Shane Jacob shares three powerful truths he discovered when facing his hardest moments. These lessons go beyond surface advice and dig into how your beliefs quietly control your world and how you can rewrite them.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Stable Living Coaching Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today. And I hope that you find value in today’s subject. That’s my goal is to bring value to your life every time that I do this podcast. So,  I’m currently getting coaching for public speaking from one of the best coaches in the world, Darren LaCroix.
I had Darren LaCroix on The Horsemanship Journey show. Darren is a world champion of public speaking. I'll tell you a little bit about what he talked about. Before I do, I just wanted to let you know, if you're watching, if you're viewing this, seeing this on video, you can check out this awesome denim and leather cowboy cuff shirt I got on. This episode is brought to you in part by Cowboy Cuffs. Elevate your life, elevate your style, elevate your life, elevate each other, proud to be partnered and associated with and part of the Cowboy Cuff brand.
Back to my good friend Darren LaCroix, who is helping me work on my public speaking. So anyway, Darren said, again, he’s my coach, he’s a world champion, and I’m developing, beginning to develop a speech. And he said to me, said,“Okay, well, just to begin, here’s an exercise to begin.”
He said, “Shane, if you were gonna die tomorrow, okay. If this was your last day, who’s the most important person, people to you? And what message, what legacy, what core, what are you all about that you would like to leave with them?”
Okay. What, what message, what, in your summary of life, what is the most important thing that you’ve learned that you would like to leave somebody with?
And, you know, ask yourself that question. It’s a good question.
Think about that just for a minute. “If that were you, and today was your last day, what would you like to leave somebody about what you’ve learned about living this life? What is the most important thing?”
Do you think that you’ve learned? It didn’t take me very long to figure out what that was. Because I don’t know, maybe because of what I do, maybe because I live with more intention than I ever have before, but I came up with, I don’t know, it’s three points.
It’s not one point, but they’re all related. And that’s what I wanted to talk a little bit about today.
And I remember when I learned these, this basic lesson of. This, this basic when I learned this message—of where I was. And I’ll tell you where I was. A couple of times. I've thought about this message one time was, let me just kind of set the stage.
There I was. I was looking out a window.
And this window was about four inches tall and about three feet wide. And it had wire in the window. It had wire in the window. And I was in a place where they had wire in windows, and the glass was very thick.
You couldn’t see through it very well unless you looked straight. If you looked off to an angle, it got all blurry. Very thick glass with wire in it. Four inches approximately tall by approximately three wide. This little, kind of slit-in-the-wall-looking thing.
That was my window.
I looked down at night. I could see lights on the highway down below, off to the north, going back and forth on this highway.
I was inside of this room. This window was inside of a building, inside of some tall fences with razor wire on them, and some tall towers with guys with rifles, watching everything.
And it’s called well, it’s called, “Nevada State Prison.” One of them. And that’s where I was.
And I was thinking about me, and… I don’t know.
Maybe I was feeling sorry for myself, wishing I wasn’t there. Wondering when I looked at all those headlights down on the road, and I thought, “Well, you know everybody in one of those vehicles down there is going wherever they want, and they’re doing whatever they want. And here I am.”
Then I thought about why I was there. Then I felt worse about myself about what I had done. All the pain and suffering I’d caused to so many people.
And I just thought about what my life was going to be like.
And while I had the opportunity to be in this place, in this facility there was a little bit of a ruckus one day, next across the hallway, in another room. We’ll call it a cell.
They had a lot of people move around this and that.
And I found out what happened was, is that straight across from me, somebody had figured out how.
One of the inmates had figured out how to get the light fixture off the roof, pull down copper wire out of the attic or out of the ceiling somehow, make a noose of it, put it around his neck, and hung himself.
This wasn’t the happiest place to be. Just let me tell you that.
Okay. Anyway, I was there, looking out this window, and I was thinking to myself, you know, I was thinking to myself, what do I think about me? You know
And I just thought these thoughts of who I am, and what I’m doing in a place like this, and what kind of people, what kind of a human being was I that was here, and what my existence was going to be if I didn’t follow suit of the guy next door, which I had contemplated suicide a little bit, but I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to commit suicide, even though I’d had thoughts about it. I had contemplated it, but I decided that I wasn’t going to.
So… what was my life going to be like?
And I was sitting there, thinking about myself, and looking through this window.
That was one of the moments in my story.
And I’ll just tell you, I wasn’t too high on myself.
Okay. I was not too high on myself.
I was so ashamed of what I had done. I was so sick and sad for all the pain and suffering that I had caused to so many people that it was just hard to go on. And I really, quite honestly, couldn’t stand me. I didn’t want to show my face to anybody. I didn’t really like the way I looked in an orangejumpsuit, you know.
You know, when it comeshunting season, I just, don’t know.
I have a thing about orange still.
No, I’m just kidding. But, I was not happy with me.
I don’t know how many times you’ve had moments yourself where you weren’t happy with you. You weren’t happy with what you’ve done. That you were ashamed.That you were just living in shame. You were just so ashamed you just wanted to hide, and nobody’d ever see you again. That’s what I felt like.
I for damn sure didn’t want to go back to my hometown. I didn’t want to talk to anybody I knew.
Yet, at the same time, I longed for all the things that human beings long for. And those things that human beings long for, by the way. I like to just call them three.
Some people say there’s a lot more than three, but basically, there’s three emotional needs. Because we want to feel a certain way. And what we long to have is a sense of belonging. We want to belong.
We also want to have a sense of significance or important. We want to feel like we’re important in the world. Like what we do means something. Like we have some sort of significance.
And we also want to feel connection. We need to feel connection. We’re, as Brene Brown says, hardwired for connection. We want to connect with other people, and be able to feel like they understand us, and we understand them. These are basic core human needs.
I still had those basic needs.
When you have conflicting, when you have ideas, you have those needs, yet at the same time, you have a view of yourself.
Now, this wasn’t on purpose.
I didn’t set out and say, “I’m going to decide that I’m a terrible human being.” I just took the circumstances of my life, the events, and the things that I’ve done, and all the input that I’d had from my brain which was based on the circumstances, and a lot of them that I created.
And then I made these decisions, I would make conscious decisions about what I thought about me.
And none of it was very good.
Okay. And when I got, released from that facility, and when I got some Liberty, and got my freedom back, eventually over a period of time, I still had those thoughts.
Those, my mindset was still playing in my mind of who I was: less than, deficient, you know.
I was not a good human being.
Okay. And I still had a lot of shame that I lived with. I didn’t want to think about it. I just kind of just wanted to exist, you know, on the outskirts, and just kind of not be noticed. I didn’t think that I was ever going to amount to very damn much, you know, and I lived in that cycle, and that, you know, that didn’t feel good.
I wasn’t, my emotional needs at the time. They weren’t being met at because I was blocking them, really, from being met with my thoughts and my beliefs about myself.
That’s really what it comes down to.
And so, I felt bad about myself, and so I drank again, and more to feel better. And then I felt better. And then the things that I did drinking made me feel worse when I would sober up. And then so I drink to feel better, and then I just lived in this cycle.
I lived in this cycle daily forever. It seemed like forever, and ever, and ever.
And then the next moment that I remember vividly was the day that I realized that my nearly 17-year marriage had disintegrated to beyond the point of being able to be salvaged. That it was gone. That it was gonna be over.
As I thought about all the repercussions of that, and my life, and, you know, my sister said this mess, and I believe it because I’ve been through it a few times now.
And I hope you haven’t, but if you have, you’ll know what I mean.
You know somebody who has been divorced, and divorce I don’t care how you slice it my sister Diana is right. I’m telling you, it’s trauma.
It is traumatic.
Everything that you’re about, all your future, your hopes and your dreams, and everything is wrapped up in this marriage, and you didn’t set out for any of this ugliness to happen. And the disconnect, and the conflict and you tell me that, you’re going to tell me that you had a happy divorce, I just don’t think so.
I mean, maybe it’s possible, but I really have a hard time believing it.
I’ve never seen or heard of anything quite like it.
I hear people talking about like that. I’m just not sure how happy your divorce really was.
Anyway.
When I was looking at that and then I, you know, somewhere along the lines through mentors that I’ve had, through horse trainers, through close family members, my mom and dad, my sister good horse trainers and horses and Ilike to say by the grace of God and the help of horses I started to wonder if I could change who I was.
And I started to consider changing what I believed to be true about me.
If I could be somebody else, other than who I was.
And who I was, is somebody that was addicted to alcohol, and that was destroyin’ people’s lives, really.
My kids were long gone and grown, and I couldn’t be the parent that I wanted to be for them, and everything wasn’t working out too well.
But I remember the moment that I found out that that marriage was going to be over.
And that was not a happy day for me.
But it was a good day.
It was a good day in that I began to, inside in between my ears, I began to think about what would be possible if I were to change.
If I were to believe something different about me.
If I weren’t to believe that something was permanently wrong with me.
If I wasn’t to believe… if I could accept me somehow.
If I could accept somehow what I had done, and what my future would look like, and this and that and the other.
I'm going to share with you the three things that I would leave, that I want to leave to this world that I've found thus far.
If I was going to die tomorrow and I don't plan to die tomorrow but if I were, I'm going to share with you the three things that I would want every human being to know who would care to know.
And that is number one: what you believe about yourself is the foundation of all your behavior.
And it's a choice.
That's number one: what you believe about you is the foundation of all your behavior, all of your results, and it's a choice.
The way that you see you, the way that you relate to you, is the way that you relate to the world.
You're a projection or a relation everything inside of you comes out as your results, and everything is based on what you believe to be true about yourself.
And you know, a lot of us don't put any conscious thought into that.
Or a lot of us just say, you know, I've never really had a problem with that, Shane.
Maybe experience shame for some once or another, but I, you know, I've never really experienced much shame, and I think I'm a pretty confident person and this and that and the other.
Number two that I would say to the world is, is: your self-image has no limits.
So however you see yourself today, whether it's pretty good or not so good, not so much it can be improved upon indefinitely.
Okay? Your view of yourself has no limits.
No cap. So if you think you're great, you can ratchet it up and keep on going, indefinitely.
And if you think you suck, you can ratchet it up and keep on going, indefinitely. Wherever you're at, this is a lifetime progression if you choose it to be so.
Okay? And here's the number three.
Number three that I would say to the world is, that developing your beliefs or improving your beliefs or your perspective about yourself will enrich your life and the lives of everyone within your influence.
See, because this isn't just about you.
It's not about what you think about you it is about what you think about you, because it's going to be the biggest influence on all your results.
But what you think about you influences everyone that you care about.
And you do not we as human beings, you and I don’t have the capability, the capacity to give and love and support the people that we give and love, that we want to give love to, only to the degree we can only give and love to the edge of how much we love ourselves.
And that is simply a fact that I rejected for so long that I found to be a truth.
So choosing making the conscious choice to improve the way that you see yourself or developing beliefs about yourself will enrich your life and the lives of everyone wiithin your influence.
Those are the three things.
And you know, and that's what we do at Stable Living Coaching. That's what the book I'm writing, One Horse Race, is all about.
And actually how to go about changing your belief, regardless of where it's at regardless if you think you're a horrible person, all the way to, I think I'm a pretty good guy or gal, to an ongoing well, basically what I have in my book is a set of skills that you can actually practice. I break it down how to improve the way that you believe about yourself.
And here's why: because like I said it's going to have the biggest influence on everything.
Because everything that you do, at the core of why you do it, and how you react, and all of that, comes back to number one: what you believe about yourself is the foundation of all your behavior.
Everything that's coming out of you is based on what you think about yourself. And so, wherever that is, you can improve it. You're just on a scale.
You don't already have it done. It's not something you already checked off the list a while back, and you're okay with it. That's for other people.
It's something that regardless of where you are if you choose to, you can take these skills and improve on it.
And that's what I work on in my life.
And that's where I have came from.
Now, I’ve moved up on the scale.
And as I’ve moved up on the scale, a lot of things happened.
I improved the relationships in my life.
I have better relationships than I’ve ever had before in my life.
I just so happen to be able to, you know, lose weight and keep it off.
Also, you know, did a two to three day detox no medical treatment, no long-term anything and walked out of there and have been sober for nine plus years, coming up on ten here in January.
And, and I could go on: earned more money than I ever had before, and on, and on, and on.
Why did all that happen?
And why would you even care to know?
Because my core message if you take it and apply it you’ll be able to get the results in your life that you’re looking for.
And that is: being able to improve your view of you is really what it comes down to.
So, you know, my friends, I’m here to tell you: if you don’t think you’re absolutely amazing…
Well, you can go ahead and think that, but you are anyway.
I mean it’s really not even up to, It’s not even up to you, and it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or not done or what’s been done to you.
You’re one hundred percent.
That’s what I would like for you to know. I appreciate your time being with me today.
Check us out at stablelivingcoaching.com. Stay with me.
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