Hiver Salley was born in 1966 to a white mother and a Black father — both artists. His parents separated early, and his mother relocated to Miami, severing contact with his
father for years. Growing up in a household that prized creativity but struggled financially, Hiver learned early that identity was something you had to build yourself —not something handed to you.
He built his first through physical excellence. As a teenager in Miami, Hiver became captain of his high school football team (GCSH) and earned a full Division I scholarship
to the University of Arkansas. He left — not because he couldn't compete, he was a true freshman starting linebacker on the roster, but because
he refused to stay somewhere that didn't feel true. That pattern of choosing authenticity over comfort would define the decades that followed. Back in Miami, Hiver discovered bodybuilding. By the late 1980s he was competing at
the national level, featured on ESPN's Muscle Magazine, winning the Mr. Florida and Orange County California heavyweight titles, and selected as the poster athlete for the NPC Nationals — widely considered the favorite to win. On stage in Miami, in front of
his home crowd, he passed out from dehydration and the use of diuretics. He retired that day.
"I learned more from that moment than I ever would have from winning.”
He returned to school, earned his BA in Psychology from Florida International
University, began graduate work at the University of Miami on a minority scholarship, and spent years working with inner-city youth through CDC and CDAS-funded programs in HUD housing projects ( Brownsville, Liberty City, Annie Coleman Gardens ) — HIV education, drug prevention, afterschool programming.
He was good at it. He was also honest enough to recognize that the systems
surrounding that work were broken.
He married, had his first son Cheyne, and moved the family to Vermont as a Juvenile Social Worker, then Colorado — drawn by mountains, open space, and the belief that environment shapes character.
In Colorado he began building again: a construction business specializing in Japanese-style woodworking and traditional Shoji screens, a silversmithing practice rooted in his
Native American heritage, and an Aikido dojo. He became a member of the IACA and exhibited work alongside respected Native artists including Sam English for Sandy Chapin of Adobe Arts on Long Island and Clifford Brycely in Manchester Vermont.
The local police chief — who had become one of his Aikido students — asked Hiver if he would consider joining the department. He grew up in Miami distrusting law enforcement. He
joined anyway. The academy voted him class president. He was sent to SWAT School in Colorado Springs. He served for three and a half years before returning full-time to construction.
The years that followed brought more building: an MMJ facility business in Florida and California, large-scale industrial hemp farming across nearly 1,000 acres in southeastern Colorado, and CBD extraction facilities he built and operated himself. And more loss: a second divorce, the collapse of the hemp business, and then the a
significant rupture of his life — the wrongful prosecution that placed him inside LA County Jail for eighteen months on charges that were later overturned, expunged, and reduced to misdemeanors by court order, with the presiding judge citing corruption in
the case on the record.
"You really discover who you are when you are placed in a situation
like that and have to make it work and thrive.”
Hiver came out of that experience the same person who went in. That fact — which he does not take lightly — is the foundation of everything he teaches.
Today Hiver lives in Crested Butte with his wife Jessica and their children. He runs a general contracting business, is pursuing his apprenticeship in Traditional Chinese Medicine, promotes the legacy artwork of his late father Charles Salley — whose
paintings now show internationally including at the Tokyo International Art Fair — and has developed an industrial hempcrete panel system combining hemp and 3D printing technology currently in investor discussions.
The Third You is the distillation of everything he has lived, survived, and rebuilt. It is not a program built from books or certifications. It is built from a life tested at every level a human being can be tested. He is not a motivational speaker. He is a mirror
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