Summary
Aaron Taylor — College Football Hall of Famer, Super Bowl champion, and CBS Sports broadcaster — shares his journey from childhood abandonment and abuse to emotional freedom. Growing up without his father, being molested by a family member, and moving constantly, Aaron learned that his worth depended on performance. Football became his outlet for emotion, alcohol his way to numb, and people-pleasing his strategy for love.
The pivotal stories are extraordinary: his mother’s wisdom when he wanted to quit De La Salle football on day one (“You got to figure out if what you want is worth the price you may have to pay to get it”); his wife’s advice before his first NFL broadcast to focus on how he wanted to feel rather than what he feared; his reconnection with his absent father where both men cried about not having healthy fathers; and his ongoing struggle to parent his sons without projecting his own wounds onto them.
The conversation explores how the drive for external validation — “good job, good play, good boy” — fueled Aaron’s excellence but also trapped him. He found authentic confidence only in circles where he could be fully himself, not in the Super Bowl, not at CBS, not in marriage. The interview weaves together themes of faith, resilience, the relationship between accomplishment and self-acceptance, and the paradox that the gold in life lies just beyond what we’re afraid to face.
Key Concepts
- Feel your way to freedom
- Confidence comes from authenticity not achievement
- Focus on how you want to feel not what you fear
- The gold in life lies just beyond what you’re afraid to face
- Adversity refines rather than destroys
- Parenting is letting them find their own line down the mountain
- People-pleasing drives excellence and traps you
- Allowing replaces striving on the back nine of life
Key Quotes
“Everything that has gotten in the way that has been an inefficient way to create the outcomes that I want has been my desire to not feel.”
“I’m in the College Football Hall of Fame. I’ve won a Super Bowl. But football — I never felt confident ever. I feel confident in circle, meaning when I’m in spaces where I feel permission to be my authentic self.”
“Every time that you’re nervous or want to do something, instead of thinking about what it is you want to do, think about how it is you want to feel after the event is over.”
“Fear is a misuse of the imagination.”
“The gold in our lives lies just beyond what we’re afraid or unwilling to go.”
“You got to figure out if what you want is worth the price that you may have to pay to get it.”
Transcript
at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what we do it’s about who and what we become in that process welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson okay welcome to the show everybody today I’m really excited about our guest today’s guest is Aaron Taylor Aaron played professional football as an offensive guard for the Green Bay Packers and the San Diego Chargers playing in two Super Bowls and in one of them they won he is inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame and is now a speaker on teamwork and performance and there’s a bunch of other things I saw on Wikipedia about you there’s like a teamwork award that you founded I’m also familiar that you work with mankind project and you do a lot of other work in self-development and personal development anything that you like to add uh one the spelling bee in fourth grade that’s often overlooked but uh one of the crown jewels of my achievement catalog wonderful wonderful awesome we’ve been talking a little bit over the past couple of years just every now and then we just sort of have a catch up after after having met and last time we talked about a week ago when we were kind of planning this podcast you just had said a phrase about your journey that I really loved which was feel your way to of freedom and I couldn’t even think of a better way to describe even the work that it is that we do with this podcast and with our courses and I’d love to just hear more about your story and how you learned this this practice whatever it is that that you refer to when you say feel your way to Freedom well I appreciate that Brett and just for the record that is trademarked but in all seriousness uh when I look back on my own life everything that has gotten in the way that has been an inefficient way to create the outcomes that I want has been my desire to not feel so whether I use emotion whether I use alcohol whether I use money Empower control all of those things were utilized by me to try to elicit something that I wanted which often involved not feeling so that was a phrase that kind of came up organically with a buddy of mine who’s a pretty esteemed coach in his own right and it’s kind of teaching me how to ask the right questions and be a more in tuned listener but I think at the core of all of our Journeys is this process of liberating ourselves from ourselves so feeling my way to freedom to me is always the access the portal to a brighter future if you will yeah I can imagine that being very important on the field if you’re overthinking what you’re doing you’re just not going to be there where the ball is going or where the you know where the players are moving how did you learn this was this something you were just born with and you were like yeah I got this check it out people I’m feeling my way to Freedom yeah it was uh basically the only thing left I tried all the other and it just didn’t work it’s like a very reluctantly started that Journey Brett but you bring up football and that’s one of the interesting things like the locker room is a sacred place but it’s not a safe place so feelings weren’t welcome you didn’t want to walk into the locker room say hey guys I’m my self-esteem is down today my girlfriend broke up with me and I’m I’m at the core of my being I don’t feel like I matter I’m enough anybody want to talk about that like those things didn’t tend to come up so instead I put on my my helmet my shoulder pads put my mouthpiece in and tried to knock the the clock off of somebody and that was the way that I got to release a lot of my emotion and I think for me and a lot of us you work hard you play hard so alcohol was my ISM of choice and uh I took part in those Libations uh liberally and as it turns out I was allergic every time I drank I broke out in rashes of very bad judgment so I had to hang those cleats up about 20 years ago but again this whole notion of doing this thing that I felt like I was born to do but feeling like a fraud the entire time somebody recently asked me when I felt most self-confident in I’m in the College Football Hall of Fame I’ve won a Super Bowl I won the lombardian college as the most outstanding offensive lineman but football I never felt confident ever in my marriage no not really how about as a father uh no an employee of CBS ah you know what I feel confident in circle I feel confident in circle meaning when I’m in spaces where I feel permission to be my authentic self one of the things that I’ve learned about me is for me to feel safe there has to be this kind of emotional game of you show me yours and I’ll show you mine but I go first and what I’m finding is when I can share and express who I am fully that there’s nothing to hide and when there’s nothing to hide there’s nothing to hide and that’s why I feel confident and whole in that space and that’s really what’s drawn me to this work that probably brought us here together on this podcast so I coached a guy who was the CEO of this startup and he played basketball for Princeton I think it was in college he played college ball and and I’ve had a couple I have another guy that I coach who was like a track star and what I notice in that work is that there’s this moment that they where it clicks that they’re they have a body and an emotional intelligence that they can access the same way they would access it on the court or on the field and when they can access it that way in business it’s like a superpower gets unlocked for them and I’m wondering if that Journey resonates with you at all in your experience or like was there that moment of understanding that there’s a way you could access your body in the circle or on CBS that the same way you could in the field and it like allowed you to like increase your capacity in that experience yeah that’s a great question Joe uh I’d love to answer that and say yes part of my truth is that I never was able to access my full Emotional Self while I played and really in my career which is going into year 15 in case my bosses are listening I really love working at CBS Sports because we’re in the middle of a contractor negotiation right now um but I had this incredible moment last year that may underscore what it is you’re talking about uh I got a call from my boss indicating that somebody on our team had gotten coveted and the question was would I be interested in calling my first ever NFL game I was like heck yeah yeah you kidding me so I was so excited about the opportunity I ran downstairs and told my wife she screamed gave me this big hug like this is the opportunity everybody in our business wants and here it was in my lap I was getting my shot so you know after kind of being a little misty-eyed and she’s like oh my God baby this is so great I looked at her and said kiss my fingers gave her the peace sign and said I’ll see you next Sunday meaning I’m about to go in the bunker I’m about to study I’m about to watch film I’m about to call everybody ever knew I’m about to do the history of both these teams going back to 1911 and it was like all of this research and that’s kind of part of my makeup is I’m over prepared guy which creates anxiety so this went on for a couple days and my wife and all of her Infinite Wisdom looks at me and kind of raises her hand she’s like uh are you uh are you open to some feedback I was like oh damn every time she asked me that a Fastball The Truth is about to be thrown over the point and then she hit me with the follow-up of permission to speak freely I was like oh damn like this is a biggie and I was like yes and she said I’m a little worried that you’re so excited about this that you’re gonna squeeze it so tightly that you’re gonna fumble this opportunity she said I would offer you this every time that you’re nervous or want to do something or thinking about how you’re gonna do X Y or Z instead of thinking about what it is you want to do think about how it is you want to feel after the event is over I want you to close your eyes when the anxiety comes up and imagine putting your computer in your game board which is what every announcer uses to call games what do you look over what’s the look on your partner’s face when you guys high five what’s the last thing the producer says is you take your headset off and go down underneath the stadium to the TV trucks what’s the you know who’s texting you what are they saying and as you go to bed and put your head on the pillow what’s the predominant feeling is it pride is it relief is it gratitude like play it all the way out fellas you want to talk about a superpower that was the best game I’ve ever called on the biggest stage in my biggest moment I’m in the college dang Football Hall of Fame I’ve been on TV for 14 years but that was the only time I never had performance anxiety and wasn’t worried about what I was going to do because I shifted my focus from what I feared to what I wanted to feel so when we talk about feeling your way to Freedom that’s another way that it can look and it led not only to the best game I’ve ever called it’s the best season I’ve ever had in television the amazing thing is even in your wife’s description of it she’s like don’t squeeze it too tightly like she described it to you in physical terms she literally was just like you might fumble it’s like the whole thing was like you could feel it in your like when you were describing your wife’s words to me I’m like oh I can feel that in my body she is she was talking to your body it’s pretty cool yeah she’s a pretty accomplished athlete in her own right at two-time Olympian and beach volleyball so I uh I am that smart at least I’m not smart enough that I can choose well that’s the best spectator sport ever I just want to throw that amen um so she understands what being a good teammate’s like she understands what pressures feels like being on the Olympic stage and growing up in communist Bulgaria and having that be the only Avenue the only way out is through Sports and all the pressure that she felt so I really appreciated that and and talk about it a lot because it really was a defining moment in my life and God dang I wish I had known that at 18. so one of the phrases that somebody shared with me recently that just blew me away because it hit me right between the eyes was fear is a misuse of the imagination so the flip side of that is what I did I focused on how I wanted to feel and the positive outcome into my brain it didn’t know the difference then all of a sudden it starts dropping dopamine and oxytocin and all these feel-good chemicals and my experience was different so how that translated on game day when it mattered was I wasn’t worried about what the words I was going to say during the open or how I was going to telestrate or who the people I wanted to put my telestrator tool that I think were going to be there that has this cool effect that I like I didn’t get caught up in all that I was present and to me presence is the portal to a a better outcome and reality and that’s what focusing on my feelings afterward allowed me to do in the moment because there was no downside as far as I was aware it sounds like what was happening there is that your your fear was like transmuting into excitement you weren’t focusing on the things you were afraid of in a way that was stuck the fears might be there but you continued to intend towards what you wanted and I think that there’s like there’s a lot of freedom that happens when you reach this impartiality of being able to be an acceptance of all outcomes and continuing to intend in the direction that you want and with you know with that maximum freedom in both of those directions then you have you have full freedom to be authentically yourself and you know call the shots exactly as they’re coming to mind you know as you did one of my best friends from my NFL days this guy Roman Fort and he was my Center here in San Diego with the Chargers and he was a Christian and a born-again Christian but he was a very approachable Christian right it wasn’t thrown in your face it was a faith of Attraction rather than promotion you know he had little baby curses uh that he would throw in there but he’s a super funny Storyteller and we were room dogs which meant on the road we would room together the night before the game everybody would pair up and since we played next to each other we could talk strategy but you know as you would expect it often got a little deeper at times and um let’s just say that I wasn’t very Christian like at 25 26 27 years old but I was Christian curious and I was Faith curious because Roman had something that resonated with me there was an underlying confidence and joy I think that I saw on him that I didn’t necessarily feel myself so I asked him about it and how he could have such faith and he said man A.T he’s like imagine playing a football game that you know you’re going to win no matter what but the score at the end of the first half is 58 to nothing and you’re losing he said but you know for a fact that at the end of the game you somehow win he said what’s your demeanor going to be like at halftime are you throwing your helmet are you super stolen are you excited you thinking holy how are we gonna pull this off like we win this deal like oh my God I can’t wait to see how this thing plays itself out he said that’s what my faith is he said for me I know I win the game at the end of the day so I don’t ever care what the score is this reminds me of the thing I’ve heard Joe say before which is when someone’s stuck in a question or stuck in like a binary what do I do this or that uh question I’ve heard Joe ask is what would you do if you knew you’d be happy either way from that place how do you actually approach your problems if you if you don’t make them responsible for your happiness if you don’t make the outcome responsible for for your joy yeah it’s challenging I have a question for you so I don’t know where you are in the still Christian curious or that whole thing but how does faith register with you now like so the deeper part of that question for me is that there’s a lot of folks out there who believe that faith is something for the religious and in my experience is that you can have a deep faith without any of the without being religious and so I’m wondering how Faith interacts with your system now what does that mean to you today and and how is it uh grown since that time hearing that story in the hotel room yeah well I’ll answer that question with another story uh that I heard in the rooms of recovery about uh a guy goes to the circus and he looks up and he sees the guy on the high wire and he sees them up there and he’s walking across and he’s got the big stick uh and he makes it across he believes that he’s going to be able to make it because this is a traveling circus and if it was really that dangerous they probably wouldn’t let them do it because they’d have to keep going through these guys so but then the guy comes out and gives a wheelbarrow and he’s got you know like sacks of sand and he’s pushing this thing across and it’s a little bit more hairy but the guy still believes in the audience that this high wire Walker is going to be able to make it from one end to the other he said Faith though is getting out of the stands climbing up the ladder and getting inside the wheelbarrow and that’s a whole lot easier to talk about than it is to do so I want to thank my faith is strong but when push comes to shove buddy I want to sit in them stands I want a big ass net and I try to create certainty so that’s literally at the core of what my dance is uh through life is to figure out to take those leaps of faith and when I look back on everything that’s been good in my life it’s when I was willing to go where I was afraid or unwilling prior to and that’s where the gold in our lives lies that’s kind of one of my anchor statements is the gold in our lives lies just beyond what we’re afraid or unwilling to go it’s those leap of face and when I’ve done that poof they disappear so your question of what would you do if you were happy and it worked out either way removes that element of fear what would you do if you weren’t afraid I’d probably do this good then go do that and we kind of talk ourselves out of this you know the richness of life’s possibilities when we let fear into the picture but that’s the game and it’s the game I believe for all of us in our own ways with our own actors our own sets our own time periods our own wardrobes it all looks different but it’s all the same deal so that leads me to a second question there are moments where I have done that I’ve gotten in the wheelbarrow and then fallen and you know only to find out that the destruction that happens is the destruction of a part of myself that can be destroyed leaving me with the part of myself that can’t be destroyed meaning yeah maybe it hurts maybe it sucks maybe it sucks for a good long while but at the end of the day I’m refined I’m purified it’s not the right word but refined it’s like there’s there’s a part of me that wasn’t real that’s lost I’m wondering if you have a story like that where you had the faith the idea is going to go one way it went disastrously wrong but at the end of the day you are better for it like the the faith still was a good bet even though there was a bump or two on the way yeah man uh that false self like I’ve been going through this phase where I’ve uh my the idea of myself like what’s that phrase a narcissists don’t fall in love with themselves they fall in love with the idea of themselves like we love that one that’s good so the idea of myself has been meeting my actual self on a profound level over the last couple weeks and it’s not going so well it’s like a blind date from hell in certain respects I think part of my origin story right is parents divorced at two I get sent back to Indiana to live with my father and his family while they’re an older adult male family member molest me there’s some physical abuse that takes place I come back to California my dad’s supposed to show up one day and doesn’t so that’s kind of the wounding that happened to me early on then we moved every two years so I was always a new kid in school just for shits and giggles I’m biracial so never felt white enough but never felt black enough always felt too black always felt too white and never really knew where I fit in but Dad was the critical piece for me and I used to fantasize about whether or not if he was around he could teach me to fight and to make bird houses and to use power tools and do all the dad stuff and fish so I have this picture of him working on a door that got sent at some point where I was you know seven or eight and I think that’s where a lot of that stuff comes from so after that day it at eight when I sat on the couch from 8 A.M to midnight waiting for him to come my mom knew right away he wasn’t coming but I refused to move that’s part of when my light went out right so through the rational mind of an eight-year-old oh I must not be good enough to love I must not matter I must not be good enough to show up on time for boom and went to sleep so that’s a story I’ve been trying to unwind well fast forward many many years and probably a story that could be a podcast in and of itself I got reconnected with my father and the moment that I’ll never forget is him sitting with his new wife on his couch in tears in my living room me sitting on the other couch across from him next to my wife with me in tears and both of us crying about the fact about how hard it was to grow up without a healthy father that’s how we connected we resonated with our shared experience in that moment and what I learned very shortly thereafter is how freaking lucky I was that he wasn’t around he was admittedly in his own words a disaster at that time when I wanted him to be there and my life would be so different if just my dad would be there and it felt like I fell out of the wheelbarrow and part of me died but what I learned in that moment Joe was that thank God God didn’t give me what I wanted because I would have been selling myself short that God doesn’t do things to us he does them for us he was actually protecting me it’s like the old Footprints over people’s toilets in their bathroom right that old poem about when the adversity hits there’s only one footprint how could you abandon me and you know obviously Jesus or God’s saying well that was what I carried you those were my footprints that’s what my relationship with faith is is that when I get what I want I’m selling myself short it’s been the adversity it’s been The Strife it’s been the challenge it’s been the loss where I’ve grown the most and on the other side of that is this almost infinite amount of possibility and that’s why I’m drawn to the things that I’m afraid to do because I kind of know that behind there there’s some riches that are just waiting to be Unearthed and then my kids don’t brush their teeth and then I get all pissed off and I throw that out the window back in my day I didn’t have a father to tell me to brush my teeth oh well so that’s man so check this out all right let’s bring this full circle because that’s a really good point now I know you’re probably being ingest there Brett but like there’s been part of me I’m like they’re really accomplished water polo players they’re 13 and 12 they’re each individually good they’re yin and yang one’s really good offensively one’s really good defensively and they’re kind of balancing out their their skill sets they’ve got an incredible coach the parents are great it’s like a case study in Youth Sports and it crushes me that they don’t listen to all the TED talks on success and resilience and teamwork and the win one for the Gipper speeches that I try to fire hose them with like I didn’t have a dad and you guys don’t let I get paid to talk and you guys don’t want to listen to me and the reality is like you don’t know what is going to work and what’s going to be there and and I have to laugh at myself in those moments because it’s like what are you doing dude like they are perfect my mom did she didn’t play hopscotch let alone play sports and I got exactly what I needed at the right time in the right way how about just listening accepting and admiring and cheering your kids on and stop trying to be what you wished you had when you were freaking 13. yeah Bravo I’ll let you know how that goes yeah six months 16 years maybe work in progress how did you end up going from this from the life that you started with with not having your father having the abuse having had that moment where you just you learned you believed you took on this belief that you just weren’t worthy and then find yourself winning Super Bowls and feeling your way to Freedom what was what was that path between then and now that opened you up to this I’d say equal parts Serendipity uh divine intervention and hard work so I got kicked out of the house at 14 because I was a dnf student mom who was a pediatric ICU nurse at Children’s Hospital in Oakland hold on a second what what years what years was your mama nurse at home from 72 to probably 83 or four my mom worked at Children’s Hospital Oakland in 82 to 86 or seven oh we have to do a little research put them in the show notes whether there was crossover or not yeah man I’d spent a lot of afternoons there well it was a horrible neighborhood back then I remember that yeah she was uh my mom ran dietitian like did the dietetics part of the hospital so anyway sorry he said Oakland small world getting smaller no that that’s a heck of a clinky dink there yeah so she was out of answers kicked me out and I spent a week sleeping on my buddy’s floor uh using his socks and underwear as a pillow and was like you know what this probably isn’t a good long-term strategy so unbeknownst to me my mom was talking to his mom every day and getting updates and you know do you want to come back home and have a chat and of course I said yes and she basically walked me back from what it is I wanted to do and I said oh I want to play pro football it’s like oh well how do you do that it’s like oh he’s just playing college and get drafted Oh just get drafted to say everybody get drafted no just kind of the better guys well when I was in college you had to have good grades you have to have good grades to play football I was like yeah you have to have a 2.0 at least okay I got College how do you get there well you gotta play high school football and they just give you a scholarship oh they just give you scholarships so she was walking me all the way back and you know the punch line was so every time you smoke weed or cut school or you know fail a class what you’re really saying is you don’t want to be a pro football player now I don’t even really know if I wanted to be a pro football player I just kind of blurted it out but what I did get in that moment was the connection between my choices actions and consequences that who and what I wanted to become was being directly impacted by my actions in the moment and I had never really kind of pieced that together and once I named that out loud that’s kind of when the invisible door started open and the Divinity and the Serendipity came in there was a show on that night that talked about the school De La Salle and the East Bay that had this 44-game win streak and the coach was talking about how his players aren’t it they’re part of it and there’s this higher standard and I was like Mom that’s the sort of place that I’d like to go well within a course of two weeks somebody comes into work they’ve got a house to rent right down the street from the school she gets a job offer that pays her almost twice as much money so she’s able to leave Children’s Hospital in that moment and go move over to Concord and kind of the rest was history and there’s some really good moments in there where I kind of came up against that fear and kind of came to the why in the road but it was that over and over and over and the harder I worked the better I got everybody worked hard but they got an inch better and I got a foot better and that was the god-given genetics that I had which is really odd because neither of my parents had any any sort of athleticism whatsoever so that was kind of the the story and that led to full scholarship in Notre Dame and getting drafted in the first round in Green Bay and I think for me growing up without a dad what my driver was was good job good play good read good recovery good boy these older adult male role models as my coaches started to serve unbeknownst to them and to me the role of my father they gave me the wisdom the Pat’s on the butt the kicks in the ass sometimes both at the same time and I was drawn to that but I was also a people pleaser and a coach pleaser so that drove me to work hard and to grind so I think the combination of serendipity Divinity and hard work um led to a pretty dang good football career it’s interesting something that just clicked for me is that you were saying earlier on you know did you have that full sense of confidence and fall did you have that full sense of good CVS or with your marriage and it seems like what you just said really illuminates that in the fact that probably in circles the only time that it’s not about somebody else’s pat on the butt it’s not about somebody else’s telling you you did a good job right and to have any kind of confidence which also to me relates to what you’re saying about your kids which is for me the whole thing about being a parent of teenagers is to have them learn to hear their own voice of good job like allow them to listen to themselves in their truth and have that move them instead of my good job or my bad job or whatever it is that I want to criticize or not criticize that’s the thing that you you have in the circle is that it’s just your truth that you’re dealing with and you’re not looking for anybody’s approval in those rooms yeah that’s I appreciate that Joe um and just last night like my kids are 13 and 12 and still want me to come in and read and just sit and talk and and we do that and I’ll do that they’ll be 33 and I’ll do it they keep asking me I don’t give a thing that’s right but I started another Ted talk last night and it was about you know details being the difference and I’m trying to teach you the skills to be disciplined about the things that don’t matter to you so that when it comes to the things that do it becomes automatic I know you don’t care about making your bed and brushing your teeth but you do care about water polo you do care about your friends and try to make those connections and then I just stopped because he gave me kind of the uh-huh yeah okay and that’s his like all right Dad time out I’ve had enough and I just stopped and I was like being a dad’s hard buddy I was like I I really struggle with knowing how much to like give you and to try to motivate you and to just love on you for the amazing kid that you are no matter what you do like I’ve written my sports story I could give a if you do anything successful in sports and I mean that wholeheartedly but I know it’s important to you so I’m wanting to give you all these things and that’s a very gray area for me and I don’t think I walk it real well sometimes and I just I wanted to acknowledge that out loud and say I you can tell me what it is you need because what’s more important to me is that you have what you need and I support you in the way that serves you not me okay okay even when we win we lose it’s father oh my God even when we lose we win I guess too but um it’s a really good point that story is not over I guarantee you that story is not over there will be a moment where that comes back and you will you will find out that he was listening and it hit him and all he could say was okay but yeah if we ever have another podcast I’ll have to follow up on so what happened there you’ll have him on and he’ll give you the real skinny amount so my moment of transformation transformation let me tell you about who my dad really is I mean it’s interesting like a lot of what tends to drive us to Excellence is often often that like you describe people pleasing and wanting to be something because that’s what’s going to get us love or affirmation from the outside and then on our journey we find that we never actually needed the outside affirmation was actually just our own that we needed and all that and then you know you have kids and you’re like okay so what worked for me and then you’ve got to go back and correct for like well what worked for me was something that actually while it drove me also became a trap that I put myself in that I needed to find find Freedom from so it’s like what do I actually do now for my kids because what worked for me isn’t necessarily the thing that I want to you know bring them through as well yeah and these poor dudes are growing up in a world that we didn’t grow up in man it’s the amount of pressure in the freaking meat grinder the last three years it’s ongoing and social media and just like we we live in a broadcast world everything is coming at us very little in between us right the interpersonal communication like learning to talk with our tongues and our mouths instead of our thumbs like this is just something this generation just doesn’t have much experience with and I gotta a brutal look into that with one of my sons who had gotten in trouble a little bit at school and he was going to miss practice and I made him pick the phone up to call his coach to tell him that he wasn’t going to be at practice and why and what the expected consequence was going to be and he started to text the answers you picked the phone up and you call him and you tell him what it is you did well what do I say you tell him what you just told me but like what words I’m like what do you mean what words like do you need a script and he slowly nodded his head yeah and that was the moment and I see you not in your head Joe that was the moment where I was like he does not know how to use the phone and call and talk to somebody and certainly about hard things I don’t know if I would have known how to do that at 12 or 13 but I had to call Abdul’s parents to see if Abdul was there so he could spend the night and we could have fun in the hot you know hi misses like that those we had to do that but these kids aren’t growing up with that and I was like oh so now I’ve got like I’m worried about the wrong stuff I got to work on his communication skills and like all these basic things that you know you sometimes Overlook with my you know National Team Water Polo playing Sun that’s all A’s and B’s and I’m worried about this stuff over here and there’s these basic necessities that these children need that I is our job and responsibility to provide um because the world they’re growing up in is not easy it’s very different from the one that we were in and you know I don’t know how we’re doing I don’t know how you ever know if if what you’re doing but you do the best you can but I do honor their walk and the difficulty of of the environment they’re coming in because stuff’s coming at them fast damn silence I love it I mean I’m I’m here trying to relate I don’t have any kids I’m like yeah I’m still trying to raise myself or else just keeps changing every minute I can’t even imagine trying to you know show you know unfilter this world for for a child right now but I see people do it my eldest um was really found herself naturally gravitating towards meditation when she was younger and so she asked if she could do a silent retreat with me and so I said I said yes and but then nobody would take a nine-year-old for a silent meditation in this country but we found a place and we did like this three-day thing and and she was so happy at the end of it and it was just like it was so her scene and about like three months later I was like hey so what do you think about meditation like what’s going on she goes I really like it but I can’t I can’t do that again for a while and I was like oh really what why not she’s like it makes me too different than my peers I can’t relate to them and I need to be able to relate to them to manage you know she didn’t say it like that but you know that was the deal and recently she’s been interested in going and and going back into that world again it was just this interesting thing of like teenagers and and all of us on some level are negotiating our own development and what the world you know the the environment that we’re given and so it’s more important to your son to learn how to text you know and and be able to like get that skill and to make the phone call at this part of his life so it’s it’s a really fascinating it’s a fascinating thing parenting oh man it’s uh it’s been the toughest and most rewarding job I’ve ever done like playing football was a layup compared to this I’ll tell you that good Lord okay so I got to tell you this story about so at the end of the silent Retreat I looked at my daughter I’m like what was your favorite thing about it she goes I think it was the style um it was the fact that you couldn’t tell me what to do for three and a half days install oh I was like yeah fair fair enough and I’ll say this Joe that to me is a little peek into the job that you are doing as a parent because she would felt empowered and had the capacity to share her truth about what she felt with this big meaningful person in her life and if she could do that with you she’ll be able to do that with boyfriends and bosses and her community that’s uh is is again sometimes when we lose we win as fathers we laughed yeah yeah yeah absolutely thank you for seeing that I want to flip this a little bit uh the art of accomplishment somebody asked me once or recently about my definition for success and I didn’t really know if I had one so my question to both of you is what’s the relationship and the context from which this podcast or row between accomplishment and success a thing that comes up for me is just if you if you live your life as art and not as something that’s something to get right or wrong and high pressure then what do you end up accomplishing and then accomplishment being like what is actually authentic for you what is what is most enjoyable for you and what is most truly what you do in this world and how do you express and I see that as being somewhat different from a lot of framings of success or accomplishment so I kind of like having that Twist on it for me success is a criteria of accomplishment meaning that if we’re going to accomplish something that’s actually something that we at the end of the day we’re like end of the of our life end of the day we’re like hey that feels good like I’m proud of that thing it’s not going to be dollars in the bank account or number of cars or anything like that though that might be part of it it could be what it’s going to be is something that is something that was deeply aligned with you and it was how you did it as much as what you did and so success isn’t the end well I think a lot of people think that success is the end goal to me success is just something that has to be met to get to a place of accomplishment and the how is more important than the what yeah it’s interesting so starting first with with you Brett and bringing art into it there’s a quote somebody shared once that I love that I’m wondering if it applies here I feel like it does but there’s there’s no good or bad art there’s art you like and art you don’t like right it’s like arts in the eye the beholder like kind of that whole vein of thinking and with respect to to what you shared Joe I I created a website called mental health best practices and it was just it’s an agnostic aggregation of all these things that I’ve used that have helped me on my own Journey around my special shortest special and uh there’s a quote on there that I’m gonna butcher my own quote but become in that process success yeah so as I’m in the College Football Hall of Fame and have a Super Bowl ring and you know a father and an employee and have all these accolades on Wikipedia don’t forget the spelling bee minus the fourth grade spelling bee thank you uh I’ll make that edit on Wikipedia for you none of that stuff matters there’s we haven’t talked a story about what that moment was like when you got that and like I’m 49 so I’m probably on the back nine or at least around second base right so the first part of my life was about being and doing and having and becoming and getting and amassing and is around second base or approach The Tee Box if you will on the back nine my life is really becoming about what it is I can allow like and it that assumption is that everything I need for these last nine holes is already there the key is for me to get out of the way I don’t have to make it I just have to allow it to get out of the way and allow what’s already there to come up and that’s a a very different but very important Distinction on on how I’m approaching life now uh at this age that was very different from an era that was contrary but also led to a lot of accomplishment so that’s why I’m kind of interested in this Framing and and how we think about it I’m curious about something in this so if I my guess is if I was to meet your sons they’re already far more towards the way you’re looking at life on the back nine then you were even like six seven years ago you know what I’m saying I’m saying like to some degree your kids are already allowing it to come to them they’re and they’re doing the work but their attitude their perspective isn’t like I have to prove myself as much as it is oh yeah I’m letting this come to me this is this is me being me and this is what happens when I’m me and so that’s my question is how much of how much of that lesson because you learned it your kids inherit some uh I guess we could probably measure it by the amount of flicker when their eyes roll in the back of their head when I talk to them oh so they’ve certainly heard it well I’ve certainly modeled how to make an amends uh perfectly like they’ve got that down they’re pretty driven right now which is interesting and I think part of my is that not true for you though because I don’t see an un ambitious undriven man no when I heard your approach on the back nine I didn’t hear that you lost your ambition it’s diff it’s you know you got to let go to take control you gotta you know hit your knees to finally stand up it’s like this oxymoronical piece that we’re we’re talking about um that’s my question I’m gonna push here just a little bit yeah isn’t that what your kids already kind of get man I’m sure hoping so buddy like that’s the goal and I think that’s why I’m pushing so hard and trying to insert my viewpoint so that they don’t quote in air quotes make the same mistakes that I made and can advance the story from a much earlier age and I’ve got a value their walk right never rob a man of his pain or his gold because both serve him equally well like at 14 years old my mom wasn’t like that’s my boy he’s on his way he’s on his way dnf student look at him look at him but I was I was on my way and that was a critical and necessary part so again maybe my 13 and 12 year old you know who are really accomplished in what it is they do and both very good students maybe I don’t have to worry about them quite as much as my mom may be worried about me and just do the best I can trust the process and like let them find their own way down the mountain I love to snowboard and I love to vomit my wife goes really slow I used to get frustrated whether we figured out that hey let’s ride up together I’m a vomit I’ma bomb it again and I’m gonna meet you and then we’re gonna ride up together and like let her take her own way pick her own line down the mountain she doesn’t don’t try to make her do what I want to do because that’s the way I do it respect her journey yeah I’ll share this story with you guys one of the defining moments in my life was at 15. moved to Concord entered De La Salle mom switched jobs she quit her job of 20 years found a new house like a ton of change and she was really really supportive in this process that started to unfold that involved me playing football at De La Salle High School that had that long win streak wait did you play at the Oakland Coliseum oh yeah for the finals NCS yup against Granada so Granada was my high school no way thanks guys the amazing thing is they all went in there like yeah and we’re gonna lose you guys are the best back then oh man we certainly were I caught it right so all of that was really close to never becoming because I had worked out in the summer and we had gotten ready and it was day one of full pads in practice so I wake up in the morning eat breakfast my mom drops me off I get dropped off by somebody else’s parents at the end of the day my mom walked into the house hey honey how’d it go don’t say a word slam the door into my room so so she waited probably 10 minutes and I’m sobbing sobbing sobbing sobbing and she walks in she goes what happened I’ll say God everything happened nothing happened like I couldn’t do anything right and the play was going left I was going right and the play was going right I went left put my pads and they just kept yelling at me and tell me I couldn’t do it you had to break the bad habits and we don’t do things like this here and I just like Mama’s I’m so sorry we moved here I can’t do this I can’t do this and she just let me go on and on and I was so broken and so defeated and so scared and she said to me you know after I got done I looked up at her she goes you got to figure out if what you want is worth the price that you may have to pay to get it and you said it doesn’t matter to me whether or not you play football or not she said but tomorrow morning I’ll have breakfast ready for you and if you get up I’ll know the decision you made and if you sleep in I also know the decision that you made but either way I won’t say a word to you and she shut the door boy there I was sitting on the edge of the bed sobbing in tears with this internal angst of what was I going to do how could I go back there’s no way I could endure what I had just endured the previous day again but somehow some way I got up and I went back to practice and I got my ass chewed again but I made a block or two and I went back the next day got my ass chewed again but I made a couple more blocks and I made a couple more blocks and a couple more and as it turned out I was pretty damn good at football I just didn’t know it yet and I think about that moment in everything every time I tell this story I get emotional because everything that came after that was so close to never becoming and I don’t know what it was in me that got me up that next morning but that resilience that gift that my higher power has given me somehow some way that no matter what just find a way to show up to get back up go to the Huddle get the play Break It walk to the line of scrimmage put your hand in the dirt and give it your all that’s been something that’s been given to me it’s one of my superpowers and that was a time that it was tested and I think about Notre Dame and the friendships there and the surrogate mom that I met there my father uh Green Bay the Super Bowl the Financial Freedom that’s allowed me to do what I do for a living now to enjoy more freedom talking about sports on television meeting my wife my children all of that poof disappears and that’s why I firmly believe that the gold in our life lies just beyond what we’re afraid unwilling to go and that was the most impactful and meaningful way that I ever experienced that and everything that’s happened since has been an incredible incredible gift thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com