Customer Spotlight
Meet Damon West! Keynote Speaker and bestselling author of The Coffee Bean. Damon shares the coffee bean message all around the world after first hearing it in his jail cell in 2009 in Dallas, TX while waiting for the prison bus to come to pick him up after he had just been sentenced to life in prison for engaging in organized crime.
Damon's Story -
Damon West grew up in a great family and went on to play college football. In 1996, he endured a career-ending injury and turned to drugs. Damon was training to be a stockbroker in Dallas when he was introduced to meth and cocaine and started committing crimes.
After being arrested and sentenced to life in jail, Damon was sitting in his jail cell waiting for the prison bus to come to pick him up when another inmate shared the story of the 'coffee bean' with him. “He told me that life is like a pot of boiling water and we have three choices: be a carrot that becomes soft, be like an egg that becomes hard, or be like a coffee bean that changes a pot of boiling water to a pot of coffee. He told me that if I wanted to survive prison and come out on the other side as someone that my parents recognized, I had to be a coffee bean,” said Damon West
Damon took the coffee bean story with him to a maximum security prison in the state of Texas. “I had to overcome everything you could imagine - spiritual, mental, physical battles that went on inside that place. One of the unlikely allies in that place was Chike Nutrition drinks because Chike was one of the things that was available in the Commissary in prison. During my last two weeks in prison, I could not go back to the food hall for fear of reprisals from anybody who wanted to take a last shot at me since I had made parole. I stayed in my bunk for two weeks, eating nothing but peanuts, tuna, and Chike drinks. That's right…I stayed alive for the last two weeks of prison on Chike,” said Damon West.
Damon travels and shares the 'coffee bean' message with schools, teams, and at events to encourage others to be a 'coffee bean' by discovering the power within to positively change their environment. To learn more about Damon's story or his book The Coffee Bean, visit Damon West's website.
