Tell me about your vision.
My vision is to, you know, it sounds very cliche,
but it's to truly make an impact on the world,
you know, a little bit about my story.
I, and how I came to meditation and ascend is, you know,
I'm a student athlete.
I spent two years playing college football at Wake Forest.
And then I just finished my last season at Georgetown.
So I transferred to Georgetown going into my junior year.
And early in college, I was facing a lot of pressure
on myself, you know, a lot of anxieties about performance.
I graduated in, graduated high school and, you know,
I was, I hate to say this, but I was kind of, you know,
I was the team captain.
I, you know, was one of the better players on my team.
And I expected that to continue to college.
I expected to get there and play and perform well.
And, you know, it's just such a different level.
It's a different motor.
There's so much more competition that, you know,
not seeing results right away was really tough on me.
And I started putting, you know, these limits on myself.
And I really realized that I was standing my own way.
And I started developing bad personal habits
outside of football.
I, you know, became distracted.
I started drinking too much.
You know, I stopped caring about my diet
and I kind of just lost focus on my vision
of becoming the best version of myself.
I got very distracted and, you know,
I had a very crucial moment in my life
where I just kind of had to sit back and like,
what am I doing with myself?
You know, how did I get to this point
where I truly didn't recognize myself?
And I was like, I need to change.
I need to change the way I'm acting.
I need to change who I'm becoming.
I need to stop these habits.
I need to reset.
And that's why I transferred schools.
I said, I need to move to a new place
and need to recreate myself,
truly recreate myself with my own vision,
with the vision of my ideal self.
And through meditation,
I was able to cultivate that sense of myself.
And through, you know, commitment to these principles
and commitment to these disciplines,
it's been incredibly beneficial for my mental health,
for my athletic performance,
for, you know, my relationships, et cetera.
So my vision is to become the best version of myself.
And through my actions and through who I become,
I want to influence and I want to inspire other individuals
to also achieve their potential.
Hampton, you seem like someone
who has experienced these things
more than just heard about it.
So I'm gonna ask you a tougher question.
You said through meditation,
what is meditation to you?
That's an incredibly dense question.
And there's tons of layers to it.
For me, meditation involves identifying
and bring to awareness who I think that I am.
What are my beliefs?
What are, what do I, how do I see the world?
More importantly, how do I see myself in this world?
And through meditation, I'm able to center myself
and become aware of certain thought patterns
and certain belief systems that I have
that influence my actions.
So through meditation, I strive,
and it's a lot easier said than done,
but to recognize these harmful patterns,
these harmful belief systems,
and kind of rewire them, if you will,
to recognize and say,
this is limiting me in this area of my life,
whether it's something as simple as,
oh, I can't, I'm a football player, I don't like to run.
It's like, that's something that's so subconscious to me.
And it's like, why am I thinking that?
It's like, oh, because I grew up playing offensive line,
which is the front line in football.
I don't need to get too much into that.
However, that position, we're bigger guys.
And so I had this subconscious belief around that
and recognizing like, oh, I don't like to run
because it's so much, everything is subconscious,
and recognizing that is allowing me to overcome these things.
So through meditation, I'm able to kind of reinvent myself
and overcome these specific patterns
that really do hold me back.
And that's what meditation is for me.
For me, it's much more than just a practice
to find moments of peace.
It certainly is that, but it's much more than that for me.
That's awesome.
Thank you for sharing that.
So how did you get started on this journey of meditation?
I mean, when you saw yourself like,
hey, I don't recognize myself,
how did the meditation come into play in there?
Yeah, so it came in, that's a very good question.
And I would say it started,
I got to a point where my thoughts were like a hurricane,
truly like I couldn't focus on anything.
I just had such harmful thoughts going through my head
and it just was, it was sporadic.
It was, I had no grip of who I was.
And I said, I need to do something.
I need some fix to this, right?
I need to change.
And my mom is an incredibly spiritual person
and she just has an aura of peace to her.
And I talked to my mom, I was like, mom,
this is what's going on.
I need something.
I didn't wanna take any medicine.
I didn't want to, I wanted to stay away from there.
She said, you should try meditation.
And I tried it and I was like, this is,
I do not like this.
Like it's bringing all these things into my awareness.
It was making me incredibly uncomfortable.
And she said, you have to stay consistent.
You have to, it's a hard thing to do.
Meditating is incredibly hard.
As simple as it is, it's one of the hardest things
and it's very paradoxical.
But coming to meditation, that was so essential for me,
just to recognize, I'm not my thoughts.
I don't, I was identifying with my thoughts, if you will.
I was having these thoughts and I was identifying with them,
which was manifesting self in my life
and finding that separation and observing my thoughts
and saying they're just thoughts.
That's not truly my identity.
These are just thoughts I have about myself.
That's been how I really started building
a meditation practice, yes sir.
And how did the journey from doing meditation
and then thinking about getting an app together
to help others come about?
Absolutely.
So I've, one of my close friends,
his name is Jamal Banks.
He's inspired me in so many ways,
but the most beneficial way is that he's such a giving person
and that's, you see people who give a lot
and then Jamal was just this light.
Like I truly saw, he's just a light to people.
He is just giving, he's grateful
and I had never cultivated that practice.
I really never practiced gratitude.
I always took for granted what I had
and looked at what I didn't have.
And seeing how he lived his life inspired me
to wanna make a change and start to help other people.
And I learned from him that helping other people
is an action and a way to help yourself truly.
And so that, through our relationship, the friendship,
I built this habit to wanna help other people
as a way to truly help myself and not in a selfish way,
but I just found it very rewarding.
I found giving to people and helping people rewarding.
And my friends included, I was trying to tell them,
I was like, you guys gotta start trying meditation.
We're 20 year old guys, we play football.
Like that's not the norm and they kinda,
they'd be like, okay, like, they kinda pushed it off
and that's okay.
I would have done the same thing had I,
someone told me that a few years earlier, right?
And I was actually listening to a meditation in February,
I was listening to a guided meditation on YouTube
and I was getting into a meditative state.
However, some things that the practitioner was saying
weren't resonating with me.
And I said, it was almost like a spiritual insight.
It was like, I spoke to God from him and he said,
with the state that artificial intelligence is in,
what if you were able to create an app
where you could specifically make meditations
catered to your situation,
catered to what you're going through.
And from that idea, while I was in this meditation,
it was like, then you could do this with it
and build this from that and branch it this way.
And I just started thinking about how many ways
that it could help people,
whether you're an athlete that's anxious before a game
and you wanna visualize yourself confidently,
making plays, whether you're just a dad who's stressed out,
work is, he has hit a quota, et cetera.
There's so many different niches that it's specific to.
And that was a very long answer to a question
that didn't need that long answer,
but yes, sir, that's how I came to wanting
to create a meditation app.
That's awesome.
Thank you for sharing that.
Yes, sir.
One more question for you before we end today's segment.
What is your goal for being on the show today, Hampton?
My goal for being on the show today
is to inspire people to meditate,
inspire people to take a leap in self-development
and take a step into understanding themselves.
Because I think that the circumstances that we're in
are all internal.
And the way we internalize our circumstances
is ultimately the way that we see the world.
And by taking that gap, by separating ourselves
from our circumstances and realizing
that it's not the circumstances that affect our mindset,
that affect our mentality,
but it's the way that we internalize our circumstances,
that ultimately is what determines whether we're happy,
whether we're confident, whether we're, you know,
you overcome anxiety.
And what I hope to gain is to inspire people to meditate,
to inspire people to begin this practice
and be fair and kind with themselves
because it certainly is a challenging practice.
However, it's without a doubt rewarding.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.