View the gallery
It’s hard to miss Tony Robbins. Not only is he nearly 6-foot-7 and built like a linebacker, he’s a best-selling author, life coach and business strategist, entrepreneur and global philanthropist with a booming voice and an outsize personality. His motivational seminars have helped jumpstart and support many of his loyal acolytes for decades.
Sage Robbins has a fraction of her husband’s Instagram followers—37,000 to Tony’s 7 million. But, lately, this Canadian-born speaker, philanthropist and businesswoman is moving into her own spotlight.
“I’m definitely an eternal introvert. And, of course, being an introvert, life would have it that I married Tony Robbins,” explains Sage. “I’m a private person, even though our life has had a public lens. Truthfully, I’ve been more comfortable as a support. But at this stage of my life, I feel spoken to. I feel called. I feel nudged to step forward, and it feels like guided timing.”
Sage, clearly a wise embodiment of her name, was raised in a small town on the coast of British Columbia with a brother, three sisters and foster siblings in need of temporary homes. She describes her parents as “salt of the earth.”
“I was really blessed,” says Sage of her mom and dad, who have been together for more than five decades. “They demonstrated what love looked like. They still hold hands. It’s lovely to watch them. My parents were so open-minded; we never talked about stepchildren or foster children. It was just our family.”
Sage met Tony at one of his events in Hawaii. She was working as a phlebotomist, and Tony came in to get his blood taken. There were “maybe a few hundred people in the room,” recalls Sage, “but we made eye contact. It was just one of those moments—more of a soul recognition. It just felt like the world stood still.”
“I’ve met millions of people over 47 years, and she stands out as the most unique, sincere and loving soul I’ve ever met,” says Tony. “She’s the executive producer of our entire life. I couldn’t do it without her.”
They married in 2001. They now live in Palm Beach with a 3-year-old-daughter, a late-in-life addition for both Sage, 50, and Tony, 64. (Tony has four kids and five grandchildren from previous relationships.) They had their child via surrogate after Sage suffered a series of miscarriages.
“I never imagined that we’d be where we are today,” says Sage of their marriage. “It just gets simpler and it gets more beautiful.”
For years, “I was so focused on wanting to be a mom,” she says. “I focused on it so much at one period that I missed living, and I missed being a mother to life. What really was healing for me over the years was dropping the obsession to be a mom and letting go and allowing life to surprise me.”
Adds Tony: “We wanted to wait to do this when we could be together at home. To have a 3-year-old at this stage of life is such a gift. She’s brought so much joy to our lives. It’s a beautiful season of life.”
That season began around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which slowed everyone down, including Sage and Tony, who were on the road traveling to over 100 cities about 200 days a year in 2019. “I’m grateful to not be on the road like we were at the beginning of our relationship,” says Sage. She believes her lived experience gives her more wisdom as a mother. “We have more to offer” their daughter, she says. Tony, for one, has “softened down.”
As Sage explains it, their life as a family is relatively normal and, well, Floridian. They swim, read, enjoy the sunshine, go to Publix, share stories before bed. “We do less doing and we experience more being together. We just have an appreciation for those human, ordinary moments of life,” Sage says.
Every night around the dinner table, they talk about why they’re grateful. For their daughter, “it might be her teddy bear, it might be her Play-Doh, it might be the dog. Sometimes it’s mom or dad. It’s sweet. I’m a prayerful person, and my prayer just looks like ‘Thank you.’ We can innocently take so much for granted, so it’s a ‘Thank you for this moment.’”
Recently, Sage and Tony launched a podcast for “authentic family conversations,” as Tony describes it. Together, they discuss a range of topics, from marriage to identity to raising kids and communication.
“We wanted to have something that felt intimate and felt connected and felt more conversational, topics or conversations we might have around the dinner table,” explains Sage. “After 25 years, Tony and I have gone through everything together. We wanted to convey our intimate parts, our lives, the humanness, the spirit of it, all of it—even just the practice of how we navigate our own inner life and world on a day-to-day basis. Being a parent is obviously incredibly rearranging and humbling, and so we wanted to share that space, too.”
This summer also brought the second year of the She’s Unstoppable Summit, a free virtual women’s conference spearheaded by Sage and friends such as Serena Williams, Tyra Banks, Derek and Hayley Hough and Maria Menounos. “It’s just an opportunity to come together, to connect and to share.” The unifying factor is to “find a kinder way.” “This is a day to celebrate women, to come together and to share in the beauty, to experience other women that are rising above their obstacles,” Sage says. “It’s an invitation back to our nature, to listen to our journeys and find the good.”
The conference is yet another extension of the Robbinses’ long-running philanthropic efforts, which have included work on such issues as the environment, hunger relief, animal rescue and stopping human trafficking. Together, Sage estimates, they have planted over 71 million trees. In a decade-long campaign with Feeding America, they have provided nearly 1 billion meals to people in need. They have helped save over 42,000 children from trafficking. City of Dreams, a film the Robbinses have produced about child labor, is in theaters now.
Helping people, explains Sage, “doesn’t have to be writing a check. It doesn’t have to be money. It’s just love. I don’t know if it’s my age or my stage of life, but I appreciate the simple things.”
Hair (Sage): Mylo Carrion
Makeup (Sage): Gina Simone
Photographed on location at The Guitar Hotel at Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood