Shownotes
6 months ago you said you started living in the present moment, what got you to that point?
That’s been the journey. For me living in the present moment was never an option because in the present moment was really confronting the reality of “I’m not enough”. And why would I ever want to live in the present moment if deep down I don’t believe that I’m enough. So as a perfectionist, as a three on the enneagram, as someone who has learned and has been conditioned to believe that I’m the most loved and accepted in life when I score touchdowns, or when I perform, or when I succeed, or when I achieve, I’ve always been looking out far in life--always trying to do something more, trying to achieve more, trying to succeed more, like what do we need to do now to get where we want to go because the present moment was never enough.
It really took me years to realize the present moment was never enough for a couple of different reasons: One, because we live in the western society, our culture applauds this hustle mentality--this do more, this achieve more, this be more disposition and posture of our hearts. I’m not saying that it’s not necessary or judging it, because I think setting goals and doing more and achieving more in life is necessary but, at some point, we are going to have to stop and ask why the more is so important to begin with. Why is it not enough now? The second reason why I was never able to do that is because, not only were the narrative of the culture encouraging me to look out above and beyond that which is now, but also it took me years to realize it was never enough because deep down I believed I wasn’t enough. That’s when I really began to unravel and begin to see that shame.
I literally contorted and twisted shame and masked my shame as ambition—to do more, to achieve more, to be more. But when shame is the driving force behind your life, shame is what gets you up at night, no matter how you mask it, it’s never going to be enough because shame always, it’s the mechanism of shame, is going to reduce you to believing you’re not enough. That’s what we do, we spend all this time looking outside of ourself to find something that can hopefully—some level of success or performance, or relationship, or job, or financial security— that can make us feel like it’s enough, but it never will be enough. So I kind of got to this point in my life where I realized enough was never going to be enough, because something was not properly aligned in me, and that was really the journey to come back home to myself and live in the present moment.
I read that you walked pigs when you were younger can we take it back to there?
I grew up on a farm in Texas and we raised and sold pigs at a local 4H. It’s funny because I am very much a city guy--I love the city, I love the hustle, the vibrant life, but I grew up in very humble beginnings on the red dirt roads of the Texas panhandle where I literally walked pigs every morning as a daily chore.
What age did you start playing football at?
Oh my gosh, I came out of the crib with a football in my hands. It was funny though, I hated getting hit. I can recall time after time where I would literally have to be carried off the field because I was crying hysterically from getting hit too hard. So, I actually shifted at a young age—I was good at football and I loved football but I wanted to actually play basketball. College basketball is what I wanted to do. My sophomore year of high school I had this really good football season and my coach kind of said you can do basketball still, but we think football is where you have the most potential. So I picked football and kind of ran with it from there.
When you were playing football at that time do you feel like you really loved it or were there other people who were influencing you?
I did love football, I had a passion for it. I had a mother that was very invested let’s say—very invested in my growth, very invested in my performance, my success on and off the field and she definitely played a major influence, she really was the primary caretaker where I learned what love looked like and love felt like and so on and so forth. She definitely had a lot of influence but I equally shared the same passion for football. It wasn’t until I got to the NFL that I realized I didn’t love the game anymore, that I really didn’t care to play that game anymore.
What do you think shifted it from loving it to not?
I think at some point football became not a chance to play, an opportunity to showcase talent, it became a lifeline, it became a source of happiness, of finding acceptance and love and validation in the world. When it shifted from a game to be played, to really enjoy, to my choice of a drug, it just created so much pressure and so many mental challenges that I at the time didn’t know how to cope with, or handle, or process, so football really became an enemy in my life more than anything. That did a lot of the process of letting football go, just realizing football had shifted from this childhood game to becoming a major obstacle in my life.
When you were going through this turmoil, were you thinking about any other options where you could see your life going or were you just holding onto football?
That’s the crazy thing. When you’ve learned to find love in one way, when you’ve learned to find acceptance and validation, when you’ve learned to find significance through something, it’s so hard to create space, so hard to detach from it, to walk into that unknown territory of “what’s next in life?”. When that’s been your lifeline this entire time, it’s just scary. So I really didn’t give myself any chance to dream outside of football because football was my lifeline, football was not just a game I played, but the way I found love and acceptance in this world. Walking away from it meant walking away from my source of validation and that was just damn scary. Really scary.
That was a whole process. It took a lot of courage and I don’t think necessarily we are naturally inclined to walk away from things that no longer serve us because we’ve learned to find so much value in that thing. We’ll hold onto it until literally it has to be pried away from our fingers or from our heart. I think in life we can walk away from something or it can be taken away from us, but we’re constantly evolving our life, we’re constantly growing in life and we always are going through seasons of contraction and expansion, like seasons of letting go and creating space for what’s next. That was such a challenging time for me to let go of football. It was scary, but it was so necessary.
Do you remember what you felt in that moment (about being told you can’t sign your first NFL contract and have to serve in the military)?
This is kind of the story behind the story. I was elated and thrilled that they didn’t allow me to play football because I knew I wasn’t going to make the team. Fear had suffocated me, it had swallowed me whole, I was playing really poorly, I was not performing well at all and I knew my chances of really making the team were slim to none and the thing is everyone was watching me because my story was all over national news. I was one of the featured players that the press was following or was going to follow throughout training camp to see how I did and I was so afraid of being seen as somebody who didn’t have what it takes, I was so afraid of not making it because my whole entire life has been centered around this idea that I find acceptance when I succeed—so what happens if I don’t succeed? That really paralyzed me with fear. So when they told me I couldn’t play, I actually was pretty elated. I was so excited that they took away the opportunity for me to be exposed as just somebody who doesn’t have what it takes. It was kind of a ‘get out of jail free’ card in a sense.
When I went back to the military, they told me that I had to serve for roughly three years, and then after three years, if I had a chance to get back into the NFL, I could get back into the NFL. So I went back to the military for three years and I told myself I had three years to become the biggest, the best, the strongest version of me so that I could, if I had a chance to get back to the NFL, that I was ready to really perform well. I’d be bigger, I’d be faster, I’d be smarter, I’d be stronger and I’d be able to overcome that fear of being exposed and not being good enough. I did that for three years and I became a machine—the biggest, fastest, strongest I’ve been in my life. I was literally a machine, the best shape of my life.
Sure enough I got the opportunity to go back into the NFL three years later to fulfill that childhood dream and I remember telling myself that “you prepared hard for this, you are ready for this”. I remember the first day back in the NFL, I signed with the Detroit Lions as a free agent, my first day on the field I literally has a nervous breakdown because that same fear, that same panic, that same visceral response of being so afraid of not being enough it hit me 10x as hard as it hit me three years before. I suddenly realized this wasn’t a performance issue, this wasn’t about being bigger, faster, stronger, this was a bigger issue going on on the inside of my life, in my inner world. This was a heart issue. That’s when I started getting curious on ‘wait something is missing here’ and that was kind of the internal voice that clicked inside of me that started the journey of ‘hey, it’s time for you to walk away from this game so that you can really go discover who the hell Caleb Campbell really is’.
During that time, when people would consider the NFL like ‘you’re living the dream’, did you feel shame that you didn’t feel that way?
Yeah, that’s a big one isn’t it? So much shame where it’s like you hear people talking all the time like “man, you’re living the dream, you have a car deal, you’re playing and making money, you go out and people celebrate you, people want to be friends with you, you’re really living the dream”. All I could think about was how much I hated my life and how much I was so engrossed in discomfort and anxiousness and guilt and dread and worry and fear everyday of my life, but trying to hide that mask, where to the outside world, I was so concerned about how people perceived me but I was so afraid of letting them in on the truth and the reality of what was going on in my life. So what you have to do, and what I did so very well was I just perfected my ability to hide behind a mask, and I suppressed and I denied, and I just ignored the real inner workings of what was happening in my life.
As you might know or as you can imagine, you suppress and deny the truth about what’s really going on in your life; you’re literally living a lie, live that lie long enough and you’re going to self-destruct and begin to implode and that’s what began to happen in my life. You know, I’m in the middle of my childhood dream and I hate myself so much because I can’t live my truth, I can’t be open and honest about the things going on in my life because I’m just so terrified of what other people are going to think, and that’s really when I learned to cope in very, very destructive ways…just really self-destruct because I was so angry with myself and I hated myself so much. That’s when it really brought me to the end of myself, 3 years into the NFL, I realized if something didn’t change and change soon, it really was going to be a matter of time before my parents would get a call notifying them that their son is no longer with them.
When you say you did therapy work, were you working with someone or was a lot of this work on your own?
I had basically a counselor or therapists and I did a lot of group healing, so within the ecosystems of community, and this is why community to important for us to actually heal, it’s only when we feel safe enough and seen enough in the community that we can begin to take off the layers that are needed to be shed so that you can actually get to the deeper and most vulnerable parts of your heart, of your belief system so you can begin to heal. So I had a team of people that I worked with, over the course of three solid years of showing up everyday and leaning into vulnerability and taking off the mask and really doing the work of healing the trauma.
What would you say to someone who is like ‘I’ve tried being vulnerable before but I got shut down’?
I think vulnerability is the unchanging variable here. Vulnerability is the doorway to the life that you are looking for but I would say that learning how to be vulnerable with the right people is a must. So, I think that a lot of people want to choose vulnerability, but they don’t realize that they need to choose to be vulnerable with people who welcome the vulnerability and are safe to be vulnerable. Brene Brown does a lot of work and does a lot of great things around this idea of ‘yeah vulnerability is the doorway to the life you are looking for but not everybody deserves to hear your story’, because people can’t create space for you if they haven’t created that space within themselves.
So early on in my journey like I would try to be vulnerable and open up and tell people the things that were going on in my life and a lot of people who were close to me would shut it down, they wouldn’t understand it and it would really leave me feeling misunderstood. And then I realized that ‘you know what, those aren’t the people I should be sharing my story with or be vulnerable with’, until I really understood that my vulnerability and me willing to be vulnerable is an act of courage in and of itself and that is what I want to applaud, I don’t want to focus on how someone responds to my vulnerability or not—that’s out of my power, that’s on them. So it’s really a shifting of mindset, where it’s like ‘you chose to be vulnerable, applaud yourself, congratulations, that takes a lot of courage, see you can do hard things.’ You should not be focused on how a person does or doesn’t respond. But I will say that who you choose to be vulnerable with is so incredibly important. Does this person make you feel safe? Does this person practice vulnerability themself? Those are the questions I ask myself before I allow someone into my inner circle where I share deeper things with that person.
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