The Queen of her Empire, Elena Cardone has designed, constructed and protected a life outside of the ordinary. She has inspired a legion of followers to create their own empires – lives that are truly fulfilling and beyond the average. She counts her current job as her most important one – Chief Family Officer, where she is a loving mother, fierce wife and loyal friend.

She began her career in Hollywood and soon became a successful model and actress of TV and film fame. A lifelong competitive sport shooter, and now wife, mother, author, business woman, empire builder, event producer, mentor, public speaker and visionary. She is the Author of the Best Selling Book “Build An Empire : How to Have it All” she is the executive producer of the massively successful events that include 10X ladies, Operation 10x badass, Build an Empire Mastermind and her own show, “Women In Power”.

Drawing upon her vast experience, Elena has developed her own curriculum to assist aspiring empire builders. In her Build an Empire course, she lays the groundwork for both men and women as she trains them how to create, grow and defend an extraordinary career and marriage. Additionally she mentors thousands of women with personal one-to-one coaching sessions.

Elena’s most recent endeavor has been to partner with ExP Realty. She is now a licensed realtor who plans on building the largest real estate team across the globe helping hundreds of thousands create generational wealth through real estate powered by EXP. She’s been happily married to Grant Cardone since 2004 (July 4th to be exact – and the fireworks have never stopped) and lives with her husband Grant, their two daughters Sabrina and Scarlett, along with their two cats, Cash and Flow in Miami Beach. Together they have built a real estate portfolio of over $5.5 Billion. Born in Louisiana from a middle class home, Elena’s dreams and visions were expanding at a young age. She always knew she was meant for more for herself, and for her future family, and today she is the living embodiment of her deepest desires.

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Walk us through your journey to enlightenment.

The biggest internal shift happened when I realized and had that cognition that I’m a spiritual being. I separated myself from my body, versus me as a spiritual being. Because before, I thought I was a body. I identified with this body. I thought this is who I am, these are the circumstances, and this is my life. I believed that I was a victim of whatever happened to me in this physical universe. I had a realization that I am a spiritual being that inhabits a body, or operates a body. And then I became interested in how I could explore that and what I could do as a spiritual being.

This happened back in 2000. It was the first time I went to the Church of Scientology. I did a Success Through Communication course. I was an actress at the time. I did this one basic little course that was, I don’t know, $50. From that, I was becoming a better actress. Then I took this other course called The Tone Scale. I had always thought of tones as cheerful, happy, sad, or depressed, and that was it. But I didn’t realize that there’s a whole range of tones, from serenity of beingness to games, enthusiasm, and interest, mild interest, covert hostility, anxiety, anger, fear, terror, apathy, and body death. There are all these ranges. It blew my mind. It gave me such a bigger range in my acting career, and I started booking all of these jobs.

Those small little courses that I was taking ended up being more powerful than my acting classes because I was understanding human nature and the mind. Then I read the books The Fundamentals of Thought and The New Slant on Life, and that’s when I realized there is a mind, a body, and a spirit. The mind is separate from the body. I always thought the mind was the brain, but the brain is the body. What is controlling the mind? That changed my whole perspective on everything and I started to look at life differently. I realized that I could actually create my life. I could actually manifest. The word “manifest” means “to make appear” in the physical universe. Manifest doesn’t mean keeping it in your head. If it doesn’t materialize in the physical universe, it has not manifested. It has to be viewable for sight. It has to show up in the physical universe.

Spiritual beings don’t need to use the physical universe in order to create something. I was like, wow, now my spirit can use my body as a tool to go take the actions necessary in the physical universe — because that’s the game I’m playing on planet Earth. So now on planet Earth, I get to use my body to take more courses, learn about finance, how to have a relationship, and how to rear children. I have to do the actions and then make the thing that I want the most manifest itself. And it is a game. Before, I was playing the not-know, not-understand game. I was playing, “I’m a victim.” I was playing, “I don’t have money.” “Bad things happen to me.” “Men cheat on me.” “Men hold me back.” That was a game I was playing. I was unknowingly creating that game.

But then I shifted my mind. As a spiritual being, I made a conscious decision. This is why I say, you either are creating or destroying your empire with every decision that you make. When I made a conscious decision to actively create my life, boom, it manifested. The life that I have right now, the havingness, these are my trophies of life. Those are very important because they reaffirm my wins. I don’t need those things to make me me. I know who I am. I know who I am as a spiritual being. I know my honor, my integrity, my grip, my knowledge. None of that can get taken away. People ask me all the time, “What would you do if all of your money was taken away?” You can’t take me as a spiritual being, nobody can. You can hurt my body, you can make me cry, you can kill my body. That is not me. I am a spiritual being. They are two separate things. You cannot hurt me, as a spiritual being. The life that people see now with the planes and the helicopters and my homes and my travel, is a manifestation of decisions and actions that I made in 2008. In 2008, I decided that I was getting on the same page as my husband and we were going to build an empire. I knew exactly what our life was going to look like. I was pregnant with our first child, the economy collapsed, and we were on the verge of losing everything financially. My life looked nothing like this. To have a vision and a goal of this magnitude in 2008 was unbelievable. 

I’ll tell you the biggest secret that no one is talking about, and again, it’s what I learned in Scientology. And it’s not about religion, because I’m also a Catholic, I’m not disavowed. Scientology is nondenominational, you can be from any religion. What’s true for you is true for you. This is the big secret. I stopped living from the past into the present. The past kept telling me, “Oh, that’s ridiculous.” That’s not going to work.” “What makes you think you can do it?” “You’ve never done it before.” “You’re on the verge of losing everything now.” “You came from so and so.” When is enough going to be enough?” “You’re not supposed to have that.” “Money is for the wealthy class.” “You can’t get in that class.” “You’ll disown your people.” “You’ll be looked at as a traitor if you get there.” I had all of that going on.

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I said to myself, “I’m disconnecting from my past. It ends today.” And I shut it off. 

I used my future to pull me into the future. I said, “Who am I in the future? Am I confident and strong? Do I understand money and finances? How do I become the person that I want to be?” First of all, I wore a metaphorical hat. If you’re a policeman you wear a policeman’s hat because that indicates who you are. I wore the hat of a powerful leader, women’s rights activist, and billionaire. I was ridiculous at the time, but I wore the hat. I said, “Don’t spend money that you don’t have.” Because billionaires don’t do that. They’re not stupid with money. I have spent hundreds of hours on courses, educating myself. I’ve gone through all of the programs. I’ve studied people. I’ve taken my spirituality to a whole other level. Those actions have allowed me to have what I wanted and become the person that I am.

So, it’s Be, Do, and Have. Be — wear the hat of who you want to be. Do. And then you will have. Most people have it inverted. They think you have to have it. “Once I’m a movie star, then I can get on the phone and call people.” “Once I’m a billionaire, then I won’t be afraid if someone tells me no on the phone.” It’s wrong. That’s inverted. That’s not once you have it, you’re never going to get it. Be it. Be the person. Let’s say you wanted a job or a client and you didn’t get it. If you wear the hat as a billionaire, you would go, “Okay, how can I follow up?” Or, “How can I create more opportunities?” “How can I learn from that? My pipeline wasn’t full enough.” 

You keep the hat on as that billionaire. It softens the blow of the depression of the rejections. If you were really a billionaire, you would know for sure that in 10 years you were going to have that, so you really wouldn’t care if that person told you no. That’s the conviction that you have to have in yourself. I have a problem with people who are like, “Think it and you’ll manifest it.” They forget to tell you this biggest action, which is the Do.

Life is a game. You have to have a barrier or you’re not going to get happiness. If everything was easy and you could have everything that you wanted right now, you’d be bored. There’s no game in that. Would you want to play chess with yourself? Would you want to play football with yourself if you were the only team and there was no opposition? Every time you went on the field you would score. How boring would that be? You would not want to play that game. Life is going to put enough stuff there for me. I understand I’m playing a game. I need these barriers and challenges otherwise, I’m not going to be able to attain happiness when I win the Super Bowl ring of life — which took a whole entire season and a whole team. No one builds an empire alone.

Photography by Denice Duff

Styled by Michael Kors

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