Hi,
I’m Rhonda
An International Speaker, Best Selling Author, Online Brand Strategist, loving Momma to Hanalei, committed wife to Brian. I’m ridiculously dedicated to inspiring mothers, families, & individuals to go after their dreams.
I’m a born-and-raised Detroit girl with nothing more than passion, desire, and a dream. I’m proud to have created a social conscious [Unstoppable] brand & digital empire that touches millions of people around the world.
Through my private mentorship program, world-class online training course, and best selling book in with audience in 88 countries, I help people like you turn their passions into profits, dream big, and create a life you love with meaningful action to create [Unstoppable] results.
You know, I haven’t always lived and traveled whenever or wherever I wanted. In fact, just a short 11 years ago, I was an office drone, in every sense of the word.
I would sit in traffic for hours each morning and night, arrive at work at seven in the morning, and leave at six at night. I was earning a six figure salary, but my life was empty. I’d come home to my husband, Brian, tired and unhappy. We’d pass each other in the hallway on our ways to our home office, bicker, and sometimes not speak to one another at all. It was the definition of a passionless existence, sleep walking through life.
Then one day, it all changed for me
I witnessed a women ask for an extra hour in the morning to take her baby to day care so that she could have a little extra time before she left them in the arms of a complete stranger. My BOSS said “Impossible”! If she wanted to keep her J.O.B. she would need to be on time each morning and not leave a minute early in the evening.
This crushed my heart
The idea of daycare has always been offensive to me. A child needs and deserves time with her parents, and to not suffer through the emotional, spiritual neglect of being shunned off onto a group of professional babysitters. No idea pains me more than the thought of my daughter sitting in a room full of people who don’t care about her, wondering when I’ll finally come back for her.
That’s not how children were meant to be raised, and when push came to shove I couldn’t do it. I refused to make the decision.
I quit
This was a major point of contention between Brian and me. He was a robotics engineer, and while that was a good job in a lot of ways, he’d never have been able to afford the mortgage on our house. It was a full-time position with two weeks of vacation. He barely had time to be a husband, let alone to find enough extra income to make up for my quitting. But this was beyond important to me, and I was going to make it work.
The immediate problem was income. We had a nest egg, but it wouldn’t last very long. Despite the work that’s involved, being a full-time mom doesn’t pay the bills. With just one job in the family, we were looking at some serious belt tightening. For two adults, that’d be fine. But for a child?
No. I had my cake and I was going to find a way to eat it, too
My husband made it clear, too; this was on me to fix the problem. To him, daycare was as natural and American as apple pie, and our jobs were necessary evils. But I told him that I’d find a way to change what we were doing, and I set to my research.
So I looked up work that a stay-at-home mom could do. I got involved with a group of people who taught me how to run a business and leverage the internet. The first few weeks were stressful. The nest egg was getting smaller but the bills weren’t, and I hadn’t made a single sale.
And then I did it—I’d finally made a sale. And then a lot of sales. And all at once, the name of the game was five-figure months. I still remember our first time pulling this off, making more than thirty thousand dollars, from home, in a single month. It was 2007, and my family had everything it could have ever dreamed of wanting.
Then the real estate bubble popped, and worse, we found out that one of the people we’d trusted the most was a complete fraud. We’d been working together to develop a golf course, and right as the economy soured, we found that he hadn’t been working on it at all—he’d pocketed our investment and there was no golf course. He’d vanished, and he took everything with him.
Between the exorbitant legal battle with this fraudster and the economy crashing, we lost everything. We declared bankruptcy. We had nothing. I felt like a failure. I’d been fooled, and now I was trapped. The only thing left was for my husband and I to go find jobs doing something we hated, work on projects we had no interest in furthering, and to be a family in whatever cracks in the schedule our bosses left for us.
The Only Way I Knew
to not be at the mercy of a fickle market landscape, and perhaps, a few years down the road, the victim of another bubble popping, was the security of an office building. But I’d made a vow to my little girl that I would raise her and not leave her to some set of strangers on a daycare. That vow meant everything to me, but our investments were gone, our IRA’s were gone. It was like being cornered and wondering which animal would bite you first.
What I needed to do—get a job, or maybe move back home with my parents—was the worst sort of emotional torture I could imagine. I’d tasted freedom, and I’d had the joy of being with my daughter and my husband full time. Now the world was crushing down on me, and if I didn’t go back into the cage I’d just left, it was going to pop me like a grape.
Stress has an amazing sort of sorcery.
It makes you think that when you’re pouring effort into keeping a huge house and a bunch of cars you splurged on—that when you’re managing your finances and your credit—that what you’re really doing is taking care of your family. That’s a lie. Taking care of your family is being there with them and for them. The house and all the other crap is extra. If your dream is raising a family, raise a family. Don’t be a slave to someone else because you think you need their permission to raise a family.
You can probably see where this is going. I did what any sane person would do who’d lived what I’d lived and had my realizations. I stopped putting off my dream. I knew how to make money. I knew how to talk to people—and my husband did too. The expense of keeping your family together is much lower once you realize that you don’t need the five-room house, and I took the thought a step further. I cashed out. I got rid of every material possession I owned that couldn’t fit in a travel case, and I, with my family, set off on a journey that was supposed to last two years. It has now exceeded 8+ years and doesn’t show any sign of stopping.
We left on our “Unstoppable Family” Journey in November, 2008. We started in Hanalei Bay, Kauai (my daughter’s namesake) with $23,808.27 to our name and a vision. We had no idea how our life would turn out. I did know that I never wanted to experience the shackles I had before with my daughter’s life being determined by a BOSS. We have since been to Bali, Fiji, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Italy, Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua to name a few. In fact, my daughter has more stamps on her passport than most adults and has now touched 6 continents [out of 7] and plans on seeing Antarctica this year. She has attended schools all over the world to be engulfed in the language and the cultures. At this point, she is rather fluent in Spanish and is learning new languages in each country.
I would like to close my story with this. When the Universe throws you a bad hand- something that forces you to ask yourself “Why Me” ask yourself “Why Not Me” instead. There may be a hidden [UNSTOPPABLE] life just behind it.
Let Me Help You Create Your Story
Rhonda Swan
