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Transforming Business And Unlocking An Exceptional Life Through Breathwork With Sophie Jones-Wright
Episode 533: Transforming Business And Unlocking An Exceptional Life Through Breathwork With Sophie Jones-Wright
Join Mitch Stephen as he talks to Sophie Jones-Wright about transforming your business and life. Sophie is a business coach who helps people find fulfillment and joy in their careers, bringing awareness to what they truly want in their lives. As part of her coaching plan, she uses a technique called Breathwork that helps people remove layers of experiences to deal with negative events and bad habits affecting them. Listen as Sophie shares about her traumatic experience in human trafficking and how she fought that to become who she is today. Learn more about how her breathwork practices can help cleanse some of your bad habits. Find your true, authentic self in today’s episode.
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I’m here with Sophie Wright. I’m going to tell you exactly how this started. I was cruising through Facebook, and I saw this girl was in South Korea. She had all these businesses and she’d been all over the place. I’m like, “How in the world do you end up in a business in South Korea? I got to talk to this girl.” Honestly, that’s all I knew, and I said, “You sound like someone very interesting. Would you please be on my show?” She answered and she’s here. I’ve been learning more about her. I find the story fascinating so I’m going to sit here and we’re going to try to get Sophie Wright’s story out. How are you doing, Sophie?
I’m doing well. How are you doing?
I’m good. You’re in South Korea and you have about eight businesses or so.
I have five.
You specialize in a different mindset and a way to set your mind. Breathing work, is that what you call it?
I’ll give you a little backstory. My name is Sophie Jones-Wright. I am a business coach and a breathwork guide. I am a retired real estate agent. I started four different real estate businesses in three different states. That is where my backstory of owning those different businesses comes from. Now, I just run one. I work with CEOs, entrepreneurs and people in the real estate field to find fulfillment and joy in their careers, and have a full life through awareness, owning what we want in life, and getting authentic.
Most people that I work with want to make a lot of money. They do make a lot of money. Sometimes, there’s this conception that if we’re our whole self and we’re honest and we show people who we really are, we won’t get to have everything, which is usually tied to some limiting beliefs around money. I asked Mitch a personal question and he was wide open with it. That’s what I help people do. I integrate the CEO or the entrepreneur to say, “Forget what you know. If you could be yourself and not wear all these masks all the time, how would that look and feel?” We make money based on that person and not the person that’s showing up as they think they should be.
We get fed so many pictures of what we should be like. Sometimes, we get lost. It took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t in the business for the money. I was in the business for freedom. Unfortunately, it takes money to buy that. You can’t be free with no money. The kind of free I wanted to be was going to require some funds and some clothes.
Me too. I wouldn’t say that I’m driven by money per se as much as I’m driven by experiences. I look at people traveling to a different country. If I find what makes someone tick and then I accelerate them, I get paid a lot of money to do that. That’s what brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment because I’m traveling to a different time zone or a different location every time I work with a client and peel back what’s going on with them. I used to be all about the money. Starting a real estate business at 23, hiring my first business coach at 23, on the phones every day prospecting, going to multiple cities and states selling homes. People were like, “How are you getting listings? You’ve only been here for two weeks.” I had a skillset and all these other things that I was like, “I was money-driven,” until I evolved a little bit more.
Let’s talk about that. What does your typical client look like? Where are they when they call you?
I got two. I have someone like Mitch. I’ve worked with a gentleman in his 50s in oil and gas. He found himself unemployed and wanted to start a consulting firm. I had multiple people that are double my age and they’re like, “I want to start something,” or “I want to take my business to the next level.” Those people usually have a hard time being very honest because they were honest with people in their lives. They had built a very confined idea of what they had to do. Now, they need to go with somebody that guides them through like, “Let’s find a different way.”
I have this Born for More mastermind. I have four coaches that work for me for people wanting to launch businesses in the online space. I have a branding coach, a content coach, a photographer, and a breathwork guide that work for me. I do the breathwork in that. I do business coaching. That is for people that want to launch and grow businesses in the online space. That’s less one-on-one time with me but you get a lot more. Those are the two different types of people that hire me.
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I was thinking about where are these people at in their personal lives, but you might have answered that. They’re usually making some transition. They figured out that what they’re doing now isn’t making them happy. If it’s like me, I’m thinking, “I knew I wasn’t happy but I didn’t know what to do about it.”
You were like, “What is breathwork?” Breathwork is a form of breathing meditation. I incorporate all of this into my work because it allows you to calm down your thinking mind. You flood your thinking mind with oxygen and tap into your intuition and that feeling that’s like, “I’m unhappy. I don’t know what to do and I could lose it all,” based on one conversation. People feel that way. You and I had that conversation a little bit before. They’re like, “If this isn’t going to work, my whole life is going to look different.” I teach people how to get honest. I came back from human trafficking. I’m in recovery from alcoholism. I had to be brutally honest and I’m still practicing it through the years.
I’m not some monk and guru. I still mess up but I can show people that the cost of living out of your authenticity is far greater. We have building blocks. If you have someone you can be honest with, then I can give you strategy, guidance and even communication skills, and then calm your nervous system down. You set out on the path and I walk right next to you. In six months, you’re like, “I built this business that I love. My marriage is better than ever,” or maybe, “We’ve decided to part ways,” or whatever is going on, but you feel like yourself as opposed to running to try to prove to everybody else that you’re somebody you’re not.
A lot of people get on a hamster wheel and building a business can be like that. You can almost build yourself into a trap. You got to be careful about that.
That’s part of this successful journey. I’ll ask you that question. At some point in time in your success journey, you will build yourself into a trap because what you thought you wanted, you go work towards, and you probably at some point, you wake up and go, “This isn’t what I wanted,” and that would be perceived as a trap. Would you say that’s true?
The trap was you created so much overhead that you can’t stop it. If you stop it, then you collapse your credit or your good name or whatever. When you’re running every Friday for payroll. I did it early. It caused me a nervous breakdown from fatigue because I was running so hard to keep the hamster wheel going to keep everyone paid and keep the lights on.
Businesses didn’t want to pay me in a timely fashion. If they would just pay me the day I finished the job, I would have had no problems, but no one wanted to pay. You had 60 days or 90 days to get paid, and then they wouldn’t even pay you then. That’s when I decided I didn’t want to be in a service business like that. If they didn’t pay me, I wanted to be in a business where I could take their property. I’d be like, “Pay me or I’m taking your house,” or “Pay me or I’m taking the building,” or “Pay me or I’m taking that land that you built all those improvements on.” I want to be where I had some muscle.
That is such a small demographic and that is who I work with. They are people that have to have some form of control over their lives. You think about the average person. They go to work. I’ve worked for another person for a small period of time, but I’ve always been an entrepreneur. There’s a form of control in that. There are consequences. If you’re like, “That business model doesn’t work for me and because of that, I’m going to swing over where I get to be far more in control.” When you’re in control, you’re like, “I’ll solve that problem. I can foreclose on your house,” but then what happens when you’re not in control of your personal life? Payroll can look very different. Payroll can look like relationships in your life that you are on the hamster wheel with and you don’t know how to get off.
This is unfair because you got to be talking to everybody on the planet. That’s what I said about my mastermind trailer that they sent me. I said there was no way to even turn that down. Everyone has got to have that issue at some point in time, if not almost all the time until they learn to master it or learn to get a handle and see it coming or avoid getting in those positions. The problem is we changed to what was working several years ago.
It’s the honesty in which. I’m finding myself in a similar transition. I have coaches, mentors and people that help me. I do a lot of breathwork to try to stay grounded. I’ve had so much change in the last few years. I got married, moved out of Houston, moved to Montana and started a new business. I like to do it all as fast as possible. I’m sure you can relate to that. I then moved to South Korea and it humbled me, but the change for me was like, “Who am I?” We all change in this new paradigm. I was like, “Who am I as a wife?” It’s easy for me to fly solo. I can control that environment. I know what’s going on.
As we change and grow, can you get honest with yourself and those around you? Do you have people in your life whom you can be brutally honest with without judgment, and then be willing to do what most people considered selfish? I don’t think it’s selfish if we are authentic with the people in our lives even if it’s going to hurt them at times. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Most of the time, it gives the other person a ton of permission to go, “Me too. I would like this to change too,” but everyone is so full of fear most of the time and have all this programming about who they think they should be. It disarms them when I’m like, “I used to sell my body for money and was almost beaten to death. Look at me now.” They’re like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yeah.” There’s no story that’s too scary that you can’t overcome. People box themselves further in instead of finding a confidant to help them get out.
It’s hard to find people to talk to. To me, you almost have to go to a stranger because everyone has an expectation or they got you set on who they think you are, and you don’t want to blow that. It’s hard for them to see you in any other light and they think they know you. When you get with a stranger to talk about it, whether it’s a therapist or a group, you could get honest with them.
I was talking with a group of men that were all there for the same reasons. I got honest with them because I didn’t know them and I didn’t care what they thought, but I did want to get the perspective from some people who may be a little bit closer to my situation. They’re closer in the fact that they had the type of finances I had if not much more than me.
The problem with success is you can buy a lot of problems. When money is not your problem and the fact that you have more than you need, you can buy yourself a lot of problems. Hand over the cash or write a check for something that’s going to be a problem. I needed to be in a room where people had been through a little experience because a lot of them I didn’t want to go through. I wanted to learn before I went.
To take it a little bit deeper, you can buy a lot of problems with those problems. Once the money isn’t a problem, you find familiar problems that were the same problems that you had before money. They look different but they feel the same to your nervous system. We’re on a baseline of familiarity so you’ll find a problem that you think looks different, but if we pulled it back, you would go, “Tell me the difference between this and this.” You just have more money now. It’s the self-awareness and having people go, “Let’s look at that.” I bet in that group, those men all said, “This is something I took on. It’s this big stressor,” but some form of this same type of stress has been going on in their life for a long time. The animal looks different but they’re still at the zoo.
One thing I noticed when I was quitting drinking and smoking is my body and mind were begging to pick up another habit. It was like, “We got two habits that aren’t moving anymore. When are you going to get us a habit?” I noticed that I wanted another habit, so I was trying to substitute it with a habit that was clean and healthy for me. It wasn’t a cigarette but, “Chew tobacco.” It’s not a drink, “Go smoke weed.” It wanted me to substitute so bad. I felt exactly the need for a substitution. My brain was wanting me to pick up another nasty habit.
That’s the paradigm. That’s where you’re programmed. Breaking through the paradigm and getting a new baseline, all hell is going to break loose. I’m in recovery, so we always say, “Stopping drinking isn’t hard. Staying stopped is the problem.” It’s a whole different bag of what you need to deal with to stay stopped because your mind goes on overdrive, and then a bunch of crap hits you that you’re used to. You said you were crying all the time. You were like, “I don’t want my new habit to be crying. That’s not what I want, although I’m healing.” That is why people don’t make changes.
It’s that age-old saying, “The familiar hell over strange heavens.” I did a little research about you. I know you’re probably not perfect, but I admire your ability to say, “This is what I need. This is going to probably ruffle some feathers about what people think about me, but what I think about me is more important because I need to be able to breathe.” More people now than ever, especially coming through the pandemic, are living on minimal air in stressful situations waiting for the other shoe to drop. When somebody like me comes in and looks them straight in the eyes and says, “Let’s get honest. Let’s let it all out.” Once we can start to deal with that, letting that weight lift, and then deciding how you want your life to look is what I help people do.
Why South Korea?
My husband’s job is out here. He works in oil and gas. I came late to the party. I was like, “I don’t know if I’m going to come.” I felt obligated. It was also a new life experience. I came to a very restrictive country during COVID. They have very different rules here.
You basically nail your door shut.
It wasn’t that bad, but you have a QR code that says your vaccination status that’s attached to your face. You get in everywhere with that. I also had to have surgery here. That’s what you commented on. I got here and found out I had to have surgery. I had surgery in South Korea and I don’t recommend it. This has been the hardest four months that I can remember in a long time and I have been through a lot, but the isolation and not talking have affected me. I think about what I do for other people and I have those people in my life, and I think about people that don’t have that. I can get honest and be like, “I don’t like this.” I regulate my nervous system and do breathwork. I still have my business. I get a lot of value out of my company, but it’s been hard.
Can you describe the businesses you have individually?
I should say it’s one right now, but I have the breathwork and the coaching. The mastermind could be looked at as a third because I have coaches that work for me there. My breathwork and my business coaching is all-in-one because anyone that hires me to do that transformational process is going to be doing both. I no longer do any of those real estate businesses, but I did start a business in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I’m from. I went to Wilmington, North Carolina and started another real estate business as a real estate agent. After that, I moved to Waller, Texas. That’s where I touched down when I got to Texas and started selling real estate out there.
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I was always the top producer in any market I was in. I always had a business coach and a sales coach. Most strangers will hire me based on my skillset. I knew what to say and how to say it. I then got divorced and moved to the heart of Houston, wide open, and started another real estate business there as a real estate agent. I then left that in 2019 or 2020 and started a coaching business.
I didn’t bring you on because I thought you had anything to sell, but I’m glad that you do because I was interested in your story on how someone ends up in South Korea and still function there as an American and how your business could run from a whole different place on the planet. Technology makes it pretty easy to do this, but what’s the time change from the United States to South Korea?
Most of my calls start at 5:00 AM. We’re fifteen hours ahead of you. I’m done with clients right around 10:00 AM, so it’s a huge difference.
We started at about 4:30 PM here. What time did you start on this interview?
6:30 AM.
What about the food?
I’m a breakfast and lunch girl. They are not. Their Starbucks opens at 10:00 AM so we’re not getting any Starbucks, but they have Korean barbecue and it’s really good. Other than that, it’s a little underwhelming.
I like the twelve dishes. The Korean restaurants here always come up with the twelve dishes. They got the sprouts and the turnips. They have all these different side dishes around every plate. Is that how they do it there or is it just here?
That’s how they do it here too. You judge a Korean barbecue restaurant on their sides and how many sides you’re going to get. The Korean people have been very nice. I’ve been able to run my business. I launched my mastermind coming here, so I hired four coaches. It’s a six-month program for women that want to grow their businesses or launch a line.
You’re busy and that’s probably your saving grace because if you don’t like it and you’re not busy, that’s a nightmare.
It’s negotiating terms of like, “What do I need? I’m going to go home early.”
Tell me about online businesses. What kind of businesses are they? This interests me personally.
All my businesses are online. I’ll tell you the format. I think that’s what you’re looking for. How does someone work with me online?
I was asking women that want to launch businesses online. Do you have a business that you’re trying to get them to launch in conjunction with you, are they opening random businesses, or do you have a swath of businesses that you can do well at?
Right now, what’s booming is coaching businesses. These are people that are like, “I have this skillset. I’m going to take it online.” I also work with real estate agents because they wanted an online presence. I work with people that were in occupational therapy that want to do different online businesses. Most people, I would take into my mastermind. How that business works is there’s an open enrolment every six months. They get to interview with the different co-coaches and then based on that, we say, “You’re a good fit,” because it’s a big investment for them. They have to come to three classes a week. Their whole business is getting launched, built, audited and branded.
The people that are nutrition coaches, online coaches or someone in real estate are the people that will continue to grow. This business is for anyone who wants to launch an online business and doesn’t want to hire one coach who thinks they know what they’re doing. My branding person used to work for Procter & Gamble. My copyright person used to work for News Weekly. I joke and I’m like, “We take you from junk mail to Vogue in the online space.”
That’s very interesting. I’m still struggling with online and making it all cohesive, what to leave in and what to leave out. You can’t do everything.
That’s why I have those co-coaches and myself. You can decide what you’re going to do but certainly, in the beginning, you need to focus on the rule of one, one platform, one place, one program if you’re starting. You’re farther along. If you have ten things you’re trying to do and you’ve never run a business, you’re going to be dead in the water. It’s not going to work for you. That’s what we focused on and then we get that business up and going and you’re making consistent five-figure months. We say, “Good luck and keep us in touch. We love you. We’re grateful we got to be a part of it.”
Do you help people with substance abuse and emotional issues or you’re dealing with the business?
I’m not only dealing with business. The Born for More is more of the tangible. Most people that are attracted to working with me are like, “I’ll hire you for business coaching,” and then on the first call, they’re sobbing about things that are going on with their personal life. That’s where the breathwork guiding and healing come in. That’s where I get a lot of fulfillment. It’s by allowing people to have a transformational experience with me and that’s more of my one-on-one container. It’s called Aligned because we’re aligning you to who you are and your vision.
I was showing snippets of my transformation as I was quitting drinking and smoking. At first, it was trickling in and I was trying to talk to people personally. I felt like it was a calling. I was like if someone needs some help with something and I can help them, I need to help them with this part. It then got so many, I couldn’t call them all, so I wrote the book, ENOUGH! where I was writing my own personal story. The first thing I say is I don’t have s certificate or a license. I’m not a doctor of anything. The only thing I got going for me is I quit smoking and drinking on the same day a few years ago and I hadn’t gone back. That’s the only thing I have for me.
If you want to hear how I rationalized to do it without an association, without a patch, without a therapist or without anything, I’ll tell you what my thoughts were, for right or wrong. I don’t even know if I’m any good. The first thing I had to do was I had to go back and put a warning in the very front of the book that said, “Do not quit cold turkey as I did. It could kill you.” One famous artist called me and said that he’d been following me. He quit cold turkey like I did and the left side of his body went numb and was about to have a massive heart attack from DTs. I had to go back and revise that but after that, I put it out for anyone who’s interested.
It’s at 1000Houses.com/Enough. I give it away digitally. I’m not sure it’s right or wrong or if it’ll work for anybody else, but if you want to know my story, what I thought to do, how I came to the conclusions I did, how I suffered through, overcame or whatever you want to call it through what I went to, you can read it. I hope it helps. If it doesn’t help, go to the next person until you find the right person for you.
I listen to your podcast and you mentioned that you were opposed to getting help. You had a plan B guy if it didn’t work and that’s what’s like, “Enough.” I quit drinking because seemingly, I had everything going for me. I was suicidal and couldn’t quit dating guys in the cartel. When I was ten years old, I watched The Godfather. I was like, “That’s my life path.” My dad’s a criminal attorney out of Utah. There are a lot of things going on there, but the point was I was putting myself in dangerous situations one way or another, and the solution was either to end my life or get help.
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If you know me, I persevere through so much that ending my life seemed so crazy. I’ve never been considered suicidal. I listened to your story where you’re like, “I was going to go to this bar. A guy and I went and I left. I stopped.” There was a lot of building up there. I have to imagine there was a lot of pain, momentum or awareness that you were like, “It has to stop. I’m going to die.” You said that in there.
I was going to die because I had developed acid reflux so bad that I was going to get esophageal cancer. There was no way around it. If you throw up bile every night for long enough, you will get esophageal cancer. What was causing it was the nicotine and the alcohol. The first day I quit, I didn’t throw up and I haven’t since. I knew what it was and I had told myself, it was life or death. I was like, “You quit and you live or you don’t quit and you’re going to die. Pick one.” I had a real high resolve. That’s why I had a plan B and a plan C. I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to see if I had the discipline. I went into it to impress myself because, after many years of drinking and smoking, I don’t know who I was after that. I don’t remember myself ever not drinking and smoking.
Do you know what’s interesting though? It’s a light bulb moment. You quit drinking and smoking on your own. I don’t understand why most people can’t do that, but if people are struggling with that, I don’t take that on per se. If someone hires me and they’re like, “I need to get sober,” that’s not my area of expertise. I’m sure this mastermind you were in, you paid to get help to have more understanding, awareness and acceptance around what you wanted in life once you were able to get rid of that stuff that was holding you back.
I did that on my own. My wife had Parkinson’s for fourteen years and I was getting to the edge of my wits. I wanted to handle it like a man. I didn’t want to run from it. I wanted to step into it and handle it. I was getting overwhelmed so I wanted to talk to these men about stepping up. I was like, “I got to step up. I don’t want to run.” I wanted to run but someone talked me out of it. Someone sit me down and helped me figure out how to get through it and not run away from it.
If you want something, you try something. If it doesn’t work, you’ve got to try plan B. If that doesn’t work, you got to try plan C. I was scared to death that I wasn’t going to be able to do it by myself, so I had a plan B and a plan C. I already knew when I was going to call them. If I tried three times by myself and it didn’t work, plan B was already in motion. You don’t ask any more questions. Don’t change your mind. You do it three times and you’re out.
Luckily, I didn’t have to go but there’s no shame. One thing that bothered me though when I was thinking about AA, maybe it has worked for a lot of people. I’m not saying anything bad about it, but the problem I had with it personally is I had read all these books about how we manifest what we’re going to be. You state what you want to be, dream about what you want to be, and look at pictures about what you want it to look like. I’m then going to walk into a room and say, “I’m an alcoholic.” Why the hell would I claim that? To me, if I walk in the room, I’m going to say, “My name is Mitch Stephen. I’m going to kick alcohol’s ass. That’s why I’m here.” I’m not saying that to dishearten anybody that’s in AA. My personal belief system was it’s not right to claim it.
That was the very thing that kept me suffering for three years longer than I needed to. This is interesting. It’s good to have this thought because I’ve read all the personal development books. My husband was joking with me. He was like, “I feel like you don’t have hobbies.” I was like, “My hobby is understanding how to make people better. I like peak performance. I like understanding other people. I read 30 books. This is where I get off. I like making money.” His hobbies are hunting, fishing, and doing all these other things. For three years, I would say there’s no way I can be an alcoholic. I’ve done all this other stuff that I’ve overcome, and there’s no way that I can be an alcoholic.
It’s not like I’m not going to claim it, but I had all that programming from personal development that was like, “You can overcome anything. You can do anything. You get up, you get to work, and you make it happen.” That mentality, because I couldn’t get honest somewhere, kept me going. All I’m saying is that everyone’s story is different. When I could go in somewhere and say, “I’m an alcoholic,” or “My life is completely falling apart. On the outside, things probably look okay. What’s going on inside is not good,” that allowed some surrender and acceptance and I needed that.
Probably you wanted to man up and needed some acceptance around your situation for people to go, “Let’s assess, game plan and figure out how we’re going to get better.” I have to be careful but I don’t think that staying in a victim mentality around it is a good idea, but what something like a Twelve-Step program offers you is a game plan to get your ass out of it.
I understand that you’re saying that to accept ownership of the problem. I had a little conflict there. I was already accepting ownership and I knew I had a problem because if I didn’t have a problem, the thought of quitting wouldn’t have scared me to death. The second thing that scared me was I did not want to get left out of the party. I still want to go to the party.
I think you still go to the party.
I still do. When I quit, I said, “I don’t want to run away from alcohol. I don’t want to run away from people who smoke or are smoking. I don’t want to walk around the smoking area. I’m going to walk right through the middle of it. I want to not want it anymore.” I put a bottle of Jim Beam on my nightstand right next to a half pack of cigarettes. Every morning when I woke up, I flipped off the Jim Beam and told him, “I own this crap right here. This is all mine.” I flipped off the cigarettes with the other hand and said, “I own this crap. You don’t have any say in it if I don’t want you to.” I did that for 30 days.
Our personal journeys are personal to us. It takes what it takes.
If someone is having success with AA, I’m not saying I owned it. I personally had a problem.
I have a question for you. Who has been the most influential mentor for you? I can tell you’re very self-supporting and self-sufficient, but who has mentored you in a way that has been impactful and positive in your life?
It’s different people at different times because there are different stages, but there have been people along the way. There was a successful businessman who was a POW and got captured in the Bay of Pigs when he went from America to fight with Cuba, and Kennedy forgot to send the planes. He was POW for two years and they did horrible things to him every day. He came over to this country with a t-shirt and jeans. They gave him a toothbrush, a $10 bill and a place to live for 30 days, and he became a multi-multimillionaire.
I learned from him all the time I was around him. I asked a lot of questions. I try not to be annoying. I also try to give back, so I’m not just taking. I might not even be able to help them because they are so much smarter than me. I can’t help them with any knowledge, so I’ll go mow your grass. I don’t know what, but I’ll give something back to you.
I had a good father. He didn’t help me, but he helped me in toughness and mental discipline. He was a Marine and a football player. These guys pushed through the pain. It’s a double-edged sword because sometimes, you’re ignoring pain or you’re not letting anybody know you’re hurting because you would be a wussy. There’s a fine line right there. I had to learn when it was okay to cry or okay to break down in a place and time. It was okay and I didn’t have to hold it all in all the time.
Who mentors you now? Who do you go to? I’m curious.
I spent two years with The Multipliers with those 50 men.
That’s where you gained a life-changing experience, wasn’t it?
No doubt. A lot of the people that go to a mentorship stay with them for 5, 10 or 15 years. I believe I go to one for a couple of years. After I get what I get from it, I switch to another facet that I want to fix or that I want to work on. I went to this one for a very specific reason and I got what I went there for. The one before that, I was trying to back myself out of the business to where I could watch a business work without me working in it and I did that. Once I accomplished whatever I went there for, I moved to another one that had a different set of goals. I love those guys and I’m going to miss a lot of those guys, but my job there was done. They did for me and I did for them what we were supposed to do. I accomplished it. I don’t know where I’m going right this minute, but I will have something shortly.
The coaching industry is very much like that. I’ve had different mentors throughout my entire life. My first business mentor came to me. I don’t know if I want to share this story, but I feel like I have to share it now. It’s interesting. How I got into the situation of being trafficked was I would date very normal powerful guys in the business, but I always had an affinity for bad boys. I loved a drug dealer, but my dad was a criminal attorney. I was around different morals growing up. He’s a really good guy. I’d go to dinner with five men three nights a week growing up. I was around different people.
Long story short, I broke up with a guy that owned a snowboarding business, met a man that had been turning women out into prostitution for well over a decade. I got a DUI and got evicted. Within two weeks of meeting him, he was like, “I’ll help you. No worries.” He grew on me. He was like, “I’ll be your boyfriend.” He brought beautiful women around me that had all of these diamonds. They’re masters at what they do. When you start to find out about human trafficking, it’s grooming a young woman for that lifestyle. When people are like, “How did you get involved in that?” You have to understand the dynamics and dichotomy around that.
If you or another woman is being trafficked, find one safe person. Women who are being trafficked are always told that nobody wants them, and that's a lie. Share on X
Once I agreed to do that, the very next day, he had me on an airplane away from everyone I knew and off to the East Coast. That man almost beat me to death in a shower in Las Vegas. I had to run home with the only clothes in my bag. When I got home, I had made so much money. I was like, “I’m great in sales.” I’d never made that much money ever. It was a lot. I called somebody that I knew that used to be a professional snowboarder and made a lot of money in stocks and real estate. I said, “I’m going to start a prostitution service in my hometown. I want you to invest.” That was my game plan because that was the only avenue that I sought to make a lot of money.
I didn’t know that my mentor knew my whole story. He said, “Give me six months if you want to do this still, but you got to read every book that I tell you to read, we’ll talk about me investing.” He had me read Think and Grow Rich, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and all of these different personal development books and that changed the trajectory of my mentorship. I’ve had different mentors through the years.
What a great friend.
That person’s like a brother to me. I have a bond with that person that I will never not have. His name is Travis. I would not have Travis mentor me now. I’m saying there are different mentors around different times and I also wanted to share a little bit of backstory of how all that came about.
I have 3 or 4 different ideas and I hope I don’t lose them all. One of them is probably the most important for humanity, so I’m going to ask that one first. What can you say to someone who’s being trafficked and needs to get out?
Find one safe person. There are different services and online groups. What happened for me was my family got educated on how to bring someone home, but let’s say you’re working in the streets and you want to get out. I would go to a church and find a Facebook group. There are different Facebook survivor groups. There are a lot of different areas and find one safe person. It takes the willingness to say, “I would like to leave.” What women that are being trafficked don’t understand is they’re told that nobody wants them, they’ll be right back, and there are no resources. That’s a lie.
There’s an amazing book called The Body Keeps the Score. You would probably love it. He talks to different POWs and people that have been sexually abused. What happens is we store trauma in our body. That’s where our body feels familiar. This is why I do breathwork with people. It’s not getting them out. This was the problem with me. It was preventing that. I’m showing them their worthiness of not going and finding another pimp or another person. Just because I left that situation, I would then go and marry a normal-ish guy who was not a very nice person or date executives in big companies.
I would always default. I would go find my boyfriend before I got sober. He was in prison for 25 years. He was a huge drug trafficker in the cartel. He got out and did the same thing. That was my default programming until I could learn to heal my nervous system and move that trauma out of my body. Find a safe person, then start to find some somatic therapies so that you can get safe in your body and you understand what it’s like to be around people that are safe.
I can tell you’re passionate about this and I can tell it still hurts you so I want to thank you very much for being honest and vulnerable. More important than anything else, I hope people come here and find the answer to their problems. I’ve never talked about this before. I’m glad that we are because somewhere, someone is going to read this episode and you’re probably going to move them out of where they’re at.
They can talk to me. You can find me online. You can always reach out to me. I have a ton of resources around that stuff.
It’s a huge problem. In my real estate career, I’ve had chances to buy strip clubs. I could have rented it for a fortune because you can only get so many licenses for strip clubs in an area around here. If you own one, you won the Willy Wonka golden ticket. I didn’t want to be part of that. I didn’t care. I didn’t even want to support it at all, and I could have made a fortune on the places. I didn’t even want to buy them and resell them to anybody because somehow that crap would still stink me up. I don’t want to be part of it. I’ve been blessed in that way. No one’s perfect but I try. I try to be a better mark on the world than the worst mark. I’m not saying I always get it right but I try hard. Let’s talk about how to get a hold of you.
Instagram is the best way to get in touch with me. It’s @Sophie.Jones.Wright. You can also go to my website, SophieJonesSacredCoaching.com, and then why we pushed to have this episode so early is I am doing a six-week personal development journey starting at the end of March 2022. Mitch, I think you’d be a great candidate for it. It’s called Unlock Your Exceptional Life. You do breathwork each week with me, but we’re going to be doing some honest journaling and self-reflection.
It’s going to be an honest group of people, probably like that mastermind. The thing is if people are living their truth, then it is making the world a better place. If you’re living in your gifts and being honest about who you are, it took me a long time to get that, that’s giving other people permission to do the same. That’s what we’re going to do in this six-week journey. That’s how you can work with me. You can also work with me in other ways and you’ll find that on my website, one-on-one and different things like that.
I want everyone to go to 1000Houses.com/Sophie. Get over there. Check it out. I’d like to thank you for taking the time.
Thank you for asking me.
I didn’t give you much reason to be on, but I’m glad you answered because I was hoping like, “Maybe she’ll look at my show and see if she feels comfortable.” I thought you’ve done a lot. You’ve been through a lot. You could tell that you had a lot of experiences and that you’re willing to share them. I was hoping you’d share them with the audience and I’m glad you did.
Thank you for asking me to be on. I’m so grateful to have met you and be a part of it.
We’ll probably talk for a couple of days and never take a breath.
I feel you and I could talk for a long time.
We just scratched the surface. Maybe one time, we are going to hone it down to just the breathwork and talk 15 or 30 minutes about that. I wanted to get to know you on this one because I didn’t know the width of everything. We’ll do the next one on breathwork.
You and I will do a breathwork session together, and then we can come back on so that you can talk from a place of having done it. We’ll talk about it in the future.
I’m fixing to go to a breathwork class. I don’t even know what to expect, but I’m going to go to a breathwork class. I’d like to thank Sophie Wright for being with us. We’ve covered a lot of ground. We are going to do something again in the realms of breathwork. I would also like to thank LiveComm.com. It’s all about lead generation, cell phone capture and texting, and how to increase your business. Who doesn’t want the cell phone number of everyone that called their billboard or their ad? Go there on the homepage, LiveComm.com, and watch the videos. I’ll show you how I reduce my days on market to four days. I don’t ever put a sign in the yard of my house. There are no more signs. It will show you how that works. We’re out of here. Bye.
Important Links
- 1000Houses.com/Sophie BreathWork Circle
- https://SophieJonesSacredCoaching.com/
- Tax Free Future Consultation 1000Houses.com/TFF
- 1000Houses.com/Livecomm
- Get 100 Pages Free 1000Houses.com/100
- Coaching with Mitch 1000Houses.com/Coaching
About Sophie Jones-Wright
Sophie Jones-Wright, a serial entrepreneur with an inspiring story.
In her early twenties, she was a victim of human trafficking. A man found her at her lowest point and promised to help her. Once he gained her trust, he took her away from everyone she knew and abused her. She ended up running for her life, and that landed her home in her mom’s basement. She was at a giant crossroads and knew she was born for more.
Within a few months of her coming home, her first business mentor came into her life. He suggested she read personal development books and get her real estate license. She was 23, and after being home for a little over a year, she hired my first business coach.
The rest was history. She has since started and built four six-figure real estate businesses all over the United States. In 2018 she was burnt out and ready to make another change. She faced the fact that real estate was no longer her passion, and started searching for something new.
The universe put another mentor in her life, and she found breathwork. This practice allowed her to heal years of trauma, learn to trust herself, and directed her to become the leader she is today.
She opened her coaching business in 2020, and she crossed the six-figure mark again in her first year. She is passionate about helping others build success from the inside out.
Today she helps high-achieving entrepreneurs stay human while scaling to six and multiple six figures. She guides her clients using aligned business strategy, sales, systems, and breathwork to help them hit new levels of success.
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