Inspirational comeback arcs aren’t reserved for fiction. Darren Waller, tight end for the New York Giants and Donny Starkins, mindfulness teacher, surface real-life tales of resiliency, including vulnerable insights into their ongoing recovery journeys and interviews with guests who illustrate what “comeback” means to them.
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Darren and Donny explore self-abandonment's impact on our lives and relationships, discussing familiar behaviors like people-pleasing and conflict avoidance. They share personal stories, emphasizing the importance of recognizing our self-worth and taking charge of our lives.
Offering practical tips for self-care and breaking free from societal conditioning, the hosts conclude with a powerful reminder: by valuing ourselves, we can authentically pour love into others. Join this empowering conversation to start a journey toward self-love and fulfillment.
In this episode, Darren and Donny spotlight the essence of the holiday season: prioritizing presence over presents. They advocate for cherishing moments with loved ones, emphasizing human connections over material possessions. Encouraging listeners to set boundaries and be fully engaged in relationships, the conversation urges a shift towards meaningful experiences. They delve into self-love, authenticity, and reevaluating life's pursuits, inspiring a reflective and uplifting perspective on the holiday season and beyond.
Darren Waller and Donny Starkins invite you to join them on an incredible journey of love, resilience, and redemption in the upcoming episode, "Love Unbroken." Cybill Fox and Rob Richardson share their deeply personal story of enduring 21 years of incarceration while keeping their love and commitment alive. Beginning as high school sweethearts and enduring a tough separation through incarceration, their account highlights their enduring love and indomitable resilience. Their story embodies hope, illustrating that determination and unity can conquer the most formidable adversities. Prepare to be moved and inspired by their transformative journey as they lead with heart and purpose, defying all odds to emerge stronger together.
Danica Patrick’s Comeback Story - The Importance of Mindset, Goals, and Self-Love
Thursday, May 13, 2021 • Duration 58:25
Danica Patrick, one of the most successful and recognized female racers in the world, shares her story of what she learned during her career, on and off the track. Learn about why a growth mindset was key to Danica’s success growing up as a racer, the vital importance of setting lofty goals, and why self-love is the best foundation for real relationships in life.
Danica is one of the most successful and recognized female racers, having been the first female to lead the Indy 500, the first female to win the Poll position in the Daytona 500, and won the Indy Japan. No other female has come close to what Danica has achieved in her racing career.
Danica grew up in Illinois and life was very normal, but she admits that she hasn’t experienced anything else so most people will think their childhood is pretty “normal”.
She began racing at the age of 10 so being competitive was a source of struggle and conflict with her father, but Danica doesn’t have many specific memories from her childhood.
Danica’s first real teacher was her father. She doesn’t recall having any role models in particular. One of the first lessons she learned from her father was that wherever your eyes are, that’s the direction you will go. This has become a metaphor that Danica has taken to heart.
Danica is a future thinker and gets very attached to outcomes. This makes her willing to work through the pain when she sets a goal so that she can achieve it.
Professionally, one of Danica’s lowest points was when her sponsor left in 2017. She had to face the possibility of being done racing and how that was going to change her life. Personally, she’s dealt with a lot more sadness in grief in her relationships.
Danica realized that the times where she happiest were when she was performing her best, and that when she was happier she also performed better. Recognizing the dynamic of her own joy and how her well-being affected her performance was a big realization.
If people grow up in a household that only rewards success they tend to refrain from taking on new challenges because of their fear of failure. A growth mindset is critical for every aspect of life.
Home is a state of being. It’s inside you and you carry it with you. As a culture, once we wrap our head around how powerful the mind is there will be some drastic shifts in the world.
So much of who we are is hidden in the subconscious mind. Once you recognize that everything in your reality is there to show you who you are, it becomes informational. We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Mike Bayer’s Comeback Story - Relentless Honesty, Awareness, and Asking For The Right Kind of Help
Thursday, May 6, 2021 • Duration 45:40
Mike Bayer shares his story of growing up and struggling with his sexuality, and tells how that pain led to a meth addiction that almost destroyed his life. Learn how Mike realized the source of his pain and how he turned his story into a platform for helping thousands of people overcome their addictions and live more fulfilling lives.
The theme of any great change is relentless honesty.
Everyone has a different upbringing and we all have a different relationship with our upbringing. Mike grew up playing basketball and from the outside it looked like everything was going well but he never felt okay with his life. He started doing drugs at a young age largely due in part to being gay but being unable to admit it.
Shame is a cloak of toxicity that eventually seeps into all areas of your life. Growing up was only okay when Mike was stoned, and doing drugs became a slippery slope into misery and addiction.
For athletes, teachers are usually coaches. Mike didn’t have any great mentors when it came to athletics. It wasn’t until Mike’s parents sent him to therapy when he was younger where he felt comfortable enough to admit to someone that he was gay.
The issue wasn’t so much that Mike was gay and accepting that, it was an issue of not feeling good enough to be accepted by his peers. Therapy is what allowed him to connect the dots and identify where the pain was coming from.
Therapy is like physical exercise. When you want to get deeper into why you feel a particular way, therapy is a way to put in the work.
Mike’s low point was simple. After suffering for months from a brutal meth addiction, he looked in the mirror and realized that he was sick and tired of being a loser. He had no purpose and was on a downward trajectory that wasn’t going to change unless he changed it.
Mike shares the story of his sugar momma and the crazy experiences he had when he was under the influence.
Awareness is the key to change. When it comes to hitting bottom, you can always go a little deeper. Mike found himself going back to drugs the day after he would throw them away in the effort to quit. Mike’s awareness and realization was that he was not the man he was supposed to be.
We have to own our lives and take ownership for where we are right now and the actions we took to get us here.
Mike got sober at 22 and he never thought he would be a person who could help other people to do the same thing. After being six months sober, Mike started working in treatment while also working other side jobs and did whatever he could to get into the field of counseling. He went from being a counselor to doing interventions and the work continued to evolve.
Reflecting On Eight Years Of Sobriety
Monday, May 3, 2021 • Duration 05:12
A quick check-in with Donny. A few words of inspiration and why sobriety is the best thing that ever happened to him.
Holly Whitaker's Comeback Story - Learning to Love Yourself
Thursday, April 29, 2021 • Duration 41:32
Holly Whitaker shares her struggle with substance abuse and addiction, and how her experience led her to creating the digital recovery program Tempest. Holly is on a mission to change the conversation about alcohol in society after realizing that her seemingly successful life was just a show, and that there is a different path to recovery available to everyone.
Growing up, Holly’s life was fairly idyllic. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom and her father ran his own business. They lived a nice middle-class life but Holly has memories that something that wasn’t right. A big part of Holly’s recovery was identifying the incidents that put her on the path to struggling with substances.
The biggest impact on Holly’s life happened when her parents got divorced after her father came out of the closet. This forced Holly to confront her own sexuality at a very young age and resulted in her and her mother struggling financially. Up to that point, Holly had always been industrious but that all changed after the divorce.
It often doesn’t matter what your childhood was like. We can all end up in the same place.
Holly’s first memory of pain was her early story of feeling like the “other” in her family. At a very young age, Holly experienced a significant feeling of not belonging anywhere.
Holly’s experience with teachers was frustrating. As a high-energy child, Holly didn’t have a teacher who was invested in her development until high school. Her first teacher put Holly onto a trajectory of being disliked for many years.
When we get close to the bottom, we can either stop and tell ourselves the truth of what’s happening or we can claw ourselves out and keep it going. Holly had many moments of being near rock bottom where she knew that she needed help to escape, but it took six months after her worst moment before she finally got sober.
Trying to live up to the image of who she was told to be held Holly back from accepting that she wasn’t happy. It wasn’t until she realized that she had a choice. She could either keep the toxic relationships in her life and die, or sever those relationships that weren’t serving her.
You don’t have to live up to other people’s standards. Be okay with being a mess. You have to work every single day on your own life, you will improve and you will encounter the same sorts of problems each day, just in a different form.
Our values are the bedrock of who we are, and if we make decisions that are not in alignment with our core values, things get messy. If you know what you are and what you stand for, the criticism you receive won’t cut as deep. Knowing who you are creates a solid ground for you to stand on.
Inky Johnson's Comeback Story - The Beauty of Adversity and Finding Your Purpose
Thursday, April 22, 2021 • Duration 33:51
Learn about how Inky Johnson turned a career ending injury into a story of inspiration and personal growth. Inky shares his experience in dealing with an injury that completely changed his life and how he went from struggling to understand it to using it as a platform for spiritual growth and service to other people.
Inky Johnson grew up in a city outside of Atlanta, born to a young mother of just 16 years of age. His early years were hard but they were some of the best years of his life. Growing up that way shaped and molded him, and gave him the motivation to improve his family’s life.
Inky loved football growing up but he also played basketball, baseball, and competed in track and field sports. An influential coach helped him make the decision to pursue football seriously.
The one thing we all have in common is that we will face opposition and adversity. One of Inky’s earliest memories of pain was experiencing a police raid when he was a child. He will never forget how that experience and ones like it shaped his decision making and choices as a young man.
Inky’s first real teacher was his eighth grade teacher and basketball coach. He recalls a moment where his teacher told him that he was better than the environment he was growing up in. The teacher took Inky under his wing and began picking him up each day before school, teaching him proverbs, and encouraging Inky to write about his dreams, goals, and aspirations. He continued to do that throughout high school and it completely changed his life.
Inky’s greatest moment of adversity happened when it looked like he was set to achieve everything that he wanted. During a simple practice, Inky suffered a life threatening injury and woke up in the emergency room, being told that his football career was over.
The greatest challenge was in trying to understand. When a person goes through something that they don’t understand and is painful, it can prevent them from moving into their purpose. The opposition can be so heavy and strong that it makes seeing why and what you should do very difficult.
Inky turned and faced his situation and instead of trying to understand it, he focused on just surviving it. Once he attained a certain level of peace around his new situation, he was able to accept it and see where it fit into his purpose.
We all get to a point in the journey where we yield to our circumstances. Whenever you are going through something and trying to change your life, it’s a “you issue.” Don’t blame other people or circumstances, getting back into balance is down to you. Inky had to yield first to get to a place of understanding.
Trent Shelton’s Comeback Story - The Power of Rehab Time
Thursday, April 15, 2021 • Duration 46:59
Internationally successful motivational speaker Trent Shelton talks about his story and struggle with fear and depression, and how his life changed completely once he accepted the power of his voice. Learn about the challenges Trent encountered during his professional football career and how those struggles became his message that he now shares with over 12 million followers every day.
Trent grew up in the New Orleans area with his two older brothers and family. Sports were a major component of Trent’s life and his parents were always supportive of him and the things he pursued.
One of Trent’s earliest memories of pain was because he was asthmatic and had a lot of difficulty breathing when he was younger. It was so bad that during one coughing episode Trent burst the blood vessels in his eyes. His mother drove him to the hospital where Trent stopped breathing and blacked out. He spent a week in the hospital and it was then that he realized how fragile life could be.
Trent learned to never take life for granted and realized that God has a plan for his life. The pain was not there to break him, it was there to build him, and it gave Trent a lot of emotional resilience from a young age.
Trent’s parents were his earliest teachers. He learned how to have faith and resilience from his mother and he learned how to be a supportive father and husband from his dad.
Trent grew up across the street from people that went on to play professional football and that showed him the fruits of hard work. Hard work can make any reality and dream come true. Get around people that make your dreams tangible and make you feel like you can accomplish them.
Trent found some success as an athlete when he was in school but during one of his first drafts, he found himself being left behind. Athletes put a tremendous amount of significance on their performance, and it was the first time in his life where Trent really felt like he wasn’t enough. A couple of weeks later, Trent was cut from the team.
He went back to his parent’s place and sheltered himself. What you suppress will turn into your depression, that's what happened to Trent. For the following three years he lost himself in the journey to try to make it as a professional football player.
Instead of the love of the game, everything was based on the fear of being cut for not living up to what people expected.
It’s hard for athletes to look within and accept that they need to heal. The selfish season is about making sure you take the time for you so you can show up in your life in the way that your family or your team needs you to.
Jon Gordon’s Comeback Story - The Power of Positivity
Thursday, April 8, 2021 • Duration 44:43
Jon Gordon, best selling author and motivational speaker, shares his hard-won insights into happiness and fulfillment, and talks about the power of positivity in transforming your life. Learn how Jon escaped a life of misery and depression and turned his life around, by pursuing service instead of his ego and focusing on encouraging and inspiring one person at a time.
Jon grew up on Long Island New York in a Jewish-Italian family. It was not a very positive household overall and he often got into fights with other neighborhood kids. It often felt like he was battling for survival.
He played lacrosse at Cornell University, where he learned about culture, leadership, and teamwork. He didn’t originally plan on playing lacrosse but an instrumental high school coach convinced him to stick with it and showed him that coaches can change your life forever.
Basketball was always Jon’s favorite game, so the transition from lacrosse wasn’t the worst. The real challenge was when Jon’s wife almost left him when he was 31. He had experienced a rollercoaster of bouncing around between law school and a dot-com job and blamed her for the circumstances for his life. It wasn’t until she said she was leaving that he started to question why he was so miserable.
He was addicted to trying to prove himself and earning the validity of someone successful. The more he chased that idea, the more miserable he became. Jon started taking walks of gratitude, praying, and meditation, and those things helped him escape the rut he was in.
We are all addicted to something, and it’s not always the usual substances. Many people are addicted to their work, or their smartphone, or social media.
Your past is a part of who you are and your soul has wounds that define you. For Jon, his biological father leaving was deeply impactful on him and shaped his attitude on life. A major life-changing moment for Jon was forgiving his biological father and letting go of the past.
We all have wounds, and we all try to fill those wounds. Your wounds are your constraints and you can either heal them and rise above them or the wound can become infected.
We are not strong enough on our own. That’s why every addiction program includes a higher power.
The most important first step in Jon’s turn around from misery was in committing to serving others instead of just building up his ego. You become a person of significance when you make others significant. This became the foundation for Jon’s future work writing books, speaking, and sending out his weekly newsletter.
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The body follows the mind. When it comes to football or racing, success is 90% mental and 10% physical. The fear of failure is more impactful than the physical skills of the body. Belief in yourself carries an immense amount of weight of the end result.
If you set your goal to be ambitious and lofty, the halfway point will still involve achieving great things. If you make your goals small you end up selling your potential short.
Small incremental goals along the way will keep you motivated and give you perspective on the progress you’re making. Compliment your lofty goal with smaller goals along the path.
To set the proper goals for yourself, you need to know who you are and what your values are.
Boundaries are not about placing limitations on other people, it’s about what you will and won’t allow into your space. Being able to say no from a place of love is a very important life skill or you can find yourself giving away your energy to people and things that don’t resonate with you. Without boundaries, there is no way to really know who someone is.
Values are the bedrock of who we are, and we teach people how to treat us.
Knowing who you really are is hard. Work, life, kids, activities and other people make it very difficult to get to know who you are. You need time alone to figure those things out, and once you know who you are you know what you are willing to put up with and be around.
Change is not part of the process, it is the process.
The ego is impatient because it knows its time is limited but the soul is patient because it knows that it has forever.
The more you love yourself the more other people can love you. Without that self-love, you won’t be able to accept the love of someone else because you won’t believe that it’s true.
Accountability is one of the most important dynamics in personal and professional relationships. Danica’s most grateful for being accountable because it empowers her to shape the direction of her life. Without accountability you won’t follow through and will end up with more of what you don’t want.
If you can recognize in yourself that you are stuck against a roadblock you are already most of the way there. People often walk through life passively and can’t see the obstacles in front of them, they just believe that’s the way life is. Pick up a book, listen to podcasts, and consume information about what you want and let that information reprogram your brain.
You are in a hormonal addictive loop to something. Whatever it is that you don’t want anymore, your body is really good about asking for it. Wherever you are really uncomfortable, that’s where the real shift can happen.
Danica’s comeback shoutout goes to her family. They’ve always been a soft place to land for her no matter what is happening in her life.
Community is especially important. Giving back to your friends, group, or tribe, even when it’s uncomfortable, is important to nourishing the relationships that make up life.
According to Mike, an attitude of gratitude keeps away the bad attitude. Mike is incredibly grateful for the life that he has today because he never thought that his life would be the way it is now.
If Mike could send a message to his younger self, he would essentially tell himself that a person has to make a choice to be better and to always stay coachable. If you’re going to be a coach you have to be able to listen. People aren’t going to remember what you say to them, they are going to remember how you made them feel.
Donny and Darren tell the origin story of the Comeback Stories podcast and how their friendship developed.
Asking for help is a transaction. If you ask for help, you have to be willing to do what it takes when you receive that help.
Mike uses the SPHERES acronym to help identify which area of a person’s life needs work and what type of help they should be asking for. To use it, you need to rate your Social Life, Personal, Health, Employment, Relationships, Education, and Spiritual Development.
We all have blind spots and assessments are a great way to figure out the root cause of an issue.
Knowing your purpose helps you eliminate confusion. If you’re not sure in the moment, look for your purpose and redefine it if you have to.
Everything is one decision away from what we want. Most of the decisions we make each day are made on autopilot but there are also decisions that we can control that can significantly improve our lives. There is usually a single decision you can make everyday that can change things for the better.
Life is better when we show up being who we truly are. That way we don’t second guess who we are and are just content in the moment.
Mike’s comeback shoutout goes to his first sponsor Mark Hertz.
Holly didn’t go to Alcoholics Anonymous until she was already six months sober. She started her recovery by researching alcohol and addiction and those books led her to other sources. Eventually she realized that there was something wrong with our society and alcohol’s place in it. The evidence pointed Holly to a choice to either keep drinking or invest in her recovery and learn how to stop. She went to AA because she was tired of being afraid of failing and it gave her a sense of community with people who were struggling with the same experiences as her.
Holly created her company to put people instead of institutions at the center of the recovery process. She gathered all the different elements of recovery into one program.
Historically, we used to believe that people suffering from addiction had lost the right to make decisions for themselves. The existing system often coerces people and takes away their choice instead of reminding people what they have forgotten.
We help people by reminding them of things that they have forgotten, showing them the possibilities, and reminding them of the power that they have.
Your hardest challenges are the ones that make you. They are the most fertile ground for growth that you can have.
For Holly, being in recovery is part of her everyday life. She has to uphold the tenets of her recovery each day by doing the work and living as authentically as possible.
Holly wrote her book not just for women, it’s meant for everyone because she wanted to change the conversation around alcohol. If we are talking about true liberation, we have to look at everything we are doing that is keeping us from our power.
Everyone has something to be grateful for. Holly tries to practice gratitude for everything that comes her way because she knows it’s so easy to think we don’t need it.
Learn to suffer. Suffering is not a mistake, the mistake is trying to cover it over with whatever you can.
Holly’s friend Colleen gets her comeback story shoutout. Comeback stories are not just the before and after comparisons, they are also the stories of people who continue to stay with it and show up everyday.
Holly’s life has been filled with ups and downs over the past 6 months and the one thing that has kept her centered has been meditation. She still resists meditation even a decade later but she still puts in the work because it’s worth the effort.
You’re not trying to escape the cycle of substance abuse, you’re trying to have compassion for yourself. If you can love yourself, you change the way you treat yourself and won’t have to drink to escape your self-criticism.
Inky has been speaking for the past 14 years and the husband and father in him wouldn’t change what happened to him. He noticed that what happened to him started to affect other people and impacted their lives in positive ways. By serving a greater purpose than just himself, Inky has found an incredible amount of peace, which he is very grateful for.
Purpose is about finding your natural gifts and talents and then using those to be of service to the world. For Inky, that means leaving the world better than he found it and leaving a legacy of action for his children.
The beauty of opposition, adversity, and challenges are that they introduce us to who we really are and help us identify with other people and have a level of empathy for their struggles and their journeys.
Inky’s comeback shoutout goes to his mother. She always let young Inky chase his dreams and gave him the space to pursue his goals.
Never forget that you’re worthy and that all of us go through struggles. Three of the hardest words for a person to say are, “I need help.” Don’t go through it alone; ask for help and you may be surprised by the answer you get. Once you get through your struggle, find someone who is dealing with what you made it through and help them through it.
It’s selfish of us to go through what we go through and to hold that experience to ourselves. We can only keep what we have by giving it away.
It’s about doing the dark work, the work nobody sees. That can be reading books, listening to podcasts, taking care of your body, and having the difficult conversations you need to have. Selfish season is about burning whatever necessary bridges you need to burn, the ones that are leading your life to destruction.
Fear controls so many people’s lives and it prevents people from becoming the person they were created to be. The fear of staying the same has to outweigh the fear of change.
Failure is just a feedback sample. You have to look at the cost of inaction and what you’re going to pay for not pushing forward.
Your perspective is under your control. It’s the window of how you see the world and it can be one of two things: the prison perspective or the power perspective. The prison perspective holds you back, the power perspective puts you in the driver’s seat.
How you see life will determine how you feel about life, how you feel about life will determine what you do with your life, what you do with your life will determine what you get.
The clarity of your perspective is determined by the quality of your practices. Self-love and self-care are crucial.
No matter what you have, if you don’t fix yourself at a core level, you will still have nothing. Once the thrill of external things wears off, you will still have to deal with the pain.
Trent hung onto his football career, not because he loved it, but because he didn’t know who he would be without it. In order to accept reality, he had to release it.
Most of the time we try to solve things at a surface level. To harbour true strength, we need to conquer pain at its deepest level. Once Trent released his fears and the things holding him back, he began the process of repairing the holes left behind.
Trent is an introvert so he did not expect himself to become a speaker. It wasn’t until a friend saw that Trent had something within him and encouraged him to speak to a group of high school kids did he discover what he was capable of.
Your transparency can become someone else’s transformation. Realizing your past had a purpose can bring incredible healing to your life.
You are more than your sport.
Detach your emotions from the outcomes and strive to stay in the middle.
At some point in your life, your moments turn to memories and memories are all you have. Fulfilling memories with the people that are closest to Trent are now the most important things in his life and what he’s most grateful for.
Ask yourself why you feel like you are being held back. Is your fear really yours or did somebody give it to you? You have to understand where your mindset comes from before you can address it. Be open to working with other people who are willing to coach you and get around those people.
There is nothing great you can do without a vision.
If Trent could send a message to his younger self, it would be “It all starts with you.” We usually live in a blaming and complaining mindset, but if you want to change your life and be better you need to take responsibility for your life and take your power back.
Trent’s mom gets his Comeback Story shoutout. She instilled faith and perseverance in Trent and taught him that there was always something bigger than him in his life.
Ironically, the greatest self growth strategy of all is to help others grow. When you are focused on yourself, you don’t grow very much but when you become a conduit for others, your growth rises to a whole other level.
Jon wasn’t successful right away. His first book was rejected by 30 publishers and not one book store in the US would carry the book. He decided to go on a 20-city tour that he paid for himself to promote the book and even when there were only five people in the crowd he knew his mission was to encourage and inspire as many people as possible, one person at a time.
When Covid hit, Jon went back to the rookie mindset and continued to push his vision, even though his talks were being cancelled left and right.
When he got started, selling five million books was never the goal. It all comes back to what your intention is, where your heart is, and what you focus on.
Don’t chase things to build up your ego.
So many people struggle with feeling unworthy. People aren’t afraid of success, they feel like they are unworthy of success. When we forget who we are, we forget the power we have inside us.
Would you choose to have a negative thought? Ideas and thoughts emerge from your subconscious all the time and some of them will discourage, distract, and divide you. Recognize those thoughts as lies and speak truth to them. Greatness and potential are within you and once you start speaking that to yourself, you will start walking with power.
The key is to unite the self. This can be done with meditation, prayer, and mindfulness.
Success is doing what you love and loving how you do it. Success doesn’t have to be tied to your performance, that’s the mistake that many athletes and professionals make. The fear of underperforming will drain you.
Perform for an audience of one.
The narrative of the universe is a battle of good versus evil. We are spiritual beings on a human journey and we each experience this epic struggle in our lives every day.
We can always change our story. As a coach, you have to know the story someone tells themselves so that you can help them tell a better story.
So often, our minds don’t need fixing, it’s our souls that need healing. No matter what is happening outside of us, it’s always about what is happening on the inside.
Talk to yourself, but don’t always listen to yourself. Write down all the negative thoughts that come into your mind and then flip the paper over and write down words of encouragement. Make refuting your negative thoughts into a daily practice. Take small action steps each day to feed your positivity and at the end of the day think about what went right. What you look for you will find.
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