There is a particular kind of credibility that cannot be manufactured. It is earned in hospital rooms, in locker rooms, and in the quiet aftermath of nearly losing everything. When I welcomed Darleen Santore, known to her clients and followers as Coach Dar, onto this episode, I knew within minutes that I was talking to someone who had earned every word she was about to say.

Coach Dar is now a mental performance coach to professional athletes across the NBA, NFL, and MLB, a bestselling author, and a sought after speaker for Fortune 100 companies. She also happens to be the Phoenix Suns’ mental performance coach. But none of that was the plan, and as she told me, for most of her life she had no plan at all, at least not one she could have written down.

A Childhood Built on Community

Coach Dar grew up in an Italian household in Connecticut, the daughter of a barber and a tool and die maker. Money was tight, but family was not.

“We didn’t have a lot but we had family,” she told me. “Sunday dinners is where everyone came together, and I think that’s the number one thing I learned early on, is community is everything.”

Her mother’s barber shop became a kind of sanctuary, a place where everyone, regardless of status, was treated the same. She described watching her mother give away her own lunch to someone hungrier, again and again, despite having little herself. That ethic of radical generosity became the blueprint for everything she would eventually build her career around.

She did not set out to become a coach. As a teenager, she ran for student council not for the title but because she wanted to be a voice for people who had not yet found their own. Looking back now, she sees that instinct as the earliest seed of the work she does today.

A Stroke at Twenty Five Changed Everything

After college, Coach Dar trained as an occupational therapist and worked with traumatic brain injury and stroke patients in Connecticut. By her own account, she felt she was living a version of the American dream. She had built a career, married her college sweetheart, and was preparing to start a family.

Then, during a routine visit to a chiropractor for sciatic pain, a neck manipulation tore an artery in her brain. She suffered a stroke at twenty-five and was told she might die.

“I thought, no, those are, that’s what my patients go through, not me,” she recalled.

I asked her how that experience reshaped her, and she explained that facing the possibility of death at such a young age stripped away her anxiety about failure and other people’s opinions.

“If I could die any day, I lost fear,” she said. “So if something doesn’t work out, okay, yeah, it could not work out for me. If I try something and it doesn’t happen the way I want to, that’s okay.”

She went on to rebuild a successful career in healthcare leadership, eventually becoming president of a large healthcare company by the age of twenty-eight. But in 2008, in the middle of the financial recession and at the height of professional security, she felt called to walk away from it all.

“I literally heard drop your nuts and follow,” she told me. “And I left everything.”

She started her own practice focused on mindset, neuroscience, and human behavior, channeling everything she had learned as a clinician into a new kind of coaching practice, long before mental performance coaching was a recognized industry.

Building a Client Roster Without Ever Marketing

What struck me most was learning that Coach Dar never advertised her services. Instead, athletes and executives found her, often through word of mouth from spouses or teammates who recognized something was missing in their performance.

“Wives would bring their husbands and say, he could be the next CEO but he won’t listen to me,” she said. “Or players would come to me and say, there is another level that I can’t get to. Like what is up with me.”

Her approach blends clinical neuroscience with mental skills coaching, helping clients understand their own brain mapping and flow states. She promises every client three outcomes from her coaching: confidence, clarity, and the courage to act on both.

Eventually her work brought her into professional locker rooms, traveling with teams and building trust deep enough that players would ask her, during long flights, about her walk with faith. Those conversations, she said, allowed her to coach beyond performance metrics and toward purpose.

Helping Athletes Carry the Weight of Public Pressure

One of the parts of our conversation that stuck with me most was her perspective on the rising pressure athletes face from sports betting culture. She described how the explosion of gambling has turned athletes into targets for fans who have lost money and now demand wins as if it were owed to them.

“That pressure should not be on another human because of someone’s irresponsibility,” she said.

She pointed out that the same standards rarely get applied to corporate employees earning comparable salaries, yet professional athletes are expected to perform flawlessly under constant public scrutiny. Her work, she explained, increasingly involves helping players separate their sense of self-worth from a scoreboard or a betting line.

The Power of Believing in Someone

I asked her about the most meaningful form of recognition she has witnessed in her career, expecting her to point to trophies or contracts. Instead, she told me the story of her close friend Thaddeus Bullard, known publicly as Titus O’Neal, a former NFL player and WWE wrestler who is now recognized as a humanitarian.

Bullard’s mother became pregnant with him at eleven years old after a sexual assault, and was nearly taken to have an abortion before changing course at the last moment. Bullard grew up facing significant challenges and was on the verge of being expelled from school when a principal told him something that changed the trajectory of his life.

“There’s no such thing as a bad kid, just a bad behavior. I love you and I believe in you,” the principal told him, according to Coach Dar. Bullard later said he had heard people claim to love him, but no one had ever told him they believed in him.

That single moment of belief preceded a remarkable run: valedictorian, a football career at the University of Florida, the NFL, a WWE career, and eventually recognition as a humanitarian of the year for his work building schools, restaurants, and entrepreneurship centers for underserved communities.

Releasing Comparison as a Weight

As her own profile has grown, Coach Dar told me she has had to manage the temptation to compare herself to bigger names in the coaching and personal development space. Her answer is rooted directly in her faith.

“Comparison is a weight, and there is no sense carrying around this weight,” she said. “I think comparison takes us off of God’s mission.”

She described picturing comparison as something that fogs the windshield directly in front of her, obstructing the path she is meant to drive. Her solution is to consistently reorient back to what she calls her mission, a calling she believes was placed in her regardless of fame or visibility.

Writing a Book Without the Help of AI

Coach Dar’s bestselling book emerged from a far more difficult period than I think most listeners would assume. She had been working on an early draft when her third stroke, seven years before our conversation, took her voice and the use of her hands.

A friend and NFL agent pushed her to keep going, insisting that despite losing her ability to speak, she possessed a formula for resilience worth putting on paper. She wrote much of the book at night, after full workdays, with no generative AI tools to assist her, only a laptop and persistence.

She is now cautious about how the next generation of writers and professionals use artificial intelligence. While she sees value in using it as a tool, she warned me against letting it replace original thought entirely.

“You will lose executive functioning, part of that brain will atrophy,” she said. “When businesses are looking for top talent, they’re going to look for the people that have the most critical thinking, and you will have lost it if you let AI take over.”

Staying Grounded in Gratitude

Throughout our conversation, Coach Dar returned repeatedly to gratitude, a discipline she traces back to her years working in hospitals, where she witnessed patients whose lives were permanently altered in an instant.

“How could you not be different walking out of that?” she said.

She extended this lens to the business world, arguing that many workplace conflicts amount to small grievances blown out of proportion by people unwilling to take ownership.

“No one’s dying here,” she said of typical workplace friction. “This isn’t life or death. It’s all figure outable. Just be radically honest, own it, come in trying to be the best that you can, and let’s get better every day.”

About me:

I am currently a Master Facilitator for The Elliott Group in addition to being on the board of advisors for our Cultural Transformation Department in ELLIOTT ARMY.

With over 14 years of client service experience, I have held substantial leadership roles in the automotive industry. I’m also an accredited coach, a speaker, a triathlon finisher, and a wife. To contact me for engagements, you can reach me at [email protected].

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