Troy's Times - March 2008


www.TroyEvans.com

Troy@TroyEvans.com

 

Hi Friend!


Welcome to Troy’s free monthly electronic newsletter, developed for people interested in overcoming adversity, adapting to change and pushing oneself to realize their full potential.

(Some ch^racters in th1s newsletter have been altered to keep it from being filtered out as spam)

IN THIS ISSUE


“It is not important How we come to the events in our lives, but how we Deal with those events”- Troy


Feel free to forw^rd this issue to friends, family and associates!


This Month's Featured Article:

From Cub Scout to Con

From Cub Scout to Con


“Everything you have in your life is there because you attracted it.”
Mike Wickett


We all made choices to get where we are today. If we stand at the gate of change and look back, some of us can pinpoint an exact moment when things started to go wrong. For others, that moment may be blurred, and all we know is that we have spun out of control since. For me it was a little of both.
How did I come to the point of robbing banks? How did I arrive at a time in my life where I was willing to point a gun in someone’s face and demand money? I can assure you that I did not aspire to become a bank robber growing up. I did not walk into kindergarten career day and say, “When I grow up, I want to spend a large chunk of my life in prison and cause my family a great deal of pain.” That was, however, the path that I chose.
Believe it or not, I was once an honor role student. I played baseball and football so well that, even when I was very young, my coaches and parents thought I might go pro one day. I was surrounded by teammates, friends, and coaches encouraging me to pursue my ambition—to become a professional ball player.
Then, when I was fourteen years old, we moved in the early summer to an entirely different city in an entirely different state, and everything changed. If you’ve ever moved, you may already be familiar with some of the dynamics of making new friends. For the most part, there is an initiation process. To get in with the cool kids, you have to show them that you’re cool. To get in with the jocks, you have to be a good athlete. But, to get in with the “bad kids,” all you have to do is be bad. And that’s easy to do. Had I been able to join up with a baseball or football team as soon as I moved, I might never have had to make a choice about whom I was going to be. But without that path, my choices were to wait until the school year and sports seasons began or make friends immediately with the kids who were most readily available to me—the “bad kids.” I made a choice. The easy one.

uuu


When my family arrived in Colorado Springs in the summer of 1978, I was used to having the whole world laid out for me. I had been born with the gifts of intelligence, coordination, and athleticism. These were the things that defined who I was. I was the “smart kid,” the “star of the team.” My family status was a given as well. My father was a senior executive for a large organization; we were firmly in the upper middle class. At the age of fourteen, I was too young to understand that these things—the things that had been mine for as long as I could remember—could be taken or, as you’ll see, given away.
I had spent the entirety of my life at that point in Phoenix, Arizona. Residents are blessed with an average of 325 days of sunshine every year. To many of the young boys living in that state, that translates into precisely one thing—it is a baseball utopia. Baseball is a year-round event in Phoenix and to many of us who played ball together; those days are the best memories of our childhood. My memories of it still are as clear as if it were yesterday. By junior high, I was already a star, getting citywide press and standing out among the best of the best. Those were the days that defined me in my younger years and when I picture my childhood, those are the days that I prefer to linger upon.
My father was a top-level employee at Motorola then. I remember him being very busy, but he would still find time to make it to my games. I remember him talking to our relatives and the other parents at the game and I remember the look of pride that was on his face when he talked about me.
I was the oldest of three and each night the family would come home from work, play or school and we would all sit around the dinner table and discuss the day’s events. I was often one of the first to speak, telling my dad about the play that I had made that day on the baseball diamond or how I had aced a test. The picture I have in my mind of those evenings is nothing less than Cleaver-family perfect.
One evening, our normally cheerful family dinner was interrupted by my father’s latest news. He had been offered a job as a high level executive in Colorado Springs. We were going to move—away from my friends, away from my school, away from the coaches and recruiters who already knew that I was going to be a star—to a place where my sunshine and year-round baseball season would be replaced with an average 43 inches of snowfall per year.
We were not asked. It was never even an option. My father had made a decision that affected every single one of us. On paper it looked great. He was going to make a lot more money and get a high-level executive title. Sure he would have to work longer hours, uproot the family and start traveling several weeks out of the year, but those are the sacrifices that a man makes to give his family a better life. Right?
Frankly, I didn’t care how it looked on paper or otherwise. I was not happy.
Even in the best scenarios, change is difficult on kids. At that age, you haven’t been around enough to learn to adapt. (Frankly, I know some adults who have a great deal of trouble with it.) I had absolutely no reference point that would tell me that things were going to be OK. What I did have was a list a mile long of unknowns.
When we packed up our things and said our farewells to Phoenix, I could only make uneducated guesses about what to expect from my new “home.” I wasn’t even sure how it could be our “home.” All of the ideas I had surrounding that word, could not possibly be associated with this new place. It was not familiar. It was not comforting to me. It did not feel like a safe haven. It felt lonely and isolating. It made me feel like I simultaneously stood out and was invisible. I wasn’t a local, so people noticed me for being new, but that didn’t mean they were rushing to greet me. Many of them seemed to stand back and wait to see where I would fall into the high school pecking order.
It was the summer, so there was no school, there was no baseball and my dinner conversation topics were fairly scant. Of course, dinner itself had been altered anyway since my father’s new job required that he travel very often. It seemed as though he was gone as often as he was there while he adapted to the requirements of his new job, and we were left to try to make a “home” out of our new house with the strangely quiet dinner table.
I decided that the best thing to do would be to make friends with somebody, anybody just so I wouldn’t be alone. That would make everything better. I wouldn’t be alone and I wouldn’t stand out quite so much.
I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, so my entertainment was limited to the friends and activities that I could find within walking or biking distance from my house. As it turns out, I didn’t have to go far.
Right there, within a few blocks from my house, was the perfect group for the new kid in town. There were no requirements for being a friend of theirs. I didn’t have to prove myself at tryouts, as I would have had to do with the jocks. I didn’t have to show that I was cuter, funnier, or better at bullying nerds, as I would have had to with the cool kids. These were the “bad” kids. All I had to do to hang with them was be bad. Sure, I had moments of conscience that told me that I wasn’t supposed to be smoking a joint or stealing money from my mom’s purse, but they were quickly overcome by the feelings of excitement over not getting caught and of relief at having made friends in a new town. I was not going to be an outcast, as I had feared. I had found a group.
To make things even better, at the center of that group, shining like a beacon to my newly relocated soul was the girl of my dreams. I was drawn to her with all of the force that could be mustered by the raging hormones of a fourteen-year-old boy. If she smoked pot, I sure as heck was going to as well. Even better, she helped me let go of some of my reservations because she was an athlete, too. If she could live in both worlds, so could I.
In my mind, I had it made. I would be able to enter school without too much harassment for being the “new kid,” and I was enjoying the thrill of being the “bad kid.” I had a girlfriend and the discovery of marijuana to make my life more exotic, and I wouldn’t have to give up the “good kid/star of the team” persona that I had held to that date. There was no down side!
Let me pause in the story to say that there is nothing more dangerous than the fourteen-year-old mind. Based on the minutiae of information I had accumulated in my short life, I was fantastic. Truly, that was my identity. I was fantastic. My parents, teachers and coaches had always told me so. I was also bulletproof. Gifts and talents were not things that could be lost. My parents’ adoration and faith in me were absolutes. I was entitled to these things. I didn’t have to worry about drugs. My friends, and more importantly, my wonderful, beautiful, girlfriend, told me so.
That’s why it was so hard to understand when it all began to unravel.
I started sneaking out at night to hang with the group, screw around with my girlfriend, and smoke some weed. I needed to finance the pot and subsequent munchies, so I started taking money from my mom’s wallet or absconding with various objects around the house. I was absolutely sure that they would never notice. After all, parents are dumb, right?
To my fourteen-year-old amazement, my parents weren’t so dumb after all. It didn’t take long before they stopped looking at me like I was the golden child and started questioning my every move.
Our strangely quiet dinner table was now filled with a new kind of daily recap.
As I said, my dad was out of town a lot of the time. My mother tried to keep me home, but at that point I was bigger than she was. What was she going to do?
She did the only thing she could. She said, “You wait until your father gets home,” and then gave him a call.
By the time the old man did get home, he was often so mad from the stories that he had heard during the week that he was ready to nail me the instant he stepped foot through the door. While I did have a healthy fear of my father’s ability to drive the point home, I also had the cunning of an addict able to manipulate my mother’s love at will.
My father had been raised to be a heavy-handed disciplinarian. His theory on parenting prescribed swift, harsh punishments that would drive the point home. If I was going to act like a loser, he was going to treat me like one so that there would be no question as to the cause and effect of my actions.
My mother, on the other hand, like many mothers who find themselves in similar situations, was still unable to let go of the image of the sweet boy that I had been. After all, it was just months ago that I had been that child. She could only hold out hope that this was a temporary phase. That, coupled with her fear that too harsh a punishment would drive me away for good, was all I needed.
I fed that delusion like I fed my own habit. Why shouldn’t I? It’s not like I was really in trouble, right? They were dumb rules anyway. I wasn’t a baby. I didn’t need a curfew. And, what are a few bucks borrowed here or there? They could afford it.
To top it off, I was so mad at my dad for having moved us away from our home; I figured he got what he deserved. From what I knew, people didn’t get addicted to pot so there was no actual fear in my mind that I was in any danger. Like I said, I was bulletproof. But my dad on the other hand, had to deal with the neighbors knowing that his kid was doing drugs. He was getting phone calls at work from my mother and my little past time was making his life downright uncomfortable. That was all the incentive I needed to justify it in my mind. I’d show him. That job wasn’t looking so good on paper now, was it?
Inevitably, my father would come home, wound up from having to deal with his delinquent son and the stresses of a new job, and my mother would begin intervening on my behalf almost instantly. It’s amazing that their marriage stood up to it. He would try to ground me and she would let it slide during the week when he was out of town. He would try to lock me out at night and she would make him let me back in. Life at home was no holiday, but that just gave me yet another reason to stay away more often and do some more drugs. And, frankly, they were so distracted by arguing over what was going to happen to me, that I could generally slip out during the fray practically unnoticed.
Of course the summer couldn’t last forever and soon I was back to school ready to resume my status as the family star in my new double life. Surely the folks would ease up a bit with a new stream of A’s and the beginning of the sports seasons.
I soon found out, however, that my two lives were not very compatible. I discovered, much to my shock, that it’s incredibly hard to balance a habit and the responsibilities of everyday life. I had graduated to daily pot smoking at that point and was even starting to experiment with some of the harder stuff. It made it very hard to concentrate on school, that is, when I wasn’t skipping to get high.
It did kind of hit my radar at that point that those A’s weren’t rolling in like I had expected. Fortunately, I had the benefit of drugs to help relieve my conscience of any clarity that might have interceded at this point. The drugs had already taken over and I was starting to lead a not-so-double life with this new, addicted me in the lead role.
My teachers were giving me Cs and Ds and the principal was constantly riding me about absences. What they didn’t understand, or maybe did but couldn’t combat, is that my friends actually encouraged me to perform this way. I was getting all of the positive reinforcement I needed from my wonderful support group, and I didn’t mind the failing. I thought, “I could get As if I tried. I don’t need to jump through hoops for these people.”
Unfortunately, “these people” also included my coaches. At any given time, I was in danger of becoming ineligible to play because of my grades. Not that I was playing much anyway. Suddenly, the things that had come so easy to me before—pitching, fielding, hitting—were getting hard to do. In junior high, I had scouts from junior colleges looking at me. The expectation was that high school would bring the college and university scouts. But, that wasn’t the case. Thanks to the drugs, I no longer had the coordination or the stamina. Instead, my coaches said things like, “We were told great things about you, that you were going to go pro someday, and we’re wondering why.” I was getting benched and baseball wasn’t fun any more.
I had all kinds of empirical evidence that drugs were doing me harm, but my young brain just couldn’t make sense of it. Drugs weren’t supposed to do this to me. My girlfriend was able to straddle both worlds; why couldn’t I?
When I couldn’t make sense of it, I let the paranoia flow in. The beautiful thing about the paranoid thought is that it absolves you of blame. It’s always someone else who’s out to get you. Once it’s out of your hands, there’s no use trying to fight the tides. You might as well become complacent and accept it.
Paranoid justification in action:
My grades are dropping because these teachers have it in for me. Who cares? It was never cool to be the “smart kid” anyway.
Hold on. I should have been able to make that catch. It’s because the coaches aren’t giving me enough play time. If they can’t realize how great I am, then I don’t want to play for them anyway.
Baseball was, of course, the toughest thing to let go of. I really had wanted to be a professional athlete. Not long into the season, however, the choice was made for me. I was cut from the team. It took me two weeks to admit it to my family.
Looking back, that was the best opportunity that I had to get myself out of trouble. There was no hiding the issue at that point and drugs had finally cost me something that I had truly wanted. Of course the only people who were giving me guidance were my “friends.” Talking to my parents was out of the question because we were all too busy yelling at each other. The coaches had given me all the chances that they could. It wouldn’t have been fair to the other players to cut me any more slack. In the end, it came down to me and the other guys, smoking a little pot, and deciding that the coaches had it in for me from day one, so I’d be dumb to play for that team anyway.
Amazingly, when I finally did tell my parents that I had been cut, it was like sweet surrender. I was actually relieved. I had been balancing two lives for so long that I didn’t want the pressure anymore. It would have been nearly impossible to put my life back the way it was before I started using drugs. My parents didn’t trust me and I didn’t think they would any time soon, even if I turned it around. It was too late for school and sports. Why bother hanging on to that side of it anymore? It was just easier to let it go and put all of my efforts into my new identity—Troy Evans, drug user.
My addiction had started out as casual marijuana use, just occasionally on the weekends, but it had grown quickly. Before I knew it, and I’m here to tell you it seemed like overnight, drugs had become the most important thing in my life. Within the span of two years, my life degraded so much that soon every event, intention, and action within my existence had to do with acquiring and using drugs. There was not a single aspect of my life that was not affected by drug use. At this point, I was so far gone; I wasn’t even welcome at the family dinner table any more. My name brought nothing but misery, pain and anger to the conversations.
I eked my way out of high school with Cs and Ds and immediately turned to the only profession that could feed my habit, and at the same time pay the bills. I dealt drugs. It was obvious that this was the only occupation that would allow me to support a habit that had now grown to the point of daily use of nearly every hard drug available on the streets.
At this point, I was climbing further and further out on a limb. Some of my “bad” friends began to see the error of their ways and pull back. Others were able to keep their impulses in check and function in society. Not me. My whole world was now about one thing only—staying high.
My parents—especially my mother—still held out hope. They tried tough love, letting me run free to see if I could get the wildness “out of my system,” getting me into rehab (three thirty-day stints, none of which made a damn bit of difference) at considerable expense. If it was not for my mother, my dad probably would have killed me or at the very least thrown me out on the street. He’d had enough of my stealing from him and other family members, not to mention the disgrace I brought upon the family.
After high school, I finally moved out, working at a string of meaningless jobs that were a screen for my activities as a drug dealer and my main desire—to party all the time.
Two years out of high school, I met a girl and got her pregnant. In a truly awkward attempt at being the responsible person from before the drug days, I married her. Our son was born a few short months later. Bringing a child into this world is supposed to be a beautiful thing. At that time, bringing Eric into this world was not. I would look into his crib knowing that I had just helped create a new life, a new person whom I knew I would hurt somehow. And so I did. I later abandoned him, and he became yet another person on the long list of those who were devastated by my drug addiction. Bringing my son into this world should have been the most beautiful event in my life. With my addiction tucked firmly at the top of my priority list, it wasn’t. I made a choice. I could have chosen my family . . . my son . . . sobriety. I chose drugs. It was easier.
After four years of putting up with my lying, cheating, and drug addicted ways; my wife filed for divorce and won primary custody of my son. I didn’t think that there was more downhill still available in my life, but I quickly discovered that the gutter has amazing depth.
I chose to leave the small town where my son and ex-wife resided, but I found I had nowhere to go. My addiction had now reached the point where I literally could not hold any type of job. Not only did a position not exist which could support my daily intake, but I had also reached the point where I stayed so high throughout the day—on meth, cocaine, heroin, prescription drugs, crack, alcohol, and anything else I could get my hands on—that I could not perform even the simplest of tasks. It was at this point, when I had zero ability to hold a job or maintain a residence, that I turned to robbing banks.
Picture my situation: By this time, I had burned every bridge I’d ever built with family and friends. I couldn’t stay with them, so I’d move from seedy hotel to seedy hotel, sleeping on the streets when I didn’t have enough money to pay for a room. When I began robbing banks, I was beyond desperate. I figured I would come out of the bank with enough money to feed my habit for another thirty to sixty days—or the police would confront me, I would brandish my gun, and they would put me out of my misery. It’s called “suicide by cop.” I wanted the police to do something I did not have the courage to do myself.
Bank robbery, incidentally, is not glamorous or anything like the well planned heists often portrayed by Hollywood. Most bank robbers are like I was at the time—acting out of desperation and with nothing to lose. The majorities are strung out on drugs, or have a gambling debt to pay, have a house that is about to be foreclosed on, in short, they’ve reached the end of their rope.
That’s where I was—at the end of the line. To me, robbing banks was a no-brainer. It was a win-win situation. Bank tellers, unlike convenience store clerks are unlikely to pull a gun out from under the counter, making it one of the safer jobs I could pull. Either I came out of that bank with enough money to feed my addiction, or the police showed up and I would force a confrontation that would take my life.
I’m not going to tell you that my decision to rob banks came without any difficulty. There remained a small part within me that realized that what I was doing was very wrong and outside of my inner character. There were at least a dozen banks that I entered, gun in waistband, intent on completing the job, only to hand the teller a $10 bill while requesting a roll of quarters. But, what was the alternative? Confronting my life, acknowledging the person I had become and the things I had done along that road, while going through withdrawals? That did not even seem to be a choice.
There was no going back. I had made so many bad decisions, finding a path to a better life had grown into a monumental feat in my mind. It was just too hard. So, I took the easy path instead—drugs or death. Either way, I figured it would soon be over. It was far easier to take a hit and live my life within the sweet release of apathy.
Then the unexpected happened. Rather than overdosing or getting myself killed, I was caught. I had committed 5 robberies at that point and the police had no clue I was the perp. In a last-ditch effort to nab me the authorities broadcasted information about the robberies in the newspaper and on local news shows. An ex-girlfriend, who was no fan of mine, saw me with a large sum of money and put two and two together. We had parted on bad terms, and so she had no qualms about calling Crime Stoppers on a hunch.
She told them where I was staying, another low-rent hotel. The police called the room, pretending to be management. It was early morning, and they knew I had a gun, so their goal was to get me to come out of the room without it. The voice on the phone said that if I was staying another night, I had to come pay for it immediately. When I did not respond to the first call, they called again. I got up and, completely oblivious, started towards the office wearing just flip-flops and shorts. Halfway there, I realized something was going on. The next thing I knew, there were a dozen guns drawn on me. I had no opportunity to point a gun at them, which meant my plan had failed. They weren’t going to end my miserable existence for me.
There I was, face on the ground, knee in my back, cuffs on my wrists, facing the horror the horror of what lay ahead of me. The drugs didn’t get me. I wasn’t cut down in a reign of bullets. I was being loaded into the back of a police car, with my shorts, flip flops and no idea what was to come.
At the time, naturally, I was not happy with my ex-girlfriend. But in retrospect, she literally saved my life. I have no doubt whatsoever that I would have died on the path I was on. That was, after all, the plan.
As it was, my life was about to become a thousand times more difficult than it had been on the easy path to destruction. I was convicted of robbing banks and sentenced to thirteen years in the federal prison system.

uuu

Some say forget about your past and concentrate on your future, but for those who are looking to make a change, that is tantamount to sticking your head in the sand. As they say, those who forget about history are bound to repeat it.
I am often asked about my childhood entry into the world of drugs. I can’t give a speech without parents coming up to me at the end, with the look that I’ve come to know too well, asking me how I started using drugs and what they should do to prevent their children from becoming addicts. I look at the pain in their faces and I can remember glimpses of the same look that, on the rarest of occasions, managed to make it through my own drug haze years ago—the look of my parents desperately trying to hang on to the child that they loved.
I last saw it the final time I was invited to a family Christmas. It was rare that I made it to a family event after high school, and the majority of the relatives were relieved when I didn’t show up. My mother was the last to hold on to hope.
I repaid her hope by showing up to Christmas dinner too stoned to function. I spent the entire holiday party passed out on my parents’ bed. When I finally came to and reappeared, it was to see that my mother no longer had the look of pain or hope that had always told me that I was still her little boy. She had a quiet resignation that told me that I was never going to ruin a family get-together again. I was no longer welcome.
That is just one of the memories that continues to haunt me today. It is painful every time I think about it, but it is important that I don’t forget it. I think that in order to move forward, we must first recognize where we come from. That means confronting your wrongs and accepting responsibility. To become the man that I am today, I first had to acknowledge and take responsibility for that memory, and the numerous other wrongs that I had perpetrated against my family, friends, and perfect strangers alike. Even in a drug-induced haze, I knew that the process would be painful. That pain, more than anything else, was keeping me from making the changes that I needed to make. It made me fool myself, point fingers, contrive excuses, and it had me locked inside a prison long before I was behind bars. But, I needed to acknowledge my past and accept responsibility before I could ever move forward. I had to forgo the easy path and truly face what I had become and the things I had done.
Have you ever wondered why they make addicts introduce themselves at meetings as addicts? “Hi, my name is Troy and I’m a drug addict.” It’s because if we say our secrets out loud, it’s not a secret. If it’s not a secret, we have to deal with it.
Drug addicts are great con artists. It’s an important part of the addiction because, in addition to fooling our friends and family, we have to fool ourselves. We tell ourselves we’re fine, we don’t need any help, it’s not affecting our work, it’s not affecting our families, and we do it because the truth is too terrible.
My first wife brought my family together for an intervention once. I came home to a room full of family, friends, co-workers, and my boss. For every excuse that I gave they had a reply.
“I can’t go to rehab now, I have to work.”
“That’s OK Troy, you can have the time off,” replied my boss.
“I have to be here to tend to the livestock.”
“That’s OK,” said my neighbors. “We’ll pitch in and help.”
“I don’t have anything packed.”
“I’ve packed a bag for you,” said my wife and, after several more attempts at excuses that they had already thought of, off we went.
They prepare families of drug addicts to cover all of the bases like that, because addicts always have excuses. We have them because it’s easier to say, “I have to work.” It sounds rational and responsible. The alternative, the truth that is screaming through our heads is just too awful. I mean, how could anyone, drug addict included, look his family in the eye, look at himself in the mirror, and say the truth: “I can’t go to rehab until I’ve had one more hit. I choose drugs over you, me, everyone, and everything. I am willing to steal from you, jeopardize your safety, and leave you without your son, husband, father in exchange for my next hit.”
Someone recently asked me why, when I was making all of those pivotal decisions in my life, I couldn’t just take the mask of the bank robber off or stop using drugs. Back then, while I was living in the world of drugs and crime, I had dozens of excuses. Looking back now from my life as a clean, law-abiding citizen, however, I realize that the question shouldn’t be “Why couldn’t I,” but rather “Why didn’t I?” It was never a question of can or can’t. I’m proof today that I could have all along. The simple answer is that I chose not to.
To quit, I would have had to admit I was addicted. To admit I was addicted would mean that I had to look at my actions as an addict. To look at my actions would have been too horrible for me to bear. To become the man I wanted to be, I had to let my secret out. I had to acknowledge the person I had been, and I had to claim the pain that I had caused everyone. This is what I mean by confronting your past and claiming responsibility.
We are living in a society of victims. You can’t turn on the news without someone telling you why they are a victim. It is only on the very rarest of occasions that reporters are able to tell us of someone who refused to take that role and, instead, chose to make a difference in their own lives. Do not choose the victim role. Take responsibility for your life today.
Maybe you’re battling an addiction like I was. Or maybe the thing you want to change most about yourself is your weight, job, or education. Whatever it is, to claim your past, you have to take away all of the reasons that you give yourself and others for being in the situation you are in and tell yourself that it is not good enough going forward.
If I throw my hands up and say that I was a drug addict and bank robber because I was a victim of a family move when I was a teenager and lost my support network, there will always be people there to pat me on the back and say, “Poor Troy.” But it will never help me get better because you can’t improve yourself by giving your power away. I have to own my decisions. If I claim them, no matter how bad they are, I claim the power that I have always had to control my destiny and to make the changes that I want to make in my life.
That is the first and hardest step of them all – putting down the excuses and taking absolute responsibility for what you have been to this point and what happens to you as you move forward.

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  • Indianapolis, IN
  • Las Vegas, NV
  • Cleveland, OH
  • Nashville, TN
  • Phoenix, AZ
  • Columbus, OH
  • Mesa, AZ
  • Chicago, IL

Commission for booking me - I offer a comm1ssion of 10%-20% ($750.00-$1,500.00) for anyone who refers me for speaking engagements and/or bulk product sales. Please contact The Evans Group for details.

Subscriber opinions and impressions of this electronic newsletter: I invite subscribers to write me with their quest1ons as well and I will answer them in the next issue. Also readers, I invite you to send in profiles of yourself and how you have used the inform^tion from my electronic newsletter, products or speech in your personal and/or professional lives. Once a month I will feature one individual for all others to read about!

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Note: You are free to reprint any portion of this electronic newsletter as long as the portion remains complete and unaltered, and the “About the Author” section is included.

About the Author- Troy Evans is a profess1onal speaker and author who resides in Phoenix, AZ with his wife Pam and his dog Archibald. Troy travels the country delivering keynote presentations, and since his release from prison has taken the corporate and association pl^tforms by storm. Overcoming adversity, adapting to change and pushing yourself to realize your full potential- other speaker’s talk about these issues, Troy has walked them.


For information on booking Troy or for a listing of available products, please contact:

The Evans Group
3104 E. Camelback Road, #436
Phoenix, AZ 85016
602-265-6855
Fax: 602-285-1474
Troy@troyevans.com
http://www.troyevans.com