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Win Today
Win Today is a performance enhancing podcast filled with actionable insights and inspiration to come out on top in life. Through captivating interviews and solo episodes, a powerful tool is created and given to listeners to be able to push through any situation in life.
Hosted by Ryan Cass, he delivers messages that align to his purpose of helping people establish a foundation for sustained success, break trends of adversity, and chart desirable courses for life. Win Today!
Win Today
#235 | From Life Sentence To Life Purpose: Damon West On Redemption, Recovery, And The Coffee Bean Mindset
What if the hardest day of your life was actually your rescue? In this episode, Damon West shares how a 65-year prison sentence became the foundation for purpose, service, and daily wins through his now-famous coffee bean mindset—choosing to transform the environment instead of being broken by it. We unpack practical tools Damon used under maximum pressure: daily surrender, a simple two-line prayer, the fourth column of personal inventory that restores agency, and why eliminating the word “try” changes everything. If you’re looking for resilience, recovery, or a mindset reset that actually works, this conversation will challenge you to show up, serve others, and become the change agent wherever life has placed you.
Key Takeaways:
• How to transform adversity instead of absorbing it
• Why radical ownership unlocks freedom and momentum
• Simple daily practices that build purpose, even on hard days
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Keep in touch below!
Winning, I would define as getting up and showing up every single day. Brian, every day that I wake up, my feet don't hit the cold concrete floor of a prison cell. I'm winning, man. I'm gonna win that day. And I'm gonna tell you something. I've been out of prison a little over 10 years at this point, and I've won every single day because I'm not in prison anymore. I'm a free man in the sense that I don't wake up in a physical prison anymore, and I remember what that's like in there. I never will forget what that's like. And I think if I ever forget, I'm in real big trouble, right? Because that's the stuff I tap into every single day. My definition of winning is that I got up and I found whatever opportunities there. I found out where I could be useful every day. That's winning to me.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to Win Today. This show is crafted for those who want to win in every aspect of their lives. Every week you will learn from a renowned thought leader that will share a piece of a winning playbook that you can incorporate into your life. If this show has a positive impact on you and you see value in it, please share it with somebody and leave a rating interview so we can help more people win. What happened next is a story I have mainly only shared with face-based faith-based audiences. As I took off running for my parents in the parking lot, a voice in my head said, Stop! Which I did. Then the voice said, Turn around. I obeyed because I knew that voice was Christ talking to me. Just as he had spoken to me in the shower of Dallas County jail the day I was sentenced to life in prison, he spoke to me for years inside those prison walls. He was now speaking to me seconds after my release. As I looked at the fence and barbed wire around the guard gate, the voice said to me, Damon, I put you through all of this for a reason. You are going to work for me now. I'm going to give you one of the most incredible redemption stories. It's how I show I'm real. In return, you will honor me by always showing up when I call you. Use the gifts I'm giving you to help others. You are a vessel. The minute it becomes about you, this is where you'll be coming back because I can find another vessel. Let's get let's get to work. That's an excerpt from Six Dimes and a Nickel. And we have the author with us today, Damon West, who I believe has one of the greatest redemption stories of all time. He is a well-renowned author and speaker and has captivated millions all over the world with his books and powerful message. And I'm so grateful that we have time with him today. Damon, welcome, brother. Ryan, man.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks a lot, brother. It kind of gives me chills that you started off with that right there. I remember, I remember that moment. That was on November 16th, 2015. That was the moment I walked out of a Texas prison. Uh I got sentenced to life in prison for organized crime, and I spent seven years, three months, and 18 days in captivity. I mean, and I was guilty of everything. I mean, I did, I did the crimes, and I deserved to do the time. But uh that was the day that I was finally free physically. And I say free physically because walking out of prison that day, I was already free spiritually, I was already free mentally, but it was the physical freedom, that last trifecta of freedom that I had not been able to accomplish. Because, of course, when you make poor choices in life, when you violate the social contract, uh, you give up your rights to live in a free society. And that's what I had done. But I found freedom, I found redemption, I found a spiritual awakening inside those prison walls. And that moment right there was the culmination of all of this coming together. It was what I call the trifecta of freedom because now my body was finally free, or my heart and my soul and my mind had long ago been freed. And I tell people all the time, Ryan, I meet more people out here in the free world who are locked up than I ever did when I served time in a real prison because more people are in prison by their thoughts and by their things than my steel bars and barbed wire and concrete combined.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they're absolutely true. A lot of folks can be in a mental prison, which is, I would argue, just as dangerous at times as being in a physical prison.
SPEAKER_01:The hardest prison to ever walk out of is the mental one.
SPEAKER_00:It's hard, it's very hard. I often say that I I believe that we all have a theoretical backpack that we're that we're carrying in life, and it's important to always check what it's filled with, because a lot of people go through life not realizing that they're carrying a whole rucksack full of bricks, those bricks being non-self-serving stories, those bricks being false narratives, the bricks being bad choices that we've just continued to carry on ourselves versus, hey, let's become aware and empty that so that we can actually live a more free life. So Damon, you shared, we just went through that day, but there are a lot of pivotal moments in your life. But before we jump into those, Damon, a quick Google search will yield a lot of results about you. We'll see a lot of the success now between the books and speaking, captivating audiences. But what do you believe, Damon, is the most important thing for the world to know about you?
SPEAKER_01:The most important thing for the world to know about me is my story is so much like other people's stories. There's a lot of elements in it that are uh they're not going to be found in a normal person's story. Most people will never go through a SWAT team raid. They'll never have a SWAT team in their living room. Most people will never be sentenced to life in prison. Most people will never be the crime boss of an organized crime ring. Most people will never ever walk inside those walls of a physical prison. And most people will probably never be, you know, on stages speaking 200 times a year. So there's elements of my story that are kind of outrageous and they're kind of wild. And it's kind of like, oh my God, if I didn't see this guy and understand it and believe it to be, if it didn't see myself, I wouldn't believe it. But my story is like so many people's stories. We fall, we stumble, we fall, we get back up, and we learn from our mistakes. And that's what I've done in life, man. Um, I've had, like I said, some some big events happen in my life. But whenever I got into prison, the the biggest thing that happened to me, I think what most people need to understand is that I finally surrendered. And it took me going to prison. In in recovery terms, we call this hitting rock bottom. And that's the thing. Everybody's rock bottom is different. Some people's rock bottom can be just some brush with something negative or dangerous that happens in their life and they wake it wakes them up to it. You told me a while ago that whenever you were a child, you saw something that made you think, hey, look, that's not going to be me ever one day. You know, you were a child when you figured out what your bottom didn't want to be. And um it took me a longer time to hit my bottom than some, but some people's bottom is death, you know. But when I finally hit that rock bottom, I surrendered and I had a spiritual awakening. I say spiritual because this is important. Spiritual awakening. When I when I say spiritual, I don't mean religious. I think religion is a man-made concept. I think spirituality is your conscious contact with whatever you call God. And you're free to believe in whatever you want. There's never going to be a room where I'm trying to convert somebody to believe like I do. I am a Christian. I believe in Christ. That's my higher power in life. But I think every person should be free to believe in what they call God. But I think every person needs to understand that it takes a surrendering to that higher power to really achieve the best version of themselves. And that's what I've been able to do in my life. Through a surrender to my higher power, I've been able to find the real human potential. And I believe this in life. I believe that human beings are capable of way more than they think they are. I think sometimes we get we get so cornered by life, and fear becomes the overriding voice that we hear in our head. And fear is a liar, you know? And I don't, it's not that I don't hear the voice of fear in my head anymore. It's that I stopped listening to myself and started talking to myself. And that's one of the big things about my life is I have all these lessons, these principles I've learned along the way. And I've been able to transfer that to other people because I'm a storyteller. And I believe human beings always aren't from storytellers, right? I mean, like Ryan, lessons, morals, principles, entertainment. It's all coming at the feet of very good storytellers. So I think the thing that people want to will hear most about me is that I'm a really good storyteller with a with a story that has a lot of elements in it. Story like a redemption story. We love redemption stories. A story with sports. Sports is really the great uniter. It's the one thing that brings Americans together like nothing else can. But we really love those true crime and prison stories, Ryan. And I've been able to unite all those elements into one of the great comeback stories ever, as my dad said.
SPEAKER_00:Amen, brother. As you go across the globe now and share your story and captivate audiences and inspire people in every walk of life, because I also appreciate that you still are very involved in the prison system and work with the Coffee Bean Foundation to improve lives there as well. How would you describe the mission that you're on, or as you're going around to speak to all these audiences? What is it that you want people to take away or do as a result of you doing what you do now 200 plus days a year?
SPEAKER_01:I want them to know what I learned inside of a dungeon, that the power is inside them to change the world around them. It's not outside of them, it's not something you have to go out and seek and find. The power is in you. And it's a it's an allegory I received from another inmate, this guy named Muhammad. So back up to 2009, May 18th, 2009, I'm sentenced to life in prison for organized crime. 65 years, which is in Texas, everything 60 and above, is a life sentence. So 65 years, which is the name of that book you just talked about a while ago, six dimes and a nickel, prison slaying for 65 years. So I just got sentenced to life in prison, and I'm back in my cell and I'm waiting for the prison bus to come get me. And this other inmate, a guy named Muhammad, older black guy, Muslim guy, he's different than me in every way possible. He's black, I'm white. He's Muslim, I'm Christian. He's older, I'm younger. In the prison world, in the jail world, we have no business talking to each other because we have so many things divide our world. But he approaches me. He finds me in Dallas County jail and he comes and talks to me every morning. He checks on me. And this one particular morning, he's telling me that, you know, look, man, you're gonna go through one of the most difficult things in your life. And he's telling me about the racial component to prison, and everybody breaks off in their own racial group, and that's how the division is in prison. But he tells me this allegory. He said, Prison is like a pot of boiling water, and you get three choices how to respond in this pot of boiling water. You can be like a carrot that goes in hard and becomes soft amount of water. An egg that goes in with a liquid inside, a soft inside, but in that pot of boiling water, that egg will become hardened, much like a hard-boiled egg becomes hardened and boiling water. Your heart can become hardened. He said, or you can be like a coffee bean that changes the water to coffee. He said, the coffee bean is the only thing that changes the water. It's the change agent. The powers inside the coffee bean to change the water around the coffee bean. He told me the coffee bean was the smallest of the three things, but it had the power to change the water when nothing else did. Everything was else, everything else was changed by the water. And he told me, he said the coffee bean can't even do its job until the water gets the hottest, until the pressure gets the highest. And that's what he told me in that jail cell in Dallas County Jail in 2009, before the prison bus came to get me to take me to prison. He said, if you're gonna turn this thing around, you're gonna have to be like that coffee bean. And the last words he ever said to me were be a coffee bean. And that's what I want people to take away. Like this story that I tell, you know, my buddy Ed Milette, Ed says this phrase, he says, Facts tell, stories sell. And so I want people to understand that this incredible power is inside them. So I wrap up all of this inside this story about this guy that actually took the coffee bean message to the biggest pot of boiling water there is a level five maximum security prison in Texas. And there's nothing more scary, more dangerous than a level five prison. And and I was able to take this message of the coffee bean and test it in the biggest pot of boiling water. And that the message that it well by the time we get to this end of the end of the presentation or the end of my books, the end of anything I do, is that if I could do it in there, you could do it out here. Because if I could transform that pot of boiling water into a pot of coffee, then what's holding you back from transforming your pot of boiling water into a pot of coffee?
SPEAKER_00:So regardless of where we may be right now, regardless of if we came up from the greatest family or if we come up through the roughest family, the roughest neighborhoods, what I heard you say, Damon, is that everybody, everybody, regardless of who, what, when, where, why, can be a coffee bean and has that power inside of them. And that's really resemblant of your story.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And everybody deserves redemption, Ron. Everybody deserves redemption, but you have to go out and earn some of that. You know, nothing in life is going to be given to you. You've got to go out and earn that.
SPEAKER_00:Let's talk about the genesis of how we even got here because your story and somebody that earns a life sentence, looking at their background, yours doesn't really stack up, meaning that you come from a great family in Port Arthur, Texas. You were a stud athlete. You had a Division I football scholarship, you had all of it, what looked like all of the cards stacking up well for you. So walk us through the really, I'd say the genesis of your mission now, and how do we go from having a a great stack of cards to ending up with a life sentence and take us through that journey, Jam, Damon?
SPEAKER_01:It's a great question. And it's something that, you know, y'all, I've I've been a very privileged person throughout my life. You know, and uh and when I say privileged, so many things in my life and my background are nothing I did. It was what I was born into. I was born into a two-parent home where my mom and my dad were married for 55 years. I didn't know anything but having a mom and dad in the home. Right off the bat, I've got it better than half the people out there that I'm growing that are growing up, and we're where divorces so prevalent, or just one parent in the home. Maybe there's always just been one parent in the home. And I'm not saying that you can't do anything with that situation, but um, I was born into a two-parent home. My parents were loving. They had me in church every Sunday, you know. We were God was at the center of everything in our lives. I was a good student, you know, made good grades. I was a great great athlete, though. Like you said, I mean, I was a Division I starting quarterback by the time I was 20 years old. But I got injured uh when I was 20, my redshirt sophomore year against Texas AM. Third play of the game, third game of the season, career in an injury, it's over. The dream is gone. My identity is gone. And I come to this fork and road in life, and and I don't have a backup plan in life. Everything in my life has been built up around being this great athlete. And everything is, you know, you look when you're a great athlete in the state of Texas and you play football at that level, you know, there's a lot of things that come at you because of who you are and how you how well you can throw a football. And once that was gone, I realized I was living life on life's terms. And that's what addicts don't want to do. We don't want to live life on life's terms. And that's when I became a drug addict. Uh, cocaine, ecstasy, pain pills, functional addict. Graduate college, move off to Washington, D.C. I worked in the United States Congress, worked for a guy running for president of the United States. And in 2004, I was back in Dallas as a stockbroker for one of the biggest Wall Street banks in the world, UBS, United Bank of Switzerland. And at that job in 2004, another broker introduced me to meth one day, and that's when the wheels come off. I'm instantly hooked to this powerful drug. And it took about 18 months before I was working when I left working on Wall Street to live on the streets. I was homeless. And that's when I became a criminal, and then I became the head of an organized crime ring of a bunch of other burglars. We broke into people's houses to steal for our drugs. They called these burglaries the Uptown Burgeries. They called me the Uptown Burglar because I became the quarterback all over again, this time of a very bad, of a very bad team. These burglaries go on for about three years. And burglary is a very serious crime, too, Ryan. I got to take a second to talk about this because uh, you know, my victims in this thing, when I broke into people's houses, I didn't just steal their property, I stole their sense of security. I stole something I can't give back and I can't change and I can't fix in these victims' lives. But three years later, on July 30th, 2008, the Dallas SWAT team took me down in a dramatic SWAT team raid. And a year later, on May 18th, 2009, a jury sentenced me to life in prison for organized crime. And you know, that's another big fork in the road in life where I'm coming to this situation where I don't know how I'm gonna survive this thing. But this is more, this is more existential than losing your football scholarship or losing your ability to play sports. This is your life is on the line at a level five macro security prison. But here is what I believe in life, Ryan. I believe that messengers are coming to us all the time. And the messengers in life don't always look like you in life. They don't have the same background as you, they don't look like you, they don't have the same beliefs as you. Muhammad is a very good example of that. Muhammad is so different than me in so many ways. But the trick in life is to be receptive to all the messengers, to receive all the messages. So, you know, those messengers that come to us in life, if you shut yourself off to people because of the differences. Let's say you have a prejudice, you know, you have a bias that won't allow you to see another human being for who they are, then you could be missing the biggest messenger in the world. And that's only going to hold you back in life. That's not gonna hold the messenger back. So I learned to be very receptive in life to all the messengers. And in my story, in six dimes in a nickel, you get to meet a lot of those messengers. Some of them were people I've met in the world of prison, you know, other criminals along the way that have turned their lives around. Uh, some of the people when I got out of prison and I got into the free world and I started going after speaking and put my life back together, there were always messengers along the way. And that's what I think happened. We're back to where we just started this conversation with the spiritual awakening. The spiritual awakening allows you to be receptive to all the things that come at you in life. Every single day I start my day off with the same prayer that I've been praying since I got into a program recovery in prison. I I ask God for two things every morning, Ryan. I say, hey man, God, put in front of me what you need me to do today for you, and let me recognize that when I see it. Because I don't want to miss whatever that is. Amen. That's it. I don't ask for a bunch of things I think I want or need. I have faith. My faith tells me that if I take care of the things that I'm needed to do today, then my needs will be met too. Not my wants, but my needs. And that was whenever I was in prison. I turned off this idea of the things I want and just asked to be useful again inside that prison. And that was really some of the key ingredients for transforming a life that had gone so off the rails. Because you think about it, man, most of the guys in prison locked up with here's what I learned in prison. After I got out of prison, I went back to school. I got a master's degree in criminal justice. This is in the last 10 years since I walked out in 2015. We're recording this in 2025. So I went out and got a master's degree in criminal justice. I went out and became a professor at the University of Houston. I was teaching a class called Prisons in America. Like I'm the only professor on the planet to teach a prisons class who lived in prison. And I would tell my class when I would start the class, you know, when I was in prison, before I became a professor, before I became credentialed with a master's degree from a university, I got a PhD in the School of Hard Knocks. And I went around, I wanted to know who goes to prison in America. Here's what I found out from Dask and hundreds of guys who are in there. The first variable that really determines who goes to prison, poverty. Poor people go to prison more than anybody else in this country. Poverty is one of the things that holds a lot of people back in life. And poverty is one of the biggest, it is the biggest reason. Lack of an education was the second biggest variable. Most of the men I was locked up with, their education stopped somewhere in junior high, maybe early high school. And in fact, the education deal was one of the ways I started transforming prison. As I started transferring my prison to other men, I opened a free touring service in there. The third biggest variable, who goes to prison? Lack of a family unit. Most of the guys I'm locked up with did not come from a two-parent home. Some of them didn't have one parent in the house. Again, you look at my life story, these are variables that don't affect Damon West and his life growing up. Very privileged guy. The fourth biggest variable, race. Again, this is not a variable that affects me. When I walked into prison, I saw half the population, almost half the population look back at me were black men. I knew something was wrong in America. Black men make up about 6.5% of the population of this country. You cannot convince me that 6.5% of the population commits 50% of the crime. But again, there is a race factor with incarceration. Fourth biggest variable is race. The fifth biggest variable, the last variable, substance abuse slash mental health. Now that's the variable that touched Damon West because addiction doesn't care who you are, where you come from. And when it's got a hold of you, it's got you. Addiction doesn't care if you're rich or poor. It doesn't care if you're black or white, if you're male or female. Addiction gets a hold of a lot of people. And most of the time it never lets go unless we find a program recovery. And that's what happened in my life, man. I was able to find that program recovery and transform my life. Man.
SPEAKER_00:You talked about messengers and how some may look a little different, or the messengers in our lives we may not even recognize as somebody that has something of us, of substance for us, but it's important that we listen. What I heard there is a having a the importance of having self-awareness and being able to look a little deeper beyond a situation so that you can actually see. Another thing you talked about, Damon, or you recognize July 30th, 2008 as the day you got rescued. I see that as another level of self-awareness that yes, what the public saw is that the uptown burglar got arrested. What Damon says is that he got rescued by gunpoint that day. Was that something, Damon, that you were able to quickly recognize as, hey, I got rescued, or did you think for a while, hey, I got caught, and then eventually you realized that, oh, actually, I got rescued. And talk a little bit about that day as well.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's a good question. Um, that day, uh, July 30th, 2008, I knew the heat was coming down. Uh, they picked up my partner in crime, Dustin, 10 days before that. So they've got my partner in crime in custody, which means it's only a matter of time before before they're gonna have me in custody. Because here's the truth about crime everybody talks. Everybody talks in crime. When those DAs and those prosecutors, those cops, they start throwing out big numbers of time in prison, people loosen their lips up. And that's just human behavior, right? Human behavior. We want the best for ourselves. We have a preservation of life instinct in us, and it's natural for people to talk in a situation like that. So I'm not throwing any shade at Dustin or anybody, the end of the people that testified against me. I mean, they never gave me the opportunity to talk to anybody else. I was the guy at the top, you know, and I can't promise you that I wouldn't have talked too if they had given me a deal. So they got Dustin in custody, you know. I'm on the couch of my dope dealer that day on July 30, 2008, and the window shatters, and there's a flashbang grenade bouncing across the floor. And, you know, I see it, I react to it, but those things have a fuse, man. It blows up in my face when I'm trying to get out of the living room. Boom, bright white light, loud noise. And when I came to when I could see it and hear again, there's a cop standing over me in full swipe riot gear, his boot is on my chest, the barrel of an assault rifle's digging in my eyes. So I could, his fingers on the trigger, man, and he's screaming, don't move, don't move. And I'm like, man, don't worry, don't worry, right? It's over. You got me. And one of the SWAT team officers screamed out out loud, we got him. We got the uptown burglar. And um, you know, that day, July 30th, 2008, as I laid on that floor, I remember thinking back to a day about 30 days before that, when I was laying on that same floor. I was, but I was laying on the floor that day in June because I was out of dope. I had finally come down off of about a three-year high. I was hurting, I was miserable. And anybody that's ever been addicted to a substance, you understand your body is going through these cravings, you're aching for it, you've you're you're fiending for it. And I remember laying on that floor about 30 days before that SWAT team raid and just telling God, man, look, I'm done, man. I'm I'm sick of living like this. I hate this life, and this is miserable. Just, man, just free me from this. And I remember when the SWAT team had me and they were zip tying me on the floor. I thought to myself, man, this is not what I was praying for. Well, this is not what I meant, right? But be careful what you pray for, man, because you know, God has ears. Um, listen, I didn't understand that immediately. I didn't fully grasp what was going on in my life. I didn't understand that my angels don't have wings. My angels had assault rifles and shields and helmets. My angels came through the window. My angels busted the door off the hinges. I didn't understand that the SWAT team could come and rescue me from a world that I was in. I thought I thought I was just arrested that day. It took me years to figure this out. But here is what I extrapolated from that while I was inside that dungeon, inside that prison, and I finally had this aha moment that they didn't just arrest me that day, they rescued me that day. I believe that in life, the SWAT teams of life, they come for all of us in different ways. A SWAT team can be a divorce, it could be a bankruptcy, it can be a marriage failing, it could be a job lost, it could be something happened to one of your children, it could be something happened to one of your pets. Life-altering events are what I call the SWAT teams of life. But here's what I would challenge everybody to do that when the smoke clears and the SWAT team is gone, what was the what was the opportunity in all that adversity that the SWAT team ushered in? Because I believe that inside of every adverse, difficult situation in life, there's some kind of opportunity there for you to grow, some kind of opportunity for you become a better version of you. Our good friend, Chris Singleton. Chris Singleton's life changed. What was it, 2015 was when his life changed in Charleston, when uh Dylan Harris goes into a church and wants to start a racial war and just starts shooting black parishioners. And one of those people that he shot that day was his mother. And Chris Singleton was a minor league baseball player, living life to the fullest, man. But Chris has this same story in his story. Like I told you ago, I my story has some extremes to it, but so many people have this element in their life. Some big event happened and it knocked them off their feet. It didn't happen for Chris right away. Chris didn't understand that his purpose in life was to be a positive influence and show someone the power of love over hate. But Chris understood that over time and he started building this platform and he started going and sharing the story. And now people are knocking down Chris's door to have him come share his story of love over hate. But so many of us have this story, and that's why I like to always bring it back. Like, look, my story's got some crazy elements in it, man. A real SWAT team in your living room. But SWAT teams are always coming for us. Everybody deals with the SWAT team at some point in their life, but you have to figure out why the SWAT team was there. What opportunity are they going to usher in?
SPEAKER_00:Right. Yeah, just like the messengers look a little bit differently, I believe what I like to share is that when life life has an abundance of gifts if you're looking at it through the right lens. Like we talked about before we started, and I often share that the greatest gift I've ever received is coming up through an alcoholic household. And that night that I shared with you when I was six years old when the police showed up was the night that my my dad got caught cheating on my mother and all hell broke loose. And I'm the one answering the door to the police. What I didn't know at that time is that, wow, Ryan, you're being given a gift right now, and this is going to help you for the rest of your life to help others. And this is why a big reason why we get to have this conversation today, Damon. So our messengers look different. And the gifts that we receive in life, yeah, some of them are packaged with bows and ribbons, but a lot of gifts don't actually look like gifts, and they're not, they don't, they're not with pretty packaging, but they're giving us something.
SPEAKER_01:That's that's absolutely right. And you know, but it's it's the it's that's growth, though, Ryan. I mean, that's like when you can see, when you finally get to a place where you can see that, that's growth. And and and here's what I would say about growth. Growth takes place outside your comfort zone. Nothing big in your life is gonna happen inside that place we call our comfort zone. And comfort zones are okay. There's a there's a time in life to sit in your comfort zone and feel good about it, feel relaxed. But when you want to do something different in life, you have to get outside your comfort zone. And that's a scary thing, right? I mean, because, you know, I think the reason why we fear outside the comfort zone is because we don't know what's out there. We know what's inside the comfort zone, right? And then that's a safe place to be. But in order for us to become the best version of us, in order to find out what we're really made of and what our I sometimes what our gift really is, we have to get outside that comfort zone. One of my like one of the neat things that's happened in life is I get to be around some very interesting people. Steve Harvey is one of those people. I I got to meet Steve Harvey at an event where we spoke at, and and we became friends. And I Steve went with me into a prison in Atlanta, and um, Steve was incredible in front of those inmates, but he always challenged these inmates in this in this talk that he gave to them to find out what their gift is in life. You know, sometimes we get locked into a job, into a life that's not really the one for us. We do it because it's safe, because it gives us maybe it provides for us the things we need at the time, the financial resources, whatever. But I think what Steve was trying to press to these guys is true happiness is gonna come when we live in our purpose and we find out what our gift is, and you start living in that gift because that's something, and like again, I'm a Christian. I'm gonna tell you from a Christian standpoint, I believe our gifts come to us from God. And then when we live in our gifts, we're fulfilling our purpose, and that's what life is about. And your life today is being fulfilled because you're living in your purpose. My life today is being fulfilled because I'm living in my purpose. But, you know, choices have consequences. Everything we do every day, if we're not consistently living our purpose, we can get it further away from it. And it's an easy thing to lose. It's something you got to really hold on to in life. And that's one of the things about being consistent every day. I think consistency is key to anything you want to do.
SPEAKER_00:One thing that people are starting to ask themselves, Damon, we're at the point of the year where it's December 2025 and this will come out in 2026, but this is where a lot of folks are starting to do inventory and how they want their life to look different, etc. One thing you said they're very important. A lot of people also, I find, will struggle with what is my purpose or how can I extract meaning from these situations that are so brutal at the time. What advice do you have, or what can you offer to somebody that is maybe questioning what their meaning is, what their purpose is as we're in this new year?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, this is this is an important element. And then something I talk about in my book, Six Times in a Nickel, and something I picked up in the rooms of AA. So I didn't invent this concept, but it's a it's a personal inventory. And I believe this is where growth really takes place. Um, in AA, which I don't speak for AA, I refer to AA a lot, Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't speak for AA. It's the recovery program I got into in prison, and I still am to this day. And I believe I'll work, you know, I'll continue to work in the steps the rest of my life if I want to stay free and stay sober. But one of the big things that happens, we have these things called the 12 steps. And in the fourth step, we do what's called a searching and fearless moral inventory. Now, the big book of AA has a sentence in there that it really grabbed me. It says, a business that does not regularly run an inventory will go broke. And this is true, right? Because I mean, a business that doesn't know what's on their shelves, they don't know what they have stock of, they don't know what they need more of, they'll go broke because they can't fulfill customer orders. And if you can't be a reliable source for people to come and do business with you, people are going to go somewhere else to do their business. So the the writers of the the big book use the analogy of the analogy of a business going broke. But here's the deal: a human being that doesn't really run a personal inventory, you will go broke too. You'll go spiritually and morally bankrupt. And that's what I think happens to a lot of people. We become spiritually and morally bankrupt because we don't run a personal inventory in our lives. And a personal inventory in the big book taught me that, you know, there's three basic instincts that control all human behavior. And these basic instincts have been at the forefront of all human behavior since humans have existed. The instinct for social to belong, right? We want to all belong to something bigger than us out there. We all want to belong to something. Everybody wants to belong and be loved. The instinct for security. Security, think about job security, being able to provide, being able to have the means to do the things you need to do in life to take care of yourself, take care of your family. So social, security instinct. The third instinct is your sex instinct. Now, I don't mean sex instinct like a promiscuous kind of thing. I mean your sex instinct, like your need to procreate, your desire, your biological desire to be with another person. These are the three basic instincts that control all of our behavior. And in the fourth step, we want to figure out why we're held back in life, our resentments, our fears, our doubts. So we write them all down on paper, right? And then we take each one of these things individually and we run it through this matrix of these three basic instincts. I'll give you an example of one that I use. I used it in my book, Six Times in a nickel. There's a character in my story, Judge Mike Snipes, the guy whose courtroom I was in when I got sentenced to life in prison. You know, before he was Judge Snipes and I was a criminal defendant, we were people that hung out together in the same social circles. I knew him as Colonel Snipes. He was a former Fulberg Colonel when I met him. I was a cocky, arrogant young quarterback. We didn't mesh well. I wouldn't say we got along at all, but we ran around the same circles. The last time I saw Judge Mike Snipes before I entered into his courtroom in 2008, the last time I saw him was 2004, four years prior to 2008, and we were at a bar and I was buying him a shot when his dad died. So when I walk into a courtroom in 2008 and Judge Mike Snipes is presiding, I think this is great, man. There's snipes, there's my buddy up there. And uh Snipes didn't see it the same way. Snipes handled me pretty rough. In fact, I would question whether or not Snipes really followed the law in the things he did in my case. And later on, after I was in prison and I was fighting my case on appeal, I would discover that Judge Snipes did, in fact, break the law. And Judge Snipes got thrown off of my case in post-conviction. And so he became one of the only judges I've ever heard of that was removed from a case after the case was done. So I was in prison. I was feeling pretty smug about this the day that I found out about Snipes' recusal for my case. And I went down to the chapel where the AA sponsor was there. His name was we'll call him Ray to protect his anonymity. So Ray is there, and I told Ray, I got him, man. Ray's like, who do you got? You know, I said, I got I got snipes. I finally proved it, man. Snipes was snipes did me wrong. I'm a victim here. Snipes, and you know, Ray's reaction to it really caught me off guard. He said, he said, it must be nice to sit on your throne and judge other people. And I'm like, what do you mean, Ray? I mean, this guy did this to me. He said, Where's your humil, you your humility, Damon? Man, humility. Ryan, humility is when we are right-sized. And we have to be right-sized in life. We have to, we have to not get involved in this thing where we think we're bigger than who we are. And and humility is the thing that keeps us in check. And I lost my humility when it came to snipes because my resentment for him was so strong. And Ray is telling me, he said, you need to work a personal inventory on the snipes thing. He said, I'm afraid you're gonna get drunk or high again if you don't do that. And and I didn't think Ray was like right on that. I was like, man, what do you mean? I'm not gonna get drunk or high. I'm just pissed off. I can't stand the guy. He said, Let's go work a personal inventory. I'd never worked a personal inventory at this point. So he draws from the board the three different columns representing each one representing a different basic instinct. So he said, Your social instinct. Does your resentment against Judge Snipes affect your social instinct? I went, Well, yeah, Ray, it does, man. I'm an ex-con, man. Excons don't fit in well in society, and I'll never fit back in as a real person again. He said, Well, put a check mark there. He said, Does your resentment against snipes affect your security instinct? Yeah, I'm an ex-con, man. You know how hard it is to get a job as an ex-con? Man, most jobs you can't even get as an ex-con. You're excluded from so many things in life because you've got this felony on your record. He said, Well, we'll put a check there too. He said, Does it affect your sex instinct? I'm like, Yes, man. Who wants to be with an ex-con? How am I ever going to find a good and decent woman to want to marry me? And how will their family ever love me? He said, Well, put a check there too, man. He said, No wonder why your resentment against snipes is so strong. This resentment touches all three basic instincts. Now, imagine, man, if you've only got three of these things and you can have a resentment if it touches one, all three of them are touching it, right? And so I'm sitting there going, man, I got this guy. Man, no wonder whether his personal inventory thing's so good. But then Ray went to the chalkboard and drew a fourth column. He said, I forgot to tell you about the last column. The last column, and it says, he wrote on the on the on the last column, he said, What role do I play in my problem? And then he handed me the chalk. He said, I want you to write on the board what role you play in your relationship with snipes. And man, I could feel my resentment slipping away, Ryan. I'm like, oh man, this is not good. I didn't see this coming right. So there I am on the board writing like I became an alcoholic and a drug addict. I committed crimes against individuals. I stole people's property for meth. I broke the social contract. You know, Ryan, the social contract is really important in our society. The social contract says in order to be part of a free society, to be a part of what we have out here, you have to obey the rules. And if you don't obey the rules, there's a consequence of that. And that's what I'm writing out. I broke the social contract. I got arrested. And when I went to the courtroom that day, the sign in the courtroom said Judge Mike Snipes presiding. You see, what Ray had me understand that day by writing the role that I play is that most of our problems in life, most of our resentments, most of our fears, we play a role in those problems. And that's what the personal inventory does for us. It allows us to discover the role that we play. Because Ryan, that's the only thing you can fix. That's the only thing you can change about your problem. And that's the only thing you can control. So the personal inventory was something that was very big for me. And I and I got to that day, I became a firm believer, and I started plugging all my resentments, all my fears, and I do it to this day, Ryan. Because every year I build up more fears, more resentments, stuff like that, and I gotta keep working the steps. But that personal inventory is magical.
SPEAKER_00:What I what I heard that Ray did for you there really is he showed you the mirror. And I believe it's important that we are work we constantly look in the mirror because life goes on, and regardless, even even now, you Damon, living in an amazing life and doing what you're doing. I love that you said that, hey, I still do this because as beings, we're constantly evolving. We have, as you say, and I've heard you say on podcasts, you're still gonna have fork in the road moments. Those never go away. Those will we will always encounter those. So what I heard is a useful exercise for people in as we go into this new year is take a personal inventory. And I believe that that's what could also help fill your goals and and your future path and make 2026 and forward an amazing year. Uh Damon, I'm gonna switch gears with the time that we do have. One thing I've I've pivoted to in 2025 is understanding what winning means to people. So, this being the Win Today podcast, what I really like to understand is what does winning mean to everybody that I have the opportunity to interview? Because I've found something interesting in high performers is that I haven't seen anybody yet tell me that winning is a certain amount of money or a dollar figure. It's not this binary response, it's usually something that comes from deep within. So I want to see what that means for you. How would you define winning in life today?
SPEAKER_01:Winning, I would define as getting up and showing up every single day consistently, many, because this thing is key. Ryan, every day that I wake up and my feet don't hit the cold concrete floor of a prison cell. I'm winning, man. I'm gonna win that day. And I'm gonna tell you something. I've been out of prison a little over 10 years at this point, and I've won every single day because I'm not in prison anymore. I'm a I'm a free man. I'm not a real free man because I'm on parole. Uh I'm on parole until 2073, so I got a little time left on parole. I got 48 years from the moment of this this recording. But I'm a free man in the sense that I don't wake up in a physical prison anymore, and I remember what that's like in there, man. I never will forget what that's like. And I think if I ever forget, I'm in real big trouble, right? Because that's the stuff I tap into every single day. You know, my definition of winning is that I got up, I got up and I found whatever opportunities there, whatever opportunities there were to serve other people. I found out where I could be useful every day. That's winning to me because I I found that if I do those things, if I show up, everything else takes care of itself. One of the things I've come up with in life is these seven-word phrases. And number seven pops up in my life a whole lot. I believe human beings, we we uh we add value to numbers, right? Certain numbers in people's lives. Most humans have a number that they go to. Ryan, do you have a number that's important to you in life? 12. 12. Okay. So every almost all the people I meet, I will say, I'm not gonna speak in absolutes, have a number that means some of them. Seven is my number, man. Seven was my college football number, seven was the year, amount of years I spent in prison, seven was the building I lived on in prison where I made the most growth in my life and that dungeon I lived in. Seven was the number of years it took me to find Muhammad after prison, man. Seven keeps popping up. Seven is a big number in my life, and and and if you're a Christian, you probably put a value in the number seven anyway. So maybe that's where that comes from me. But I started coming up with seven-word phrases, and this is something I've been working on in life. Um, one of them is that you know, a get-to job, not a got-to job. Get to do this. I don't got to do this, you know. But another seven-word phrase that I've come up with that that goes along with this question you asked about winning is I will remind myself on difficult days. Years ago, you dreamed of this life. Those seven words, man. I'll remind myself, I'll look in the mirror. Years ago, you dreamed of this life. So go live it, Damon. You know, that's um that's important, man. The self-affirmation. Here's the thing about the voice that you have inside you. Your voice, whether it's in your head or you say it out loud, your voice is the voice you will hear more than any other voice in your lifetime. What are the things that you're telling yourself? What kind of things do you tell yourself when times get tough? What are your words for winning? I would encourage everybody to find those words.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And I appreciate that. And the seven-word reference as well. Damon, the you hit the nail on the head too. The most important conversations we have are the ones with ourselves and in our minds. And it's important that we audit those narratives as well, because it's often we put stuff in our mind that just isn't true. We have no evidence that supports it. So I certainly appreciate that. I have two rapid fire questions. Imagine that I wish that we get to meet in person someday and we go to a cool lunch spot or maybe go to watch a football game, not sure, but we're going up an elevator and we're going up two floors. Each person, there's gonna be a person that gets in the elevator that's going up one floor, they recognize you. They've read the change agent or six times in a nickel. They have time to ask you one question, and the amount of time you have to answer is the time it takes to go up one elevator floor. So, with that, someone comes in, we're going up one floor, and they say, Damon, how can I be a coffee bean in 2026 and beyond?
SPEAKER_01:I would tell them a quote from my good friend Randy Glenn. Randy Glenn is a buddy of mine that owns a business in Abilene, Texas. Uh, we became close friends over the years, and Randy has a phrase that he says to people, and I put it in my book six times a note because it was so impactful to me. Randy says, eliminate the word try from your vocabulary. Yes. Try only means you won't do something. When someone tells you I'm gonna try to do something, just tell them, hey, just tell me you're not gonna do it, right? And the same with you and how you talk to other people. Don't tell somebody you're gonna try to do something. You're either gonna do it or you aren't. So if you want to be a coffee bean, you want to transform your life, that's on you. You are the one that can do that, but you have to eliminate the word try. You got to stop saying this word. The word is a powerless word.
SPEAKER_00:Amen. Yes, I I'm clipping that up because that is one thing that as a leader in the corporate world and with people I tell people that I work with, that's the first thing you have to stop saying because that basically means it's optional. And if I asked you if living your dream life or achieving a certain goal is optional, the answer is gonna be no, of course it's not optional because it wouldn't be on your goal board if it if it was optional. So, yes, eliminate that word because it is I like the the term black magic. It's a black magic word, it doesn't produce anything fruitful.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The last one, Damon, someone gets in the elevator and and says, Damon, what's one book besides yours that I should read in 2026 to improve my mindset and live my best life?
SPEAKER_01:Two books. I'll give you a fiction and a nonfiction. The nonfiction book is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. It was the first book handed to me by my cellmate Carlos when I got to prison. He said it was required reading for turning your life around inside of a dungeon. It's required reading for anybody that's going through difficult situations in life. Victor Frankel was in Auschwitz. He was in a concentration camp. Victor Frankel found the only thing he had that he could control in there was how he viewed the world around him, how he how he decided to deal with what was going on. He controlled that. Um, the other book is a non-fiction, is a fiction book. Uh, it was called The Count of Monte Cristo. Read the abridged version. I think the other abridged is like 800 pages. The abridged version is much shorter and it's great. The Count of Monte Cristo is about a guy that is sent to prison. It's written in the 1800s uh by a man named Alexander Dumas wrote this book. But the main character is sent to prison. He's set up for a crime he didn't commit. He spends about 18 years in a dungeon. He he escapes from prison, he comes into a vast fortune, and then he spends the next 18 years of his life plotting revenge on the men that did that to him, and he gets his revenge. And in the end, he's an older man. He spent 40 years of his life chewing on this revenge. The revenge has been driving him for almost 40 years. And once he got his revenge, and when I say he got his revenge, he got it all, man. He he killed some of them, he killed some of their families, he got it all. He destroyed their lives, he got all these men back, but once he got to the end of this thing, he was empty. He was morally bankrupt because you can't live a life based on hate and fear. You have to find a life based on love. Love is the overriding principle. Human beings want two things out of life, Ron. We want to belong and we want to be loved. And when those two things are met, the human spirit is capable of anything. So I would say man's search for meaning, the Count of Monte Cristo.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing books. When my prep notes, I was going to reference Man's Search for Meaning because I believe that you know one thing I would have wanted to know is when did you start to find meaning in prison and behind those walls? But we'll we'll save that for another time. Damon, this has been such an amazing conversation. I'm so grateful that you've made the time. And I really love the lessons that you provided to us. And what I recall most is that there are a lot of messengers that are in our lives and gifts that are being given. And it's important that we're looking through the right lens so that we don't miss a messenger or a gift that's being delivered. It just might not look the way that you envision it to look. And in addition to that, I love how you provided us an exercise and a reminder that regardless of where our life is, we gotta keep looking in the mirror. And ultimately, the last thing is each of us has the power to change the environment that we are in, and we all have a coffee beam inside of us. Um I'm so grateful, Damon. How can we keep up and support you as we go into this new year?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, my website is Damon West.org. That's where your people book me for speaking and whatnot. And my social media is at Damon West7. All my books are available on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. My newest book, Six Times in Nickel, is the one I would tell you has the most story to it. Yeah. Tells the whole story.
SPEAKER_00:Right here. Yeah, pick up Damon's books, folks. They're truly incredible. You really get to go on a journey, be a coffee bean, and win today. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ryan.
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