OYP Episode 43: Courtney Stephen

Courtney Stephen, ex-professional football player for the CFL and now the Director of Community Partnerships for the Hamilton Tiger Cats, tells us about how his pursuit of a professional football career helped him develop the tools, mindsets and behaviors needed to be successful in his post playing career and how the intersection of his passion, capability and ambition made him dangerous both on the field and in the boardroom.

Interview

Peter Szczerba - Welcome back to the Own Your Potential Podcast, where you'll hear stories from leaders across the globe about how they've take control of their career growth and lessons on how you can too. I'm Peter Szczerba. And today, I have the extreme pleasure of sitting down with Courtney Stephen, who's a former professional football player with the Canadian Football League, and now the Director of Community Partnerships with the Hamilton Tiger Cats football club.

Peter Szczerba - Courtney, I've been looking forward to this for a while, we go way back, but this conversation is particularly exciting to me because you got such a diverse background compared to some of the other guests I've had on here. Why don't we just kick it right off? Can you take us through your career and professional journey up into this point?

Courtney Stephen - Wow. Yeah, so No, man, I appreciate you giving me a chance to tell my story, because it's not the usual and I think that's part of the reason why I'm able to be in the position that I'm in, you know, spoiler alert. I just retired from playing professional football. But what brought me to that point is what gave me my out, if that makes sense. So, let me go back to the beginning. You know, I started playing football competitively, when I was about eight years old. And you know, like any kid at that age, you had dreams and aspirations of playing at the highest levels, whether that be you know, NCAA in front of 100,000 people at the horseshoe in Ohio State here at the swamp and Florida and all these different places. We're playing in the NFL or just playing football whatever it may be, you know, I I grew up as a kid in outside the suburbs going to Toronto Argos games and, and watching guys like pinball Clemons UI, just go crazy, right. So football was a big thing for me. And just once, once I got through, you know, my first couple years of high school, and I started to realize that I had potential to make it. People, people were really generous with the strategies and giving me advice about how to make it because when you see a young kid with ambition, who's actually paying the costs to get where they want to go, you're more willing to lend a hand and work with them. So I was fortunate to have a lot of people who, you know, made sacrifices for me, took the time to teach me things and, and that's a huge part of my career story. Because, you know, giving back is a large part of my value system and, and what I'm able to do now is rooted in giving back. So to go back to the origin story. I learned all about branding, marketing, yourself communication, selling, positioning yourself as having a competitive edge against whoever else was out there in the field in the market as a young player, because when I came out of high school, it was the year 2007. YouTube dropped in 2006. So from 2009, to 2012, marketing myself as an athlete had to grow and adopt, and there was an evolution from my first highlight tape being on a VHS to being on DVD to being on Google Video to being on YouTube, to being email marketing campaigns directly to recruiting coordinators and dv coaches in the NCAA weekly giving them updates about my latest game. So me understanding how to package up a product, which in this case, was the athlete and market that product to determine who's my target audience and then build a relationship with them and ultimately try and close a deal. That's something I was learning how to do in high school. And so long story short, don't get the scholarship. You know, I do all the legwork. I have hundreds of DVDs and I get to the point where I'm emailing hundreds of schools and sending them my my recruiting profile, sending them my highlights, get a couple offers, but they're not the offers that I wanted. I didn't want to play want to play. I didn't want to go to law school. I was going to leave home so I decided to stay close to home. I went to school called Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. I played there two years. And after two years there, I just felt like this is amazing. But this can't be all there is. So I did the same process over again. And with the help of my older brother. I leaned on my network. And one of the things I learned along the way is that you know, the people that you know will be able to open doors for you but you got to walk through them. And so I package myself up again, I made another highlight tape, I updated my clips up My athletic CV, and I send it to a school called Northern Illinois University. It's just my brother's alma mater. And, you know, because I have built great relationships with all the way through my path, the athletic director, head coach and my position coach at Wilfrid Laurier. They say, you know what we'll grant you release to go and chase your dream, because you never done nothing but give us your all. Ryan's having that cachet. Having my parents believe in me being that kid who was waking up at 6am Ryan is going to the YMCA on his own during summer vacation to go get it in. They believed in me. So I got the blessing from my school, I got the blessing from my parents. I got the blessing from Northern Illinois, they say you know what, we don't got a scholarship for you. But if you want to come down here, you can walk on pay your own way, and we'll give you a shot to try out for one year. So my parents, I wouldn't even say they roll the dice they work and said, you know, what can you be giving it your all for like the last eight years, we're going to do what we have to do to make sure this opportunity doesn't slip through your fingers. And so they remortgage their house, money out of the equity of their house and put that up, as what I like to call, you know, an educated bet, or like, calculated risk in my future. And so I went down there I reinvented myself as an athlete, as a as a students, as somebody in the community who could be, you know, notable, you want to you want to stand out, so did walked on, eventually earned a scholarship. And after all of that, five games into my NCAA career, tore my ACL, Oh, my God.vSo there was a heck of a journey, man. And I mean, I just remember sitting on the trainer's bench there and just thinking like, man, no one cares about the risk you take for the glory, nobody cares how much work you put in. And the game of football does not love you, right? No matter how much you love it, it does not love you, nothing is promised. And all of the work you put in, that work itself is it is a risk. You know, it's the same as putting capital into a business. It's the same as you know, going out on a limb and taking the opportunity costs of option A or Option B, it's like, no one's guaranteeing you that you're going to yield any reward. Right? I was sitting there on that bench, I started thinking to myself, like, if I can't, you know, walk down stairs in my house and go get a peanut butter sandwich. If I can't do any of those things, then I'm not an athlete. And if I'm not an athlete, and at that point, I started thinking, way more than the athlete. I am an athlete, and I'm way more than an athlete. So let me just start thinking like entrepreneur, let me start thinking, let me start packaging up all this experience that I have, and doing something with it. So my friends and I, we had a clothing company when I was in Hong Kong in college. And that was like the first successful business venture that started it was called enrollment. And it was really just sure squares, tank tops. And yeah, just basic apparel with just one brand across the chest. Yeah. You know, we put out some campaigns and I used that to help pay for groceries while I was in college, you know, because the scholarship checks were cool, but they weren't that bad. And so, you know, that was one of my first successful business ventures. And then once I got drafted into the CFL, you know, things actually ended up working out in my favorite where I still had an opportunity to continue playing after that injury. And I returned from my senior year played, and then I went to the CFL. And, you know, I had a six year stint in Hamilton and then I played for one year in Calgary and all the while I was running a youth football mentorship program, I took the experience that I had from high school, learning how to market myself learning how to speak in front of a camera learning how to handle an interview, learning how to be an athlete learning how to train, body learning, nutrition, learning, the weight room, all this stuff that I did to go from, you know, just a humble kid playing high school football to somebody who was one of the top 30 VCs ranked team playing in the Orange Bowl in my senior year from a walk onto a scholarship kid who was you know, drafted to play pro football in Canada. I took all that experience and I packaged it up until the US mentorship program and that program went on to be very successful. And over the course of a couple years, we did six figures in revenue. And that's how I built my experience, you know, because a lot of people in my age cohort when they came out of school, they went into jobs, you know, they worked at Deloitte, they worked at Royal Bank, RBC they worked at you know, the became electricians they became this that you can't do that. I went to the gym. I wasn't Don't you know I'm saying I was making plays on my CV. And so one of my mentors when I was in college, Mr. Barr Sema, he's one of the big losers at NIU, I remember him saying, like, I wanted to be a CEO by the time I hit 50. And so I met with a bunch of CEOs. And I asked him what's on your resume? And they said, you know, what, you got to learn how to manage people. So he took jobs that gave him opportunity to manage people. They said, you got to understand a tech stack. He said, Okay, well, I'm gonna go get involved on the IT side of things. They said, you got to know how to do sales. And so he got sales experience, they say you got no international business and trade relations, he did that. And so for me, I took that same approach and just piecing together different experiences I wanted to have in my, my tool belt, so that when I made that transition out of the game that we all inevitably have to make, that I wasn't going to be somebody who was just standing at a crossroads. with nowhere to go, I wanted to give myself lanes and many paths. And so when the pandemic hit my seventh season, and I was signing to go play for my eighth, everybody had to take a backseat and just sit down for a while and look at life and think about like what's really important, right that I had a newborn son, I was working in the offseason job and in a software company doing sales selling technology. And I left that job to play football last season, and that season got canceled. And so I'm sitting down thinking, football really doesn't love me. But you know what, I think I've gotten very far in life because of this game. And now it's time for me to make my exit on my own terms and use this experience, my network, all of the things that I've gained up to this point, to build a bridge to the next place, so that, you know, I don't have to flounder into my next job, that I can go there with confidence into something that is a great fit for me. And one of the biggest pieces of advice that I give to young players is that, you know, when you finish the game has something to show for it, whether it be a down payment on the house, clearing your debt, or if it's just having that transition, wait so that when it comes time for you to pick another job that you don't have to take, and you can get what you can take what you want. And, you know, I started going into a realm of wealth management, because I'm very passionate about financial education and financial literacy. But what ended up happening is, as I was getting ready to take a job in wealth management, an opportunity presented itself to have an executive or a dilek, Director level role in professional sports. And I've always had a dream of, you know, being an operator at the highest level, and to be able to be an everyday operator in sports and entertainment in the field that I'm very familiar with, I've cut my teeth in levels, from grassroots to college sopro. Those aren't doors that open all the time. So when an opportunity came, I immediately dropped the dream of being a billion dollar hedge fund guy or management and I just ran straight to the opportunity to get into the business operations and pro sports. So now I'm about a month in and things happen fast here. So I feel like I've already been doing it for a year, but at home because I get to marry my love for the game. I get to marry my love for sports with my entrepreneurial tendencies, with my love for operating with the skills I've learned in, in cross functional operations, whether that be marketing, whether it be people skills within a be selling, whether that be client experiences, all of that stuff comes together in pro sports. And that's a long, long winded story of how I went from just being a football player to being on path to become an executive in pro sports.

Peter Szczerba - So first of all, I am literally salivating at the mouth the diversity of questions here because I say this all the time that the life of an athlete, even an amateur one is a high mileage one. There's a lot of things that you go through that mature you that develop you that high tension, high stakes experiences that put miles on you physically, mentally and emotionally. We're in ways that other things simply don't. And you're you're in your early 30s what a decade into your career. And the type of wisdom that you're speaking with is the type of wisdom that people speak with after a full 4050 year career. And that's exactly why I was excited to have this conversation, man. So first of all, congrats on the opportunity, being able to make that transition. Having all of this hard work, kind of pay off in it. In a dream opportunity, and making the best of, you know, what has been a tough time for everybody across COVID. But I want to start where you started all the way back. Because some of this high mileage stuff started right away in terms of developing your marketing and kind of promote self promotion skills at a high school level, in relatively, you know, low technology ways you talk VHS tapes and DVD and stuff like that. But that is, that's hard work. That's almost manual labor compared to doing that sort of promotion today. So your high school kid, where does that come from? Like, who's telling you how to do that? How are you? That's a full time job to do all that. And then, you know, so talk about that a bit.

Courtney Stephen - But I'll say like, it's got to be a full time job. Because what, what else do you have to do? You know, and far be it for me to be that guy who's talking about the kids these days, but no one is going to understand what a certain experience was, like, unless they've been through it. And so for me to talk about me to be able to talk about running two VCRs, to dub your highlight tape. No one who was born after like 1993 is going to be able to relate to that analogy shifted so fast, right. And I think it was just out of sheer alignment of a lot of things. That one, when you're passionate about something, and I don't mean, like, it's fun for you. But I mean, when you're passionate about something, and it lights you up, and you have a hard time putting it down, and you love it, and you want to be elite, and there's something about it, that that forces you to leave no stone unturned. If you're actually good at that thing, that's a dangerous combination. So it's like, I had, um, quenches your thirst for knowledge when it came to football, and everything that was gonna help me be the absolute best football player that I can be. And knowing that the resources around me had game to kick, I was tapping in on a regular basis. So let me give you an insider's look at who some of my support system was, because this is the type of stuff that made me try to put my program together because this is a very rare combination of influences. One of my older brothers played college football before me, but he's a four four guy coming out of in the coming out in the 90s. where, you know, the ability to get a database of prospects from all over the nation isn't as simple as a couple clicks, like you might be now like, you had to travel around, go to all these confines, but downtimes. Yeah, I noticed. So I don't know what, what the case was for him to get on the radar. But he got on the radar, he got out. He played at a school that I played out. But when he played there was not a good school. Nonetheless, he got out he found his way he came back and he told me, this is what you need to do. Then add on top of that, I had another brother who was a master of digital media and arts off. So this guy's a videographer. And he's, you know, his career is beginning to blossom. So he came to some of my games, he was living in my hometown still. And he recorded me for the sideline. Now I'll say the first couple of games that he recorded me, maybe sometimes he was bald, watching like a fan. And I didn't know what the template was that we were trying to fit. So we would record a game and we'd watch him be like, yo, with this play right here, we can see the play, but we can't see me. And really, for this type of footage, I think I need to be the focal point. So maybe position the camera here and turn this cameras angle and do this and do that. So I was with somebody who was technical, but also was at a grassroots enough level to be open to learning a certain way that was going to work for me access to somebody with skills and time. So I had my two brothers. And then my sister was like a fitness freak, and she was going to the gym all the time. So sometimes I piggyback off her and she's cooking food. I'm like, make little extra for me. If you're going to be cooking healthy, then that's easier for me to do things that are red. So this confluence of factors. It's like you're in an environment that's a breeding ground for success. Not to mention that my mom back in the day ran for a Canadian national team. She never went to the Olympics, but she she has some records regionally in the sea of Serrano. So it's like, I hire me it was one where if you had the right attitude, and you brought that energy, like look, I'm trying to do something helped me people were going to help. And I think that's what a lot of people got to understand is that even the greatest talent in the world is wasted on somebody who is not curious or somebody who is not the aggressor, you're the aggressor in the situation. If you Want to get all the juice out the squeeze? Otherwise, it will be, you know, a guy who's pretty good. But in this world, you have to be able to separate yourself, you have to be able to go and figure out how to get the contact information for a coaching how to reach, you might not know how to be able to figure it out, you have to be curious enough, right. And eventually, you're going to, you know, scroll through enough websites, you're going to do enough Google searches to find something every college in America, and Canada has a staff directory, and on that staff directory, you're going to be able to find the football team. And every football team has somebody in charge of recruiting college recruiting coordinator, and that recruiting coordinators gonna have their email address listed in the staff directory. And you can find that put in this spreadsheet and then build out your own database. And that's the kind of stuff that you can do, no matter how much talent you have. All it takes is passion and action.

Peter Szczerba - Hearing all this, it you know, I think through the lens of athletics, it's easy to understand how it fits. But it's so incredibly transferable. And I talk about that time and time again, with folks on this podcast who have nothing to do with sports, but that the fact that the types of things that you pick up this type of mentality about being the aggressor, driving your own progression, right, that is directly transferable to any career, right? owning your own potential, the name of this podcast is the whole point, right? You're driving and pushing your career forward. So what's incredible is you had these circumstances surrounding you, right, and they were the perfect concoction for success. But it still took a special individual to recognize that a young age and take advantage of them. So that is, you know, unbelievable, you put it all together, you're you're you're doing the grunt work that it takes early on, right on top of the work to actually be good at at the sport that you're pursuing. And then you have the gut punch of not getting the result out of all that PEGI wants, like, so you're 18 years old, 19 years old, like how do you bounce back from that, and then still go off and still find success? You know, Adam, Adam, slightly lower level in a Canadian university, but that's still built you up towards what ultimately turned into NCAA D one, right? So like, how do you bounce back from that at that age?

Courtney Stephen - Man, I'll tell you the absolute truth. And like, it's easy to say this kind of thing, knowing how the story ended. But I'm telling no word of a lie. I remember because there's a thing called signing day. And I say the first Wednesday in February, where all of the D one schools, you know, they're allowed to have their letter of intent signed by the I think now they do it in the winter. And in february two, but this was like a big thing. So it was like the deadline and you knew who was really trying to who was really trying to offer you to pray. So I remember when national signing day came and I was a senior I was in my last year of high school. And I got an offer from like Stony Brook Murray see a guy that's another one w school, I got one from, like, somewhere in that somewhere super cold that nobody wanted to go. And then Western Michigan and University of Miami of Ohio both said, You're not one of our guys. But if somebody else backs out, we'll get you. And so I remember like almost pretty much being in tears about it just because like of how much would they meant to me, right. And at that time, I remember calling my brother and just being like, Yo, I'm not going to be second best or second choice. I'm staying in Canada, and I will be the best who ever did it in history. And that was like my naive goal. And I think that to two degree, you have to be a bit delusional and naive. And you have to believe that these kinds of things are possible. Because the people who believe in those things are the ones who will achieve them. Obviously, not everybody is going to be able to be the best by definition there is one. But having that kind of attitude that literally there was not going to be anything humanly possible to stop me from being the most impactful player in Canadian football history. Like that's how I approached every single workout. It wasn't even about football. At that point. It was just about me, proving something to myself never proving anything to anybody else or proving haters wrong or, you know, showing up the doubters that stuff is fluff love. If you need somebody from the outside to get you up in the morning, then you're one bad call away from being somebody who has no juice probably will have heaters you need that you don't need that. What you need is somebody in the mirror who motivates you and when you can wake up at Every day with a mission, then there's an unlimited supply of juice in the tank that you can go out there every single day, every single day and get it and that's what it takes to be the best. So I had to have the best seasons in college football. My freshman and my sophomore year when I worked for Lori and I truly believe that that sequence of events as well allowed me to go on to play in the NCAA, eventually.

Peter Szczerba - I love even just the way that we're talking about this right now. I it honestly gets me excited. And it hits me. And I got to go release it after we finished this podcast somehow. But I think I'm going to challenge you a little bit Actually, it's it's not naivety, I think it's ambition. I it's not delusion, I think it's hunger. And so I think that you can have those, those intangible traits and just be devastatingly ambitious and hungry for success for yourself. Now, for anybody else, like you mentioned. And it doesn't matter if it's sports, or if it's in the corporate world, or as a doctor, and you want to be the foremost smartest, best in a specific field or niche. It's totally transferable to whatever you do, right, whether, you know, you touched briefly, and I want to get into it later in terms of your entrepreneur, real endeavors. But like you wanna have the best clothing brand ever, that is an ambition and internal ambition that you want, that you have to have in order to be successful. And I am a big creature of shoot for the stars land on the moon, and you're still landing on the moon. Right. So that's how I see it. And I think that that is absolutely necessary to overcome something like like that. Because I mean, ultimately what it was is a failure. It's unfortunate, right. But I think that that also set you up to be able to bounce back from the injury you had later. And I want to talk a little bit about what you did before that injury, which is basically you bet on yourself, you had a support system around you that made it possible for you to do that without a high level of risk. But you still did it right. And there's an enormous amount of pressure, when you have a support system helping you through something like that. And to bet on yourself and be successful, there's a level of urgency and pressure that comes with that, that is hard to replicate elsewhere. So talk a little bit about your mentality when you're let's say, you know, fighting for your spot on that team, you know, then fighting for the for the scholarship playing in front of 100,000 people at Ohio State, but knowing that in the back of your head, as good as all that is you're you're still you have to make it all work, you have to be successful, because you got people that sacrificed a lot for you to make you do to help you do this. So talk about that. Betting on yourself and dealing with that pressure.

Courtney Stephen - Yeah, so I will say one thing I never did play in front of hundreds, the biggest crowd that played in front of was the Orange Bowl in Miami, we played against Florida State or 71,000. But that's still pretty pretty darn big crowd.

Peter Szczerba  - I'd say so,

Courtney Stephen - Yeah, but um, man, one of the one of the keys that I think was able to separate help me separate myself from, you know, my, my previous self, because ultimately, I'm competing against yourself every single day. I think it was that I didn't know what I was up against. I was transitioning from Canadian Football to the US. Now you can watch it on TV, you can see it every day. But unless you live something you don't truly know what it's like. And I don't know, good, bad or indifferent. Like, every single day when I used to go train, I would train sometimes with other people. But I think I got the best out of myself when I trained by myself, right? Because I was training on pure fear. Like the fear of not being good enough to do what I set out to do. And so not a type of fear that like me shrivel up and get in the fetal position, but the type of fear where the adrenaline pumps your palms sweat a little bit in though your pupils dilate and it's like life and death. And when you can tap into a flow state. And just like every day workout, or I'm running hills, you know, I jog from my house to the park, I bring you six bottles of water, a lacquer and some cones. It's just me and the hill and the sun. And I'm training you know, with not knowing how many other people are out there also doing the same thing. I can't see them. It's like Mario Kart when you're racing the ghosts, but there's like just an image in my mind of somebody else out there taking one extra rep than me. Right so out there with the cones just five, five yards longer pardon me, you know their sprint is five yards longer their, their reps are one rep more you know, they're just giving a little bit more juice. It was like an infinite enemy that couldn't really be be and that pushed me to do challenge myself every single day. And that fear is something that I was able to just bottle up and tap into on a regular basis. And that allowed me to get into some of the best shape that I've ever been in. And so, you know, not everybody can get to that place because I don't think everybody cares enough. And that's okay. But it's just because like I said, in the beginning, if you're extremely passionate about something, and you have something on the line, like there's something at stake, you know, I put out a body of work to the point where people believed in me and put up bread, like people really put money up 1000s of dollars, I'm in high school. No, no, I'm in secondary University. I never seen $10,000 at that point in time in my life, right? I never seen $20,000 at that time in my life, you know, I barely seen $5,000 I had jobs, but I never kept the money long enough to accumulate that, you know, so like, you want to come through for those people was to be lazy, is to be disrespectful to everyone who ever believed in you, right? Not to over exaggerate the point. But like, this is the same mentality I take into work every day now. Like, I got a sticky note on my wall, and it says, Messiah mode, and support, whatever it's whenever it's time to like get to it, I just look at that I hit the button. And I clock in because sports is just a venue that allows you to demonstrate your grid, overtly. But there's other places in life. There's other arenas where you can take that same degree of focus and tenacity and channeling into being great at other things, whether that be, you know, taking the focus necessary to remain patient while teaching your kids something new, right? Whether it is, you know, staying in the office for that extra five minutes focus before you go on lunch, because you think that the timeliness of this next email will change how it's received by the person on the other end, right. It's a plan of just understanding a situation and capitalizing on things while it was hot doing one more thing today, then you could just let it go and let it pile up tomorrow. I'm not to say that to glorify being a workaholic, or anything like that. But just when you want certain things in life, football taught me that you can go and take them, as long as you're willing to pay the appropriate cost and you do things with Mary and you do things with honor, right? Nobody in football is allowed to grab a face masks that's against the rules, which you're allowed to run as hard as you want. And you're allowed to jump and brush and scratch and claw for whatever you want to stay within the lines and all the tenacity that you have can be your benefit. All that pressure can be privileged if it's channeled in the right way.

Peter Szczerba - So much I want to unpack there, I want to tap in particularly to this idea of leveraging the fear. And I have always said that fear is courage that has said it's prayers. And I think it's an important thing, whether it's in sport, whether it's in professional life, corporate life, or whatever the case is, right? This idea that being afraid is a negative is false, because it keeps you sharp, it keeps you urgent. And if you're fearful of failing at something, it's because you care about it. And I think that that is what pushes you to do better, right to work harder, and that what you describe this idea of your pupils dilate and your palms getting sweaty that, that you know shakiness from the adrenaline as the moment is approaching, right? And you're prepping yourself, I get that when I'm prepping for a big presentation, when I'm about to go in front of senior clients. And I'm sitting there, you know, three minutes, two minutes, one minute before the zoom call starts, then I'm on right. And like the first 10 seconds that I'm talking, my voice is shaky. Right? And it's like, I feel that every time there's a big presentation, and then the flow state kicks in, and then you get into your comfort zone and then the confidence builds. But the confidence is built on that fear driving the preparation.

Courtney Stephen - And you know what the confidence is built also on taking reps through the theater. Yes. Taking reps through the fear. Look, I told you I did sales, right. So I remember selling myself on getting the job with limited experience. Like I work in retail when I was in high school and I was in college and I got experience, you know, assessing a customer's needs making a prescription closing. Yeah, urgency, all that kind of stuff. Right. So, I mean, I've got a little bit of formal training here and there and I've supplemented my own study. But I remember being on the sales floor as a business development rep doing cold calls, and being around some other people that were recently hired and then being around some senior account executives that were you know, they were they were they were the short computers do big deals. And so you're around people who are nervous, and people who are overly confident, and you're in the middle, and everyone can hear you. And some of my colleagues used to want to go and make their calls and these little phone booths because no one can hear me, I'm thinking to myself, and this is something I got from football, which is like, a lot of us right now are nervous. So if I'm able to rise up around all these people who's nervous and assert myself as the one who's in control the situation, immediately I have an advantage. advantage. So what I did, I got a standing desk, I stood up in, in the group of maybe about 15 of us, I stood up, everybody's sitting down, I stood up, I just started making my dial standing, let everybody hear what I have to say fumble over it, get hung up on whatever it was. But after doing that for a couple of weeks, then all of a sudden, you become known as that guy. Right? Right. And that's a great opportunity. For anybody. It's like when you find yourself in a situation, that's really hard, right? The worst thing that can happen is that you meet your own expectation of not not doing the best. And the best thing that can happen is that you exceed that expectation, you grow, you get better, and you have new opportunities, because you were able to evolve into your next form. As somebody who is equipped with different skills and a different level of toughness, to meet new situations that are even a little bit more challenging. challenges, you need those challenges. If you didn't have them, you will

Peter Szczerba - 100% I think pushing yourself to step outside your comfort zone professionally, personally, emotionally, however, in those types of challenging situations, has accelerative impact on your growth in a lot of different ways. And, you know, that's something that's popped up a bunch of times in this podcast, and hearing it with this type of intensity, though, when you channel this athletic mindset into it, I think it I want to what I want to do is normalize the idea to normal corporate or professional people that having this type of extreme approach to your career growth. That's okay. Right, like it's gonna set you apart, right, doing something silly, like something as subtle, but as as significant as standing up in a room of 50 people sitting, that's gonna set you apart, and it's gonna force you to perform because you're on a stage. And it's as artificial and as insignificant as it may seem, you're on a stage and is pushing you to do something that's a little more challenging. And that's a great example of that mentality, as extreme as it may seem, resulting in growth. And now you're leveraging that further down your career, you're channeling it, you know, now in your role, but also you had to sell yourself right in parallel to excelling as a professional football player to stand up your youth football organization, right? If you had some cachet going into that, because you have the ability to say I'm a pro athlete in the sport, you want to be a pro athlete in. So that already gives you a leg up. But then from there, people can suss out pretty quickly that there's nothing behind the words that you're telling them. So you being able to sell your mic, your mindsets, your frameworks, your approach to setting yourself apart, that's huge on top of actually having this as the substance in the words that you're saying, talk a little bit about, you know how you did that in parallel to playing it. And you know how that really set you up to transition into the role that you have now?

Courtney Stephen - Well, I'll say I learned so many things. But one is you can't sell something you don't believe in course. And for me, the frameworks that I use were ones that I actually lived through. So just having a program that was built on the pillars of football, so athletic skill, right? physical fitness, learning how to train your body, outside of you know, catching and running and tackling, learning how to train your body, you know, push ups, sit ups, sprinting, running, technique, jumping, those kinds of things. And then professional development, and professional counts as being a student, because the student athlete, that's your job, but then also how to, how to handle media, how to handle an interview, how to write an email, right? Those three pillars, the physical, the football, and the professional putting those together. And knowing what that did for me. It made it easy for me to sell that because I can tell I could speak to each point, you know, and I understood who my target was. My target was the player really, but the target morsels in the player was the parent. So a lot of those kinds of conversations happen with you and the parent, because the parent wants to know that you're going to take care of their kid and that their money is going to be invested in something where they're going to see, you know, growth and develop the greatest asset which is their kids, right? They don't care about, you know, really at the end of the day, they don't want they don't care for your proof player like that draws people in, but ultimately what they want is they want you to take care of They're kids. And so when you can tap into what is the true thing that the person you're serving is looking for, then it takes a lot of pressure off of you having to memorize the scripts, it takes a lot of pressure off of you having to quote unquote, say the right thing. Because you're able to reach a level of, you know, being genuine, that lets you just be you, right? Anybody can be themselves, when they're doing something that they're, they're truly an expert in. And something that, you know, they're very confident will solve the problem people need to have solved. So two things there, one, you need to become a subject matter expert in the thing that you do, right? You can't, you can't like, obviously, you have to start somewhere. But a lot of people are afraid to say the words, I don't know. But it's okay to say I don't know, as long as it's followed with, but I'll find out, right. And that can be the most powerful thing that you do in your business, in your career, or in your relationships, because it's okay to be the person who doesn't know, as long as you're also the person who knows how to solve problems, or has a reputation for filling in the gaps and growing, no one wants to work with somebody who is the same today, as they were last year, you got to be growing, you got to be adding value, and you got to actually care about the finished product that you're delivering to somebody else. So to me, you know, just having my own business, you're able to get your foot in the door, to have longevity, and you're only able to build lasting relationships, if you tap into what it is that the other person really, at the end of the day, even if they can't articulate it, with their doing business with you for

Peter Szczerba - There's so much there. And really what I want to transition to next is you did this in parallel to playing. And that's great, and it developed you as an individual. But that on its own you having developed these skill sets and being able to grow as a professional in parallel to being a pro athlete, that didn't secure you the opportunity you have today. Right? You had to promote the fact that you did this, you have to let the people in the networks that matter that are going to get you the opportunity with a professional team, to know that you've developed these skills to know you're building this level of expertise and this track record running and operating a business and selling and being able to have impact outside of football. So what did you do while you were playing to bridge the gap between what you were doing outside of football with the people within football, to make sure that you are setting yourself up with the connections and the visibility and the brand equity. So that way they came to you with this opportunity that you have today,

Courtney Stephen - First of all, like you said his brand, right? It's Brandon, all of us in this day and age, especially in this digital day and age, all of us have brand, you have a resume, but I can type your name and Google and if you don't own the first two pages of Google at least on your name, then you got work to do. It's very simple for somebody like myself to drum up, you know, a traditional CV and just fill it up with stuff that I did, you know, I work this place I worked that place but because of things on their themselves are not going to be overly impressive and jump out as this is a candidate we need to work with. We have to find ways to build brand work constantly constant, like it's a full time job because the people that you know we're going to open doors for you. And those are the doors that you're gonna have to be able to walk in and tell stories about other stuff that you've done. So that really the CV is just the icing on the cake. They want to know the person. And in this era, it's pretty easy with the content libraries that we can all have for ourselves. If you type my name in any search engine, whether that be Apple podcasts, Google, whether it be you know, I don't even know where you're going to find something because my agent taught me this. And I remember working with him after my first after I signed my first my second deal was coming up. And we had a conversation I said to him, like you know what? I really like how we work together. But we only work together once every you know, three years. And then I you know I pay you every year deal for me. But then we come together we do a contract every three years. And then I want to do something more like I want you to help me build my brand outside of this game because that's ultimately what I'm here for. I need to create a name. And so this guy, I was going on vacation. The next day, this guy FedEx me overnight, two books from somebody named Gary Vaynerchuk. And this is like in 2000 I want to say 16 and one of the books Study 70 was called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. And it's basically about giving away your best information all of the time and teaching people and sowing seeds. And being the center of influence being somebody who's a connector, just providing so much disproportionate value for everybody in your network. That when you eventually call on them for a favor, there was a, like, a notable imbalance of social equity, right? They owe you one. Right? So it's like, I took that. And I learned to provide value on social media, I learned how to provide value in the business I ran, I learned how to provide value in my community, I have a main network with people. And if I can solve the problem, I'll connect you with somebody who can learn how to do these things. And I learned how to communicate in an efficient way that people could digest depending on which platform they're consuming my information on. And by doing that consistently, and weaving those overarching strategies into the daily tactics that I was implementing. Then when time came for me to a, can I use you as a reference in this interview, I'm going into, of course, right Oh, Can Can you introduce me to this person who works at this place that I'm actually going to do an interview at so that I have somebody there who I know when I can speak to about what it's like before I go and run into a dark room. Of course, those are a simple favors that you could call on people after you've already provided them with information and value, or when you come to their school and you've done a speech for free, or when you've taken their kids to the field and teach them how to backpedal or when you just, you know, found a great book and you share it with the people on your social media, like after a while you become known as that guy. That gives Yeah, and that's a great reputation to have. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, you don't want to do things with an ulterior motive. But if it's a part of your character to naturally be giving and providing value, eventually, when you do need something in return, people will be more than happy to help you out because you help them at some point in time.

Peter Szczerba - So, man, there's so much that's transferable in that and I think the way that I want to kind of sum it up is that you are a football player who has the dream of achieving, and progressing to become, let's say, the GM, or some equivalent level of success in your post Playing career. And that to me, when you talk about all the work and the hustle and the grind that you put in to build the networks to build the brand to provide that disproportion of value. That is no different than the developer who wants to be the CTO. And while they're putting in the work and and developing and coding and doing the things that they have to do to develop the deliver in their job, they need to be doing the networking, they had to be providing the guidance, the mentorship, the disproportion of value, branding themselves, so that way, eventually they can make that transition and go elevate themselves out of that delivery and into leadership or into that ultimate goal. There's, there's no difference what everything you articulated, whether it was on the football field, or then what you did in parallel to and now what you get to do after, there's no difference between that and what you're doing at your desk at your computer, when you're building websites, or you're a lawyer or your any other profession or corporate job. And I think that really is is why I love having these types of conversations where we intertwine sport and the professional corporate world because those journeys are the same from football player to GM or or president of a team to or from like developer to CTO or business analyst to CEO, whatever the case is. And I really love how it's come together in this conversation. And I think what I'm seeing in this is really when you combine what we talked about earlier, that ambition, then with the perseverance to overcome some of the setbacks that you had, all along the hustle. And I think hustles a big intangible that people underrate like the hustle is not just hard work. It's hard work with creativity, it's hard work with efficiency, and I think that's when you start to do things, something called hustle, right? Those things when they come together. That's what makes people really dangerous and what makes you able to succeed and kind of move past others and, and be elite like we talked about.

Courtney Stephen - Yeah, and I will say one thing to also just not to just be busy and to be doing a lot of things, but to work hard on tough problems and bring them through the finish line because a lot of people you know they're addicted to busy. Yeah. But at the end of the day, you're graded on what you bring through the finish line, right. And if you can deliver on projects, and you If you can work on timelines, if you can teach yourself new skills that's going to help you manage resources better. If you're going to be able to enter into more conversations and keep up with what people are talking about, right, they'll be able to, you know, be a better operator. And at the end of the day, I think for me personally, that's the ultimate KPI is like, how well can you operate? When you're given a task? Can you bring it to the finish line, and for me, that's my biggest metric that I'm gauging myself on now, before it used to be, you know, maybe my fitness. And I used to pride myself on the fact that, yeah, I can run fast. But I can run fast for four quarters, right. So that's, that was what gave me my edge to be able to play the game. Of course, you get older, you get smarter workout, you get stronger, but my thing was, I will outlast every player on this field. That's how the game has my edge. Now my edges, whatever problem is, I'll figure a way to solve it and bring this to the finish line, despite anything getting off the rails. So not to just hustle and not to just work harder than other people, which of course, you do have to do. But to deliver,

Peter Szczerba - I think, you know, as athletes, the idea of legacy is often something that we mull over and think about, well, how are we going to be remembered? What are we going to leave behind? What's the recognition that people are going to give us when when it's all said and done? And I think if your legacy is being the person who takes things across the finish line, and gets it done, as pretty damn good. corny man, Ellison. I, again, I think is that's a beautiful sentiment to leave off on. I want to have another one of these in the future, once you're a year or so into this opportunity, and you're killing it and you're on to the next step, and seeing what your trajectory is in then, and just see how these same mentalities and frameworks have facilitated your success in your new role. I want to thank you again for your time. I've absolutely loved every second this conversation and I can't wait to get this out there.

Courtney Stephen - Hey, Peter. I appreciate the catch up, man. It's been awesome. Thank you.