From the Jail to the Football Field to the Stage
Big Mike Coyle spent twenty-one years in law enforcement in Utah, finishing his career as a bailiff in the courts before retiring at fifty-one. Most people in that position decompress, pull back, and look for something quieter. Mike did the opposite. He answered a Facebook ad to join a semi-pro adult contact football league, asked his wife for permission, and laced up his cleats with a team of men half his age who were still trying to figure out who they were. What he found on that field was not just the competitive outlet he was chasing. It was a room full of young fathers and husbands dealing with addiction, collapsing marriages, and a lack of structured adult guidance in their lives. That realization did not stay on the field. It became The Mentor Sessions podcast, a show built entirely around the question of who shaped you, not just what you built. Mike told Robin in Episode 282 that he had to look at his own mentors first, from his father to his high school offensive line coach, a man he tracked down just two days before recording this episode after more than thirty years, before he could articulate why this work mattered. That kind of honest personal inventory is the foundation the whole project rests on.
The Three Things Nobody Actually Tells You About Mentorship
Mike’s stage talk carries a deliberately uncomfortable title, and what he shared in this conversation delivered on that promise. The first thing nobody tells you is that mentors are already around you and you are probably not recognizing them. He draws a clear line between formal mentors, teachers, professors, journeymen in the trades, and informal mentors, the colleagues who have been on the path slightly longer and are willing to share what they know if you just pay attention. The second thing is that receiving mentorship is an active responsibility. You cannot take the information and coast. As his guest Wendy Alexander said directly on his show, mentorship only works if the person receiving it executes. Mike described watching people invest money and time into coaching and then simply not do the homework, which he called genuinely discouraging from the mentor’s side. The third thread running through everything he said is that mentors need to see you invest in the relationship itself, not just extract from it. He made this point through a story about earning the trust of people on the wrong side of the law during his enforcement career. They would tell detectives they would only talk if Mike was in the room, because they knew he genuinely cared about who they were beyond the file in front of them. That same instinct, showing up for the person rather than the transaction, is what he is trying to build into every conversation on his show and every interaction with his football team.
Hoarded Wisdom and the Backyard Barbecue
One of the most striking images Mike offered in this conversation was the contrast between a squirrel burying a nut for winter and a backyard barbecue where everyone brings something and everyone goes home full. He applied this directly to how knowledge moves, or fails to move, through organizations and communities. He argued that the apprenticeship model, which still works reliably in the trades, has gone mostly missing from corporate environments, replaced by group leadership programs that strip out the one-on-one time it actually takes to develop a person rather than an output. The boomerang effect Robin described from his own career in business development maps directly onto what Mike is advocating. When you give without calculating the return, the return tends to find you. Mike illustrated this with a moment from after his retirement, when he ran into officers in the community who told him their captain was still frustrated he had left, nearly a year later, because the relationships he had built were not transactional and could not simply be replaced. The closing conviction he left with the audience was straightforward and difficult to argue with. No one gets there alone. There is no self-made person. Behind every success are people who taught, pushed, believed, and gave opportunities. The only honest response to that is to turn around and do the same.
Episode 282 is a conversation worth sitting with, especially if you lead people across distances, cultures, or career stages and want a more honest model for what development actually looks like. You can Watch on YouTube or Listen on Simplecast and choose whatever format fits your Friday afternoon.
Leave a comment