BLIND BILLIONAIRE Sean Callagy Reveals The Secret to Get People to Say YES to You

1. SCSean Callagy0:00

   I'm on the verge of becoming the first blind billion-dollar founder in the history of planet Earth.

2. JSJay Shetty0:05

   What do you wish people knew about making money?

3. SCSean Callagy0:07

   If nobody told me this truth, I'd be blind and broke. Value and money are all about [beep] . Period.

4. JSJay Shetty0:17

   Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Today, I am joined by Sean Callagy, entrepreneur, speaker, and the founder of Unblinded, a company that has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, leaders, and professionals transform the way they communicate, influence, and connect with others. Today, we're breaking down how to read people, build trust faster, and develop the kind of presence that can change your career, your relationships, and your life. Please welcome to On Purpose, Sean Callagy. Sean, it is so great to have you here in the studio. Thank you for being here.

5. SCSean Callagy0:57

   Well, Jay, you're too kind. It's an honor and privilege to be in your space, everything you've created. Thank you for having me here today.

6. JSJay Shetty1:03

   Sean, I feel like my audience and I have so much to learn from you, and I feel there are so many areas we could begin. And when I was preparing for this interview, I was thinking I could go in a million different ways. But where I want to start is simple, but I believe it's poignant. How do you define success?

7. SCSean Callagy1:20

   I define success from a place of freedom, unblindedness, with a lack of human constraint. So simply put, when people understand the truth, the relevant truth for their life journey, they make conscious free decisions not polluted by the limiting beliefs and fears of all the people who've been around them since birth, and they decide to pursue that and dynamically recreate it as life shifts and changes, and they live as close to what they decide to live as possible. That is how I define success.

8. JSJay Shetty1:53

   And your mission, you used the word there, your mission is to help the world become unblinded. What does that mean?

9. SCSean Callagy2:00

   To see what people don't see about the exponential acceleration of the more they desire. People would like more abundance, more abundance in their finances, more abundance in their time, and scaling and leverage with integrity, and of course, more leverage in their magic. And I use magic for everything besides money and time. Purpose, fulfillment, gratitude, contribution, all the things that are higher vibrational ways that people can feel better about themselves and support others in doing the same.

10. JSJay Shetty2:32

    Do you really believe that the reason why people are not successful, happy, abundant, joyful, fill in the blank, is because they have limiting beliefs about what they can achieve?

11. SCSean Callagy2:45

    I do. People have enormous limiting beliefs, and they're often hidden. I think people don't know how to.

12. JSJay Shetty2:53

    What is that how to?

13. SCSean Callagy2:54

    The how to is always relevant to the outcome people desire, making that conscious unblinded choice towards it. But if we're in a capitalist structure like the United States of America, I know you have listeners from all around the world, but if people are in a place of capitalism where money has some degree of relevance, right? We create purchasing power for food, for shelter, for the beautiful home you enjoy here, and so many of your listeners either have or desire to have. Money has relevance, right? So what I tell people all the time is, I believe that there's a hierarchy of how we pursue the more we desire, and people get incredibly confused about that hierarchy. So I often talk to people about this first limiting belief, which is that money requires stress, friction, and suffering on an enduring basis. My discovery of all of this was because I was gonna go blind and be broke, and I didn't know how to not be blind and broke, like all the people in my family with this hereditary eye disease. Seventy-five percent of people like me are unemployed, blind people, to put into a simple headline. I believe that people first have to discover this truth, that to create their greatest degree of freedom is because you have lived this truth. You have achieved the only human attainable superpower, and it's the ability to, with integrity, influence other human beings to say yes. And yes is in a sale. It's not marketing. It's not just management or leadership. Everything is on the other side of, for human beings, of yeses, but yeses that should happen, not yeses that we manipu- manipulate and pressure. And once human beings realize that this is the freedom of opportunity of creation from every spiritual leader to political leader to business leader to sports coach and every happy family is because yeses happen together. And once people realize that the creation of yes and its mastery is at the center of all that will help us live on our greatest purpose and why, uh, then we begin the journey.

14. JSJay Shetty4:55

    I want to talk about your journey, Sean, in a moment because I can't even begin to tell you how moved I am learning about it, understanding it, meeting you today. But what do you think is holding most people back from the life that you're talking about? What's restricting them? What are they getting wrong?

15. SCSean Callagy5:11

    It's first because we are, we are provided so many conflicting messages from birth. I grew up in a household that didn't have resources. My parents were divorced when I was one year old. My mom pushed a hot dog cart in Jersey City, New Jersey, for a while to make a living. And I was told by my beautiful grandparents, including my blind grandfather with my same eye condition, that someday I'd be a doctor. Uh, that was their placeholder for being successful, right? They didn't understand what success was, but doctors were successful because they had some money and resources. So I was told I would be a doctor someday. But at the same time, I was told by my grandparents to have money, you had to be a bad person. So I, like most people, were given conflicting messages continuously. I went to Catholic grammar school, and I was told, uh, children are seen, not heard. We were told to shut up and sit down, and we were told so many things that would limit us over time that couldn't help but play out into our future. Then, as a high school athlete, I was blessed and privileged with great leadership.And these were great leaders that taught us how to win and be a team. But what we weren't taught is how to translate those principles into our adult life of freedom, abundance, joy, and happiness. So why I believe, to answer your question directly, that so many people struggle, Jay, is because they're provided massive amounts of conflicting messages that are imprecise, generalized, and often false that doesn't help them understand how to have a beautiful, abundant, happy, integris life in a capitalist structure.

16. JSJay Shetty6:51

    It's fascinating how people from different walks of life can have very similar messages, even though those messages are very gated. So I like you, I often joke that I had three options growing up, either to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a failure.

17. SCSean Callagy7:06

    [laughs]

18. JSJay Shetty7:06

    Uh, that's what my parents and family had put before me. I chose the third option. I did not become a doctor or a lawyer. Uh, so you did better than me on, on that from, from my parents' perspective, uh, building what you've built. And then also, on the other side of it, I was also told that people who have money are bad. And when we'd see someone who had money, whether it was a family friend or someone's home that we visited, it would always be that they did something dodgy to get that.

19. SCSean Callagy7:32

    Mm.

20. JSJay Shetty7:33

    Or that there was something, you know, untoward about how they processed money in their lives. And that planted some really deep seeds in me, and I think all of us have a relationship with money, success, value, purpose, mission, expectation that comes from that. How did you begin to unravel and pick at those early definitions of success, wealth, value for yourself, and then how do you teach others to do that?

21. SCSean Callagy8:01

    Thank you for this question because it brought tears to my eyes because I easily couldn't have found that truth. Because I was-- it was 1997, twenty-seven years old. I didn't become an attorney to be rich. I became an attorney to not go blind and be broke. So I applaud your courage in resisting what your parents shared. I didn't have any type of leadership like that or a thought or some incredible speaker like you discovered who, who brought you down a different pathway. I just had, okay, doctor or a lawyer 'cause I don't wanna be broke. So I became an attorney, and I won the game of law school because I discovered how to win it. I was very good at figuring out from my sports background h-how is this game structured, and how do you play it? How do you win it with integrity? So I got a big job at a big law firm, and I realized this was not gonna create financial abundance. In the first few months, I became incredibly depressed. I was unbelievably scared, and I discovered that it was those attorneys that marketed and generated business that had freedom, and I had such a deep negative association to anything marketing and selling. So I was gonna quit. I was gonna become a high school baseball coach and football coach, do something my heart and soul knew could be good because I couldn't see how marketing and selling could be good. I had a miracle happen. I went to my chiropractor, who was a mentor of mine, told him I was gonna quit. He said, "Before you do, read Anthony Robbins' book, Awaken the Giant Within."

22. JSJay Shetty9:32

    Mm-hmm.

23. SCSean Callagy9:33

    I said, "I don't know who that is."

24. JSJay Shetty9:34

    [laughs]

25. SCSean Callagy9:34

    He said, "Go get this book." And what Tony's work did for me is it permitted me to reframe meaning and asked me the question like, "Is that true? Is that always true?" He taught me that question. And I started saying, "Is it really true that marketing is bad and evil?" And I came to the conclusion that's not true at all. Because, Jay, what I had done in law school is I had began to develop my influence skillsets, and I'd also began to think about injustice and inequity and the incredible complications with our legal system and real challenges. And what I began to think is, "I'm being suppressed in this law firm of hundreds of attorneys built on a financial model that's non-integris because they are not permitting me to create the value for clients I can create. They're using me to put me in a library." You know, not, not bad people, but this is what the structure was. Said, "And quite frankly, I'm better at influence than virtually anybody in this building." I was a two-time national moot court champion in law school, and I'm like, "There's not anybody here that I'm finding that can be more persuasive and influential than I can." So I quit my job. I had no money. I was petrified. I knew nothing about business. So I began to look everywhere I possibly could, and I couldn't find answers and solutions. But I started on my credit card my own law firm at twenty-seven years old. They offered me psychological counseling at my job. My family was losing their mind. But I was committed to find out if there's a way to win the game of freedom with integrity and heart and love in a capitalist structure, and I found that there was.

26. JSJay Shetty11:11

    Talk to me about when you first discovered your condition and learned about it and how it slowly started to affect your life in such a deep way.

27. SCSean Callagy11:21

    Yeah. Seventeen years old, I'm gonna get my license. All I care about is getting my [chuckles] driver's license. My mom knows I'm going blind since I'm five. Uh, she tells me at seventeen, so she kept this a secret for twelve years. And I was a, again, a peak performance athlete in high school in baseball, football, wrestling. I had no idea. And truth, she didn't want me to get my driver's license, so she couldn't have gifted me with a better time to tell me 'cause I wasn't devastated. All I wanted was my license. So I wasn't focused on the fact that I'm gonna eventually go blind. I was focused on, how do I convince my mother and prove to her that I'm safe enough to get my license? Um, I did. So I got my license at seventeen, and it wasn't anything that serious yet. And as I went through the next decade of my life, it took my baseball career from me. It didn't allow me to go on to play professionally, and it slowly eroded. But it was a, a slow thief. They say retinitis pigmentosa is this, uh, thief that almost apologizes for what it's taking of your vision. I had the ability to read pretty finely until my mid-thirties. Um, I stopped driving, uh, around forty. I stopped being able to read around forty-two. I'm fifty-six now. So I was really functionally blind, unable to watch television by forty-three, forty-five. Uh, but each of these were just slowly being taken over time, so it gave me this unbelievable privilege of adjusting.At each stage, and also gave me the gift of massive urgency to get out ahead of this, so I could be sitting somewhere like I am right now with you, uh, using my voice and my influence and my communication skill sets and having built a team, um, so I wouldn't be dependent upon things I could no longer do.

28. JSJay Shetty13:05

    When I hear you, I hear so much gratitude and positivity and optimism-

29. SCSean Callagy13:09

    Yeah

30. JSJay Shetty13:09

    ... when I see you on stage of... If anyone's not seen Sean on stage, go on to YouTube right now and literally type in Sean Callagy, and-

Episode duration: 1:34:13