Dr. Darian Parker, the IDEA Personal Trainer of the Year 2023 recipient, is a multihyphenate entrepreneur, athlete, and a man of faith. And he is breaking open myths. On what it takes to be a Division-1 Student Athlete competing at elite levels. On the interior work he has to do to be a good father. On the reality that life is lived at its best and realest without guarantees or known outcomes but is founded on authentic love for our fellow humans. And so many more. All we can rely on is our ability to build true relationships with one another and to make a commitment to show up every day even when the outcomes are unknown or don’t go our way. Darian believes that one’s life doesn’t bloom under the bright lights of fame, accolades, or ego. Instead, it is a relentless dance performed in the powerful spaces of the phrase “I don’t know.” For Dr. Parker, the real champions show up daily and do the monotonous grunt work that is a major and essential part of what we call living.

Zak Sandler and I have a deeply personal and contemplative conversation about the struggles he has faced with his mental health and how he has managed to organize his life with a brain that functions in a different way. From his original diagnosis as bipolar while an undergraduate student at Yale University, to becoming a highly creative Broadway pianist for such shows as Wicked and The Color Purple, Zak has traveled the road from despair to acceptance and now to allowing his creativity to guide his response to his diagnosis. Zak will tell you that he does not have a mental illness or a disorder. For him that language implies there’s something about him that needs to be fixed. He chooses the phrase mental condition, because it indicates that his bipolar diagnosis is simply part of who he is. At core he is not broken. This distinction is how we move from shame to understanding and hopefully acceptance. That our differences, no matter how acute, are simply that - differences not deficiencies.

Jimmy T. Martin lost his first wife, Linmarie to cancer. She was only 29 when she died, leaving him heartbroken and lost, but with the dream of a business called Brrrn. She said it was the proudest thing that he created that she wouldn’t live to see. With the help of his family, his friends, therapy and his wry sense of humor, Jimmy was slowly able to rebuild a life for himself, and with his business partner Johnny Adammic find a way to bring Brrrn to life, not once, but twice. This story does have a happy ending. He finds new love with Rachel who eventually becomes his wife, he builds a transforming business, and there is even a son. But there is also the wisdom of experience and loss that filters through his life that you cannot help but see, hear, and feel. More than giving up and feeling sorry for himself, Jimmy leaves us with compelling questions in our conversation. Questions that he had to answer for himself when he had to choose to live or to give up. He asks: What are the prompts in your life that are calling you to take action. To do something different? To make a different choice? To choose life? What actions are the prompts in your life calling you to take?

Nigel Franklyn is one of the founders of Moss Wellness Consulting. He is the self-described Spa Whisperer who was recently featured on "The Tamron Hall Show," but more accurately, he is a person who lives a life of artistry and takes leaps of faith into the unknown. As he says, “I jump off cliffs now and I don’t worry because I really believe fully from my direct experiences that either I will find something soft to land on, or someone will teach me how to fly.” His global career as a spa and wellness aficionado began when his life was changed by a spa therapist in Atlanta who in one service gave him such an overwhelming feeling of nurture, it changed the trajectory of his career and life. He knew from that moment, his life would be devoted to bringing that sense of nurture and wellbeing to people all over the world. His paintings too, like his work in the spa and wellness worlds, are bold and brash, yet they tell a very personal story. A story of a man who lost his parents as a teenager. A man who stepped into the essence of his identity at six years old when he declared he wanted to marry Superman. A man who believes that in order to receive the benefits from something or learn something, you have to learn to surrender to the process. You can’t fight it or be overcome by fear of it. Because in the spaces of surrender we find faith and belief.

Ask Chris Hetherington what learned from his 11 years in the NFL playing fullback for teams like the Cincinnati Bengals, the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers and he will tell you he learned to be a pro, be accountable, to keep his word, and the importance of getting a good education. After smashing wedges on the gridiron, he took those lessons learned and then went on to have a career as a CEO in financial services and now today he is the Founder & CEO of Peels CBD, which is on the road to becoming a disruptive force in the CBD product market. The line is formulated from orange peels and has no traces of hemp, cannabis, or THC and can attract consumers who may have negative associations with traditional CBD products and marijuana. (How it all works he will explain in our conversation.) Along his unpredictable path, he discovered the Stoics, yoga and meditation. And now this elite athlete who once crushed it on the football field is now meditating twice a day and learning to breathe through life as opposed to making things happen through brute force. The through line in Chris’ remarkable life is his devotion to family - he calls his mom his hero, he loves his two sons unabashedly, and looks up to his big brother. He also lives life with physical and mental discipline, a commitment to team, and being a man of his word. If you say you’re going to do, then do it. That is what makes you a good person.

“The ineffable gift that is gold” is how a colleague and critic once described Marnye Young’s voice and talent behind the microphone. Known as the Audio Sorceress, she has leant her voice to narrating over 200 audiobooks and become the owner of a well-established and respected audio publishing company. But her real wizardry isn’t only her work in the recording studio. It comes from what she has learned from becoming a businesswoman, wife, and a mother of beautiful twin girls: owning her greatness, living with compassion and kindness for those who are different from her, and pushing open the doors so people can see and hear her.

Kevin Chadwin Davis has lived a life that many people cannot imagine. He witnessed the killings of his mother, sister, and brother at the age of three. The person who took their lives was his own father. And with an almost startling recall of detail, that life changing day for him in 1998 has seared itself into his memories. His life journey has been one of a man fighting for survival, facing the dark corners of a life he did not choose and yet must reckon with every day. His choices for survival have been complex, searching for his father’s love and understanding in the world of escorting. As he himself says, “What I was looking for in these men was parts of my dad that I didn’t have.” But his story doesn’t end there. He is now advocating for HIV and PrEP education and opening a candid conversation on the plight of sex workers. At the end of it all, Kevin still believes in the importance of forgiving people. He practices it daily.

Leon Logothetis has lived the life of an adventurer, traveling the globe in search of people willing to demonstrate acts of kindness to one another. He has chronicled his experiences in four books and a TV series called The Kindness Diaries. At the core of his work is his quest to live a life of vulnerability, love, and magnificence. His is a life not driven by the consumption of material items, but passing along kindnesses, some big and some simple, quiet gestures to his fellow human beings. What have his years of traveling and giving taught him? As Leon says, “It has taught me that we are all the same at base. We simply just want to be seen. We simply just want to be heard. And we simply just want to be loved.”

From arts organizations in Nebraska to the glittering lights of Broadway, Gennean Scott has spent a lifetime advocating for representation for people who are underrepresented in the arts. Her work as the Chief Diversity Officer for the Broadway League comes from a personal place. Growing up as a young dancer in America’s heartland, she had to find her way in the ballet world where there were no role models for her to look up to and overcome her own complex feelings about being one of one in many of the spaces she occupied. From being a single teen mom, to becoming an educator struggling to provide for her children, to her life today as the voice of change on the world’s biggest stages, her story is that of a person who pressed forward because as Gennean says, God put her here for a reason and he isn’t about to let her fail.