A walk on the boardwalk alongside the Hotel del Coronado is a vacation activity for tourists. For locals like John Polo, who is a life coach and motivational speaker, it’s a reminder of how good life can be.
“I try to remind myself every day that I live in my paradise, and I’ve waited a long time to get here,” John says. As a newcomer to town, he is fulfilling a dream that started in Chicago seven years prior. But there was a time before there was room for dreams. There was a time when John was living a nightmare.
John & Michelle
John met his wife Michelle in high school. “We lived in the same town, right outside of Chicago, but we weren’t really friends. We didn’t really know each other. We both moved outside of that town, and we’d go back to town to hang out with friends. That’s how we became friends. I developed a crush on her, asked her out a few months later. We dated for a year.” John laughs as he admits, “She broke my heart, and we lost contact for seven years.”
He was surprised to find an email from her out of the blue seven years later. John’s dad had passed away, and she reached out to extend her condolences. “She would later tell me that she was Facebook stalking me. That’s how she found out about my dad. We talked for a whole year, and then we finally saw each other after a year. At that time, she had a four-year-old daughter, Emma.” John embraced the role as a male figure for Emma, eventually becoming a stepfather. Everything was working out for John until the diagnosis came that would shatter everything.
Cruelty of Cancer
“We were together for two and a half years as adults before Michelle got sick. She was diagnosed with cancer, and then she fought for another two and a half years. We were together for five years before her death.”
Michelle is more than a line in John’s story. She was a vibrant woman who changed John’s life. “She had a really, really, really difficult life before the cancer. When we found each other as adults, it was the first time that either of us had really found happiness. Then it got snatched from us, in an instant.” He pauses and continues, “She remained the kindest person I’ve ever known, even through the horrible cancer that she had. She was one of those people who was funny without trying to be – I have to try be funny. She never had a ‘why me?’ mentality, even though we got the bad end of the stick. She grew up without having the type of role models you would want as a parent, and yet she was the best mom I’ve ever known.”
Grief & Fatherhood
When Michelle passed, Emma was nine. John discusses what it was like being a parent while navigating his own grief.
“I never hid my grief from Emma. She saw me during really bad moments. She saw the pain, and looking back, I’m actually happy that I did that. It gave her the unspoken okay to be in pain and to also grieve. She knew she didn’t have to hide it; we could grieve together. We could pick each other up, support each other, and show each other love. This is something I talk about with clients as well. It’s an unspoken way to show your kid that you can get back up, and it’s an unspoken way to teach resilience. I had no idea what I was doing when Michelle passed. I had no idea how to tackle the grief of a nine-year-old. I really let her grief come to me. One of the things I learned, especially with young kids, is you can’t force it upon them. You can’t say, ‘let’s sit down and talk about mom.’ You really need to let them come to it in their own time. I think that’s the most powerful way.”
A Mother’s Eternal Love
When asked if there was one thing he would want Emma to know, John explained, “Emma was the first good thing to ever really happen to Michelle in her life. I would just want to tell her, ‘You will never have any idea how much your mother loved you, it’s beyond.’ I would reinforce that. I think that, unfortunately, when kids lose a parent at that age, it’s really hard for them to have memories. I lost my dad when I was 24. I have the memories. But memories are something Emma struggles with, so I think I would reinforce the type of love her mom had for her.”
Letting Grief Guide John to Positivity
“A month after Michelle passed, I was going stir crazy. I had no idea what to do with myself, and a friend suggested I start a blog. I didn’t know how to do that. I Googled ‘how to start a blog.’ Then, I started one with a matching Facebook page where I would talk about my grief and share my journey.
“I recognized that I was a good writer. I never liked writing before. Never had any interest in it, really. People started telling me, maybe about a year in, that I should really write a book. I started working on that, and I put my first book out about 18 months after she passed. That was the same time that I got my first speaking opportunity in San Diego.”
While it seemed like a path had formed for John, he was still unsure of what direction to take. “My first book was coming out. I gave my first workshop on grief, and to be honest, I still didn’t really love it. I went home, and people started asking me, ‘Hey, would you consider life coaching?’ So, I started the life coaching journey. When I started it, I was almost homeless. I had a business with my aunt that we ran for over a decade, and it suddenly went under. There was no money coming in. My house was for sale, but wouldn’t sell. I had a couple thousand dollars to my name. I remember sitting on the couch with my mom, and she asked, ‘What are you going to do? I can get you a job with your godfather.’ I told her that I didn’t want to sit behind the desk my whole life.”
Steering His Life
John decided to go all in on writing, coaching, and speaking. “It went crazy overnight. It went from absolutely nothing to a successful business in two months. That’s what I did for about seven years.”
As a self-described introvert, John said that it took many years to start enjoying public speaking, which has since become his passion. After presenting various keynotes, he notes that a common message is that anyone can rebuild. “As much stress and chaos and even cruelty and hate are in this world, this world can also be a really beautiful place. My philosophy for my life now, other than wanting to help as many people as possible, is to live the best life for the rest of my life. That’s my biggest message – hope. For so long, I didn’t want to be here. So, for me to now say I love my life, my hope is that people will see that good things can happen too, and you can rebuild yourself and your life.”
Coronado Kind – August 28, 2025
John is hosting a speech on kindness at the Coronado Island Marriott on August 28. He promises this is not a cooking-cutter speech. “We’re not going to talk about rainbows and butterflies. It’s pretty intense because my journey to kindness began when my wife was dying. I was so angry and bitter, and I came very close to staying there for the rest of my life.”
He advises, “The speech is quite intense, but my hope is that attendees walk away feeling both inspired and empowered to not only step into kindness every day, but also to recognize the power they have. I think a lot of people feel very powerless in this human experience in a lot of different ways. We have power in how we treat people, what we say to them, and the way we show up every day. So, I’m hoping that they leave empowered to go out there and try to make it a finer world.”
John truly believes that most people could benefit from attending the free event. “Cruelty breeds more cruelty, and hate breeds more hate. If there’s someone who looks at the world and feels hopeless because people are not always kind, I think this speech would really speak to them. You don’t have to wait for somebody else to change things. We can change things.”
Internal Kindness
John starts sharing his personal struggle with internal kindness. “I was always so mean to myself. I had a really horrible relationship with myself most of my life. About eight months after Michelle passed, I was on the floor sobbing, and I realized in that moment, I realized that I had always taken care of everyone else since I was twelve years old. I was essentially a caretaker for my mom, then for my dad, then for Michelle, and finally for my daughter. I realized that I had to start taking care of myself the way I had taken care of everyone else.”
He continues, “It didn’t all hit me in that moment, but part of my journey was realizing how mean to myself I was and that it got me nowhere. As a society, we speak to ourselves in ways that we would never speak to someone we love, to a colleague, to a neighbor, or to a stranger. We even speak to ourselves in ways that we wouldn’t speak to someone that we strongly dislike or hate. Part of [the kindness process] is becoming aware and then doing the work to start speaking to yourself with respect. That’s my first thing. If you have a lifetime of being mean to yourself, we don’t need to get you to love yourself overnight. But we can start by speaking to ourselves with respect, and then eventually, we can become our own biggest cheerleader.”
Salon On First
While John offers various workshops and keynotes, he says that the ones about kindness and inner dialogue are two that are nearest and dearest to his heart. In a serendipitous turn of events, John shares, “The day I was going to sit down and start getting the speech about kindness into the world, that is the day that I saw The Coronado Times article about Marilyn [Klisser] and her mission for loneliness. I reached out to her and told her what I do. She got back to me immediately, and we sent up the kindness speech at her salon [Salon On First]. That was the first time I ever gave the speech. Kindness is huge to me.”
Coronado Dreams
During John’s visit to San Diego for a widower conference, he says that it was the first time in his life that he felt like he had found his people and his community. “The conference was from Thursday to Sunday, and at the conference, I met friends and connected with all these people. I felt like I found community, for the first time in forever, I didn’t feel lonely.”
He continues, “After the conference ended, a couple of us who became really close extended our trip. We went on Monday to Pacific Beach – at the time, I didn’t even know we were in Pacific Beach – and I remember this was one of the defining moments in my life. I’m eating fish tacos and having a drink with these new friends after this amazing weekend, and I no longer feel all alone in the world. I’m being funny, and I’m making other people laugh, and I’m laughing, for the first time, really, since my wife was diagnosed with cancer. I remember looking at all these people rollerblading and riding their bikes and having the time of their lives on this beautiful afternoon where the sun is shining.”
“It hit me in that moment, life could be more than cancer and grief and pain, and that was really the moment where I wanted to live again.”
Planning for the Future
John went back every year to speak at the widowers’ conference. Two years later at the conference, someone asked him to go to the Del to get ice cream. “That started my love affair with Coronado.”
He made a plan that as soon as his daughter Emma turned eighteen, he would move to Coronado. He recalls having a countdown on his phone set for the day, five years out. “I was out shoveling snow in two degrees, and to center myself, I’d be like, ‘okay, 922 more days, or whatever it was.’”
When John met his current fiancée, Ali, four years ago, he told her that he would be moving to Coronado. He brought her to Coronado, and she fell in love. John emphasizes that he enjoyed speaking at Salon on First, as it ties into his message about community combating loneliness. “We feel so much a part of the community here. You always have the opportunity to build community, and it’s not necessarily going to work the first time you try. But keep at it. You can peel away that loneliness.”
John asked Ali to marry him the year before they moved to Coronado, the day after he gave his first keynote speech in 2023. He asked her on Coronado Beach. On making their move out west, John says, “Ali and I sold our cars before moving here. Our family and friends thought we were crazy but we just kept telling them how Coronado is completely walkable. Plus I have multiple sclerosis so walking is really good for me. So we walk everywhere, every day.”
John hopes Emma will also join them in Coronado one day, but for now, she is a practicing cosmetologist in Illinois. “She comes to visit. I’m hoping one day she’ll come live out here, but I want her to do her own thing as well.”
Say Hi to John
John and Ali can often be found walking by the Hotel del Coronado or enjoying a bite at Parakeet Café. You can follow him on Instagram, check out his website John Polo, read his books, or attend his upcoming free talk Coronado KIND at the Coronado Island Marriott. RSVP to [email protected].
The Coronado Times welcomes ‘Meet Your Neighbor’ suggestions from our readers of locals to profile. Email your nomination here.
