Expected to die at birth, Sean Stephenson has faced an army of reasons to give up and countless opportunities to embrace pity. He suffered more than 200 bone fractures by age 18, reached a height of only 3 feet, and is permanently confined to a wheelchair. However, this man took a stand for a quality of life that has inspired millions of people around the world, including Tony Robbins and President Clinton.
Over the past decade, Sean has found that individuals are notorious for making excuses. Sean not only addresses the excuses, but also the ‘BUTS’ that fuel the insecurities behind them. He has created a movement committed to educating students how to get off their ‘BUTS’ and STAND in life. Taking people on a journey through human potential, Sean proves that we can all triumph with the power of STANDING.
SEAN STEPHENSON: Thank you.
JANET ATTWOOD: I’d be really interested to know how you reversed it, or did you have to? Were you just born Mr. Positive? Can you tell us the story of how you got there?
SEAN STEPHENSON: I have no magical fairy dust. I didn’t pop out of Mom and say, Hey, everybody, you can do it! Look at me! I love my life, and every day is peachy! No. In fact, I think people sit in my audience and look at me onstage, and the way they can get away from the truth that I’m spewing is they say, That might work for Sean because he went through all that pain. He was probably positive since day one. Then they can say, I wasn’t, so I’m not like Sean, and they can emotionally check out.
That’s such bunk. It’s not true. Every day I wake up I have to make a conscious choice, Today am I going to commit to a life of happiness, or am I going to commit to a life of struggle? This is a day-to-day experience. If someone just spent some time with me and followed me around when the cameras aren’t there, I’m not on stage, and I’m just in my PJs in my house, they would see that I get upset. I practically cried this morning. Things happen to me. The thing is that I fall down just like everybody else.
I just bounce back up quicker because I realize that you never get anywhere on the ground. You never get anywhere curled up in the fetal position sucking on your thumb at 30 years old, or 50 or 70. You just don’t. It’s a matter of saying, That wasn’t fun. I’m brushing myself off. Let’s look at a lot of the tools I’m going to share with you today. Let’s go do what you do when life works. Go do what you do when life works, and you’ll get your life working again.
JANET ATTWOOD: I love this next question because it’s exactly what I’ve been going through a lot. How do you think a person’s life circumstances influence or lead them to discover their life purpose? This is my whole thing: life purpose, passion, and all of that. How do you think a person’s life circumstances lead them to discover that?
SEAN STEPHENSON: I don’t think it necessarily does. I think there are a lot of people who never find their purpose, and that’s sad to me. It’s a very sad reality that a lot of people never go on a mission to find their purpose. They’re miserable because all they can do is chase gratification. All they can do is slam a bunch of sugary, greasy, heavy, caloric food into their belly to try to feel good.
They drink, smoke, do drugs, intimidate others, check out on mindlessly surfing the Internet, or have a bunch of mindless non-connective sex. The closest they’ll ever get to feeling good is temporary gratification. I realized one day that that never works. Every time you go seek out gratification, meaning that instant good feeling that doesn’t last, it’s like you poke a hole in your soul and more of you oozes out.
The more you keep poking, the more your soul oozes out, and you wonder, Why am I drained? Why am I scared? Why am I lonely? It’s because you’ve been seeking out a life of gratification and not a life of fulfillment. The only way I’ve found to be truly fulfilled is to get on your purpose. First, find your purpose, and then get on it. It’s all about focusing on, Why am I here?
Your purpose must be to solve a problem for the human race or the planet. If you’re not solving a problem for the human race or the planet, you’re going to end up creating them. You’re going to end up being the one making the problems. Your purpose is buried inside of your pain. It’s there because you wouldn’t truly understand the depth of how powerful it was if you didn’t have to go through the hell to find it.
If you didn’t have to go through the layers of complexity of dark emotions to come out the other side, you wouldn’t truly value it. If I just handed you your purpose and said, This is totally free. You don’t have to do anything for it. It’s going to be easy for you to do, you’d say, I’ll get around to it.
JANET ATTWOOD: I love what you just said. Your purpose is buried inside your pain. Can you tell people what you mean by that a little bit more?
SEAN STEPHENSON: Absolutely. When I look back at my life, I had a life-altering moment when I found my greatest source of pain, which is that, what I’m having to go through isn’t fair. From that, I went deeper into that feeling of, It’s not fair. Why me? Who among us can’t relate? I went deep into that, and what I found was that in every moment, everything is either a gift or a burden. The beautiful thing to life is that you choose. You choose.
When I chose gift at a very young age, it didn’t mean that the pain went away. It didn’t mean that my life got easier. It meant that I found the hook point. I found my jet fuel. I found what I needed to go through pain to head towards my greater purpose, which is to teach all of humanity that you can love life and yourself amidst pain. It’s not an either/or.
It’s not, I’m out of pain, or I’m in pain. It’s, I can be in pain and love my life. Most people numb themselves, Janet. I know a little tiny sliver of your life, and I know that you’ve had moments, and you’ve definitely come across those people in your audiences. When pain gets too strong, we reach out for numbing agents. I’ve never seen a problem solved through ignoring it.
JANET ATTWOOD: I want you to give a really specific personal example of your purpose being buried inside your pain. Just bottom-line it.
SEAN STEPHENSON: You mean the moment that I found it?
JANET ATTWOOD: Yes.
SEAN STEPHENSON: I would say it happened when I was in fourth grade. There was one day out of the year, Janet, where everybody else got all dressed up, and I could finally blend in. Most people spend their whole lives wanting to stick out, to be seen, and to be heard, but when you’re born radically different, you want nothing more than to be able to put on a baseball cap and disappear into a crowd, especially as a child. One day out of the year as a child I could do that, and that was on Halloween.
I remember one morning in fourth grade I was in my costume right before school. My mom was making my lunch in the kitchen and taking the backpacks out to the car. I was rolling around on the floor out of my wheelchair in my costume. I was so excited, Janet. I couldn’t wait to show it off to my friends. I caught my left leg on the corner of the doorframe, bent it back, and snapped it at the femur, the biggest bone.
If you’ve ever broken a femur, you know it feels like someone stabbed you with a knife and began to twist the knife, put a clamp on it, and tighten the clamp. It’s this horrific pain that you just can’t meditate yourself out of. It’s there. It’s in your face, and you’re stuck with it. I remember having this white hot anger. I think it may be the most angry I’ve ever been in my life.
This white hot anger shot through my body not because I was having to go through pain, but because I knew that I was going to miss my favorite day of the year. I would have to wait another entire year to get a chance to have that special moment of blending in and getting to be like everybody else. I was furious, and I felt like I was being punished for a crime I had not committed. Have you ever had a moment, Janet, in your life where you felt like you were being punished for a crime you didn’t commit?
JANET ATTWOOD: I have had a number of those.
SEAN STEPHENSON: It’s horrible. I’m not going to sugar-coat it. I was angry, and I was filled with self-pity. I was angry at God and overwhelmed. My mom came into the room, and she always calmed me down when I would break a bone because they couldn’t take me to the doctors. There was nothing the doctors could do. My mom would run her fingers through my hair and say, Shhh, Sean. We need to relax, sweetie.
Let’s think about the last vacation we went on and how much fun we had. What did you love about our last vacation? She was trying to transport my mind from the pain. I was so angry that day that I didn’t want to play any more games. I was furious, Janet. My mom could see that in my eyes. She leaned back and formulated a question that forever changed the course of my life, and I alluded to it already. She said, Is this,-‘this’ being my condition, going to be a gift or a burden in your life?
It was like this warm wind of wisdom that we can’t explain in science, but I know what I felt. It just came rushing into the living room and surrounded my body, and I had instant clarity. The clarity was this: I loved my life with all that pain. Maybe the purpose of my condition, maybe why I had to go through it, was to teach the rest of the human race how to love their life amidst their pain.
JANET ATTWOOD: That’s so beautiful, isn’t it? Boy, it’s not without a cost, right?
SEAN STEPHENSON: Yes, it was a horrible cost. That wasn’t the end of the broken bones. I fractured up until the point where I was about 18 or 19 years old, over and over. I would wake up every morning wondering, Today am I going to be in excruciating pain? What that moment taught me, Janet, is that it’s not the facts. It’s not the fact that I have this condition. It’s not the fact that somebody had to go through a divorce or was born with a metabolism that makes it a lot harder to keep thin.
It’s not the facts of our challenges. It’s our interpretation of the facts that make all the difference. That’s why there are some people in my condition who are miserable and die lonely, scared, and feeling like the world wasn’t fair to them. They did nothing with their lives. Then you have other people like me and many others, hopefully, who say, You know what? This is what I got, and I’m going to play it. I’m going to use it, shake it, move it, and share it with the world.
JANET ATTWOOD: I love that, Sean. You can see that your interpretation is definitely that every moment is a gift. It just shows up. Everything is energy, and when you got on stage when we were in Calgary and rocked that room, it was just so much more than the words you were speaking. It was who you were being that was speaking so loudly. It was so loud.
I’ll never forget it. It was like one standing ovation after another after another. It’s because people are craving this. What you have is you’re so transparent. Transparency is what people trust, and that’s who you are. Thank you for that.
SEAN STEPHENSON: You’re welcome. It’s not easy. I know that may not sound very inspiring, but the things that have come to me that are the most valuable, Janet, did not come easily. I love the Law of Attraction. I love when people say, Some of the best things in life are free. I agree with all of that, and I think there’s also this other element where if something is just handed to us and we didn’t work for it, we don’t value it.
JANET ATTWOOD: I was interviewing Tony Robbins sometime last year, and one of the things he said was, Janet, don’t you oftentimes look at the things that are the hardest for you to go and grow through and say to yourself, ‘Boy, that was the one that really was the gift’? It was one of the hard ones.
SEAN STEPHENSON: You know he was one of my close mentors growing up.
JANET ATTWOOD: You are one lucky guy, and so was he. I’m sure you were one of his mentors growing up, too. Now I want to get to your book. You have this great book, Get Off Your But: How to End Self-sabotage and Stand Up for Yourself, that points out that many of us keep ourselves from-and you were just saying it-living a full life because we sabotage ourselves. How do you tell people what to do to change those patterns?
SEAN STEPHENSON: There are six lessons in the book. I’m going to cover two of them quickly with you. One of the things that a lot of people don’t think of when they think of self-sabotage is the people around them. Because we hear self-sabotage, we think it’s all about the self. I would love it if you could jot this down somewhere, Janet, because I think this will be one of the coolest things to have on your person.
I know that I’ve carried it with me for years. When you’re in the environment, you become the environment. We don’t like to hear that because our egos say, No, I’m bigger than my environment. I’m stronger. I can turn things down. I can say no to bad things. Yes, for a while. I know for certain, Janet, that if I hung out in a dilapidated home where everybody inside was smoking crack-if I hung out there long enough-it would only be a matter of time before I would smoke crack.
I know that sounds wild, but it’s true because who you are is not shaped when you’re having your best days. It’s the decisions you make when you’re having your worst days. On your worst days, if you’re exhausted, scared, and lonely, and you turn to someone who hands you a toxic piece of advice or activity and says, This works for me, you’re going to say, Okay.
I believe that a big part of ending self-sabotage is cleaning up your environment, who you surround yourself with, and who you choose to call your friends. I think a friend is who you call when you have a bad day. No one, if they have a nine-to-five job-unless they’re friends with this person-calls up their boss when they’re having a bad day. Nobody goes to the DMV, snuggles up with a complete stranger in line, and says, I’m having a bad day. Can you just hold me?
We don’t do that. What do we do? We reach out to our friends when we’re having a bad day. When we’re having a bad day, a day that’s really a challenge to our soul, and we get bad advice or activities as suggestions, we end up taking them because we want nothing more than support, and we’ll take bad support if it’s all that’s available.
JANET ATTWOOD: That is so brilliant. I would agree with you 100% on that one.
SEAN STEPHENSON: Good. Let’s see if we agree 100% on this next piece of advice.
JANET ATTWOOD: So far, so good.
SEAN STEPHENSON: Okay, good. The second thing is talked about so much in the personal growth industry, but I don’t know if it really can ever be said enough, and that is our inner dialogue. Who you are is two-fold. It’s what you say on the outside and what you say on the inside. The world can think you’re so positive, loving, and dedicated because of what you keep saying and doing on the outside.
If on the inside you’re beating yourself up, tearing yourself down, saying you’re not enough, and you go to bed with your head on the pillow with your worst enemy talking in your ear, that’s not right. That’s not healthy, good, or acceptable. If most people talked to their friends and their boss the way they talk to themselves, they’d be out of a job and have no friends.
JANET ATTWOOD: Say that again. I love that.
SEAN STEPHENSON: If most people talked to their boss and their friends the way they talked to themselves, they’d be unemployed with no friends. We’re so hard on ourselves, Janet. Even the leaders, the people shaking this planet, the people who are so kind and loving to others, the things they say to themselves!
JANET ATTWOOD: It’s so funny that you mentioned this particular one. Last night, I was showing these clothes I just bought to my girlfriends. Marci Shimoff and I had just gone shopping, and I was showing them to her and saying, Gosh, I don’t know about this one. Look at my chin. It’s kind of showing. No, look at this. All of a sudden, one of my friends said, Janet, I’m so surprised.
I said, What? She said, You’re so positive, up, happy, and all these things, and what’s this? I was kind of making these jokes, but you know, Sean, there are no jokes, right? It was a really great moment for me. It was like, Whoa, it’s ‘Groundhog Day’ backwards. I loved what you said. You have your days.
I think this is really important for all the people who are on this call and listening. What you said is that even the top transformational leaders in the world have their days and moments where they’re backing up and doing a Groundhog Day, which is a do-over. Okay, let’s see. Let’s look at that chin again. Oh, it’s a beautiful chin. I love you.
SEAN STEPHENSON: One of the things that I look at is that you need to speak to yourself with more respect, you need to speak to yourself with more love, and you need to speak to yourself with more appreciation. Imagine you have this tiny little toddler who just looks up into your eyes, and they have these big, brown or blue-it doesn’t matter what color-eyes, and they’re looking at you and saying, Am I enough? Do you love me?
Your heart would melt, and you’d say, Of course you are. Of course I do, sweetie. You’d scoop them up and give them a big hug. That child lives in you, and you’d better take as good care of it as you would the real-life form that would be standing in front of you. It’s so easy to think, No one really knows what I’m thinking on the inside, so I’m going to tear myself to shreds. On the outside, I’m going to act like I have it together.
If humans could listen to each other’s inner dialogue, we would shape up so fast, because we would be so embarrassed by how rude we are to ourselves. Anybody you’ve ever met who was just a miserable human being and hard to be around, I promise you that if you had one of those stethoscopes and you could put it up against their ear and listen in to their own head, you would hear a soundtrack that would scare the be-Jesus out of you. You’d say, Whoa! I was thrilled because I got re-tweeted. You know Twitter, right?
JANET ATTWOOD: Right.
SEAN STEPHENSON: I got re-tweeted by Tony Robbins recently because I said, The hurtful are hurt-full. Only those who are miserable can create misery.
JANET ATTWOOD: I want you to repeat that for everybody because that was so amazing.
SEAN STEPHENSON: Sure. The hurtful are hurt-full. Only the miserable can create misery.
JANET ATTWOOD: That is so beautiful. One of the things you just said is that we shred ourselves apart, and if we could hear each other’s inner dialogue, we would all be so embarrassed. I would say that the world is becoming so hyper-sensitive. There is so much consciousness that is flowing now, and although we can’t hear it, you can actually feel it, wouldn’t you say?
SEAN STEPHENSON: Of course.
JANET ATTWOOD: You can feel it on people. You can feel it and sense it. You walk into a room and say, Wow, what’s with that person? because you feel it. It’s like they’re vibrating.
SEAN STEPHENSON: What I tell my clients, Janet, is that you can lie to yourself. You just can’t lie to me. I mean you can try to tell yourself that no one notices, but they notice. I dance this line of making sure people know I’m doing the best I can to stay humble and yet still giving myself the celebration to know what a great job I’m doing here. I can tell you that the reason why people are gravitating towards me on a larger scale, it seems like now more than ever, is because I’m here to tell you I have great inner dialogue.
I have great little conversations. Am I perfect? No, but I can tell you that the majority of the time-I’d say 90% to 95% of the time-here’s one of the common statements that I’d tell my best friend, meaning me: I love you. I’m right here for you. I’m not going anywhere.
JANET ATTWOOD: That’s so beautiful: I love you. I’m right here for you. I’m not going anywhere. That’s so tender. What do you think that creates for you?
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For more information about Sean Stephenson and his work, please go to www.TimeToStand.com.
