Chris Daukaus has made big, career-altering decisions before.
Early in his UFC career, he was balancing competing at the highest level of MMA and working full time as a Philadelphia police officer. He decided he wanted to put everything he had into being the best fighter he could be, so he hung up the handcuffs.
We can all learn from this. Big changes can be downright scary. And especially when nobody is forcing us to do it.
But deep down, if we quiet our mind and reflect, we know what’s right. We can figure out if we’re unhappy or held back, but it takes breaking away from constant distractions to examine our situation.
Daukaus has never looked back on his decision to be a full-time fighter, but the results didn’t go as planned. Now, after a few L’s, he makes the move to the light heavyweight division. It took patience. It took commitment. It took some courage, and now he’s happy with his new life.
I asked him what his thoughts were when facing career-altering decisions. Here’s what he told me:
“Do it. Just do it. Just jump right in. If you’re on a path … this is one path, this is the other one. You could either stay on the same path on which I was on. A lot of people would say I was on the heavyweight path for too long. I was going back and forth between the heavyweight and light heavyweight … and leaving the police department and not leaving police department. If you’re going to make a decision, then fully do it. I didn’t do it for awhile because I was always second guessing. … I was micro-managing things and over analyzing things. It’s really just about making that decision and taking an objective look at things.”
My own experience
I, like many, have made some big career decisions over the years. But there was one in particular that forced me into the unknown. It turned out to be how I got my job with the UFC.
You see, as a broadcaster, it’s rare (especially early in one’s career) that you are dealing with options. It’s more of a “have work, will travel” situation. If a small TV station in Wyoming asks you to be the sports anchor, you say yes. Because if not, you might be waiting another six months before another call like that comes. And chances are, it’ll still be in some other sleepy town that is not synonymous with major sports.
So climbing the ladder is pretty simple. You cut your teeth, and then a bigger job comes along. So you say yes. And then another. And those decisions are usually pretty easy, or at least were in my case.
But when ESPN tells you they aren’t picking up your contract renewal (as they did to me in 2017), well … it was time for a change. The layoff in April of 2017 was very uneasy to deal with. I was married with a 1-year-old, and with the changing media landscape, wondered what the future held.
But I will say this: I fully believe to this day that the reason I’ve continued to have success (and landed an even higher-profile job than I got laid off from) was because my excitement for the unknown trumped any fear. The chips were down, and I had a chance to see what I was made of.
We all would like to plan and know what our immediate future holds. But I gotta tell ya, when I had no idea – it was pretty exhilarating. There were nerves, of course, but in life, like any great roller coaster, that’s the fun of it.
So if you are out there contemplating some type of change, big or small, maybe give it a shot and embrace that you have no idea what’s to come.
Fitz Nation with Chris Daukaus
You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere else you find podcasts.
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UFC announcer and podcaster Brendan Fitzgerald writes about the journey of life and lessons learned (with a healthy dose of UFC broadcasting insider stories, too!). Subscribe on Substack.
