Win Today

#236 | Winning Is: Choosing Where You Stand

• Season 6

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Winning Is… choosing the right environment. In this series of "Winning Is...", we talk with Damon West about mindset, resilience, and personal growth through the coffee bean philosophy. Damon explains how environment, daily self-talk, and simple leadership habits drive consistent success in life, work, and recovery. If you’re looking for practical motivation, mental toughness, and tools to perform under pressure, this episode delivers fast, actionable insight.

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SPEAKER_00:

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.

SPEAKER_01:

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. If you're brand new, that is an excerpt from an interview with Damon West, who was most recently on the podcast, but more so a conquest that I'm on to understand what winning mean to high performers. I believe that winning is something that is often touted around social media, and sometimes it appears that it's more of a binary thing, whether it's uh you achieved this result or earned X amount of money, etc. But what I'm finding in high performers and folks that are on this show is that winning is something that is very deep. As you just heard from Damon, besides not hitting the floor of a prison cell every morning, really what you can extract from that is winning is being in an ideal environment. Winning could be not waking up in a toxic relationship anymore. Winning could be having your mind free. Winning could be going into a workplace where you're surrounded by a healthy team. So in that, I translate Damon's definition. The first thing he said, we'll hear the rest here shortly, is winning is having the environment of your choice. Obviously, prison would not be anybody's idea of winning, at least I don't think so, not for this audience. But that is the intent behind this, is that with every episode, I will also explore what does winning mean and then turn that into a bite-sized nugget. Now, if you're not familiar with Damon West, I highly recommend you go back to episode 235 and listen to his story. Damon is has, I would say, one of the greatest redemption stories of all time, formerly being sentenced to life in prison in the state of Texas for organized crimes, comes from a great family, was a stud athlete, and really threw his life away after he was introduced to Crystal Meth. And from there, when he's dealt his life sentence, which obviously thankfully he hasn't and didn't have to serve the entire thing, he learns about what it means to change the environment around you and to be a coffee bean and how we can all be a coffee bean. What does that mean? Think about a pot of boiling water, the environment, the world that we're in, whether it's your world right now, or in Damon's case, a physical prison, when you throw a coffee bean in a boiling pot of water, what happens? It changes the environment around it because that water then becomes coffee. And all of us have the power to change our environment and positively influence our environment. So Damon, his definition of winning is being in an environment of his curation and creation, now being someone who speaks over 200 days a year, but then also what he says here is being of service. So think about this week, this month, this year. What does winning mean for you in terms of the environments that you place yourself in and how you serve others? And let that be a key driving force for you in 2026 to win. Now I will recommend Damon one more time in that his most recent book, Six Times in a Nickel, really uncovers the lessons that he learned from the seven of the 65 year sentence that he did serve. And you'll hear here that he's still on parole for the rest of his life until 2073. So there are a lot of lessons. His books are incredible, but check this out and be mindful of your environment and who and how you're being of service in win today. Thank you. 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_00:

Winning, I would define as getting up and showing up every single day consistently, man. Consistency 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. I'm on parole until 2073, so I got a little time left on parole. I got 48 years from the moment of 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 are there, whatever opportunities are where to serve other people. I found out where I could be useful every day. That's winning to me because 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, damn. 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_01:

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.

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Ryan Cass

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