How I Became A Public Speaker

The ability to speak with conviction can transform your life and put you in rooms with the world's most influential people. As someone who has shared stages with Ed Milet, Tim Grover, Jesse Itzler, and Charlie Kirk, I've experienced firsthand how mastering communication opens extraordinary doors—but my journey to that mastery began in the most unlikely place: a prison cell.

Before incarceration, I lived with what I call "false bravado"—confidence that only emerged when partying or using substances. When sober, deep insecurities surfaced. At 23, sitting in jail with a decade of wasted potential behind me, I made a decision that would alter the trajectory of my life: to focus relentlessly on personal development. I began with the fundamentals—reading books, improving my writing, and meticulously building my vocabulary through daily dictionary work. This wasn't just about words; it was about reprogramming my brain to think and speak differently.

My first attempt at public speaking in a prison program was disastrous—voice quivering, face flushed, confidence shattered. This experience with glossophobia (fear of public speaking) could have deterred me completely. Instead, I recognized that everything I wanted existed on the other side of that fear. I raised my hand at every opportunity, volunteering to speak until eventually becoming an inmate counselor leading discussions. After release, I leveraged social media to further refine my skills, recording videos daily and critiquing every aspect of my delivery until my messages became automatic.

This transformation didn't happen overnight—it's been 13 years in the making. Most people abandon their goals after months of inconsistent effort, but exceptional results demand exceptional commitment. Are you willing to invest a decade becoming the person you aspire to be? The only way to reach that level is by creating an undeniable track record that convinces not just others, but your own subconscious mind, that you are who you claim to be. Stop waiting and start demanding what you want from life today.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Power of Articulate Speech
• 3:02 Prison Journey to Better Communication
• 8:12 Facing the Fear of Public Speaking
• 12:30 Creating an Undeniable Track Record
• 15:22 Getting on Stage with Top Speakers
• 17:09 Are You Willing to Put in Years?

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

The ability to speak an articulate message and inspire, move, persuade and influence people is such a valuable skill set. That skill set right there will get you in the room of the top one percenters in the world. If you stand for something that you believe in and you speak with conviction and certainty and you do it over and over and over and you really want your voice to be heard by the masses, you start to get around the most influential people in the world. Welcome back to another episode of the Unstoppable Mindset Podcast. I'm your host, sean Crain. We're here in beautiful Goleta, california, 805. If you're from the 805, go ahead and drop a comment below. Make sure to share this episode and this message with somebody that wants to be inspired, that's looking for direction or focus or purpose in life. You guys, all I want to be, is an example, and that means for me, every day, I got to strive for excellence. I got to go above and beyond every day in everything that I do. If I truly care about you, my family, if the words that I share hold value and have meaning, I need to back them up with so much action, with so much results, that they are undeniable. And that's what I'm striving to be is an undeniable figure that has a track record of success and always doing what he says he's going to do, being authentic, showing up, pouring my heart and soul into the world and every message every day that I get. That's my goal and I'm fired up, you guys, and you know I had someone ask me the other day, sean, how do you become a public speaker? How do you start speaking on stages? I've been able to speak on stages all over the country with some amazing, amazing people Ed Milet, tim Grover, jesse Itzler, marcus Luttrell, I mean. The last event I was at that I spoke at, charlie Kirk was the keynote and we all know Charlie Kirk just got assassinated, right, and I've been sharing a lot of content about that. But in this particular message I want to talk about my journey to becoming a public speaker and getting close to people like that. You know, the ability to speak an articulate message and inspire, move, persuade and influence people is such a valuable skill set. That skill set, right there, will get you in the room of the top one percenters in the world If you stand for something that you believe in and you speak with conviction and certainty and you do it over and, over and over and you really want your voice to be heard by the masses, you start to get around the most influential people in the world, right? There's an old saying, right, like the pen is mightier than the sword, well, the tongue is mightier than the sword. What does that mean? That means that the ability to speak eloquently, the ability to be influential in your speech, in your speaking, it is such a valuable skill set. You can get people inspired to change. You can help people to change their whole mindset. You can help people to overcome years of trauma or setbacks or procrastination if you know how to speak to people and get them inspired for change. And so for me, this has been a decade plus in the making.

Speaker 1: 2:59

I want to take you all the way back to when I got incarcerated. Now, prior to going to jail, I wasn't a guy with a ton of confidence. I had what you call false bravado. Okay, when I drank or partied and did drugs, I was very outgoing and fun to be around. I had false bravado. But when I was sober and I would come down off of that high, I was very insecure. I didn't have confidence, and that's why I use drugs and drink to numb out that feeling, to mask that feeling.

Speaker 1: 3:28

They say that alcohol is liquid courage. Or when you're younger I'm sure a lot of you can relate to this like going to parties. Or when you first start talking to girls. Or maybe for you, girls, when you first start talking to boys, you have a couple of drinks and you loosen up and you feel better. All of a sudden, you have that false bravado, you feel like you can be the way you want to be. Your inhibitions are lessened, right. Well, for me, that was the way I was as a young person. But the problem with that I wasn't building genuine confidence in myself. You know, confidence comes from having an undeniable track record of you showing up and going above and beyond to get results in your life. That's when you become undeniable in your subconscious mind. Right, that's what everybody needs to strive for.

Speaker 1: 4:06

But when I was 23 and I went to jail, I didn't have that. I had just wasted the past 10 years of my life. So I just had a track record of not doing anything I was proud of, and I remember man wanting to be a person who I felt proud of, wanting to be esteemed, wanting to be able to look in the mirror and be like dude, you're really doing something in your life. And I didn't have that at that moment. And so I remember, in jail I just started focusing on what I could do each and every day to better myself and I share this story all the time because it literally changed my life. But I started reading books. I started writing letters back home focusing on improving my penmanship, my grammar, my spelling, all that stuff, and I started looking up words in the dictionary.

Speaker 1: 4:42

Now, I started doing this early on. Number one I was reading books because I had nothing to do. I was writing letters back and forth to my dad and I remember I got a letter from him and he was critiquing my spelling and he was like telling me about all these words I misspelled and grammar and punctuation that was off. And I was like damn, like I didn't like that. I took it as a personal challenge and I remember thinking to myself well, I have nothing but time in the cell. I'm going to make sure that I write every letter back to my dad perfectly flawlessly. And I started doing that and I remember in a short period of time he wrote me back. He goes, man, your letters are amazing, like you're getting help from somebody, like how are you learning how to spell and write this way?

Speaker 1: 5:17

And what was happening was every book that I was reading I'd come across all these words I didn't know the meaning or definition of. And I'm sure when you read, sometimes you come across a word and you don't know the exact meaning of it. But with the context and the sentence you can kind of put two and two together. I used to do that all the time. I'd just skip over the word and keep going. But I remember because I had all day long in this cell. I thought to myself why am I not looking up these words and memorizing them? So, like a little kid, in second, third, fourth grade, I started keeping a vocab list. I started writing down all these words and their definition and the type of speech right Verb, adjective noun and I would go through every day and memorize them and memorize them and quiz myself. And before long I had papers all over my cell with vocab lists. And not only would I memorize them, but I started then using those words in my letters back home to my dad and other family members. I started using those words when I would talk and converse to my cellmate, even on the phone, talking to people, even to the inmates, even to my lawyers, it didn't matter.

Speaker 1: 6:16

I wanted to change this bad you guys. This is what change really looks like. A lot of you say you want to change. You're not willing to do the mundane work every day, for as long as it takes I mean like the tedious shit, right, like some of you want to change your health and fitness, but you don't have attention to detail with every meal that you eat, you don't scrutinize every macro you put in your body. You're not taking every rep to failure. You're not really pushing yourself. So in life, if you want to get results, if you want to evolve, you have to push yourself like you've never pushed yourself before. If you think you're working hard right now but you don't have the results, it's because you're not working hard. You're not. You get what you demand.

Speaker 1: 6:54

In this life, I wanted to be somebody who was articulate. I wanted to be someone who was outgoing. When I first started changing my life, I had a vision of the person I wanted to be, and I remember always seeing actors in the old movies and even the newer movies. Whoever, the main character was the guy with charisma, the guy who got the girls, the guy who killed the bad guys, the guy who stole the spotlight. They were always well-spoken, they always had charisma, they always had good energy about them. I wanted to be like that in my life. I wanted to be the main character and the superstar. It's the way I felt ever since I was a child.

Speaker 1: 7:31

But I lost that version of myself when I was an adolescent, right, and I was hell-bent on getting back to my truest, authentic self, and so that's why I wanted to be good at speaking and that's why I started reading books and writing these letters home to perfection every day, because that was a reflection of me becoming that person. You know. So, dude, I literally had a pocket dictionary and I would look words up in that thing all day long and I would write these words down. I'd write their definition and manner of speech down, and I started to use those words in my letters back home and when I was speaking to people. And what happened was it started to create a new program in my brain. I started to speak differently, I started to think differently, I was more eloquent, I was articulate, and so this, over years and years and years started to change my speech patterns and, like I said, the way that I would articulate myself to people. But then I actually had to put it into motion.

Speaker 1: 8:16

To become a public speaker. It's not enough just to be able to have an extensive vocabulary. You got to know how to speak to people. You have to know cadence, you have to know when to bring your emotion and your passion into something and then when to tone it down. You know, you have to know how to use pauses. You have to really be able to connect with your audience. It's very, you know, it's almost. It's an art form, public speaking.

Speaker 1: 8:39

And so the first time I got a chance to speak in front of people, I didn't have this experience. I was actually in a drug program in prison and I got in front of all these inmates and I choked, my voice quivered, my face got red, I was nervous and all I was doing was telling the truth about my life and my battle with addiction. But it was because I was speaking in front of people for the first time. My nerves were rattled, I wasn't used to it, and they say that public speaking is one of the greatest fears humans possess. It's actually called glossophobia, which is from a Greek word, glossa. That means, you know, fear of the tongue. And I remember in that moment I hated the way I felt. I went and sat down in the audience amongst other inmates after I got done speaking in front of them you know, in all these chairs that we were all sitting in and they were clowning me and making fun of me and I hated that feeling and I remember I realized like I don't want to feel that way. I got to master the art of public speaking. I had to face that fear head on.

Speaker 1: 9:34

This is where a lot of people go wrong. You want to become a certain person, you want to achieve certain results in your life. But when times get tough, when there's resistance, when you don't do as good as you want to do, when you're met with adversity, how do you show up the next day? How do you react to that? You guys, anything that you want to be in life, all the results that you want, are on the other side of that fear. You have to push through it. A lot of times the fears are magnified in our own brain because, like for me, that feeling of choking in front of all those people and just being embarrassed. I hated it and I could have let that feeling make me feel less than I could have like, oh, I'm never doing that again. That's most people's initial reaction, right? But instead I said, screw that, I'm going to do this as many times as I have to to ensure I never have that feeling again. I'm going to master the art of public speaking.

Speaker 1: 10:17

And so every time I got the chance in that jail, in that prison, in the program I was in for the next X number of years, I'd raise my hand in these groups and I'd speak in front of all the inmates. And it got to the point where I got really good at speaking and sharing my story. Then they promoted me to inmate counselor. I'm literally in the same program, leading lessons and teaching the other inmates. In a very short period of time I went from somebody that couldn't speak in front of others to somebody who could not only speak eloquently in front of other inmates but actually start getting them to open up and share, get them to talk about their past, get them to talk about the changes they want to make. This was not only me becoming good at speaking, but me becoming a leader for other people, a coach, somebody who can make an impact in life. It happened because I was working on developing my skill sets, because I had clarity around who I wanted to be, but then I wasn't going to let the resistance and the fear and the doubt inside of me stop me and a lot of people do, and that's never. That's why they never get to where they want to go in life. You know, and a couple other things that I want to share with you.

Speaker 1: 11:15

At that time, something powerful was taking place inside of me and I started looking at myself as a different person. This had been three years of me just working on myself, not just public speaking, but educating myself, working out my personal development, my growth every day, and I started thinking about what was possible in life. I started thinking about how I was helping these other inmates and getting them to open up and share about their life, their goals, their mistakes, and I started seeing myself in a different light, as someone who could truly be a catalyst to help others. And I would sit on my rack at night and I would close my eyes and I would envision myself giving entire speeches to these vast audiences and I would be able to see their faces, like I was there in the moment and I was just articulating this powerful message word for word, just on point, hitting them with the emotion, hitting them with those one-liners, getting them to think about their lives, triggering a transformation for people in the audience. I would envision those moments over and over and over and honestly.

Speaker 1: 12:15

Anytime I got a chance to tell my family or other inmates, or even counselors, or even the guards, what I wanted to do with my life, I didn't shy away from speaking the truth. I would tell people I want to coach, I want to speak, I want to write a book, I want to go out and make an impact in the world. And sometimes you'd get responses from people like oh, really, you know? Like, oh, like. How are you going to do that? You know people always are going to judge, they're always going to doubt you. But if you can call your shot and stand firm in your beliefs and you have conviction in what you want to do, there's nothing that can stop you in this life.

Speaker 1: 12:46

But in order to get to that point, like I said earlier, you want to create a track record of undeniable evidence that you are who you say you are, so that your subconscious mind grabs hold of that belief and, no matter what people say about you, you have a core belief of competence and confidence that you've created over time. The only way you do this is by being repetitive and consistent and developing these skills right and doing it over and over and over and over and over, and facing fears and pushing through them. It doesn't matter what's in your path. You got to fight through it. That's the only way I was able to get here to this point today.

Speaker 1: 13:22

So all that took place before I even stepped foot out of my jail cell, out of the prison that I was in. But then I use social media to enhance it, to sharpen myself, and I remember recording videos and then watching them back and like cringing, like oh damn, that was my facial expressions. That's how I sound. You know. I thought I was like this world class speaker because I have been doing it in jail and I got good at writing and I had developed myself, but I was nowhere near the level that I need to be at. So I started recording videos on social media every day and the cool thing is, when you go live, you could see yourself and I remember I would change my facial expressions, I would practice my cadence, I would work on these speeches all the time. All my one-liners, all my stories, all the messages, all the things that I touch on. I've said them thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of times, to the point where now it's just automatic. When I step on stage and I get a mic, I get an audience. I know exactly just how to tap in it's repetition. It's automatic to this point, you know.

Speaker 1: 14:30

But then to actually get on those big platforms for the guy like a Charlie Kirk or a guy like a Marcus Latrell or Ed Milad number one speaker in the world, jesse Itzler, probably the best speaker in the world If you've ever seen him live, you know what I'm talking about I had to demand that I got on that stage. What I mean by that is I would go directly to the event coordinator, I would message them, I'd build a relationship with them through social media or at another event I was networking at, or maybe they heard of me through, you know, a client or a mutual acquaintance. But I would always let it be known what I wanted to do. What was that purpose God put on my heart? And I tell them, man, I want to change lives. I want to share my story. I want to impact your audience. I want to get them to think differently. I want them to look at their lives and realize how precious it is, and I want to get them to live with more urgency and understand what's at stake. Like, give me a chance to share my story, give me a chance to get on that stage and change your audience members' lives, like I will. I promise you that.

Speaker 1: 15:25

And what is the first thing that these people would do I guarantee you, without even seeing them do it is they would go check out my social media and, because I put out so much content and put in all that work and all that practice and all that repetition, all those videos that I shared with you earlier, they'd see something in me right, the undeniable track record of me doing the work. They would see that right In my videos, in my skillset, and it would give them the confidence that I could go on stage and add value to their event. So that's how I've been able to get on stage and speak with some of the most eloquent, impactful speakers of our time. Tim Story is another one. If you've heard Tim Story speak, I spoke with him twice and he's incredible, and these are all individuals that I look up to that I wanna emulate that. I always take little bits and pieces of what they're doing and I wanna make it my own, but this is something that God put on my heart. I'm passionate about it, I love doing it and the reason I wanted to share this clip is because that's been 13 years now in the making to get to this point and share with you guys what I've been doing.

Speaker 1: 16:22

I want to ask you something. You know you only get to live once and the things that God's put on your heart and the goals you have and the visions about who you want to become like, those are special. Those are for you and nobody else. Are you willing to put 10 years in plus to become that person, to get these opportunities that you say you want? Because a lot of people talk about what they want but after six months or a year or whatever, they stop, they quit, they give up.

Speaker 1: 16:45

And there's a lot of you out there. I've coached a lot of you. I've spoke to a lot of you at events. I see a lot of you at the same reoccurring events and you're the same you were the year before, but you tell me about your goals and you tell me about what you're passionate about and you tell me why you want to do it, but you're not changing. You're not really all in and that's why you're the same and you're stuck. And so, man, I just want you to recognize that you get a gift here an opportunity to go out and create and become somebody that's exceptional. The only way you get to that point is by creating a track record of undeniable evidence that you are who you say you want to become, meaning you put in the work, you face the fears, you develop the skills and you get whatever it is you have to have in this life. Demand what you want, call your shot and get up today and go out and get after it.