Aaron Taylor — Feel Your Way to Freedom: Growing Up Fatherless, Becoming a Father, and Winning a Super Bowl Along the Way

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 2 Super Bowls, and in one of them they won. He's 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'd like to add?

Uh, one, the spelling bee in 4th 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 had said a phrase about your journey that I really loved, which was, "Feel your way to 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 practice, whatever it is 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, 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 and power, 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 he'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 shit and it just didn't work. So I 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 and say, "Hey guys, my self-esteem's down today. My girlfriend broke up with me and 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 helmet and my shoulder pads, put my mouthpiece in, and tried to knock 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, uh, 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, uh, 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, and I'm in the College Football Hall of Fame, I've won a Super Bowl, I won the Lombardi in 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 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 where it clicks, that 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. 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 contract negotiation right now. Um, but I had this incredible moment last year that may underscore what it is you're talking about. I got a call from my boss indicating that somebody on our team had gotten COVID. And the question was, would I be interested in calling my first ever NFL game? I was like, heck 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, kissed 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 I 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, in 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, here it comes, a fastball of truth is about to be thrown over the plate. 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 going to squeeze it so tightly that you're going to 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 going to 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 and 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 as 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. 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, um, 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, a two-time Olympian in beach volleyball. So I am that smart. At least I'm that smart enough that I can choose well. That's the best spectator sport ever. I just want to throw that in there. So she understands what being a good teammate's like. She understands what pressure 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 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. And to my brain, it didn't know the difference. And 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 in 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're 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 in 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 Fortin, 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 was 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 in 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, AT," 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 sullen? Are you excited? You thinking, holy shit, 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.

It 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? A 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, and 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 how has it grown since that time hearing that story in the hotel room?

Yeah. Well, I'll answer that question with another story that I heard in the rooms of recovery about 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 him do it because they'd have to keep going through these guys. So, but then the guy comes out and gets 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 think 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 where we're afraid or unwilling to go. It's those leap of faiths. 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?

Hmm.

I'd probably do this.

Good.

Then go do that. Whoa, wait, what? 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 a 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 is not the right word, but refined. It's like there's, there's a part of me that wasn't real that's lost. And I'm wondering if you have a story like that where you had the faith, the idea was going to go one way, it went disastrously wrong, but at the end of the day, you are better for it. Like, the faith still was a good bet even though there was a bump or two on the way.

Yeah, man. That false self, like, I've been going through this phase where I've— the idea of myself, like, what's that phrase? Narcissists don't fall in love with themselves. They fall in love with the idea of themselves. Like, my— Love that one.

That's good.

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 2. I get sent back to Indiana to live with my father and his family. While there, an older adult male family member molests 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 2 years. So I was always the new kid in school. Just for shits and giggles, I'm biracial. So never felt white enough. I'd 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 birdhouses 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, 7 or 8, and I think that's where a lot of that stuff comes from. So after that day, at 8, when I sat on the couch from 8 AM 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 8-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 that my life would be 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 footprints. How could you abandon me? And you know, obviously Jesus or God saying, "Well, that was when 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 all that shit out the window.

Back in my day, I didn't have a father to tell me to brush my teeth.

Yeah. Oh, oh, 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 in jest there, Brett, but like there's been part of me, I was 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 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 mad, 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 even 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, to be continued.

Yeah, we're gonna do an update podcast. And oh my God, 6 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 mom a nurse at?

Oh, uh, from '72 to probably '83. 3 or 4?

My mom worked at Children's Hospital Oakland in '82 to '86 or '87.

Oh, I have to do a little research, put them in the show notes whether there was crossover or not. Yeah, man. I spent a lot of afternoons there.

Well, it was a horrible neighborhood back then. I remember that. Yeah, she was— my mom ran dietitian, like did the dietetics part of the hospital. Anyway, sorry, he's like Oakland.

Small world getting smaller. No, that, that's a heck of a quinky 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 I 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. She's like, oh, well, how do you do that? It's like, oh, you just play in college and get drafted. Oh, just get drafted? Does 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 and da da da da da. 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 punchline 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 doors started to open and the divinity and the serendipity came in. There was a show on that night that talked about the school, De La Salle, in 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 2 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 Y 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 sort of athleticism whatsoever. So that was kind of the, the story. And that led to a full scholarship at 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 pats 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 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 in ball? Did you have that full sense of confidence at CBS 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. And to have any kind of confidence, which also to me relates to what you were 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 and 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 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, I appreciate that, Joe. 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 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, timeout. 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 shit 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.

Okay.

Even when we win, we lose as fathers. Oh my God. Even when we lose, we win. Win, I guess, too. But, um, that— 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 about his dad.

So my moment of transformation.

Yeah, exactly. Transformation. Let me tell you about who my dad really is.

It's interesting, like, a lot of what tends to drive us to excellence is often, often it's like you described, 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. It 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 frickin meat grinder the last 3 years that'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 got a, 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, you know, what the expected consequence was going to be. And he started to text the answer. I said, uh-uh, uh-uh, you pick 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 nodding 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 and hi, you know, hi, Mrs. Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. Like that, those, we had to do that. But these kids aren't growing up with that. And I was like, ah, 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 son 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 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. The world 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 And I said, "Yes." But then nobody would take a 9-year-old for a silent meditation in this country. But we found a place and we did this 3-day thing. And she was so happy at the end of it. And it was just like, it was so her scene. And about 3 months later, I was like, "Hey, so what do you think about meditation? What's going on?" She goes, "I really like it, but 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." She didn't say it like that, but that was the deal. And recently she's been interested in going back into that world again. But it's just this interesting thing of teenagers 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 than 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 I got to tell you this story about— So at the end of the silent retreat, I looked at my daughter and I'm like, "What was your favorite thing about it?" She goes, "I think it was the silent— It was the fact that you couldn't tell me what to do for 3.5 days." Wait, you didn't install a voice in her head?

Whoa. Oh.

I was like, "Yeah, fair.

Fair enough." I'll say this, Joe, that to me is a little peek into the job that you are doing as a parent because she 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 saying 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 in the context from which this podcast arose 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. 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 of the beholder, like kind of that whole vein of thinking. And with respect 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 sort of special. And, uh, there's a quote on there. That I'm going to butcher my own quote, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what we do. It's about who and what we become in that process.

Yeah.

So as I'm in the College Football Hall of Fame and have a Super Bowl ring and I'm, you know, a father and an employee and have all these accolades on Wikipedia, don't forget the spelling bee, minus the 4th 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, in it, that assumption is that everything I need for these last 9 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 than you were even like 6, 7 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 me being me and this is what happens when I'm me. And so that's my question is how much of that lesson, because you learned it, your kids inherit?

Some. 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 about this stuff. So they've certainly heard it. I've certainly modeled how to make an amends 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 unambitious, undriven man.

No.

When I heard your approach on the back nine, I didn't hear that you lost your ambition.

It's different. It's, you know, you got to let go to take control. You got to, you know, hit your knees to finally stand up. It's like this oxymoronical piece that we're talking about.

That's my question. I'm going to push here just a little bit.

Yeah.

Good. 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 to 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 let them find their own way down the mountain. I love to snowboard and I love to bomb it. My wife goes really slow. I used to get frustrated with her. We figured out that, hey, let's ride up together. I'mma bomb it. I'mma 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.

Mm-hmm.

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.

Yep, against Granada.

So Granada was my high school.

No way.

I should—

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, 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 and 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 walk into the house. Hey honey, how'd it go? Don't say a word. Slam the door into my room.

So, ooh.

So she waited probably 10 minutes and I'm sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. And she walks in. She goes, what happened?

I was like, I, 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 in. They just kept yelling at me and telling 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, I, Mom, 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 she said, 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 then 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 and 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 where we're afraid or 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.

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