Troy's Times - November 2008


www.TroyEvans.com

Troy@TroyEvans.com

 

Hi Friend!


Welcome to Troy’s free monthly electronic newsletter, developed for people interested in overcoming adversity, adapting to change and pushing oneself to realize their full potential.

(Some ch^racters in th1s newsletter have been altered to keep it from being filtered out as spam)

IN THIS ISSUE


“It is not important How we come to the events in our lives, but how we Deal with those events”- Troy


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This Month's Featured Article:

Passing Through Open Gates

“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure.”
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

The moment of my release, I was filled with overwhelming happiness. I had learned valuable lessons and I had succeeded. I was drug free and educated, I had my family back, and I had my whole life ahead of me. But, I soon found out that freedom itself was a challenge.
The first night of my release, my sister picked me up at the gates a free man for the first time in many, many years. It was an extremely strange feeling to come and go as I wanted. There were trees around me, a dog ran by, I heard a kid laugh, and I had an ice cream cone. To celebrate, my sister took me to downtown Denver for dinner and introduced me to sushi. I had never heard of such a thing and the thought seemed repugnant, but compared to what I had been fed for the last several years I knew there was no way it could kill me. She dropped me off in the middle of downtown Denver as she went to park the car. There I stood, lights flashing, cars passing, crowds of people walking by me. The stimulation was overwhelming. I couldn’t move. It was like I was frozen in time, like I wasn't even there. As my sister approached she said I had the strangest look on my face, a look of fascination and fear.
The comings and goings of the free world were something I hadn’t witnessed for years. I knew guys who returned to prison of their own free will after purposely violating their parole because they could not take the real world. They were institutionalized. Having been told what to do and when to do it for so many years, they couldn’t make decisions for themselves. We heard stories of trips to the grocery store that would leave a grown man completely overwhelmed by the choices in, for example, cereal only to realize that he had been standing in the aisle for an hour without making a decision. It is an amazing feeling to fear a thing like Cocoa Puffs. Was this going to happen to me? I had no idea what to expect.
Generally when prisoners are released, they’re assigned to a halfway house, a place that is meant to help you get your feet on the ground as you re-assimilate to the world. Like prison, halfway houses have several rules designed to help keep you out of trouble. Even more importantly, they help your parole officer keep an eye on you when you are released.
Due to my strangely sudden release, the state did not have any room available for me in a halfway house, as would normally have been the case. Instead, my parents went through a fairly intense process of evaluation to allow me to return to their home.
For the first few months, I kept to myself for the most part and continued the life that I knew. I would run in the morning, lift weights in the afternoon, and run again in the evening. I filled the hours in between sitting at my desk writing my resume or monitoring the stock market. The whole time, I wandered the house, unnerving my parents by the way that I would just meander from room to room without a purpose like I was still pacing a cell. Years later, they commented that my face looked haunted. They didn’t quite know what to do with me and that made three of us.
To further complicate the situation, I was still being watched. I was well aware upon my release that I would be on probation and be subjected to surprise inspections, drug tests, and ongoing scrutiny by a parole officer. Compared to another five years in prison, that seemed like a blessing. The eyes that kept me continually off balance were actually much closer than that. I was in my parents’ home. The last time I had been under their roof, I was high, lying, stealing, disrupting the family, and breaking every promise in the world. When I was locked up, it was easier for them to trust me. But, out in the real world, with real world temptations, no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t fully trust me.
I made my decision right then to, once again, embrace the changes that had been laid before me. So, I made a list of things that I wanted to accomplish and set about trying to complete the entire thing in about ten minutes. I was no longer stagnant, I was hyper committed. There was no such thing as down time to me. No such thing as time off. Every moment that I was awake from early morning to late at night was spent working toward something on my list. I felt a compulsion to constantly prove to the world that I wasn’t an imposter; I truly did belong in the outside world. I thought I was being watched all of the time, so it was absolutely paramount to me that I be seen having focus and commitment at all times.
See how hard I’m working! See how many hours I spend committed to my goals! See that I am keeping my nose clean!
One day I woke up from my daily ritual and realized that I had become the model prisoner all over again. Here I was with access to the outside world. I could walk barefoot through the grass, see a movie, go to the park…I could do anything I wanted; yet I hadn’t really allowed myself a single freedom.
I had to get out in the world. I had to leave Evans #24291-013 behind and start figuring out who Troy Evans was.
I found employment through a local temp agency, and at the same time began working for a member of the National Speakers Association. The temp agency work was a means of making money, but through the work with the speaker, I was building a foundation for giving a previously discarded life new value. While in prison, I had begun to build my worth again through my relationship with my family, and yet, there was a world of potential that I had thrown away when I was 14 that I needed to make up for. I had taken the wrong path. I couldn’t turn back time, but I could give the time lost meaning. I thought that if I could use my experiences to spare even one person the pain that I put myself and my family through, then there would be purpose to all of the years I had lost. Call it Fate, Karma or Divine Intervention, but I felt that there was a reason that the National Speakers Association had been the group to take a chance on me those years before. I needed a path and this one seemed clear to me.
I worked in a furniture factory from 4:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m. (doing their accounting of all things), and then I would head over to my mentor’s to put in another full day’s work, helping him with scheduling, answering phone calls, and whatever else he needed, before working with him to write the first drafts of speeches I still give today. Between the two, I was finally starting to live again. I was following a purpose that wasn’t based on the sheer mechanics of living life, and in the meantime, I had started to do the things that normal people did like managing to save enough money to buy my first car. It probably wasn’t much to look at from the outsider’s perspective, a ten-year-old Acura Legend, but it was my first step toward freedom.
I had created some momentum in the outside world, but what I truly craved was my own space. Nothing fantastic. Literally, all I needed, was a space of my own that gave me some privacy; a place where I could go to sleep at night and feel safe; a place where I could have some time with my new girlfriend. In short, some place that was not my parents’ house.
The day that I walked into my apartment for the first time, that was the day that I truly had my first taste of freedom. From there, everything started to click for me.
I started to feel more comfortable around strangers. I could go to the mall and not panic when I saw a group of people walking toward me. I started to change my own personal culture from that of a con, who had to constantly be on guard for the next life-threatening event, to a free man. That may seem strange, but for many months, the things I craved most on the outside, human interaction, normal conversation, a safe environment, were outside of my grasp because I couldn’t shake the thousand-mile stare. Looking back, I’m certain that what I had was some sort of post-traumatic stress. I couldn’t put everyday things in the right frame of reference. Groups of people were gangs, it didn’t matter if they were all 80 years old and had walkers. I was suspicious of them because they were in groups. People walking behind me in the mall might have shanks. I generally turned around to find a teenager with a pink cell phone or something equally ridiculous, but I couldn’t shake it.
When I moved into my own place, that final shift took place. Now I wanted to be around other people. My girlfriend used to tease me that I couldn’t cross the room without stopping to have some involved conversation with a perfect stranger. I had been without that sort of normal interaction for so long, I couldn’t get enough of it.
It wasn’t just the people either. It was everything. Every day, whether I was doing something new or something completely routine, I would find myself stopping to wonder why I had never realized how special the world was, how beautiful flowers were, how gratifying it was to watch children play, how soothing it was to lie in the shade. I was 35 years old and it was like I had never done these things before in my life.
Then I started my journey to the pinnacle of my freedom. My mentor took me aside and told me that I was ready to go out on my own and begin my career as a professional speaker. It was barely more than a year since my release and suddenly, I was on planes to different parts of the country, I was meeting more people in one day that I would have thought possible, I was touching the lives of more people in one day than I ever could have hoped to. I was being paid to tell my story. I had complimentary meals and hotels and standing ovations. And, this is the big one; I was being paid compliments by people left and right. I was laying my entire past out for the public to scrutinize as they would and I was being thanked for having made a difference. This was the true purpose of my journey. I had turned it around from desperation to dedication and I was becoming the man that I wanted to be.
It wasn’t an easy trip. I had to embrace change at almost every turn, but this time I had my friends and family there to give me support.
Freedom was an awesome thing and it was meant to be a little scary to me. I had to relearn freedom from the standpoint of a sober, law-abiding citizen. I had to have it revealed to me in shocking clarity so that I would know that every moment I spent as a free man had amazing things in store for me. Becoming educated and surviving prison was only a short part of my path. Once I got out, I found that there would always be another challenge, another obstacle to overcome, another lesson to learn. I found that I was better than I had been, but I was still not the best I could be. This will always be true.
That is the warning in this article. You must learn to love the path toward reaching your goals, because at the end of each path is a new beginning. In the preface of this book, I told you about Janus, the god of gates and the god of beginnings who is depicted with two faces so that he can look forward and back. When you have finished the goal that you set for yourself after you read this article, you will have a choice to make between continuing on a new path or slipping back into dead time. In life, I will meet Janus again and again because as soon as I accomplish one goal, another must replace it. And, each time I meet him another test is passed and another lesson is learned. Dead time is no longer good enough for me nor will it be good enough for you.

****

Not all of the gates I pass are huge and imposing and neither will yours be, but sometimes the smallest challenges can still hold great lessons.
Upon my release, I discovered I could not get auto insurance because I didn't have an insurance record for three years prior. Where I live, under state law, if you can’t show proof of insurance for the prior three years it is illegal for the insurance companies to issue you a policy. This was intended to catch people who'd been driving without insurance, but left no loophole for someone such as myself who didn't need to carry insurance for prior years. Phone calls, letter writing and appealing my situation seemed to make no difference to anyone I contacted, and I was finally forced into informing an insurance company that the place I resided for the past three years did not require drivers to carry insurance. From that, I learned that there actually are still people in the world who prefer to think the best of you rather than the worst. I never said where I had been, but they were happy to assume that I had been in a foreign country. I’m sure that prison never crossed their minds. After years in the detention system, it was nice to finally be given the benefit of the doubt rather than the nightstick of unfounded assumption.
Upon obtaining insurance I tried to secure a driver’s license, but was told because of a ten year old violation in another state. I would have to resolve that issue before my residing state would issue a license. Hence another six weeks of red tape and paperwork being passed from state to state before I was finally issued my drivers license. It forced me to remember that no matter who I became, I would always have to be accountable for my past.
I then attempted to rebuild my credit, but the bankers were shocked to see that not only did I lack a recent credit history, but also my credit report was actually completely blank, as if I had dropped off the face of the earth. I was informed that this was more damaging than having a bad credit report. I would have been better off showing a bankruptcy, a repossessed vehicle, anything. From that I learned that even a clean slate could present a challenge.
Of course the credit report is the only place where there was a preference for a marred past. Inform someone that you spent the last several years incarcerated for armed bank robbery, and the reception is usually very cool. I learned quickly that it was better if people got to know me first, before I shared the details of my recent residence with them. Only then were they willing to look beyond the stigma at who I really was.
Easy times after my release? No. Worth working for and fighting through? Yes. That which is worthwhile in our life, which is really worthwhile, is never going to be easy. My dead time is over and every day, I choose a better life.

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Featured product for this issue!

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If you live in or near one of the following cit1es where Troy will be speaking over the next few months, please contact The Ev^ns Groups for details on an opportunity that does not come around often- see Troy present for free!
  • Los Angeles, CA
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  • Bloomington, IL
  • San Francisco, CA
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About the Author- Troy Evans is a profess1onal speaker and author who resides in Phoenix, AZ with his wife Pam and his dog Archibald. Troy travels the country delivering keynote presentations, and since his release from prison has taken the corporate and association pl^tforms by storm. Overcoming adversity, adapting to change and pushing yourself to realize your full potential- other speaker’s talk about these issues, Troy has walked them.


For information on booking Troy or for a listing of available products, please contact:

The Evans Group
3104 E. Camelback Road, #436
Phoenix, AZ 85016
602-265-6855
Fax: 602-285-1474
Troy@troyevans.com
http://www.troyevans.com