From Prison to Miracle Mornings with Robert Valentine

**Hal Elrod** (0:02)
Hello, and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast, the show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod, and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level, as well as interview world-class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves, and we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go.
Have you ever felt like your past has already decided your future? Like the mistakes you've made are too big, too many, or too permanent for real change to be possible? If so, you're not alone, and I want you to hold on to that feeling for the next 10 minutes because my guest today is about to prove you wrong. Robert Valentine spent 11 years in prison. He battled addiction to meth, heroin, pain pills, and food, and by the time he hit rock bottom, he'd lost nearly everything. That mattered to him, but with five years left on his sentence, something shifted. Robert discovered this podcast and started practicing the Miracle Morning in a three by five foot prison cell, and he never stopped. As a result, he's lost 90 pounds. He's sober. He's rebuilt relationships with his six kids, and he's been out of prison less than 100 days and has dedicated his life to helping other people walk the same road that he walked. Stay with us because you're going to hear the exact habits Robert built behind bars that are still positively transforming his life today. You're going to walk away with proof that the person you want to become is still available to you no matter what's happened in your past or what you're going through right now. It is my great pleasure to bring to you this conversation with Robert Valentine.
Robert Valentine, it is so good to be with you, brother.

**Robert Valentine** (1:54)
Good to be with you too, Hal. Thank you.

**Hal Elrod** (1:57)
Yeah, you just got emotional and I appreciated that.
I said, pardon me, it was like, I wish we would have recorded that to share, but I have a feeling you might get emotional a little bit more. Let me set the table for everybody. Robert sent me a video and actually Robert, let me ask you, who were you recording those videos for? Because that was day, I think, 36 that you were out of prison. Is that what the context was?

**Robert Valentine** (2:21)
Yeah, that was correct. It's a challenge that I'm doing, capturing my first year out of prison, so I'm recording one video every day for the first 365 days I'm out.
So I like to do things to challenge myself. They're hard that I can commit to every single day. So that's just a challenge. I haven't really shared a lot of them yet. I share some of them with people and so I was just doing two things at once, recording my daily video that day and plus sending it to you, which I really got to thank Stephanie Blackwood for connecting us. Yeah, that was really sweet of her and her story to do that. But yeah, I got emotional, Hal, because it's been a long journey to get here to this point after listening to you and reading the books and doing this five years ago is when I started the miracle, in prison. So yeah, it was just, I never really pictured this day happening and happening this quick. So it's just an honor and a privilege to share this space with you today.

**Hal Elrod** (3:14)
Awesome. Well, thank you, brother. And you're an inspiration. I mean, you sent me that video and I immediately invited you to be on the podcast. And then you shared, oh, that's amazing. I wasn't asking, but that's actually like a dream of yours. Share the background. You mentioned that you were 36 days out of prison. How many days now have you been out of prison?

**Robert Valentine** (3:31)
Today's day 79

**Hal Elrod** (3:34)
Okay. It's been a month or so since we connected. So 79 So first of all, congratulations. Thank you. Not just congratulations on getting out of prison, congratulations on who you are as a human being and what you're doing to be the best version of yourself and help other people.
Take us back, like share your story, share how did you end up in prison? What was prison like? And then I guess kind of you can lead into what you recorded on the video for me, which is like how you discovered the miracle morning. You became a certified yoga instructor. You lost 100 pounds. Like you're such an inspiration, man. And I'm sharing this with my audience because I really want them to be inspired by you, to learn from you, to learn from your example.