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Jay Barnett Personal struggles lead to mentoring, motivating others
Personal struggles lead to mentoring, motivating others
B Y Ph IL rIDDL e
aseries of major life set-backs caused Jay Barnett to struggle, even consider taking his own life, but a crucial emotional turnaround led him to a career of mentoring and motivating young people in crisis.
Moving from his home in Mississippi to Grapevine when his parents split created issues he had to deal with throughout adolescence and college. The realization of how tough it was to work through those problems motivated him to initiate programs for young people, particularly young African-Americans, in similar circumstances.
“I grew up in a single-parent home,” Barnett said. “I was blessed to get an athletic scholarship to Tarleton, and really, I didn’t have a lot of male guidance because my parents divorced when I was very young. I made a lot of mistakes as a teenager.”
Barnett, Tarleton’s first-ever four-year starter as a linebacker, recalled how he would show up at football practice, hiding the fact that his mother was homeless.
“I understood that finishing this part of my life would help me later,” he said. “If I had quit school, it would have been a temporary fix. It was important for me to stay in school.”
He made enough of an impression on the Memorial Stadium gridiron to attract the attention of the NFL. He got a tryout with the Green Bay Packers, but failed to get a contract offer. He played for several teams in different arena leagues before giving up on his dream of playing professional football.
“I struggled with depression and I considered suicide,” he said. “I felt like a failure. Football had been my mechanism for coping with the obstacles we lived through as a family. When I couldn’t play anymore, I found myself in a dark place.”
That was where his education at Tarleton kicked in.
“I had a minor in business,” Barnett, a 2005 graduate, said. “And that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I had to design a business marketing model and that is what I fell back on.”
He started playing to his strengths, which included motivational speaking and mentoring at-risk teenagers. His work has led him to share lessons he learned through difficult times. His book directed toward young men, Hello, King, earned book of the month honors from Grown Zone, an online personal development site. He also has created The ME (Men of Excellence) Project and WE (Women of Excellence) Project, five-week programs to drive leadership, character and mental stability.
Headquartered in Atlanta, Barnett recounts working with thousands of at-risk youth over the last eight years.
“No one in my family had ever gone to college. I was the first one of five kids. I had to feel my way through a lot of things because I didn’t really have a model or a blueprint to follow.” That sense of uncertainty inspired his mentoring programs. The aim is “to give kids the tools to find themselves quickly through their adolescent years because those are some of the most challenging years you can face.” “When I first started out in business, I was training athletes,” he said. “I came from that arena. I saw a lot of kids progressing physically, but regressing when it came to their mental growth. I wanted to create something they could utilize to make solid life decisions.”
