Tell us more about who you are and what you do.

My name is Dominique Easley. I was born and raised in Staten Island, New York, and I’m first generation American. My mom’s Haitian and she’s from Haiti. 

I’m a father of five. I have three boys, two girls, one bonus daughter. I’m a married man and retired from the NFL in 2019. I was fortunate to be drafted in the first round to the Patriots where I won a Super Bowl in 2014 and ended my career with the Rams in 2019. Unfortunately, losing the Super Bowl to the Patriots during that year. 

From there, my retired life started in FinTech and Edutech, which is financial literacy and education-based application. I also have 13 hours in the air, flying and I know I’m continuing that. I also have my micro cultivation license in New Jersey, in the marijuana field. 

Now I live in Georgia, where I reside. I have my real estate license where I started doing fix-and-flips, as well as I am actively into a construction company as well, so becoming a GC. 

Myself, I love to travel and try all types of new things. I’m very adventurous. I love to get my heartbeat racing. I’m big into mental health. I’m a big mental health advocate. I myself was addicted to opioids throughout my playing career. When I was playing, I also suffered from, well, I can’t say “suffered,” I have acknowledged my childhood trauma, which led to a lot of now-trauma. Which I’m going through. And I’m working diligently every day, trying to get better as a person and also bringing in the people who are around me to get better in their mental health space as well.

What did you love most about your playing career in the NFL?

Playing in the NFL I loved the comradery, to be honest. Being able to go in the locker room with the guys, having those relationships, and basically, it being a big playground for a bunch of grown adults. It’s what I miss the most. During practice, during meetings, as well as off the field.

How were you able to balance being a dad, football, and your mental health?

I won’t say I’m able to balance it. I’m still learning to balance it. One of the most important things to my life and my legacy is my kids and being a dad. So, it’s really hard. I try to make sure my kids are receiving things that I didn’t receive as a child. My childhood wasn’t good but it also was good. Great mother, great parents, but they just didn’t have certain knowledge that they were able to give. So to be able to give that to my kids – I will always make sure I’m emotionally aware of what’s going on with my kids, physically aware, and educationally as well. 

I just love being around them. I take them to work and try to show them the ins and outs of what I am doing because I didn’t receive that from my parents. When I was playing football, I really didn’t understand how to balance it. I didn’t understand how to prioritize in the correct way. 

But now as a businessman, I won’t sit here and say it’s harder, but it’s easier in a way of intentionally doing and intentionally involving them in certain things that I’m doing in life. So being able to balance it is, and always will be, a work in progress as my kids are now kids and toddlers, but as they get older, and become teenagers and adults, it’ll all continuously be a work in progress. 

Mentally, how was your transition from the NFL to your post-playing career?

For me, I didn’t really have a bad transition because I grew up in New York, like I said before. So I never loved football. I didn’t grow up playing football. I started playing football in high school. I loved basketball and baseball, still to this day. So when I ended football, I was ready for football to end. 

Football was more of a traumatic experience. It was a great experience, but it also was a big traumatic experience for me as well. When it came to my personal relationships and just me as a person, I was not able to actually work on myself. So my transition was actually a blessing because when I retired, I worked on myself. I worked on my mental – the most growth that I’ve seen for myself has been since I retired. So my transition has been like I said, a blessing and I won’t say in disguise. It’s just been a straight blessing.

Who are you as a Father?

I’m vulnerable, understanding, and a friend. I won’t lie to you I had some dope parents. My parents always made me feel comfortable to speak my mind in a respectful way. So they taught me manners. They taught me how to be respectful to adults, but they also taught me to express myself. I won’t say, in an emotionally intelligent way because they didn’t have those tools, but they never put a border between a child and an adult and what we were not supposed to say to them – they always had that door open. 

So, for me, I transitioned that into me being a father, as well as adding those tools that my parents didn’t have as far as the emotional intelligence – understanding what trauma comes from showing them that argument is okay. Everybody argues so what is important is how to actually deal with it. And that’s the one thing that I’ll say the older generation didn’t have those tools. What they did was, they told us not to pay attention or try to hide everything from us. So now as an adult, we had to figure out how to work through those things now. When my kids see an argument between me and my wife or see something that can possibly make them uncomfortable. I allow them to ask questions and I allow them to see the result of the conversation that me and my wife have, to show that you’re able to communicate your feelings, even though it might not be nice for the other person. So I say I’m a friend, teacher, lover, vulnerable and really I try to be that person that they need me to be.

What’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself since becoming a father?

I don’t have to be who I was raised to be. And what I mean by that: I had the tendency of saying, “this is how I was raised.” So I was doing a lot of things that my mother and my father did, which wasn’t always bad, but I don’t have to do that. I can learn who I want to be as a father. I can learn who my kids need me to be as a father. 

One saying that I now understand is not to be true is, “treat people how YOU want to be treated.” But in all reality, you’ve got to treat people how THEY want to be treated. You’ve got to understand them. So I try to understand my kids to be the person that they need me to be, for them.

Why is it important to teach your kids about the importance of mental wellness?

Communication. One thing, like I said, I didn’t grow up seeing, I didn’t grow up having those tools. I had to communicate what they would call confrontational things. How to communicate your feelings to someone in a respectful way. If somebody has hurt you, how to communicate your vulnerability and be okay with not expecting a certain type of reaction. 

I feel like that’s one thing everybody does that allows confrontation or allows misperception to someone’s intention is communication about how they feel and when they do communicate, the way a person reacts. They always expect the person to react the same way or they expect the person to be in their feelings. Just to be vulnerable and be okay with your feelings and be able to express that. That’s the reason why I think it’s important to teach them about mental health.

Define what Legacy and Family means to you.

Legacy for me is just, black and white, my kids – their happiness. It’s not a measure of financial success. It’s not a measure of visible success. It’s a measurement of internal happiness. How happy my kids are internally, and for them to understand what makes them internally happy. That comes with obviously, emotional intelligence, understanding, being vulnerable, and working on yourself as a whole. 

Family for me is definitely not blood. I don’t call family, “blood.”  I won’t say family is people who are there for you because people could be there for you for a reason. I say people who share the same morals and values, and there’s a natural organic love between each other.

Tell us more about the Easley Foundation.

So The Easley Foundation’s mission is to give athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, as well as their families, the resources to be able to work through their mental health. The one thing that people don’t understand is that families have the most effect on the people who are going through a certain type of lifestyle that 1% of the world lives through and can possibly understand. So being able to educate them and being able to create vulnerability between that relationship; and that only happens with work, with therapy, with vulnerability. 

So giving an open space, and also giving the resources to be able to figure these things out about themselves, while playing, while active, and during their retirement. 

Also, adding in the financial literacy part of it as well. Like that’s a big thing about this foundation too. I attest that to mental health as well because finance is unfortunately a mental stress in this world. So understanding how to be financially literate in this world would also give you mental peace.

What’s next for you?

What’s next for me is to continue to grow what I’m doing now, which is in real estate. I am heavily into real estate and my focus is to fix and flip homes. And, within real estate, our next plan is to start to create homes for veterans and group homes as well.

My end goal, like when I know I have done what I wanted to do, is to be able to build homes and schools while providing needed resources to third-world countries, starting with Haiti, which is where my mom’s from. 

How can people learn more about you, your brands, follow you, etc?

You can go onto Easleyfoundation.org to learn more about our mission and sign up to be the first to know our plans and events that are upcoming. As far as my brand, you can go on and follow my social media My Instagram is @EASIE91, and my X, Facebook, and LinkedIn are @DominiqueEasley. 

So you can reach me at those handles, and like I said, Easleyfoundation.org to learn more about what’s going on with the Easley Foundation.