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Sean Michael Crane's Unstoppable Mindset
Sean Crane shares his story of Redemption and how his struggles early on in life helped him develop a mindset and perspective that he has used to cultivate the life of his dreams. Sean walks you through his most gruesome moments from seeing his mother overdose as a kid to watching his father in a standoff with police. After years of experiencing a living hell Sean was arrested and faced life in prison. Sean shares the most impactful moments behind bars and how they changed his life forever. After 5 1/2 years incarcerated Sean returned home a different person with a compelling vision to inspire the world. Now, a family man, successful entrepreneur and person of influence, Sean is on a mission to spread his message and impact lives across the globe with his lessons and the same breakthroughs that have helped him in his life to this point.
Sean Michael Crane's Unstoppable Mindset
3 Life-Changing Lessons from Prison
Freedom can be found even in the most confining circumstances. When I was 23 years old, I found myself facing life imprisonment for a crime I didn't commit. After taking a plea deal, I served five and a half years behind bars – years that unexpectedly became the foundation for my greatest personal transformation.
From the depths of county jail, where negative thoughts tormented me daily, I discovered the profound power of perspective. I realized my problems weren't inherently bad – it was my perception that created suffering. When I shifted from asking "why is this happening to me?" to "how might this experience benefit me?", everything changed. This mental pivot didn't alter my circumstances, but it completely transformed my emotional response, replacing hopelessness with possibility.
Prison stripped away everything, leaving me with profound appreciation for life's simplest pleasures – walking freely outdoors, hugging loved ones, making choices about my day. This acute awareness of life's precious nature has never left me. Now I wake each morning determined to make every moment count, not through extraordinary achievements, but through presence, authenticity, and positive impact. Through those challenging years, I developed the clarity to recognize what truly matters and the courage to pursue it without hesitation.
The most powerful lessons often come wrapped in our most painful experiences. Your current challenges, whatever they may be, contain the seeds of transformation if you're willing to shift your perspective. Don't wait for circumstances to force your awakening. Start today by questioning limiting thoughts, appreciating life's gifts, and honoring your authentic path. Your mindset determines your reality – choose one that empowers rather than constrains you.
Your problems are not bad. They're not inherently bad. It's the way that you think about them and the way that you perceive them and then the emotional reaction you have that makes them negative in your life. But you can take any set of circumstances adversity, pain, loss, tragedy, whatever it is and if you learn how to use your mind, you can find something in that set of circumstances that can actually help you. So for those of you that don't have what you want right now, you're not happy in your life, you got to start with high level awareness around your thoughts. You got to start challenge thoughts that are negative and limiting in your life. When you're in that position, you realize how precious life is and how much of it we waste and take for granted, granted.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to another episode of the Unstoppable Mindset Podcast. I'm your host, sean Crane. Thank you, guys for tuning into the message. This is going to be a really impactful message for anybody in life who wants more and maybe you feel stuck. Maybe you don't think that you're on the right path. You don't have the right attitude or mindset to be successful. This is going to help you.
Speaker 1:I'm going to share with you three impactful lessons I learned in prison. That changed my life. So, if you don't know, when I was 23 I was facing life in prison for a crime I didn't even do. I was facing life in prison. I was charged with attempted murder and I spent eight months in the county jail, going to court, you know, facing the judge, the DA, you know false accusers, all these things, man. The news press put my picture on the front page, said Sean Crane, charged with attempted murder, and it was stemming from a fight at a party that had turned into a stabbing in which one man almost died. All the while I proclaim my innocence, but no one believed me and there was very little I could do to prove my innocence. So I ended up taking a plea deal for assault with a deadly weapon and admitting guilt to something I didn't do to get a lesser sentence, and I was sentenced to seven years in prison and I ended up doing five and a half years.
Speaker 1:From the time I was 23 till right before I was 30 years old, I was in prison and in that time my whole world was transformed right. Five years is a long time to be away, let alone in an environment where you're never relaxed, you're never comfortable. Where you're never relaxed, you're never comfortable, you're never really happy. You know, I was in an environment where every day, you were very aware of what was going on and threats and danger and pain that you're experiencing, whether it was missing your family or being hungry or just those really desolate types of settings that we were in. But you know, what happened was when I was in county jail.
Speaker 1:I remember I was sitting there every day and I was waking up thinking to myself how is this happening to me? Like why, why am I being falsely accused of this crime? Like why is this happening to me? You know, and you start questioning things you know, like why is God doing this to me? Why is my life coming to an end? This isn't fair. And I just was being a victim. That's the truth. I was being a victim in the way I was thinking.
Speaker 1:I remember this really powerful thing happened. It was a shift in my own self-talk. I don't remember exactly, like when it happened, but I just remember thinking man, I'm not going to make it through this time in prison if I can't figure out how to get control of my own mental state. Like I was just going crazy with these thoughts every day they were torturing me, they were leading me to feel depressed, anxious, sad, all these negative emotions. And I remember one day I just thought, sean, what if this experience is actually going to help you? You know, like what if this experience going to jail is going to help you to get sober and avoid some accidental overdose or just like a miserable life struggling with addiction? Because before prison I was battling addiction for 10 years? And that was a thought that really was like challenging those negative thoughts I was having, because it was a positive thought, it was in a positive or at least hopeful outcome. And the next thought was that you know, maybe this experience is going to help me to figure out myself.
Speaker 1:For the longest time I was codependent with my dad, my uncles, friends, cousins in our lifestyle and I could never be my true self. I always was a part of that lifestyle, that mentality. I just never felt like I was authentically able to be myself and I felt it inside. I wasn't living the life I wanted, you know. And so I remember thinking what if this experience is going to get you away from all those people and finally help you to figure out who you are as a person?
Speaker 1:And like that was a positive thing, you know, and the ultimate one for me was believing that something divine was taking place, that divine intervention was happening in my life to maybe save my life or to alter the course of my life, and I remember I was sitting there thinking what if God has a plan for you that you can't see right now? But this is a blessing in disguise, and you hear people share about that all the time, people that have gone through horrendous things, extreme adversity, you know stuff that they never would have wished upon themselves. And then, years later, they talk about how it was a blessing in disguise, and I remember in that moment I just realized this could be one of those moments. This could be something that nobody would wish upon them ever Like. It was something out of a nightmare or a movie or a book that you've seen, and you think to yourself no way that happened, no way that actually happened, and it was happening to me.
Speaker 1:And so what it did is it forced me to make radical changes and how I was thinking, how I was operating in my life, and that's something that a lot of people can't do, people that don't change. They don't know how to shift their thinking. They don't know how to alter their perspective. You know, I talk to people all the time and they're always thinking about their problems and stuff that's happening to them and why they can't do this and why they can't do that. And, honestly, none of that shit even matters. It doesn't matter as much as the way that you're interpreting it does.
Speaker 1:And that's what I realized when I was sitting in my jail cell that, yeah, the judge and the lawyer wanted to send me to prison. For decades, all the people at the party falsely accused me. The people that knew the truth weren't coming forward to help me. Even my own lawyers didn't believe me. Like, yeah, all this stuff was true, but it didn't have as much of an impact over me and how I was feeling as my own thoughts did. You see, every day when I was having those negative thoughts, I was feeling so hopeless, and that's why people get suicidal and kill themselves in those situations. And so when I made that shift in my perspective and I started looking at my situation with potential positive outcomes, I felt a shift inside of me. You know now there was a little bit of hope, a little bit of optimism, and it made me start to reflect on my situation and perceive it as something that can actually help me in my life, and so that's the first thing that I want to share with you guys that prison taught me.
Speaker 1:Your problems are not bad. They're not inherently bad. It's the way that you think about them and the way that you perceive them and then the emotional reaction you have that makes them negative in your life. But you can take any set of circumstances adversity, pain, loss, tragedy, whatever it is and if you learn how to use your mind, you can find something in that set of circumstances that can actually help you. And it might be something that you can't utilize for years in your life, it might be a learning lesson that you can apply down the road, but whatever it is, you can extract something from that experience that could actually help you.
Speaker 1:Like, let's say, you lose somebody that you love God forbid. You lose a child, a loved one, a significant other man, and I've lost a lot of people in my life. Now, you can be sad about that and you can dwell on that and you can put it. Let it put you into a depression. Which people that go that route like? I don't fault you, I get it. We're human beings. We have emotions, but when people die in my life, I do the best to honor them in the way I live, going forward, and I picture them being in heaven or still part of me, right, energetically, spiritually, and I'm like I'm going to honor my mom, I'm going to honor my dad and the person I become. I'm going to honor my cousin man and live and give that much more to this life, because he's not here to do so and he doesn't get that chance, you know.
Speaker 1:And so what I do is I try to use negative situations and I try to turn them into positive opportunities for myself. And so the way I do that is I always ask myself Sean, how can you learn and grow from these circumstances? You know, what is the silver lining here? How can you use this as a catalyst to push you in a positive direction, like that's what winners do in life. They take any set of circumstances and they use it to their advantage, and that's what I've done ever since I was in jail, then prison and beyond. You know, anything that I've been facing, whether it was challenges in relationships or challenges in business or challenges on a personal level I'm always asking myself how can I learn and grow from this? What is God trying to teach me? How can I come from out from this situation a better version of myself than I was before I went into it?
Speaker 1:And that mindset will change your entire life, because a lot of people don't get what they want or get where they want to go. Not because life's unfair, not because there's not opportunity, not because you know there's a curse on them, not because they're parents, not because you were bullied as a kid, not because of any of that shit. It's because of the way you're thinking and your mindset is flawed. And if you could fix that, your whole world's going to change and you'll start to see it. You'll have a new lens in which you view the world and over time, time, you'll see different things, you'll have different stuff, you'll do different stuff.
Speaker 1:I promise you that, because here's the thing you must recognize about psychology and thinking right the way you think always has a meaning attached to it. So like, let's go back to me in jail when I was thinking about how my life was over and how no one believed me and how this wasn't fair and all these things. The meaning was a meaning that made me feel hopeless, like the. The meaning attached to it was hopelessness. It was that no one's coming to help you, that your life's over, like. What a despairing feeling to experience. Right, and anytime there's meaning attached to a thought, there's an emotional reaction. My emotional reaction was sadness, it was grief, it was anger, it was resentment, it was depression, and so from there that affects your actions.
Speaker 1:So when you change your thoughts and you start to alter your perspective and now, the meaning that I attached with mine was like, hopeful and optimistic, and it gave me courage, it gave me faith and that affected my daily actions. That's why, in prison, I was able to make everyday count. It's because of that shift in my thinking. So, for those of you that don't have what you want right now, you're not happy in your life you got to start with high level awareness around your thoughts. You got to start challenge thoughts that are negative and limiting in your life and you got to do what I do and shift them into potentially positive thoughts, even if it's like dude, somehow some way down the road this is going to benefit me and you don't even know how thinking that way is better than being a victim and thinking negatively.
Speaker 1:Now the second thing I want to share with you guys is just life is precious, and when I sat there incarcerated in a cell that I couldn't leave, I would have given anything to be able to get out and do anything. I remember joking like with a cellmate and being like dude. I wish I could just go outside and roll in the mud right now down a hill like a kid. Like go pick flowers, go walk on the beach, go hold a girl's hand God. Get to cuddle with a woman. Like can you imagine that? Get to go eat ice cream. Get to go out in the sunset. Get to go run up in the foothills. Get to go swim in the ocean. Like get to I didn't call or talk to, or like I was short with. Like go tell them I'm sorry, make amends.
Speaker 1:When you're in that position, you realize how precious life is and how much of it we waste and take for granted. So the second thing that changed my life when I was in prison was understanding how valuable this gift is and not wanting to waste a second, and so what it's done for me ever since is I truly wake up every day and ask myself like how can I make this the best day of my life. It doesn't mean that I have to have these astronomical things take place, these monumental milestone moments. It just means that where I'm at, I'm present, I'm giving my all and I'm really pushing myself to be my best and I'm pushing myself to make other people feel good. I want to impact other people, you know, I want to bring joy into people's lives. I want to be my best, true self in everything I do, and so life is precious. That's the second thing I learned.
Speaker 1:If you're taking it for granted, if you're complaining about stuff, you have no idea how bad it could be. Or like, imagine if you woke up tomorrow and you're in a hospital bed. You know, and you had gotten in a car accident you can't even remember, but now you're paralyzed from the waist down. Imagine, imagine how much you just wish you had your body. You could walk, you know, you could go outside and be in the fresh air. Like, think about when you're sick. All you want when you're sick is to feel better, right, like when you're sick, all you want to do is just feel not sick, feel normal. Well, that's kind of what I went through, but on a really profound level, right with my life like I thought my whole life was over. I was 23. They were saying in prison, I had a blue band on in jail. That means you're facing a life sentence and it just really put things in perspective for me how quickly your life could be taken from you, how precious it is. And so, while you're here, make it count.
Speaker 1:Go after your dreams, be a good person. Let go of the bullshit that holds you back. Get away from toxic people. Put good food in your body. Take care of your health. Get outside, go run, go to the beach, exercise, go travel places. If you can Go after your dream job. Don't settle Like, don't limit yourself. Know your worth. Don't allow people around you that hold you back to be around you. Don't make bad, freaking choices. Everything you do is going to shape and mold the life that you create. Go all in.
Speaker 1:Like all the cliche and corny things that people say are so true. Live each day like it's your last. Like I don't know what the other ones are, I can't think of them right now. Like like, be a good person. Give your all, be all you can, be like the army. All that stuff is so true. I remember sitting in jail, going oh my gosh, all the corny bullshit that I used to clown and thought was a joke. It's all true, like all the things that you see in commercials or all the stuff that elderly people tell you. It's all true, and one day you're gonna potentially realize that in a painful way, because you wasted too much time.
Speaker 1:And I know a lot of people that die with regrets, a lot of people that die never even being close to their full potential or doing what they want in life. In fact, there's some statistic out there. I don't know how people figure this stuff out, but they must've asked a bunch of people on their deathbeds their main regret in life, and the majority of them said that they didn't live the life that they truly wanted, that they lived the life where they settled. They limit themselves, or oftentimes they live the life based on other people's expectations for them, not their own, whether it's family members, society, their community, whatever it is their religion, their country that they were in. Don't limit yourselves, because that's going to come back to haunt you one day as regret.
Speaker 1:And so this leads into the last thing that I recognized and really changed my life when I was in jail, and that was we got to be honest with ourselves about what we want, who we want to be, you know. You got to be honest with yourself because so many people have a truth inside their heart and then they have a version of themselves. They showed the world, they have their authenticity and then the mask they put on, they have their goals, their dreams. God put those dreams in your heart for a reason. Like you have an intuition, you know who you want to be, you have a path you're supposed to travel in this life. That's your purpose, like it's here for you, right? That's why you're on this earth. But so many people second guess it. They let fear stop them, they question themselves, they listen to others, their influence, they settle, they get lazy. But if you do that, you're going to suffer for the rest of your life because you know inside of you that there's something more out there for you and you can feel it.
Speaker 1:And so that's what jail did for me. It allowed me to have an interruption in my life, a pattern interruption that gave me five and a half years to reflect on all these things I'm sharing with you today, to integrate them into my psychology, into my freaking DNA, and then to put it into action. For five and a half years, it didn't matter if I was in jail. Every day I was up early, working out, reading books, you know, positively impacting people around me, wanting to be a good person even in that negative setting.
Speaker 1:And so what I did is I shifted my identity over time, I shifted my mindset, I ingrained these habits into the way I live. So when I came home, I was able to go all in on my dreams and build the life I always wanted for myself. Those three learning lessons if you apply them in your life the way I did, over time they will massively transform who you are, how you feel, how you live, how you impact others and, ultimately, the life that you create for yourself. I want you guys to live the ultimate life. I want you to live the dream life, but only you can do it for yourself. So from this moment forward, you got to go all in and go 100 miles per hour and never look back.
