought he was joking, and after we picked our jaws up off the floor, we looked at Gabby, who had goosebumps, and asked if she had told him our names. No, she said, no one knew your names.

I simply put special guests on the calendar. To be honest, I didn’t even remember your names. Of all the names in the world, Carol and Joyce were the only two names on plaques Manny had made because God told him to.

Being in shock and total amazement, we asked him how we could thank him. And then it goes on to say that he asked us to recite the Gettysburg Address with him, and we said, well, Annie, we don’t know the Gettysburg Address. And he whipped out two sheets of paper and he said it from memory, and.

And we said it from reading it, and. And then we got in the car after all of this, and I looked at Joyce and I said, you know, I have to confess, I asked God for a sign this morning because I just wasn’t sure if what we’re doing is. Is crazy or if we’re supposed to be doing it.

And I said, you know, are we on the right path? And if so, could you give me a sign, Joyce? And I started crying. Joyce said, so did I. So we just cried, and then we laughed because there we sat in the car with two wooden plaques, which were our signs, metaphorically and literally and physically. Where’s your plaque now? It’s all right next to my bed.

10,000 miles of miracles. Manny’s now a part of that story. And I know there’s so many other stories in there, but Manny’s involvement in this is really interesting.

He follows this thought process of intuition. For him, God drives that intuition. Do you think God is always involved in intuition? I do, certainly for both of your journeys, all three of you.

I’m not sure what else I would connect intuition to, but I find that to be remarkable. Wow. It was remarkable.

So where was that in your. In your. In your travels? Was that the beginning? The middle of the three weeks then? And we’ve gone for three and a half months, so of course we know we’re on the right path.

That’s why you asked that question. Right. All right.

So did you think the rest of the. The rest of the journey is like, oh, we got this made? Oh, no, no, no. We still had our moments.

I remember I was in a grocery store, and we were buying groceries, obviously. And the lady said, I’m sorry, but there’s not enough money in the account for these groceries. And we just looked at each other, and I’m like, oh, my gosh.

And I said, well, so how much is in the account? And we’ll just put the rest of it back. Right. And.

And we were embarrassed, and so we did that, and we got in the car, and I just. We. I just looked her.

I said, what are we going to do? And she said, pray. Let’s pray. And so we prayed, and we went back to wherever it was we were staying at the time.

And that evening, we had a website set up called Dame’s Gone Wild. And that evening, my aunt, who I had visited a couple of weeks prior, had deposited $500 into our donation account on Dame’s Gone Wild. So.

Yeah. Is the website still up? It’s. I still have the domain name.

Okay. But it’s not active right now. It is not.

Okay. Will it be? Will do. I will have to recreate it.

Gotcha. Okay. Currently we have this book.

What are your hopes for this book? Well, the book was a little bit like the Journey. I was afraid to write the book just because of being vulnerable and worrying about what other people thought and was it going to be good enough. And just the same normal human reactions that I think most authors have.

Other authors I’ve talked to have had the same fears before publishing a book, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to write the book. And that’s really probably as I, as I look back at the things I’ve studied that you have out there, that’s the biggest change in your life.

You were really moving forward through this thought process of this is what I’m guided to do, this is what I must do. This is really the change that’s happened in your life. Oh, yes.

And that’s guiding everything you do. It is guiding everything I do. And it came from an event that was very painful.

It came from an event that I thought for sure not life, was over. But now what, now what am I going to do? How am I going to survive through this? Yeah. I was reading that you connected specifically with the journey of being a woman and empowering other women.

And it really resonated with me because, you know, I’ve been married 35 years and Diane was a stay at home mom for about 22 years. But there’s a point in time, and you speak to it in one of your interviews, I don’t remember which one, where she felt a loss of identity because she got to a point where maybe the kids didn’t need her so much anymore. And she’s like, what do I do now with my life? Can you speak to that a little bit? Yes.

I think as women, we tend to give our identity over to our families and our parents and taking, nurturing and taking care of other people and, and we don’t necessarily pay attention to creating our own identity until we do, until we get older and perhaps. So for me, it was when I was in my 40s that I started to think, you know, wait a minute, I love all these people. Yeah.

But that’s not who I am. I’m not just a mother and a daughter and a sister and know a wife. And so I think women, I don’t know because I’m.

I’m not in a man’s head, but I think women tend to give. Give themselves over to other people much more readily and for longer periods of time until we kind of vanish, you know, we don’t know who we are. Right.

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But if it works, then what’s the problem? Well, when you’re designing a website for a moment in time, it’s tempting to think in the short term. Upfront costs are generally lower and timelines can be a little faster. But if you think in the short term, you get short term results which usually ends up costing you more money.

So for long term results, let’s use Neiman Creative. We will make sure that anyone that comes to us is not a prisoner of the moment. Contact us today infohmencreative.com do you feel that’s a generational thing or do you think it’s still pretty consistent? I’m not sure it’s a concern of mine as a parent.

It’s a concern of mine as a father. And I always said, listen, don’t identify yourself through a man, but do you think it’s changing at all? Well, it’s not just through a man, first of all, it’s through taking care of elderly parents, it’s through taking care of children and then perhaps through a man as well. And I have two sons, so it’s hard for me to answer that question.

I know that the women today, I’ve read a bunch of books and articles on it. And the women today, like if the man doesn’t bring something to the table, they’re really not interested. Now not all women, of course, but for majority of them, like, it’s not that they need to have the man, they don’t need to have the ring, they don’t need to feel like that’s they’re part of a couple to feel worthwhile.

Right. But I still think they have the basic need to nurture. Okay.

And there’s nothing wrong with that need to nurture. It’s creating the balance of keeping my own identity while I still take care of the people I love. Right.

How do we nurture that then? Let me ask you this. Do you have ideas, suggestions, me as a man, how I can help support that journey for maybe my daughters, for my wife? What is my role in this? Maybe asking them questions, you know, about how they feel about that and just do they feel like they have their own identity? You said your wife now is working and has created a new identity at least somewhat through the work. Right, but I don’t like to create my identity through work.

As an entrepreneur, I can tell you that she’s. She’s supporting me half the time. Yeah, she has.

She’s. She’s amazing. She’s carved out this own.

Her own path and identity. And she just applied for what she called her dream job working at the Library of Congress up in Virginia. Oh.

Yeah. So. And she’s an author herself.

You know, she’s written a couple of young adult books. So, yeah, she certainly has worked hard at creating the person she wants to be. Yeah.

And maybe with your daughters, you can say, I had this conversation with this woman today who. And then talk about what I just talked about. And so how do you feel about that? You know, is that.

Do you feel like you’re. Do you feel like you have an identity now? How old are they? 25 and 20. Yeah.

So they probably feel very strongly that they have an identity. And the problem is that might get lost later in the caring of other people, certainly. Yes.

So I guess one of my goals is to make sure they don’t have to care for me for a while. Because you mentioned. Yes.

And now that I’m getting older, I see it in my peer group so much. We do have to take care of our parents. And it’s.

It does pull on you. It pulls. We have a.

A limited amount of energy. We have to decide how we’re going to spend that energy, and sometimes our energy must go to that. And I. And I hope it’s our pleasure to do so.

But that doesn’t make it any less challenging. Right. For sure.

Okay. So you mentioned a rap. A need to write a rap piece.

Do you remember what that was about specifically? And how did you go about the creation of that? Did it create itself? It created itself. You didn’t say, oh, I got to write a rap song about this specific incident. Oh, no.

Or emotion. It just happened. Well, I was told that I was going to write a rap song.

And you couldn’t get it out of your head. It wouldn’t leave me alone. It just wouldn’t leave me alone.

And now. And I thought it was the craziest thing in the world. All right.

And then one evening, it was. I was told that now is the time. So I just surrendered.

I just said, okay, well, you know, I’m going to go into my room for 15 minutes and nothing’s going to happen. And literally 15 minutes later, I walked out and the entire song was written. I didn’t write it.

Why is he. I didn’t write it. It’s pretty cool.

So if you don’t like it, I didn’t write it. If you do like it? I wrote it. You want to hear it? I’m ready when you’re ready.

Okay. And we named my car Freddie. The Freedom Bus.

Bus. So this is called the Freedom Bus. Bus.

There once were some ordinary girls with rosy cheeks and pretty curls. They lived an ordinary life Life with lots of tension and strife Strife. Had lots of debt and bills to pay Wondering would it always be this way? Go to work come home and eat.

Wake up feeling tired and beat There were plenty of mouths to feed Feed. They was always doing good deeds Deeds. Seemed it would always be this way.

Kept on praying for a brand new day One day They’d had enough of doing the same old stuff. They decided to have some fun. Fun.

Their ordinary life was done. Done. They soon came up with a plan.

How not to work for the man. Dames, dames gone wild here just to make you smile. Taking orders from the one above Knowing how to spread the love.

Dames dames gone wild here just to make you smile. Let’s travel. Spreading love to others.

You know, like we was mothers. Pretty soon it was ready and set. Set.

They’d help people. Planets and pets. Pets.

What name do you think we should be so they’ll remember you and me? Why not call us? Dame’s Gone Wild. We don’t want nothing too, too mild. People said you’re crazy.

You’re nuts. Nuts. Your spends you’re supposed to stay in your ruts.

Ruts? You can’t just up and quit your job. Who do you think you are, the mob? Where are you getting your money? This ain’t no land of milk and honey, honey. Oh, but you’re so wrong they said we gotta do this or we are dead no more ordinary life for us.

We’re getting on the freedom bus. Bus. Dames Dame’s gone wild here just to make you smile.

Taking orders from the one above Knowing how to spread the love. Dames, Dames gone wild here just to make you smile. Dames Dame’s gone wild.

Ah, I love it. You get full credit for it. Even if.

Even if somebody else wrote it through. Spir spirit. I love it.

It’s awesome. So before we started, we were talking about audiobooks. And if you end up doing an audiobook, then I look forward to hearing that beat behind that.

Okay. It’s going to be fun. Good.

Very, very cool. So with our new purpose that we discovered in the last couple years, we’re teaching people, we’re writing and where there might be possibly potentially a podcast in your future. You’re thinking about it.

You’re kicking it around, right? I am. Tell me, since we’re sun leaders and we have this and we’re sun readers now, because we’re going to be reading your book and we have this awesome podcast where we can reach more people, we can teach more people, what do you think your podcast would be about? Oh, it would be about a leap of faith or if I Were Brave, maybe a title like that. If I Were Brave.

There’s a great song Janice Stanfield wrote and sings called if I Were Brave. And. And, and that’s.

See, I’m. I’m conflicted with this because my soul wants me to do the podcast, and my human nature says that’s crazy. What are you gonna do a podcast for? And so as I was walking up the stairs today to sit down with you, my soul’s going, see, I told you you were gonna do a podcast.

And I’m like, well, I’m just a guest today. And so it’s the same thing. It’s the exact same, same thing this book is about.

The exact same thing the song is about. And I have been paying attention more when I’m seeing people’s stories on Facebook, when I’m having conversations with friends, I’m paying more attention to the people that were brave enough. Because this was really a pretty crazy thing to do.

This 10,000 miles of miracles. We stayed with 26 host families. We only knew 12 of them before we left.

And we served their favorite charities, so we served 30 organizations. But it was a pretty crazy. We left with $500.

Right. We had no intention of spending any of our own money. We.

That was not. We didn’t want it. I think I calculated we ended up spending about 5,000 some odd dollars over the three and a half months between food and gas and that kind of thing.

And so back to the podcast. So I. I’m still. I still have the battle in my head and.

And we’ll see who wins. I try to feed the one that feeds my soul, so. Right.

That’s really interesting. I always talk about payments, particularly for entrepreneurs. Payments in two ways.

Payment for your sole payment for your pocketbook. So that sole payment, so hugely important. That’s why we connect to purpose.

So my hope is that you do that, that wins out because I think there’s some amazing stories and I think it really does tie into your purpose. However, just to be fair, we can have conversations at any time with anybody to still serve that purpose. I think we can reach people this way.

And I think there’s so many people who don’t get to have their story told. And that’s just one. One way to do it through this process.

$5,000. That’s a pretty tight budget. Looking over three and a half months, 26 host families.

Right. That’s amazing. In the course of three and a half months.

I’m not sure what the math on that is, but it sounds like, what, maybe four days at a time. Oh, yes. Three to four days.

Three to four days at a time. Sometimes we stayed a week. That was the longest.

Two women on the road. On a leap of faith, did you ever feel threatened? Did you ever feel there was any danger anywhere? How did you navigate that? We never felt threatened. We only left one place early, and that was Detroit.

Detroit. And we had had served in the very impoverished neighborhood of Detroit. And at the time, Detroit was a pretty unsafe place to be.

I don’t follow it much anymore. So I don’t know if it still is or has changed, but, for instance, Joyce wouldn’t let me stop to go to the bathroom on the highway. She’s from the Bronx.

I’m from St. Pete. I’m like, what looks like an exit to me. She goes, oh, no, we’re not taking that exit.

Wow. And so she knew, Right, that that wasn’t the place to go. And so that was the only place we left a day early.

And nothing happened bad to us. I. I just. I just had a feeling that it was time to go somewhere lighter than that.

But no, we. We went looking for love, Eric. And that’s what we found everywhere we went.

That’s awesome. So pretty safe. Which is really.

It makes me feel good about humanity. Yes. Because I’m not so sure I would send my girls out there on that journey.

I wouldn’t keep them from doing it, but I would worry a lot about them. And I think that’s a different maybe story than I would have expected. I would have expected a couple of sticky situations in three and a half months.

No. So that’s very encouraging. Servant leadership.

I think you’re living it and breathing it through this journey. And now after this journey, we hear the words thrown around so much. Could you define servant leadership for me? Servant leadership.

Well, it’s about helping other people. Right. It’s about going where there’s a need.

Certainly I had to be a leader on this journey because it all had to be mapped out. Even though we didn’t necessarily keep to the route we had planned. We mostly did, but sometimes we couldn’t.

But so I had to be a leader. Joyce was not interested in doing any of that capacity. And she’s not a leader, she’s a follower.

See, I don’t like to follow because then I have to do what people tell me to do. So I want to be the one telling them what to do. But the servant leadership, I mean, I. This all started when I was 16, and I went to help a little boy at the PARC facility here that helps disabled children.

And he had down syndrome, and his name was Tommy. And Tommy couldn’t put his clothes on by himself. And that’s what I was teaching him, how to do, how to put on his pants, how to put on his shirt, how to put on his shoes.

And he was the sweetest little boy. And he stole my heart. And I have no idea what happened to Tommy through the years, but I’ve been volunteering ever since.

Oh, my goodness. And the beautiful thing about this story is that the very last place we served was a special needs school in North Florida in Jacksonville. And the very last person I got to help was a little boy with down syndrome.

I couldn’t have planned that. I could not have orchestrated that myself. I had no idea when we went into the school who the kids were going to be.

I knew there were special needs kids. But, you know, God put me with this. This other little boy that brought me right back to my beginnings with Tommy.

And I knew that. Okay, it’s okay to go home now. You know that.

That EE Cummings poem where it talks about how we end up where we started and, you know, we. That’s home. And so then it was okay to.

For us to go home. And it’s. That’s a miracle by itself, isn’t it? To feel like the world is all perfect in this moment, and that’s really validation for the whole journey.

So that’s amazing. This is one of the things shifting gears for a second. St. Pete, you’ve been here your whole life.

Except for the first two years, since I was two. Yeah. I never.

I don’t know how many people I meet like that, but that’s, you know, that’s amazing. And you’ve watched this community change significantly in this time, right? Oh, absolutely. So since we’re sun leaders and we’re based here in St. Pete and you have a business here in St. Pete.

I want to talk about that a little bit. Okay. Where do you feel we’re headed here in St. Pete? What do we need to do to continue moving in the right direction? What’s your.

What’s your biggest concern for our community? If you have any? Oh, I do. Okay. Absolutely.

I, I, first of all, I love what has happened for the most part up until now. When I grew up here, it was other than I got the joy of being on a boat most of my childhood and going to the beach. Those aren’t two horrible things to do.

But there was nothing else to do in St. Pete and the average age was in 60 something. And now it’s probably late 30s, early 40s for the median age. And so I love that aspect of it.

I love the fun of it. I always loved the waterfront parks. You know, we’re the fourth, we are the fourth most waterfront parks of anywhere in the country and I love that aspect of it.

But. Or, and we are growing too fast. I mean, I sell real estate.

Right. So you would think I’d be all about, oh, that’s wonderful, because that would put money in my pocket. But no, I am so concerned that one day, not too far in the future, we’re going to look back and go, oh, gosh, we probably shouldn’t have added all those toilets all at the same time because our sewer system isn’t quite capable of handling that.

And look at the traffic patterns. And now we have traffic jams. I mean, one of the things I love about this area is there’s really, for the most part, other than rush hour, there’s not a lot of traffic jams.

That’s going to change if they continue to put all these condos up and apartments up and. Right. So that’s my biggest concern.

St. Pete has soul. You know that St. Pete is a great place to live and, and I want my grandkids to experience the same wonderful community and character and nature of this place as I did. And my concern is we’re growing too fast.

So as citizens, do we have any control of it and should we take any responsibility for it? What can we do? Well, we do have control, of course, in who we vote for, although it doesn’t always turn out how you think. You know, they don’t always come up with the platform that they actually implement. So we do have control with that.

I go to a lot of the forums and panel discussions. I, I read some of, most of what I read in the news is about development and real estate. And I mean, that’s the business I’m in.

So I want to keep up on that market and the financial world as well. I don’t know what we can do. It’s all in the elected leaders.

Right, Right. It seems that it is. Well, they’re the ones that approve city council and they approve the permits.

The building department. They put the people in the building department that approves the permits. Right, right, right, right.

And we’ve got a huge project going on right now that is pretty, I wouldn’t say volatile. That’s not the right word to use, but it’s controversial for sure. You know, and we’re speaking about the, the, the raise project and has the chance to put a lot of people to work and to create.

Everything looks great on paper. Right. And I haven’t seen it.

And as a business coach, we sit down, we work with people. There’s not one plan that doesn’t work on paper, but once he’s put it into motion, that’s when the challenges happen. So I’m not smart enough to tell you if this is a great plan or not once we get into it, but it certainly is community changing.

Yes. And that’s going to be interesting as the original stadium was community changing. That’s what brought the growth to St Peter in the first place.

Baseball. Yes. I have a picture of my oldest son, he was about 18 months old with a shovel in the dirt of when the stadium was going to be built.

And it was a big ceremony for the groundbreaking and that’s awesome. And Andy was out there with the shovel in the dirt and they took a picture of him, put it on the front page of the newspaper. That’s so cool.

And, and we were excited about it and it was something to be excited about. And I’m not a big sports fan, but it was exciting to have a national team here and not just in Tampa. Right.

And that is what brought a lot of the growth to this community. So it was controversial then, too, and it did a lot of things wrong. We as a city did a lot of things wrong with that initial stadium.

So that story you just told is the narrative that is on the pro side of why this must happen. So through that lens that you have, what should we change this go around? Should we change anything as we develop this new project? If it goes through, I don’t believe I have a lot of power to change any of that. I, I, it’s all in the government and, and the money.

It’s the people with the money. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

What we should do is make sure we look out for, first of all, some of the over all of the people that were displaced in the first place with the initial stadium, which they’re making gestures toward that, but it’s not enough. And you know, just, and that’s not the only thing for me that’s controversial, it’s the whole. Every time I turn around, there’s another tall building going up and new monstrosity down there on 4th and Central.

I just. Oh, it’s a big one. It’s going to cast a shadow on a lot of those other.

There’s a historical building across the street, Snow Arcade. It’s the prettiest building we have, and it’s not even going to be nowhere. Josh and I used to work out of there just a little while ago.

Yeah. Yeah. So the reason I ask these questions is because we are you and I and Josh.

Now. The three of us in this room are involved in this group called SunLeaders. And I really want us to be mindful of what our role is in this community that we call home, in this community where we make money.

It’s hugely important to me. And I always say that I’m not smart enough to have the answer, but I think if we get enough people together, we can come up with the right answer for it. So this has been an absolute delight for me to be able to speak with you and have this time.

I appreciate it very much. We’re fellow sun leaders. We are sun readers because we get to feature your book.

I’m excited about that. What I want to do is I want to give you a moment to speak with the audience here. Tell them one more time, first of all, the name of your book, how they can order your book.

Thank you. Anything else you want them to know about your real estate business, if anything, and then I’ll go ahead and close it out. Sure.

So the name of the book is 10,000 miles of miracles, and you can order it on Amazon and it’ll probably get there the next day, if not the same afternoon. And I also help people make memories in new homes, work with buyers and sellers in real estate. I’ve lived here my whole life.

There’s not a neighborhood I don’t know. And I love showing off my hometown to people that I get to help. And the stories I get from the happy buyers and the happy sellers, it just warms my heart and.

And it’s part of my purpose, so I’m happy to do it. I love it. Wonderful.

Well, Carol, thank you again. I appreciate it. I want to remind listeners, my name is Eric Nutting.

I’m the owner of the Growth Coach of St. Petersburg, Florida, and my goal is to make sure we have happy, healthy people in this world. If I can be of help in that way, I would be grateful. Reach out to us.

And I want to let you know, at this moment, you too can be a son leader. It’s easy peasy. All you have to do right now is join us on a Facebook group.

Reach out to us. We’d be happy to get you involved that way. We’ll soon be launching a website designed by name and creative.

We’re excited about that. And if you’re in town, we meet on the first and third Fridays of every month at 12:30 at our building here, the Florida Nest. Reach out to us.

Let us know you’re coming. We’d be happy to see you. It’s free, free and free.

Join us. Be a Sun leader. Get involved.

We’d love to hear from you. Appreciate it very much. Sam.