#149: Creating A Winning Culture With Ellis Wyms

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel. I feel incredibly lucky to be here right this moment, blessed in fact that we've got another beautiful day. Every day is a beautiful day when you're above ground, as somebody once told me. And as much as that sounds like a cliché, man, that's just true. It's just a fact because the alternative isn't a good one, right? I mean, we all have challenges. I got challenges. Doesn't matter how good things are going in one area, money, relationships, health. I mean, those are all blessings, but doesn't mean I don't wake up and have an ache or a pain or a complaint or something going on in my headspace that I just don't understand. And the more I read, the more people I meet, those regular everyday people, as well as people who've done some significant things that other people would envy. impressive things doesn't make them any different as people. Everybody's got the same aches and pains, same complaints, same crap between their ears sometimes, and I'm no different. So I just feel grateful to be here and grateful that I've got a wonderful guest today that we get to meet, get to know. He's somebody I'm just getting to know, somebody that I look forward to getting to know actually. I'm going to introduce him to you in just a second, but let's start with his name, Mr. Ellis Wims. Hello. And I'll read a bit of his bio and then we're going to dig right in with Ellis. As a 6th-round draft pick out of Mississippi State, Ellis Wims quickly established himself as a mainstay on one of the most renowned defenses in NFL history. On his way to a successful 8-year NFL career, Wims reached the pinnacle of the sports world in just his second season, helping the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to take home their first and only championship in In Super Bowl, looks like 37, if I'm getting my Roman numerals correct. Following the conclusion of his playing career, Ellis launched Athletes for Computer Science. Despite a successful NFL career, a pathway to success in football was not always clear to Ellis. Born and raised in rural Mississippi, he envisioned a world where students from all communities have the same opportunities to develop skills in computer science. That's so cool. As industries continue to be shaped by technology, it was clear to Ellis that these tools are needed for students to be successful in a 21st century job market. That is freaking way cool. Ellis, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you with us today.

Man, I appreciate you having me, man. You know, it's Super Bowl week, man. So, you know, I'm geeked. I'm getting ready to go to my— in a few hours. So, uh, yeah, it's Super Bowl week. Well, I'm amped up right now.

This is it, man. This is the culmination of just endless hours of practice and playing and film and getting chewed out in the locker room and winning and losing and everything, man. Talk about aches and pains. Like, I didn't plan for that intro into this conversation to be so on point with your former profession, but it's true. Hey, listen, what's not written in this— I read a lot of bios and make a lot of introductions in my work. have for more than 10 years, and I'm not always really moved by what somebody's doing, especially when they've sort of transitioned out of one career and to another. Sometimes it just doesn't move me. I don't know how else to put it, but this did and does, and I really appreciate what you're doing in the world right now. I

appreciate that, man.

What's not written in that? What didn't I say that you'd love for people to know about you?

I would say that I'm a family man. You know, I'm a father. Love chasing my kids around baseball and basketball every weekend, yelling at referees and having fun. Let's see, I don't know, it was written in there, I'm from Indianola, Mississippi, so at heart I'm a country boy. Grew up in Indianola, hometown of B.B. King, King of the Blues.

That's right.

Yeah, so a lot of blues, a lot of hole-in-the-wall clubs, a lot of catfish plates, a lot of good people. So yeah, I want people to know I'm a father, I'm from a small town in the South, and I'm in Texas because I like barbecue.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now, we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created The resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Well, I was wondering about that hat you're wearing, man. You got a—

I went to an event in New York a couple weeks ago after the cheating scandal came out, and yeah, I wore this hat, and the New Yorkers were— they weren't really nice to me. I'll just say that. They weren't really nice. They had some choice words about the Astros hat.

Well, I'm a Yankees fan. I grew up in New York, man, so I can appreciate it, because when— you know what, the Yankees in the last 2 years Have had two of the best seasons they—I can't say they've ever had because with 27 world championships, when you don't win a world championship, it's not one of your best seasons. But when you win more than 100 games in consecutive seasons and don't win the World Series, as a Yankee fan, you go, "What is? I mean, WTF, right?" And so, like a lot of New Yorkers, man, they can get on folks. And to just think that maybe some team had a little unfair advantage in connection with that's. We hate the Sox, man, and now they're under fire now too, so.

Man, you know what? It's an old saying that if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying. Especially in sports. Or if you ain't looking— but you gotta figure out how to cheat without getting caught.

You're being very bold right there to say that. 'Cause I would've probably said, if you're not looking for an edge, an edge, but you're right. You used the right words. I mean—

Blatantly cheating.

Blatantly cheating.

In football, if the referee not looking and I'm holding, I'm not holding.

It's like, what can you get away with?

What can you get away with? But the Astros didn't get away with it. So, you know, they tried a little too hard. I say they were trying a little too hard.

It's a risk-reward thing. I mean, you take the risk and they did get the reward, but now it's come back a little bit. I'm trying to remember the name of their manager, but he just lost his job. Yeah, I mean, Hinge, right?

I forgot AJ's last name. But, uh, yeah, AJ, he's, uh, he got fired. He lost his job. But hey, he went home with a World Series trophy. It's just, it's got a little smudge in the corner.

Got a little smudge in the corner. They're not gonna put an asterisk next to that stat or something, I guess, but—

Just a smudge.

You know what, it's so interesting. We went out to see some blues last night, in fact. And so when you were bringing up B.B. King earlier, I'm thinking about when I saw him in Red Bank, sitting down with Lucille in his hand, and that man was a gift. And what he could do with a guitar, I mean, just incredible, right? I

mean— You know what? He came back to Indianola every summer and did like a blues festival. And that was Indianola, Mississippi, small town, but we'd get people from all over the planet in our little town, eating catfish out there in a field with mosquitoes everywhere. listening to B.B. King play blues until 2 in the morning. So, but, you know, so I grew up on the blues. I grew up in that time. And there's some things that you don't have growing up in rural Mississippi, but there's a lot of great things that you do with your people and your family and the connections that you have there. People are simple. Life is simple. So a lot of things you don't get caught up in that you probably would if you were living in another place. So I wouldn't say it's not always optimal, but it's definitely a blessing.

That's a beautiful way to put that. Yeah, we saw John Mayall last night, 86 years old. Check it out. He's a British blues god, icon, played with Eric Clapton in this thing called the Bluesbreakers back in the day. And I just was blown away. And I'm going to talk to you about this in a moment too. Resilience is a big topic for us. In fact, when it comes to the kind of keynote speaking that I do and the consulting we do with organizations around the globe, It's always about this topic of how do you gain a greater edge in the marketplace. So we talk about not sort of cheating, but it's a cheating of a sort when you think about it, because any kind of edge you can get, you typically in competition, you don't tell your opponent about it. You're not going to tell the other team that you've discovered something, just like a company, an organization is not going to tell their competition that they just discovered some kind of an edge. And we're not talking about a steroid edge. It's a performance edge on the side of how you become more resilient, how you increase your capacity, how you can lift your performance based on how you take care of yourself, which will be really relevant to your former profession you've got and also with why you started helping kids in the way that you're currently helping them. So just real quick on John, I mean, 86 years old and this guy's standing up behind the keyboard out in front. He's got ridiculously cool, eclectic, rad band with these young, young bassist guy, really neat on the bass. And then he's got a woman with fiery red hair on the electric guitar playing lead guitar and she's just shredding and older dude behind the drums. And he's standing out in front for 2 hours, didn't take a break, man. They didn't even take nothing, even right with their encore, just came right back out. And he's on the keyboard, he's playing guitar, he's playing the harp. And I'm thinking, man, this guy is the picture of resilience. Any of us, we want to be 86 years old, still doing what we're most passionate about when we're 86, filling up an entire club, getting paid to do it. I mean,

that's amazing. That's amazing. And again, like you said, it's taking care of yourself. But I think more than anything, I think he found his lane. He got in it and he stayed in it. He's fulfilled by what he's doing. So when you love what you're doing like that, and you really find what you're passionate about, again, it's not work to do it. It would be work for him not to do it, probably, right? It'd probably be harder for him just if they told him you couldn't do that anymore. So, you know, that's just testament to really finding your lane and finding something that can get you out of bed in the morning.

Yeah, so let's talk about your lane, 'cause, you know, obviously you started playing football when you were a kid, right? I'm assuming you don't make it to the NFL when you decide in high school. I mean, very few people just go, hey, I'd like to play some football.

You got a few monsters out there like that. But yeah, for the most part, you got to be raised in it a little bit.

Right. Those folks are outside the bell curve for sure. So give us a little bit of the history that leads you to the NFL, and then that becomes your lane, and then you pivot, you make a change in retiring, etc. So give us a little essence of that story if you could.

I mean, I think, you know, I started playing football, you know, growing up in a small town, you know, you don't have all these football leagues or little leagues. So you just start playing with your friends in the neighborhood. And when I was a kid, you know, it was Jerry Rice and Walter Payton and Singletary and Lawrence Taylor, all those guys.

That's my man.

Yeah, I got a chance to meet LT. LT is still off the chain, man. He's like, he's a barrel of laughs and he lives his life, man. Those guys were kinda people we looked up to that kinda got us interested in the game. So I started playing when I was in junior high. Actually broke my leg the first year I went out, was in a full leg cast, but still ended up going back. Went to high school and was a starter on my high school team. Now my high school team, we weren't that good. We played a lot of homecoming. You know, you get scheduled for homecoming when the team's like, yeah, we need to get this win this week, so—

Yeah.

We gonna schedule those guys. Like, we were those guys. So I didn't come from a winning culture, but I think what was always something about me, 'cause again, when you grew up in that environment, a lot of times the culture, is it a winning culture? Like, you know, we'd have an offseason program, 2 or 3 guys may show up. We might start the season with 80 guys and 20 may finish the season because the culture just wasn't built for guys to be resilient and guys to really show up when things are hard and be there at practice every day. But I think I was always just kind of wired to just really just kind of do what people ask, do what I committed myself to. My grandfather— I didn't have my father growing up. My grandfather had a huge impact on my life. And he was a military man. He was in World War II. So he was a very hard worker. He was also a carpenter, so he built a lot of houses. So I think some of my work ethic of just not showing up, just showing up because it's your job and you committed to do it. And I just happened to be a good enough athlete with showing up and doing the work that I stood out. So I stood out in a culture that wasn't a winning culture. We lost a lot of games. We didn't play good football. But when we went to play games, I played well. And I got an opportunity to be the first person from my high school to get like a Division I scholarship. Which was really, really cool. But for me at that time, like, that was the pinnacle, right? 'Cause I'd never seen anybody go to college, right? So it's like, this is it. I'm going to Mississippi State on a full football scholarship. Like, that was it. So I get to Mississippi State and I was a linebacker in high school. I showed up like 40 pounds bigger than they recruited me.

Mm.

So of course they made me move to defensive line and I hated it 'cause I wanted to be a linebacker, but I did pretty good at it. And Coach Sherrill, Coach Jackie Sherrill, you remember Jackie Sherrill?

Sure do.

Jackie Sherrill coached at Pitt, coached at A&M, coached Tony Dorsett. He was the coach at Mississippi State that recruited me. Great guy, mentor, father figure. But he was the first person that told me, hey man, if you keep doing what you're supposed to do, you might get a chance to play in the NFL. And I still, it wasn't like real to me, but he kind of spoke that into me. It's like, okay, maybe I can. So I go through most of my career in college, I'm not a starter, right? I'm backing people up all the way to my senior year. My senior year, I think I started 6 or 7 games, then I got hurt. So I just still, this thing of getting drafted wasn't really real to me until I saw my name on like a list that ranked me with defensive ends. So now I'm like, okay, I'm getting drafted, right? Yeah. So yeah, that was pretty cool. And then I go to Senior Bowl, play there, go to combine. You know, you combine, they poke you, prod you. And I go from not thinking I'm gonna get drafted, to happy I'm gonna get drafted, to after the combine, I'm like, man, I'm better than these dudes.

Yep.

I'm looking at everybody go through the combine and running and going, I'm like, man, I'm better than these dudes. Like, I gotta get drafted, like at least on the first day. But then the draft comes and I don't, right? So first day I don't get drafted. Okay, I didn't go first day. Second day, we get to the 6th round, Buffalo Bills called me.

Yeah.

And they had a conversation with me and they said, look, We don't think you're gonna get drafted here. If you don't get drafted, we'd like to sign you as a free agent. So at that moment, I'm like, I'm not even getting drafted, 'cause this team's calling me and telling me, like, you know, if I don't get drafted, I'm coming there. And of course, like, nobody wants to live in Buffalo. Like, absolutely nobody on the planet wants to go live in Buffalo.

Hey, all the people from Buffalo, don't take offense to that, man. You know how beautiful Buffalo is.

It was like the coldest place on the planet.

It's like the tundra. It

looked like the coldest place on the planet, okay? Just because of the cold. Like, city's beautiful, but man, I'm a country boy from Mississippi. Yeah, the opposite. No, even for the NFL, like, God, Buffalo. When they called me, I kinda freaked out 'cause I think I'm not gonna get drafted. Sitting out in my car crying, and my mom, we're at my grandmother's house, my mom comes out and she has my cell phone. She's like, Tony Dungy's on the phone. So in my car crying, got the phone from Coach Dungy. Sorry about that.

That's Tony Dungy calling.

Yeah, it might be Coach Dungy hitting me up now. What's up, Coach? I'll probably see him this week somewhere, man. He does a lot of things in the community, so I'll probably be at his All-Pro Dads event this weekend. But I took the call from Tony. He was like, we're gonna take you with this pick here in the 6th round. Be ready to come in and work hard and earn a spot. So that was my journey from an environment where it was a Tough environment where I had to stand out when nobody else had stood out. Going to college, not being a starter, and really kind of working my way through there to getting drafted in the 6th round by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and getting a chance to live my dream. So it was a— looking back on it is an amazing journey, man. It is, you know, I tell people all the time, there's nowhere you can go to get the feeling of getting an opportunity to play in the NFL on Sundays. Yeah, yeah. That's just something you can't ever replace.

So you said earlier, you're talking about winning culture. I think whether it's in a small organization, big organization, or anywhere else, any other environment, like even a family environment, you and I, before we started this show, we're talking about your kids, my kids. And so you want to have a winning culture. I just think that's a great term. And so I want to understand your definition. How would you define what is a winning culture?

A winning culture is one where everybody involved And everybody on the team or in the group is pushing toward— together toward one goal. And that goal is the singularly most important thing for everyone. It's a unique thing, and it's not something that everyone can do. You see the coaches in the NFL, they're constantly changing over, changing over, and changing over because they don't have people in leadership positions that understand how to build a winning culture. And at that time, you know, when I got drafted to the Buccaneers, Coach Dungy was the poster child for being able to build winning culture. I mean, he took that team, when they weren't the Bucs, they were the Yucks.

Yeah.

Like, you know, they were like 0-16, like they were the bottom dwellers of the NFL. And Coach Dungy came in and he was able to build a winning culture, which was kind of build a way of doing things, a way we do things, the way we practice, the way we prepare. We're gonna have a mantra throughout this team of how we behave in the community, How we behave on the practice field, effort we give on the practice field. It's the way we do things, and everybody in the organization had to be accountable to it. And the leaders in the organization, the best players on our team, they were bought in. So the first day you come in, you understand what the culture is from a Warren Sapp or Derrick Brooks or John Lynch or Rondae Barber. Those guys as players would let you know what the standard was and make sure you understood that every day we hit the grass, Every day we're in the meeting room, we're locked in, we're focused, and we're getting better. And if you can't do that, you can't be here. You understand that really early on.

What was that mantra? Did you just explain it? What are the words that you define that mantra as?

I think the thing— you'll hear Mike Tomlin say it right now, say it now even as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was our defensive backs coach on our Super Bowl. And the thing that you will hear most is, no excuses. No explanations, get it done. No excuses, no explanations. So nobody wants to hear a reason why you weren't there, why you didn't do it. I fell, or I slipped, or I forgot, or— it was no excuses, no explanations, max effort. Know your job, know your assignment. If you're on the grass, we got to be able to trust all 11 guys understand exactly what to do on every single play. And you execute your job first. And that's a very unselfish way of playing a team sport. 'Cause you get paid by stats a lot of times and production. In order to be within the scheme of what we're doing, you may have to do your job even though the play's over there, or you think the play may be happening over there. You can go make that tackle, you can go get that sack, or you can go make the interception. The scheme of our defense says you stay here and you guard this area. So you have to be unselfish and put the scheme first. If down to a man, like, you put the scheme first, you play as hard as you can, but you do your job first and you're committed to our goal as a defense, not your goals as a player.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different. Something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So, go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Right. One goal for a team. That sports is such a great analogy for other areas of life and business in particular because Any team, any sports team, they've got one goal. Everybody on that team's got one goal. What's that goal, right? What's that goal?

It's supposed to be winning a championship.

That's it. There's one goal and everybody's bought in. Like you say, everybody's bought into that one goal. And that's a different kind of accountability that exists because in an organization, for example, you got people who are thinking about themselves. I mean, look, you got people on teams that are thinking about themselves too, and those are losing teams, right?

For

the most part. But when you get a team that can win, it's because everybody's pulling in the same direction. Everybody's on that same page and putting themselves second to the overriding goal of just, let's win a game.

Yeah, at the end of the day, no matter if you're a football team or organization, you're gonna need people to achieve whatever goals that the company has, and everybody's gotta buy in, and you have to create a culture within that company that allows, that motivates people to want to buy in. And sometimes the leader isn't the person that's trying to tell everybody what to do. Like, the leader is the person that can inspire everybody to believe in the same goal, to set the same priorities. And the best leaders I've been around in the NFL, again, they're able to understand their individual players that they're in charge of, whether it's the D-line coach or the coordinator, or they're able to understand their guys and they're able to really get everybody on the same page based on how those guys think, how they process information. So the best leaders I've been around, yeah, they're tough, but they get it. They really get to know, not like personally, but they want to know how you think, what motivates you, why are you here, so they can give you that motivation.

Yeah, I'm going to get your feedback on this because to me, feedback and accountability is such a big deal in how it is that we get better and how we are able to help other people get better as leaders, whether again it's a leader in a family or a leader in a company. And so my theory is that, because I've never played professional sports, I played in college and did— been around it all my life, but there's a difference between feedback that's rooted in judgment, which we all know what it feels like when you're being judged, right? People don't want to make mistakes. They get tense. They are defensive, right? No pun intended, right? But they get super defensive when they feel like somebody's being critical of them and judging them. Mm-hmm. So the intensity arena of professional sports, my theory is that what you saw, especially among— in the winning circle and the teams that won, were systems of accountability and feedback that was rooted in something other than judgment.

Absolutely.

I feel like that feedback, that accountability was rooted in love. Love of the game, love of the mission, of that singular purpose that everybody was bought into. Is that far off from how you experienced it?

Oh, that's right on the head. With Rod Marinelli, he just left as the defense coordinator for the Cowboys. I think Oakland Just hired him as their defensive line coach, but he was my defensive line coach for 5 years in Tampa. And one of the things he always did, I mean, he was tough, like he'd get on you, but it'd always be rooted in the expectations, the standard. So if the standard is for, if you're one-on-one with an offensive lineman, you beat him, right? And if you don't beat him, he's gonna get on you by not beating that guy. He's not gonna tell you that you suck for not beating him. He's like, hey, the standard is you're one-on-one, you beat that guy. That's the standard, let's go. Now he might say it with some harsh words, right? He might get on you, but it's never in a situation where, again, he's degrading you or tearing you down.

Right.

Again, if you're trying to accomplish something, and I do a presentation called The Winning Edge, and if you're trying to accomplish something, especially something big, or like winning in the NFL, you gotta go out and go against a 6'7, 350-pound lineman. You can't go out there not being confident. You can't go out there not believing I'm gonna beat this guy, or I'm gonna achieve this thing. 'Cause if you don't believe it, you're gonna attack it like that. And then he's gonna punch you in the face. NFL, like, if you run up on somebody timid, they're gonna punch you in the chest and knock you on the ground. Yeah. So you have to attack it like, I believe I'm about to drag this guy. Like, he sucks. I'm better than him. He can't stop me. And the best coaches will make sure you go into a game with that mindset, not second-guessing yourself and not being sure about yourself. Yes.

They build you up. But ultimately, that love gets defined in different ways. So I was a lifeguard at the beach, and it was life and death all the time on this beach. We made hundreds of rescues every day. More than 100,000 patrons on the beach on Saturdays and Sundays, and we were a crew of 20 lifeguards, and we got that job done every single day. I was there 7 summers. And it was because that culture, as you said earlier, that how I would define the winning culture in our field was that we had each other's backs. We had a got-your-back culture. That was our mantra, was nobody goes down in our water. Nobody goes down on our watch. This is intense even for football. Like, we're talking about intense stuff. We would say—

Life or death.

You either make the save or you die trying. That was our mantra. We lived with that. But we were all bought in and we knew that people had our backs all the time. So yeah, I mean, even in baseball, like we're talking about the Astros and Yankees, I mean, you think about classic example on the pitcher's mound, right? Pitcher's throwing up some balls flying or things are going on, manager or pitching coach comes out, third baseman comes in, first baseman, catcher comes out, right? What are they doing on the mound? What are they saying to that guy? You suck. I haven't seen anybody suck as bad as you going back to AA ball. It's Forget AAA, right? There's no conversation like that out there, right? It's like, how you feeling, man? What's going on? How's your arm? What do you think about the next batter? And it's only because they want to win a game. It's not that people might have lost confidence or want to say something pretty harsh, even get personal, but they want to win a game.

They want to win. And again, it's that one goal. And again, they probably go out there on the mound and probably like, hey man, how you feeling? I'm okay. You got 10 more pitches? I think I got 10 more, let's go. These next 10, let's go strike out these batters right now, let's go. 'Cause again, sometimes you just need to be pepped up, and everything comes from your mind, your mental, how you feel about it. The body will do what the mind tells it to do, but you have to sometimes push it.

Yeah, and sometimes they're gonna get out there and go, you know what, give me the ball. I mean, you know, it's like, give me the ball. But it's not, again, give me the ball, you suck, go take a shower. It's like, yeah, we're gonna bring in somebody else to help now. This is where it's again not a personal thing, but it's about that singular vision, whatever that is. So I want to talk about your leaving the NFL after an 8-year amazing career. When did you guys win the Super Bowl, by the way? What year was that?

That was 2003.

2003. So I'm trying to think what year it was that in the year that the Patriots were undefeated, And the only defeat they had that year was to the New York Giants that beat them in the Super Bowl. On the, on the way to that Super Bowl season, winning season, the Giants may have been like, I don't know, finished the season 8-8 or something. I mean, they didn't have a great season, but they marched through the playoffs and they had to play Tampa Bay, had to play you guys in Tampa Bay. Were you playing at that time? Do you remember that?

No, I think that was a year before I got there. That's a couple years before I got there with that game. Yeah, I was there. Let's see, we played against the Oakland Raiders When we basically traded for Jon Gruden, he was the Oakland coach in '02, and then we traded for him, and we got him to coach us in '03. So his last 2 teams end up playing each other in the Super Bowl, which was probably crazy.

Trippy, yeah. Wow. So you play 8 seasons, and it's time to retire. What was that about? 'Cause this has become a big thing right now with guys like Andrew Luck, and I forget this other guy just more recently.

Luke Kuechly.

Yeah, like 28 years old saying—

Yeah, great, great player, great linebacker, plays for the Carolina Panthers. Yeah, it's, I mean, everybody doesn't get to choose. I know during that time, you know, I didn't get to choose. Basically, for most guys, the NFL says, look, we're not gonna hire you anymore. Nobody wants to sign you to a contract, so you're done. And again, that's a tough transition, man, 'cause again, football has been your life. Like, you've seen yourself through that prism from junior high through high school, through college, through pros. That's who you are. And now when it's not there anymore, you're a little lost. Like, what's next? Who am I when I don't have on a helmet? And that's always a really tough question for guys to ask when they're done with the game.

And I think when you said it earlier that you changed, that you were in your lane, and that's powerful when people are in their lane. And I want you to weigh in on your experience of this. I don't feel like you changed your lane even with what you're doing. I think you just widened your lane. And that's how I'd frame it because what you're doing now, you have tremendous passion for and helping kids. And I'd really love for you to tell us about Athletes for Computer Science and what inspired you to do that and what in that transition was most difficult for you. Because I don't think— my guess is most people watching or listening to this right now have never heard that about the NFL, that there's sort of a time. I mean, we know when people get injured and got to retire or when you choose to retire like some of the folks we just mentioned, but that moment where you sort of get the sentence, it's like somebody says to you, you're done. And we'd be like, no, no, no, I got more.

And it's not your choice. Like, it's not your choice. So it's hard, man. It was hard for me because I really wanted to play. And, you know, I was working out, trying to get in great shape, but I had so many injuries. Both my shoulders were bone on bone. My lower back was, you know, bone on bone. I had L4, L5 was bone on bone. My ankles were arthritic. So even though I was, what, 29 years old, like my body was beat up pretty bad. So bringing me in as a player is like, we're bringing in, you know, damaged goods a lot of times, you know, when you're at that point. So they just have to weigh younger player that costs less, older player that costs more and he's hurt. So that's hard for you to take, that your career's over. So in that transition, I got pulled in a bunch of different directions by a bunch of different people, 'cause I didn't know what I wanted to do. Like, so somebody came along and said, hey man, you should try this. Or, you should try this, or, what about this? And it's like, I don't know. So you just end up kinda just going in to win, 'cause again, football is gone, it's not coming back. You don't know what's in front of you. So that was a really, really tough transition for me, but I've always done stuff in the community, even from when I was, you know, in my early 20s. Like, I used to do football camps and go to schools and speak. So after, you know, I tried being— working in the trucking industry and being in that industry, 'cause somebody asked me there, I was like, nah, I don't wanna do that. Real estate, it was boring, right? Money management, don't like it. All that stuff, there's nothing could really kind of get my juices flowing. Like, I wouldn't get up like, yeah, I'm looking forward to going to look at these balance sheets today. Like, I just wasn't— it wasn't my thing. Not that it couldn't be somebody else's, because numbers could be somebody else's thing. Wasn't my thing. So I've always done stuff in the community. I've always been very tech savvy. My major in college was technology teacher ed. So I wanted to teach tech classes and coach football, if I, you know, when I graduated. So I started working with Microsoft on trying to find innovative ways for kids to stay fit. So we would go in and do programs, raise money, donate Xboxes with body tracking cameras, all these different technology to help kids kind of track their fitness, track their movements.

Their physical fitness mostly, right?

Yeah, physical fitness. Yeah, it was physical fitness. But I started to kind of see the places that I was in. I'm like, man, these places are hurting economically. Like, it's not like the problem is that they're, you know, they need to exercise more. A lot of the issues around the country is people don't have a way to participate in the economy and they don't have the confidence that they can.

Right.

So I started to see some of the computer science education that Microsoft was doing in the store through my partnership. And I thought, I was like, you know what? Why can't other people have access to this stuff? You know, people who don't live near a Microsoft Store. 'Cause if you live near a Microsoft Store, you can go take classes whenever you want for free. Right. But if you don't, you don't have access. And most of the country, most of our educational system is struggling to find access to training that's actually relevant to the economy. So I created Afterschool Computer Science. We teach the classes remotely. We teach them in rural areas and inner cities. Anywhere in the country, we can teach classes, and I get athletes to come on as education ambassadors on our video conferences.

Yeah.

So they come on, they visit classes, they get a chance to talk to the students, engage with the students, students get to ask them questions, they encourage the students, they inspire the students. We hire college students to teach our classes, computer science students, because we're teaching computer science fundamentals K through 8, right? So it's not like— we get our college students who have some background in computer science, education students who have a desire to be teachers, and they get a chance to learn how to teach remotely and teach something and inspire kids in a way to do something that could possibly be relevant in a career or actually starting a business. I wanted to be a part of really kind of helping support our educational system in that way.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. That's so cool. I mean, my mother-in-law was a teacher for 30 years and my— 18 years, and my dad for 30-plus years. I mean, I did it for 2 years in middle school, so I know that age group pretty well. Yeah, man.

They're handfuls, boy. 30 of them?

They beat me up good, man. I had 5 classes, 30 each, you know, 150 13, 14-year-olds. I'm still exhausted from that.

You gotta have the patience of a monk, like, to be able to—

Patience of a monk. And yeah, nothing more important than that. Just can't say thank you enough for being inspired to do that. It must feel great. I mean, that, that's where you're expressing your passion these days. And when did you start that? How long ago is it?

I started that in 2018. We've had over 1,000 kids go through our program. And again, we teach these kids, like, they have our class through the entire school year. So it's not just a visit, like, one class. Like, they have our class through the entire school year. So it's awesome. It's great to see because again, you see federal government, state government, private sector talking about the need for STEM education and the need for workers with computer science skills, technology skills. And a lot of these jobs, the best jobs in America, get outsourced because other countries have focused— made that a focus of their educational system. So they have the labor force with that expertise that companies like Apple and Google and Amazon That's the expertise that they need. Exxon, Chevron, I know I'm here in Houston in the oil and gas sector. Again, there I was meeting with one of their directors of their IT at Exxon the other day. He talked about, man, we have to compete with Google, we have to compete with Microsoft for talent. Our issue is we're not as cool as Google, right? We're not as cool as Microsoft, right? So again, those are some of the most powerful companies in the country and they're struggling looking for the right talent. So, you know, I want to be a part of kind of Cultivating that talent, right? There's a need, there's an opportunity, why not?

There's a huge opportunity forward in the near and long-term future that these are jobs that are going to be around. That's fantastic. I want to quickly get into your definition of resilience, and then we're going to talk about rituals as we wrap things up. How do you— because you mentioned resilience earlier, and it's a lot of interest to us— how would you define resilience?

Just understanding that you're gonna lose, you're not gonna win every time, and being prepared to just keep moving forward. Like, being a defensive lineman, I got blocked a lot. I got 2 sacks in the game, I'm player of the game. I might have played 40, 50 snaps, 30, 40 pass plays where I got blocked. I win 2 of them, I'm player of the game. So you have to be resilient. You have to be able to say, okay, you blocked me that time. Okay, I lost that time. Okay, you got me that time. Okay, you told me no that time. Yeah, you told me no. 10 people just told me no, but hey, I gotta keep moving. I gotta keep going. Eventually, you'll land where you wanna land. So that's resilience to me. It's just like, just understanding you're gonna lose. People are gonna tell you no, and you just gotta keep trying.

Yeah. People, I think, were raised in so many ways to see failure as just an unacceptable result. You know, like failure almost amounts to a little mini death. Die a little every time we fail. Because we've been trained that there's such consequences attached to failure. Your grades in school, whether you got punished or whatever, there were consequences attached to making a mistake. And even today in our culture, I mean, just sort of societally, we see this culture. I think Bill Maher calls it the cancel culture. Yeah. You know, somebody makes a mistake and boom, they get taken off the air. You know, if you see an entertainer or somebody that's in the movies or on TV or something and they They make a mistake. I'm not— and by the way, I am not defending certain kinds of mistakes that people make. I mean, if you violate the law, you violate somebody's rights, there ought to be consequences.

Absolutely.

And at the same time, I think the pendulum has swung to such a degree that we're also losing sight of the fact, I think, I feel, that we're human beings by nature. It's just what you're saying. I mean, a part of being a human being is to learn resilience, which is to learn from experience, and the greatest teacher of experience are the mistakes we make. I mean, I don't know. It's one of those things we're gonna—

People don't have space to make mistakes anymore. And that's a tough society to live in.

It is. It's tough. And certainly, I guess if we're closing the loop on this one, when it comes to your, your, your professional experience, both as a football player and as a business person, if you take— remove the failure piece, the making mistakes piece from the equation, what would you be left with on a football team or business?

Yeah, I mean, it— one, it wouldn't be fun, right? It wouldn't be fun because, again, part of the fun of getting a chance to compete is knowing that you can lose and knowing that you gotta compete and knowing that you have to make the right move and trying to figure out what move you need to make. You know, in business and growing this organization, again, what I'm doing I think is a great cause, but at the end of the day, it's building an organization, it's building a business. So I have to make the right moves, develop the right partnerships, talk to the right people. I'm gonna talk to people who are gonna tell me no. I'm gonna talk to people who are gonna tell me yes. I'm constantly growing and learning and evolving every single day as far as running this organization, but I'm never gonna quit, right? I'm never gonna quit. And so I know eventually everything will be exactly what I want it to be. It's not on my time. It's just— it's on God's time. And that's— And I just gotta keep working, man. So now I gotta tell you this right now. I gotta tell you this. We gotta finish up 'cause my wife will beat me if I don't go pick up my kids.

It's perfect. The last thing else I wanna ask you is just give us one ritual, one personal ritual you've got that helps you to remain resilient, stay resilient.

Meditation, man. Meditation. Just taking 10 minutes to myself and trying not to think about Anything. Because again, running this organization, having a family, having a wife, 4 children, mom, on this board of this organization, gotta call this person, gotta make sure my children are practicing, make sure they're doing their homework, make sure my wife is happy. Like all of these different things, man. Like just that 10 minutes to be like, man, I just don't want to exist right now. I just want to just— Like shut my brain down and not think of anything. So I would say best ritual that I have is 10 minutes of meditation every day.

There you go. And when you talk about 10s, I just finishing up this book, 10% Happier, which is a book about mindfulness and meditation by Dan Harris, a killer book. So first of all, Ellis, thank you so much for being on the show today. I've ridiculously enjoyed this conversation and I know everybody else, same thing. So My reminder to our audience, in addition to letting us know your comments and what you thought about the conversation, any questions you've got, just to remember what a blessing it is to be here now in this, whatever this is. Because in this moment when we're taking our breath, this breath right now, we wake up tomorrow and you take another breath and you're awake, you can realize there are people in that same exact moment who are taking their last breath. And that makes that moment special. Sacred, even something you can be grateful for in the midst of any other thing that's going on in your life. You can be grateful in that moment, and and if you want to dare to really stretch the bounds of your comfort zone, maybe say these four words when you wake up tomorrow: I love my life. I love my life. Ellis, do you love your life?

Love my life, man. I'm blessed.

Right on. All right. Peace out, everybody. Ciao. We'll see you soon.

Take care. All right, man. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

All right. Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.