Guest: Dakotah Keys

Topics Covered:

Track and field, Pac-12 Championships, faking an injury to avoid further competition, succumbing to other’s standards, and an amazing story of how speaking into a person’s life came back to Dakotah in an unusual way. 

This episode concludes our three-part series on mentoring: Showing-up, living-out, and speaking-in. Dakotah Keys talks to a live audience at this year’s Mentored Up Event. 

Dakotah Keys won four state championships in high school, setting state-records in the decathlon. Then he took his talents to the University of Oregon where he won three Pac 12 Championships in the Decathlon and was named a 5-time all-American. He performed at the highest level of track and field, having opportunities to compete at the national and Olympic level. 

Dakotah credits much of his success to a unassuming, meek counselor named Jim Kistner who took Dakotah in as a mentee in high school and has been there for him ever since. Dakotah now serves as an Oregon State Police officer. 

In this episode you will hear him open up about his fear of letting people down, examples of good and poor mentors in his life, how he allows his student-athletes room to fail, and he opens up about his time at the University of Oregon and the immense pressure he placed on himself which eventually led him to fake an injury so he no longer had to compete. His story is an example of bravery, vulnerability, and an honest reflection why we should allow those around us to fail and fail hard. 

References:

Fail Harder motivational video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEVd0QMjCc8

Street Art:

Photo by Wiredforlego at https://www.flickr.com/photos/wiredforsound23/15439138047/in/photolist-pwiBRi-23ejWjT-22UehuA-J1aPAr-oAozu3-DinVuc-4VNLrj-21SiFqu-nDppL3-nDC3E2-2h77i8i-hrTAuW-fKdYFW-nPU9Yy-7XkMkz-eaAUct-jgED4q

Business Partnership:

Gorilla Graphix https://www.facebook.com/Gorilla.Graphix.Salem

http://gorillawrapz.net

Transcript:

Dakota Keys:

Thank you guys for having me here today. What a blessing it was to have Skyler contact me and asked me to do. For those of you that don’t know me, I don’t very well at public events, speaking in front of people. I usually keep to myself and so just kinda bear with me as I work through this.

As I was preparing this, I believe a kind of testimony today, I kept trying to make it less and less personal so I could get through this and that hopefully you guys will walk away with something and not judge me for who I am and the things that I went through the things that I felt about myself over the years of competing. But the more times I tried to do that the more I prayed about it, God just kept putting these words into my heart to share a true story, a true testimony of what mentorship should be could be and what I experienced being good and then what I experienced to being really poor mentorship and how that affected me as a person, as husband at the time, soon to be father, a brother, son. So as you guys just kind of bear with me through this, I’m going to try to work through it. Not Super organized. I’m going to have everything written down here, so just bear with me.

As Skyler mentioned, some people in here know of my past experience with athletics. If you guys would have had me here and I I wouldn’t have come to talk at this five years ago, four years ago at this point. With all that success, the thing that I would have seen most is actually all my failures. The embarrassment that I went through,