This is Part 1 of a 3 part series entitles “The Calhoun Chronicles”: an interview about the background and current endeavors of Pat Calhoun. Calhoun runs the Coaches Institute of Your One Degree

The Beginning–Pat’s Origin and Path that Brought him to YOD

“I was serving as a police officer with the Tulsa Police Department. One of my officers that I worked with was going through a very rough time in his life. I was using every managerial  and motivational methods and tactics that I could think of to motivate Steve. However, I couldn’t seem to get him turned around or changed.

This was one of those officers that for years he led the squad in stats. He was one of the most productive guys. If you wanted an officer that would go take an excellent report, Steve would be the guy you would ask to take it. He paid a great amount of attention to detail on everything. Although, in this period of his life he was going through a divorce. He would literally take what should’ve been a 30 minute report and disappear for 3 or 4 hours. It was really disheartening to watch him go through this. I knew he was a Christian, but he was just going through a dark time. About 6 months later, the same guy is literally outperforming the entire squad in his stats and his performance to the point that the officers that had complained about his lack of performance were now complaining that he was making them look bad because he was working so hard. I took him aside and I said “What in the world has happened to you? I mean you have really turned your life around in the last 6 months.” And he said “Let me introduce you to Dave Jewitt.”

So I met with Dave and he began coaching with me. I apparently quickly realized that what I thought was burnout that I was experiencing was simply that I was living in my reds.
Dave walked me through the process and I discovered that if I could learn to eliminate many of the reds and yellows in my life Suddenly, I realized that I had choices that I can make that can make things better. I could learn to say no to things. The moment I discovered that I could learn to say no to things that I knew were reds, all of a sudden my life began to just completely change. It made all the difference for me. Suddenly, I had control of giving myself energy. I started pursuing my greens and found a renewed sense of vigor and energy and enjoyed my job again.

As a police officer, a lot of times people glamorize the job, they think it’s just one exciting haul after another. However, the reality is police work is 98% boredom split up with just about 2% of sheer terror. It’s that 2% of sheer terror that everybody sees on TV. That’s what they’re thinking life is as a police officer. That’s what most police officers want, they want to get involved but as a police supervisor I wasn’t, I was literally on the periphery of a lot of the fun stuff. Once, I realized that these were the reasons that I joined the job, and those were the things I wanted. I made an effort to start doing that stuff again. All of a sudden I was renewed.

Then I left the department and went into business with some friends, even against Dave’s warnings. Dave was looking at my responsibilities within the business and he said “Pat, I see that this is full of reds” and I said “but Dave you are overlooking all of the greens that I can make from this”. I was looking at the money. There was a lot of money involved in this business. Unfortunately, most of the money went out and very little ever came back. So then I thought “Now what? Now what do I need to do?”. Just as this was happening, Dave decided to take a 90-day sabbatical and he asked me if I would be interested in serving as his coach during that time. So I ended up coaching about 15 guys and was just having the time of my life. And then they hired Mike McNamee as the executive director. Mike and Dave came to me and asked if I would be willing to set up the Coaches Training Institute. That’s what I am doing now.
It is a huge blessing.

Just recently, I was coaching a gentleman in Dallas. He just made several million dollars off of a business venture. He’s 45 years old and retired. However, he realizes he’s too young to go play tennis or golf all of the time. So he’s asking himself “Now, what do I do?”. We told him to take a look at this process. He decided that he wants to get involved in helping create ministries, reaching out to others, and helping to get those ministries funded and established. He’s not the kind of guy that wants to create a ministry and be done. He wants to create it and then move on to the next one. This all happened because of my connection with him, one of the connections with the local universities here, and my connection with Compassion International. We have some opportunities that none of those individuals would have been able to do had it not been for Your One Degree. We don’t know where that is going to go just yet but the potential in that could be amazingly huge, more than any one of us could have imagined. What we are looking at the possibility of doing will be able to rival what Campus Crusade has been able to do over the last 50 years. It’s just amazing what could possibly happen with that. Only God could do that kind of thing.