SEASON 3: EPISODE 6 TRANSCRIPT

Shawn Johnson and Andrew East

Shawn Johnson:
My parents did everything they could; this is going to sound really weird; to convince me to stop. Every time I had a hard day or I wanted to quit, they were ecstatic. They were like, "Great, you can come home. We can sit and watch TV and eat ice cream and I can have my little girl back." It was always this interesting concept of this was truly my thing. Everyone made it my decision to continue or quit, and it was no one else's to make. And so I think what I've taken from that now being married and having kids is we're each on our own journey and it has to be self-driven. If it's for the wrong purpose or for someone else, it's probably not going to last. At the end of the day, you have to choose what you want for your life.

Andrew East:
Everyone says that, "Oh my gosh, sports teach you so much and there's all these overlapping skills that carry over past when your time is done on the field." And I would say from age 22 to 30, I was like, "I don't feel like I'm equipped to do anything else besides be on a team playing football." But as I've gotten more and more removed, I do realize how refining it is to show up every day and do the daily disciplines, that it might not be an exciting day of practice, you might not have some massive breakthrough, but you might have an incremental improvement. And if you have enough of those over years, it can really pan out to have a wonderful effect.

Dr. Greg Jones:
In a culture often driven by comparison, achievement, and external validation, hope invites us to live differently. It reminds us that purpose is not found in accolades or applause, but in faithfulness, presence, and embracing the roles we are uniquely called to play. Hope anchors us through seasons of challenge and grounds us in what matters most. My name is Dr. Greg Jones, president of Belmont University, and I'm honored to be your guide through candid conversations with amazing agents of hope, people who demonstrate what it means to live with hope and lean into the lessons picked up along the way. They are The Hope People. Today's agents of hope are Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson and former NFL player Andrew East. Shawn shares how her parents' encouragement to pursue gymnastics for joy rather than validation shaped her intrinsic motivation while Andrew reflects on how sports taught him the discipline of daily growth and the value of embracing his unique role on a team, all lessons that continue to guide his life beyond athletics. In our conversation, Shawn and Andrew discuss how their faith has provided a foundation of hope through challenges and disappointments and how their marriage and family have become central to their shared sense of purpose. They also speak candidly about using their platform to authentically celebrate commitment, parenting, and the beauty of living fully in the present moment. Their message is a powerful reminder to pursue God-given passions, trust the journey, and resist the temptation to measure our lives against others. Well, Shawn and Andrew, thank you for joining us on The Hope People Podcast. We're delighted you're here.

Shawn Johnson:
Thank you for having us.

Andrew East:
Thanks for having us, Pop Pop.

Dr. Greg Jones:
I want to begin by asking each of you to just reflect on your own upbringing, both of you as athletes who have accomplished incredible amounts individually. What did you learn growing up and developing your skills as an athlete that's helped to shape your life and your perspective now?

Andrew East:
Wow.

Shawn Johnson:
First thing that comes to mind, my upbringing was unusual for elite athletics in gymnastics. I started gymnastics when I was three and fell in love with it. I had tried so many other sports along my career and along my childhood, but gymnastics was my favorite. And through that whole journey, my parents did everything they could; this is going to sound really weird; to convince me to stop. And it wasn't reverse psychology, but looking back, it felt like it because every time I had a hard day or I wanted to quit, they were ecstatic. They were like, "Great, you can come home. We can sit and watch TV and eat ice cream and I can have my little girl back." And I was like, "Wait, what? This doesn't mean a lot to you? You don't find extra value in me through it?" And it was always this interesting concept of this was truly my thing and my parents didn't love me more because I did it and I didn't get more value because I did it. And every time I would find myself in this roadblock of I'm tired of it, everyone made it my decision to continue or quit and it was no one else's to make.

And so I think what I've taken from that now being married and having kids is we're each on our own journey and it has to be self-driven. If it's for the wrong purpose or for someone else, it's probably not going to last. And teaching our kids that I love you no matter what and I'll support you, but at the end of the day, you have to choose what you want for your life and how to continue going on through it.

Andrew East:
I could say I've never met someone who has intrinsic motivation or determination like Shawn. So your story panned out pretty well, I would say.

Shawn Johnson:
Maybe for other kids we have to teach it. I don't know yet. We haven't gotten there.

Andrew East:
Yeah. I'll start off by saying I love sports and I love athletics and I'm so glad that I was able to do it for so long. And so I would say that I didn't fully realize everything I learned from sports until maybe age 30, 32. Everyone says that, "Oh, my gosh, sports teach you so much and there's all these overlapping skills that carry over past when your time is done on the field." And I would say from age 22 to 30, I was like, "Where are these skills that I learned?" I don't feel like I'm equipped to do anything else besides be on a team playing football. But as I've gotten more and more removed, I do realize how refining it is to show up every day and do the daily disciplines, that it might not be an exciting day of practice, you might not have some massive breakthrough, but you might have an incremental improvement. And if you have enough of those over years, it can really pan out to have a wonderful effect.

And so I would say just knowing that daily disciplines do make a difference was one thing I learned. I would say understanding the concept of a team and that I can't be the quarterback and the wide receiver or I can't be the linebacker and the defensive end. I need to play my role as well as I can. There's no sense of me being jealous or there's no sense of me trying to be something else. It's just like be where I'm at as well as I can. That's continued to have a really positive effect on me as we've gotten married. It's like I don't need to be anything other than the best husband and father I can be and what that means right now in this play of life.

Dr. Greg Jones:
That's great. Hope is one of those virtues that's linked to an ability to face the brutal facts. And sometimes that involves suffering, sometimes that's failure. I imagine, Shawn, that as a young kid learning the balance beam or other activities, there was a lot of failure and probably frustration. And a lot of people quit when they find that something's hard. Football is similar. Teams lose, struggles, you get a penalty called on you, all those things. How did you learn to really embody hope by embracing the failure or the suffering and rise above it?

Shawn Johnson:
I think I could trace it back to the first week I was in gymnastics. Gymnastics is a really interesting and very humbling sport in the sense of you fail and fall on your face hundreds of times before you ever succeed. But I will never forget the first time I was being taught a skill and I was so frustrated and I was so mad and I kept falling and kept failing and couldn't do it. And the feeling of the very first time I did it hooked me for life. It was this incredible reward for failing over and over and over again and for the rest of my career, that hope of if I just keep working on a skill, no matter how long, and some skills and some routines and some things took me years to learn, I knew and I had hope that at one point I would feel that standing on the clouds moment of I did it for the first time. And it was truly what made me fall in love with my sport. I felt invincible because it made me feel like I could literally do anything as long as I just kept working at it.

Andrew East:
I love this question because I played football at Vanderbilt University, and so we needed a lot of hope and it was rooted in a lot of failure.

Dr. Greg Jones:
Vanderbilt back in the day before it became a football school.

Andrew East:
I guess I need to change the preface and the backdrop.

Shawn Johnson:
I will say you were the first glimmer of hope in Vandy football.

Andrew East:
We had some good years, but Vanderbilt historically has been the doormat to the SEC is what they call us. But it's changing now and I think a lot of it is due to this hope that... I don't know how you would differentiate hope from some type of irrational confidence or maybe you got to be a little delusional in order to achieve anything different than what you're achieving now. You have to say, "I think I could do something else." And for Vanderbilt to beat Alabama when they were number one in the country and you see the quarterback out there pre-game acting like he's the best player in the world, it's like that's actually what it takes. You can call that delusional or you can call that irrational, but you don't get the win against Alabama. You don't get the extraordinary outcome without having that hope or whatever that thing is. It's like the seed of what could be.

I think it is really important to be honest with your failures and start with the reality of, it might be your coach pulling you aside and saying, "Hey, your game right now is trash. You have a lot that you can improve on, but I'm telling you that because there is potential for improvement." You know what I'm saying? And I think it's like you have to be humble in the preparation and almost arrogant in the execution, it seems like, where you have to be humble enough to take that constructive criticism and to take the feedback in order to put you in a position that you can step on the field against Alabama and get the win.
So I love hope and I think it could change everything. And I know that's an ambiguous, intangible quality, but you have to be able to dream about something and that's what makes humanity so great. That's how we invent things and that's how we're... It's just a really exciting thing and there should be more of it if you ask me.

Dr. Greg Jones:
Well, that's great. And clearly, for both of you, faith plays a significant role in that hope, that hope calls you to something beyond yourself. And whether it's... You might call it delusional, but you can also just call it confident trust in God, that the unimaginable becomes imaginable or the impossible becomes possible. Tell us something about each of your journeys of faith before we talk about how that's come together in your life together in marriage and parenting, but how has faith played a role?

Andrew East:
We're actually just finishing up a book. This is our first book that we're writing together, which is really fun. It's all about commitment and it's called The Courage to Commit. It was really fascinating to write this book where, ultimately, we wanted to write it because we wanted to tie in our experiences being married for 10 years without giving marriage advice. It's you just have to go all in and commit and then be with each other through thick and thin. Or our athletic careers, we just have to commit to the daily disciplines that we were talking about earlier.
But ultimately, what that process of unpacking all these different experiences led us to was, okay, well, if we are trusting in our coaches or if we are trusting in each other to a certain extent, what would be the ultimate exercise of trust? And ultimately, that led us to just this concept of faith. It is trusting in the creator or trusting in the hidden operations or mechanics of how the world works or how relationships work, and then you're like, okay, for us... We could have a lot of different gods. You could have the God of money, you could have the God of sports, you could have the God of accomplishments, you could have the God of each other or marriage or whatever, but what would be the best trust exercise that would have the, I think, most trickled down effects for us in a practical sense? And the fruits have been amazing.

There are day-to-day ramifications of that exercise of having faith in the ultimate God of the universe, and that affects how we are married to each other, that affects how we operate with our kids, and that affects how we navigate our occupations and our athletics. So sorry for the tangent there, but I have a lot of ideas on this one.

Dr. Greg Jones:
That's awesome. Shawn?

Shawn Johnson:
You get him on tangents.

Dr. Greg Jones:
Spoken as only a life can.

Shawn Johnson:
Yeah. I think mine, going a little different direction for the question. No, in such a good way. I love how you speak on that. I was raised in a faith-based household, in a Christian household, and was told the rhythms and routines of life when it comes to being a Christian, but didn't quite understand it. Going through my Olympic career, I was fueled by wanting to be the best in the world, but I also had this noise of the world saying, "If you get to stand on a gold medal podium at the Olympics, it's the highest form of success, praise, worth, value you'll ever feel in the world." That is the epitome of value and purpose that you can feel. I had that in the back of my mind on top of everything else.

I just remember I was 16 years old, so I was still a kid, but learning one of probably the greatest lessons that I've ever learned in my life, which was when I stood on that podium, knowing very well that everyone said, "This is the greatest moment you can ever feel in life, period." And it felt so empty. Don't get me wrong, it was the greatest blessing. I had fulfilled my dream. There was such accomplishment in it, but it did feel empty.

For me, standing on that podium to feel that, I remember just having this great sense of curiosity of this cannot be it. That's what sparked my personal journey with Christian faith and trying to understand it deeper because I learned so quickly in that moment, the material items this world has to offer is not going to do it. I got to experience that on a pretty grand scale.

Dr. Greg Jones:
Wow, that's powerful. As you were talking, I was thinking about Ben Zobrist who was on this podcast talking about when he won the World Series and was named MVP, and he thought, "That's everything I've ever aspired to, and it felt empty." Sometimes we think about needing hope when you're down and out, but sometimes you need that hope in God when you've actually achieved the greatest success, which is pretty extraordinary for standing on the gold medal stand. Pretty amazing, and yet there does need to be something more and different in that.

Shawn Johnson:
Absolutely.

Dr. Greg Jones:
You're talking about writing the book Courage to Commit, which is extraordinary, and I do think that that's a challenge for a lot of people, that courage to commit. If I'm not mistaken, y'all met through Andrew's brother-

Shawn Johnson:
Yes.

Dr. Greg Jones:
... when you were performing and you were at Vanderbilt playing football.

Shawn Johnson:
Yeah.

Dr. Greg Jones:
Tell us about that courtship and who was smitten first, who was more reluctant? How did that go? Because it can't have been easy given athletes' schedules and everything else.

Andrew East:
So back to delusional confidence. Yeah, my brother was an Olympic level cyclist. He met Shawn at the 2012 London Olympics, and she was at a point in your career, don't let me speak for you-

Shawn Johnson:
No, please.

Andrew East:
... but she had just retired from her comeback in which she was trying to make the Olympics again and retired in July before the Olympics. And so she was trying to think about what's next, and she was looking at going to school at either Stanford or Vanderbilt, and she made the right choice of looking at Vanderbilt just because we got connected and I gave her a tour. I was smitten from the get-go. I heard her talk. We had one phone call that I think lasted about 30 minutes, and here's Shawn who has these incredible capabilities and is so talented and has achieved so much, and she has this really gentle humility that is striking, to be honest. It's amazing that she's able to carry the humility with her talents so well and so gracefully. I'd never seen anything like it, and I was like, "I want more of that."
So we had that one phone call that was in September 2012, and she didn't talk to me again for nine months. I was trying to talk to her for those nine months, but she didn't talk to me. And then we ended up-

Dr. Greg Jones:
She was just busy.

Andrew East:
Yeah, she was busy, for sure. But we went to the CMA Fest in June 2013. We hung out for a couple days, and then I gave her a whole tour of Nashville, and I was telling her all the history of how, "Nashville's considered the Athens of the South, and here's why it has all these universities. It's this intellectual hub." I was giving her a whole tour of the city. She's a country music fan, fortunately. And so she ended up extending her trip and we ended up dating, and we've spent only a handful of days apart since then pretty much.

Shawn Johnson:
I remember I was 20 at the time, freshly retired from gymnastics, hadn't started college yet because I've been deferring, was getting ready to go to Stanford. Ended up transferring to Vandy for you. And this is all after pretty much a first date, and we did the long distance thing for probably a month or two in this terrifying courage to commit. I just remember thinking, as a very type A person, if I'm going to truly give this relationship a shot, I got to go all in. So a month into dating, I moved across the country, transferred colleges, moved right down the street from you.

Andrew East:
Got a dog.

Shawn Johnson:
Quit my job, because I was doing public speaking, and just said, if we really... Because we had said from the get-go. We aren't here to date just to date. We were looking for our spouses and we're just going to see if it works. We went all in with the understanding that if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, it's fine. I will still go to Vandy or I can transfer back. It's totally fine, but I gave up everything to a certain extent to come here and try and it worked out.

Dr. Greg Jones:
How did developing your relationship and then getting married while you're making a transition from the highest of highs and world stage to retirement and adjusting to an ordinary life, you're playing football and the highs and lows of getting cut and signing with a new team?there's a lot of emotional volatility for each of you as you're dating, learning a new relationship. How did you sustain that relationship and what resources did each of you provide to the other that helped you navigate all those complexities?

Shawn Johnson:
I think the first thing that comes to my mind is within this transition, I was really tired of working. I had pretty much gotten hired to do my first job at 12 and had been working for 10 years straight. And so when I moved to Nashville and we started dating, I just quit everything. I gave up everything and started from ground zero. And it was an emotionally vulnerable time, but Andrew and the city and his friends truly embraced me as one of their own. And you would go off to school and football practice and I would go do my thing, whether it was with your friends or just embracing myself was kind of how I dealt with my side. But then it was really cool having been freshly retired and gone through my career. It's almost like I could see everything he was going through in his personal football career, and I could relate to it so well that I felt like... I mean, I had a whole Rolodex of I was like, "Do you need a sports psychiatrist? Do you need a rehab guy? What do you need and how can I be your best supporter in your journey?"

Andrew East:
It's interesting. I think with the emotional volatility that we went through, it opens the door to vulnerability. I don't think it's a guaranteed correlation there, but I think one thing to Shawn's credit that she really was relentless with was using the rock bottom that I was experiencing, balancing... I was supposed to be with the Kansas City Chiefs for 15 years and I would've won three Super Bowls by now, but I got cut after three months because I just couldn't deal with it. And so I was in tatters and I, again, didn't think I had any skills that were able to be applied to anything else than football.

So I sat on the couch for three months after that first time getting cut and was just a sad guy for a while, and it was very emotionally volatile. But Shawn used that instead of me pulling back or allowing me to isolate myself or just bask in the shame that I felt, she really pressed in and was like, "Hey, how are you?" We would just have moments where maybe we'd talk, maybe we'd just sit in silence, but it became a fertile grounds for connection, which I'm really glad about, and it opened the door to us exploring other aspects of each other.

It's interesting when Shawn gets approached by people when we're out to dinner or whatever, they're going to ask one of three questions like, "How was gymnastics or how was Dancing with the Stars?" or whatever. And with me, a personal brand is really tied to one thing you do in life. And so that's a pretty single faceted dimension to comprehend somebody, but it forced us, as we were struggling in those things that we were known for, to open up and explore other things that we were interested in, other things we were good at, other parts of each other that we hadn't yet understood or conversed about. So it ended up being such a positive, as painful as that process was.

Dr. Greg Jones:
That's beautiful. You've been both really transparent in talking publicly about some of this journey and the influence. What led you to think that that was important to do? Because often, people try to hide the painful parts of a story, and you've been willing to share it in a way that's inspiring and inspires others to hope.

Shawn Johnson:
I think there was a starting point inspiration when we first started going into this influencer world, which is wild that we're in it, but we both traditionally came from sports entertainment, very traditional. You would see someone on NBC, you would see a one-minute fluff piece that the editors got to control. I just remember from my personal brand, people had been telling my story for so long, and they had painted a picture of who I was and how I competed and how I operated and how my mind worked. I'm not saying it was false, but there was so much left out. I had been put onto a pedestal as a robot, a machine of a human who was just born to do gymnastics.

I think the inspiration about being so raw and vulnerable and real is every person you watch on TV, there is a very human side to them, and they are just like everyone else. It's just making this relatable connection point with the world to share that we are all very similar and we all have very high highs and low lows, and the more we can relate, the more it actually instills hope in people that they can get through something or they can do something. It's just a better connection point rather than truly trying to alienate yourself from people and put yourself on a pedestal.

Dr. Greg Jones:
You all live integrated lives, both personally and professionally. It's a way that parenting and marriage and all of your work. How does your creative work, social media, podcasting, your influencing, how do you see all that coming together as a kind of ministry of hope to others?

Shawn Johnson:
We messed around on social media for a very long time before kids doing anything that we thought would get the views and pay the bills. We got very tired of that very quickly and realized that the only thing we truly love doing is having fun together and having fun with our kids later on when kids came and showcasing that in a way that we feel is safe for our family, not overexposing too much. But we have chosen this route of... Social media and the digital space is very polarizing. There's a lot of profane, controversial, edgy, provocative things out there that young generations and kids are watching and they're being corrupted by.

We just said for some reason we've been given a platform with a lot of people's eyeballs, a lot of which are younger. If we can showcase two people who love each other having fun, who have a family and kids think that's pretty cool, I feel like we're doing a good job. And it's not fabricated. It's truly our life and we don't want to put anything false out there, but we want to show people that having a family and being married is pretty cool.

Dr. Greg Jones
That's awesome.

Andrew East:
Yeah. I mean, we had the opportunity when we started to do all these gymnastics videos, which were the trendiest videos on the platform at the time, and we could've been huge. Our following could have been massive, but Shawn didn't want to do anything gymnastics, as hilarious as that is with her background. I was like, "We're going to crush. We're going to dominate this whole thing." And then she's like, "No gymnastics." I was like, "Okay, well, we have to be creative in other senses." It's been so fun to flex other creative muscles and try to figure out what does it look like for our voice or our style to be applied to this format, whether it be podcasts or YouTube or short form stuff? It's really become a wonderful living diary, it feels like, and in a lot of ways, an extension of what my parents and grandparents did. I have videos of my dad Christmas morning from my grandpa filming him, and so it's so fun to see. And my dad used to film all of our football games. It's so fun to see.
Shawn Johnson:
His dad filmed everything.

Andrew East:
Yeah. It's like I'm not some novel thing to my family. I'm just doing what my dad and my grandpa did, and now we get to share it with people and have built this wonderful community, so it's been amazing.

Dr. Greg Jones:
That's awesome. I want to close with one final question for you both, because you are so great at being influencers. What advice do you have to young people, perhaps people entering college and just beginning to think about their life, the impact they can have, whether that's in sports or in social media or in any arena? What advice would you want to give to young people about how to live a joyful, hopeful life?

Andrew East:
I love that word joy, and I feel like people get all worked up about stressing about how their dreams haven't happened on their timeline or haven't happened yet, or maybe they're comparing themselves and this person's dream is happening quicker than theirs, or you start playing this game and it really does strip the joy. My advice would just be, be where you're at and do that with as much excellence as you. Whether you're in school or whether you're at your first job, just focus on that day. You don't need to look any further than that.
There's the verse of Lord be a lamp unto my feet. And if you think about it like a lamp, the old school lamps with candles, they're maybe putting out a foot of light ahead of you if you're on a dark path. And it's like that is a trust exercise. And if you're hopeful, I think you could walk down a really beautiful path, but you got to take it one step at a time and you can't look beyond that. So I would just say be where your feet are.

Shawn Johnson:
I had a similar thought of just live in the moment. Kids especially are getting very worked up about their future. I mean, weren't we all? The more you can live in the moment, the better. I think especially with social media, it takes you away from the moment. But I think to keep it simple, something that I talk to young kids about, and I think even college kids, it's more important, and the way I was talking about my own children, I think we were all given a God-given talent and joy and passion for something. And I think it's our job to find it. And I think every single person's going to look different, as they should.
So if you have someone in your life telling you, you need to go down a certain route or do a certain thing because it'll make more money or whatever it is, I would say push back on that. Find what you love and what you have a true desire and passion for and run with it because I think that's what you were born to do.

Dr. Greg Jones:
Thank you for participating in this conversation with The Hope People. Our aim is to inspire you to become an agent of hope yourself and to help us cultivate a sense of wellbeing for all. To join our mission and learn more about this show, visit thehopepeoplepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this conversation, remember to rate and review wherever you get your audio content.