Name & Graduation Year:
Clint Gresham '10

Major:
Business Administration – Entrepreneurial Management

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.
Best Selling Author, International Speaker, Younglife leader, TCU Grad, Super Bowl XLVIII winner...I help people love the process to wholeness.

I grew up in Corpus Christi and my senior year of high school, I ended up committing to go to the University of Oklahoma. TCU didn’t show up until maybe 3-4 months after I had made that commitment. So, I started my collegiate career with OU. Thankfully there was still an opportunity to play at TCU, so I ended up transferring. I had to sit out for a season and after playing for one semester, Coach Patterson put me on scholarship. It was an incredible honor to get to play for him for three years and I also got an incredible education at the Neeley School of Business and felt like my time at TCU really prepared me for the six years I spent playing for the Seattle Seahawks where I got to be a part of some really incredible teams under Pete Carroll. I got there right at the beginning of his regime and finally in 2012 we really turned the corner and were playing in a bunch of playoff games. It was a fantastic run. After getting released about a year ago by the Seahawks, I had in my heart to write a book and share my experiences and what it means to walk in wholeness. For the last year I have been working on the book which just came out on October 3 – it’s called Becoming: Loving The Process to Wholeness. And now I am out all over the world, it has been an incredible season of life.

I also do a bunch in the faith community. My faith is a big part of my story. I do secular motivational stuff. More than anything, I remember what it was like to have a low sense of self-worth. Our sense of self-worth and how we see ourselves is the lens that we view everything in the world. And unless that is accurate, we’re not going to treat ourselves with very much honor, which is going to get us in these cycles of performance or feeling like we don’t measure up and ultimately it robs us of the life that we really want to live. My mission is to help people see that in themselves. I love it and I am passionate about it. I can speak from experience as somebody who has walked through that, of being in a really competitive, high profile situation like I was in with the Seattle Seahawks where I got to play in two Super Bowls and enough playoff games for it to be its own NFL season and that entire time I am battling this really destructive low sense of worth. The book essentially helps people discover that in themselves and will help them walk in wholeness.

What is your biggest accomplishment since graduation?
There’s so many ways to define what success is and a big part of my story is helping people define what success is for them in a way that is sustainable and actually leaves us feeling joy. I won a Super Bowl, which is amazing, but was never even a dream of mine. That was like saying “I am going to buy a condo on the moon”…it was just a ridiculous thing to even dream about. One thing that I have discovered about a lot of accomplishments after spending some time with really high-profile people and really high net worth people is those things really don’t satisfy us the way that we thought they would.

For months after we won the Super Bowl, I remember everyone would say to themselves, to each other, and I would even say this “I keep waiting for it to sink in that we won a Super Bowl” and what I realize that all of us were saying in that was “I keep waiting for this accomplishment that I thought would satisfy me to satisfy me the way that I thought it would and it’s not.” It’s amazing that I won a Super Bowl and that would certainly be the thing that everybody says “Oh man, you accomplished something.” That accomplishment is fantastic, but it didn’t make me happy the way that I thought it would, so things that have mattered in my life is I got to come up to Seattle and my time with the Seahawks grew things in me and made me stronger and grittier and more resilient in ways that I really, really needed in my life. I got to meet the love of my life up here and some of my best friends in the world. I think that I was like a lot of people that were told “This is what it means to be successful” and usually a lot of those things are disconnected from our hearts and look good on paper, but if you look behind it a little bit more, they really don’t satisfy us the way that we were hoping they would, so that is a big part of my message – helping people have a satisfying life.

I know people who have those kinds of accomplishments in their right place, but I also know people that it’s like this hamster wheel, where you are never satisfied and it is never enough, it’s almost like an addiction. I remember when we won the Super Bowl, it was 36 hours later, we’re having our exit meetings and someone comes up to the front of the room and days “Unless you win two Super Bowls, you haven’t done anything.” I remember thinking “That’s the most offensive thing I have ever heard in my life. We just won the Super Bowl and you’re telling me this is meaningless?” The reason he was saying that was because it was meaningless to him and it didn’t satisfy him in the way that he hoped.

What is your favorite thing about being a TCU Alumni?
I am so thankful that I said no to TCU and in the midst of me saying no to TCU, TCU said yes to me and brought me back into that family (after I originally elected to attend Oklahoma). It was the best decision of my life, and I think that not only speaks to the football program and Coach Patterson, but to the larger community and the type of people that TCU produces – people that are gracious and don’t respond with offense, but are open-minded to people. Just the community within TCU is fantastic. One of my favorite things is to come back and see just how much it has evolved and grown and expanded. I think that anything that is healthy grows and I think that with the growth that TCU has had over the years, it just speaks to the health of the university, the mindset that is cultivated, not only by Chancellor Boschini, but globally across the board. I just love how interconnected and intimate not only the alumni are, but the student body.

What is your favorite memory while at TCU?
Football-wise it was beating Utah in 2009 on College GameDay and then also that same year when we beat Clemson in Death Valley. It was pouring rain and we barely beat them in the last minute. Academically, making it into the Neeley School of Business was incredibly massive for me. I definitely felt tempted to pursue an easier degree or maybe something that wouldn’t have required as much, but by making it into the Neeley School, it really forged in me some work ethic and some determination that I really needed if I was going to be successful in what I was doing with the Seattle Seahawks. So when I got to my time with the Seahawks, because of the lessons that I learned not only with the football program, but in the Neeley School of Business, I felt like I was set up for success in a lot of ways.

Where can you be found on a Saturday afternoon?
I have realized that it is so different each weekend. Recently, I was at Frog Alley signing autographs for kids and got to be at the bookstore for an autograph signing for my book and that was awesome. We try to come to as many games as we can, but because I travel and I speak so much, my work ends up being on the weekends.

Where can we find, follow, and friend you?
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClintGresham
Website: http://www.Clintgresham.com
Twitter and Instagram: @gresh49