288. The Power of Perspective: Choosing Empowering Stories with Sean Kanan

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness coach, Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello and thank you for joining us today. I'm so happy you're here. Happiness solved is the place where we explore everything you need to become the best possible version of you. This is Sandee Sgarlata, and today I've got some exciting news for our dedicated listeners. We've just launched our exclusive members only portal.

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Sean Kanan, I am so excited to be speaking with you today. How's everything? Know everything is going extremely well right now. I am very blessed, very fortunate. So nothing to complain about.

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Isn't that the best though, right? It is. So for those of you who are living under a rock and do not know who Sean is, I pulled your bio up on just, you know, your career has spanned so many years, so you've done a lot. But not only are you an actor, I didn't realize you were also a comedian. You've written a few books, one of which I'm reading right now, the way of the cobra.

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But what I really love mostly is that you also have been on Capitol Hill raising awareness about bullying. Yeah, it's, it's something really, something I'm very passionate about. Whenever I have the opportunity to speak about anti bullying, I jump at the opportunity because I think it's become know. I hesitate to use the word pandemic, but it is definitely endemic. And now with kids using the Internet and cyberbullying, it's become geometrically worse than it was when I was a kid.

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Oh, yeah. Well, I think I'm a year older than you and you shared the same birthday with my brother. I was like, oh, that's kind of fun. Yeah.

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But, yeah, I was bullied so badly when I was a child and it was just like, oh, it was just shugged off. It wasn't a big deal whether it was a lot of my nose because nobody I was made fun of. From preschool into high school, people made fun of my nose, which people spend a lot of money these days to get it to look like that, right? Yeah. I think people don't realize that even as you become an adult, you become a fully formed human being.

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Many people still carry the scars from the bullying that they endured at a very young age. And you really got to do a lot of work on yourself and on understanding life to heal that sort of stuff. And some people unfortunately never do. And it becomes like a debilitating chain that they wear around their necks in the form of a disempowering story. And the fortunate people are able to reframe the story and turn it into something positive that motivates them and inspires them.

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But all too many people aren't able to do that. And many, many, too many allow it to kind of foster a feeling of victimhood about themselves, which is really sad and will really hold you back in life. Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. I know for me, in my early forty s, I actually went to a plastic surgeon to inquire to have my nose straightened out.

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I would joke like my mom. Her nose looks almost like that of Barbara Streisand. And everyone else in my family has what I perceive to be this perfectly straight nose. And so they did the picture and everything, and I saw what I would potentially look like, and I was just like, oh, my God. But it took that to fully embrace you.

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Say it. But without knowing you, I'm going to guess, and this is a complete supposition that really what happened was over the many years, you did a lot of work on yourself and changing your nose, which was an external manifestation of what you perceived to be an answer to the bullying, no longer became important to you because you had reconciled within yourself. Yeah, well, that happens with age when we've been on this planet pushing six decades. Right? It's like, I've been saying that a lot, Sean.

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I know, but I embraced my 40s, my fifty s, and I'm like, I'm gearing up. I'm like, I'm going to do this. Because it beats the alternative, right? It beats the alternative, which is not being here, so you better embrace it. Right?

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That's right. Exactly. And I want to talk about your book. I have it on my phone because I do a lot of reading of that. But before we go into that, not everybody reaches a point in their life where they're even capable of writing something as amazing as this with so many golden nuggets in it.

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How did you reach the point in your life? What is your backstory? That was like, I need to get this message out. Well, I'm a firm believer that there are two universal forces which bring about change in human beings, and that's fear and love. Yes.

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And I reached a point when I was about 50 years old. For my 50th birthday, I received a star on the Palm Springs walk of fame. Congratulations. That's huge. Lots of people came and made speeches, and my parents flew in, and there were photos and parties and everything.

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And when sort of the fog of the celebration cleared and I was looking in the mirror, what was reflecting back at me was the guy saying, okay, what now? What's next? And the scary thing is, I didn't know. And to make matters worse, I was 40 pounds overweight. I had no prospects for acting work at that time, believe it or not.

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And I was engaging with some old demons more frequently than I probably would like to admit. And I realized that everyone else in that moment might perceive me as being successful. But I knew that I was rapidly slipping into mediocrity. And I knew that if I didn't do something about it, it was going to go from being noticeable to me, to noticeable to everyone else, to irreparable in my life. And the saddest thing would be that I would never have the opportunity to show the world and to help the world and do all the things that I want to do.

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And so I decided that there was going to be no more of this waiting for my ship to come in crap. I was going to build the damn ship. I just had to figure out how to do it. And I started doing some things. It's funny, as it is, with most challenges in life, the solution is simple, but rarely easy.

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Simple, but rarely easy. And I started doing what was very simple, but not easy. And within about a year, I had made a profound difference in my life. And as I was writing way of the Cobra going into the book, I just knew I couldn't write a book like this unless I was living my life in accordance with what I was writing. I just would feel like an enormous fraud if I did that.

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And so I made some massive changes in my life. I stopped drinking. I lost almost 50 pounds.

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The way that I looked at things changed significantly. And every single thing got better. It was like the clouds parted and the universe was raining down on me. All the things that I was so angry that I wasn't getting, when in reality, I was the one keeping myself from it. Wow.

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Thank you for sharing that, because that authenticity is what helps and inspires others. So Cobra is a wonderful acronym. Would you like to share with that acronym? The acronym stands for character, optimism, balance, respect, and abundance. Love it.

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Now, in the beginning of the book, and when I say golden Nuggets, what I'm referring to is you have all of these short how Cobras are to act. They act with integrity and honesty, not only when it's easy or being watched, but always it goes on and on and on. But the one that really stood out for me is the very last one. A Cobra recognizes that you never know what private war another person may be fighting, have empathy for every person's life situation.

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Could you imagine how things could be so different in this world if everybody looked at another person from that lens? Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I wish I had originated that quote. A lot of people who are much smarter than I am have said it, but it just resonated with me. And a lot of times I'm asked to sort of distill into something simple, what it takes to be successful.

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And I tell people it takes four things, and one of them is to live with compassion. And I say that you never know what private war someone is fighting. And an example is you're standing in line at the pharmacy and you're in a hurry, and you see an elderly woman reaching in her pocketbook to write a check. And it's like if we could be convicted for murder for the things that go through our head because we've got something so important to do, and you don't know if she's deciding whether she has enough money to get her husband's medicine or for them to eat that night. That's right.

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And when you realize that, you can take a deep breath and you can become a more compassionate person. It's not about the thoughts that flow through our heads sometimes, which are reprehensible. It's what you choose to do with them. Yes. Otherwise, every single person who ever got cut off would be in a state mental hospital.

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Yeah, I know. It's like, because really, especially when you talk about road rage and things like that, we're never going to know why the person almost cuts you off or almost hit you. Right. So I always just say, just make up a different story. Absolutely.

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Oh, my gosh. I hope they're not driving to the hospital because their kid was just in an accident. Right. There's a great book. It's called the four agreements, by, you know, and one of the four agreements is never take anything personally.

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And when you learn not to do that, and it's hard. It's hard, especially because human beings, we have a tremendous capacity for jewelry and for feeling aggrieved, and that is the food source for victimhood. But when you realize that almost everything that, quote, unquote, happens to you in this world, that you don't like is not done out of malice to you. And when you realize you can step out of it, it's funny. I was coaching someone today, and he was kind of lamenting something, which, frankly, was really stupid.

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And I said, listen, I'm just going to tell you something from my life. So I had a 645 pickup today, and it was raining, and it was to do stunt training, which means I had to do something very physical in the morning. And I'm in the van and we're in traffic and we're driving, and the first ad calls me and says, we've had a screw up. Go get coffee for an hour. So tell the driver, let's get coffee.

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Ten minutes later, he calls back, listen, we can't resolve this. Just go back to your hotel and we'll pick you up again in 3 hours. Now, I could have attached the story that I'm not being treated the way a star of my magnitude should be treated, and blah, blah, blah, and spin my mind out. Or I could have simply said, this is great. I can go back, I can get in bed and keep writing, which I was doing, and I was making great progress on my new book.

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And this is how film and television sets work. Because it's like Mike Tyson says, everybody's got a plan till they get punched in the mouth. That epitomizes working in film and know the best late. When you. When you realize that it has absolutely nothing to do with know, it alleviates that feeling of being angry and resentful and all that stuff.

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Now, listen, I'm not perfect at it, believe me. I mean, I tell people all the time before you think I'm living on top of a mountain in Catmandu, levitating 3ft off the ground in a lotus position, contemplating my navel. I've made every one of those mistakes in my books a dozen times over, which is why I wrote the books, right? I mean, we all have. We all have.

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And what I've learned is that it's usually not about me, but it's so much like it's hindsight's 2020, and it's so easy to look back and have that perspective. And at the end of the day, almost always, you can look at a situation and say, that happened for me, not to me. Well, it's interesting you say that, because a lot of what I do with my clients is I talk about the concept of story and how human beings attach these negative stories. The problem is, first of all, why do humans attach stories? Well, humans don't like the unknown.

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And so they like to qualify events very quickly and they do it in a binary way. This is good, this is bad, this is positive, this is negative. Right. The problem is that human beings are a, terrible historians and b, they can rarely see what's coming over the horizon or the 30,000 foot view like as terrible historians. If I said to you, okay, Sandy, tell me something that is a really seminal, important, life altering thing that happened when you walked me through the who's what's, whens, wheres, whys, what it smelled like and tasted like.

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And then I said, okay, now I'm going to take you to a movie theater, I'm going to sit you down and I'm going to show you a movie of what really happened. You probably, at best, would be, I don't know, 60% accurate. And it's not because you're not trying to be honest. It's because everybody sees life from a different prism with 1000 variables. Now you and I have some of the same variables.

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Where we both live in the 21st century, we both live in a western democracy now we both live in the United States. Now it starts to get a little different. I'm a man, you're a woman. Okay, difference in variable. Then you start looking at somebody.

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Someone gay, is someone straight, is someone black, is someone white, is someone have a disability, is somebody come from higher education or not? And none of these variables are any better than the others. They're simply different. But when you infer a story or when you infer an event that happens to you, it has an effect on your story, right? And if you'll indulge me, there's this great thing.

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It's in my new book. I think it's in my new book. There's a woman, she's a journalist, and she's on skid row and she's writing an article about the homeless. And she's just next to this guy that is a hope to die drunk bum, about 50 years old. She says, let me ask you something.

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How is it that you came to this place in your life? And he said, well, he said, I had a father who was an alcoholic, drank a pint of whiskey every night. He beat my mother, beat my twin brother, beat me, could never keep a job. How else would I have grown up? And she was so intrigued by that, she tracked down his twin brother.

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She looked at the address and she looked at this magnificent house. She said, this can't be right. She knocks on the door, this very put together guy in his 50s opens up with just the slightest resemblance to the bum that she had seen before. And he said, please come in. Let me introduce you to my loving family.

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I've been a doctor for 30 years in the community. And she said, how is it that you built this amazing life? And he said, well, I had an alcoholic for a father who drank a bottle of whiskey every night, beat my mother, beat my twin brother, and beat me. How else would I have grown up?

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Two identical circumstances, two very different stories, completely changing the trajectory of the two individuals lives. Wow. So it's powerful, the stories. And we don't realize we do it sometimes, especially as adults, we do it with everything, whether it's weight loss. Oh, listen, my mom's fat, my dad's fat to my dna.

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I can't lose weight or I'm too old or I got a bum knee or whatever it is. Can you pause this for a second? Absolutely.

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All right, we are back. We were talking about just how things happen for you, not to you. Yeah. Concept of story, how the universe doesn't hate you. Most people don't have it out for you.

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Things happen, and when you personalize them, that's really sort of the first step to creating a sense of victimhood, which is just something nobody wants to be a victim. It's a choice. It is. And then whenever we have this conversation on my show, I always like to say, if you're going through pain, pain is pain, and it's real and you need to feel it. Yeah.

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Let me put a caveat to that, which is there are people that are victims in the moment of something terrible happening to them, and that is horrendous. I am in no way, shape, or form trying to minimize that. What I'm saying is that the conscious choice to continue allowing what happened to you and victimized you in that moment, to continue it, though, that is a choice in no way. Exactly. Do I not have compassion, empathy for people who have gone through horrendous things.

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I know. I like to always just throw that in and thank you for saying that as well. Just because sometimes we all have been through it, where you're going through something and you know on a conscious level that it's going to be better, but when you're going through it, sometimes you just can't always see it.

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We get blinded by things and wrapped up in ourselves. Yeah. And that's just part of life. So I wish we had time to go through everything that cobra stands for, but I would love to just talk about the abundance thing, the abundance part of it, because I feel like there's so much. And you talk about here in the first paragraph, it's all about fear, but that cobras recognize that the universe holds an infinite amount of success, wealth, love, and happiness for everyone.

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Love that. I take this a lot further in the follow up book to weigh the cobra, which is called welcome to the kumate. I'm a huge proponent of the universal laws, and one of my personal favorites is the law of vibration. Do you know what the law of vibration is? It says everything is energy.

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Everything vibrates at the subatomic level, whether it's a rock, vibrates, but also thoughts and words and emotions vibrate. The highest emotional vibrations are love and kindness and empathy and compassion. And the lowest are fear and anxiety and jealousy and all of that sort of stuff. And most people become anxious in life because they fear the unknown. And they project a possibility of what's going to happen that they create between their ears.

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And then they ruminate on it. And for me, and I always tell people, this is not a theological conversation, but the very first thing I do every morning is I get on my knees and I thank God for five things. And if I can't think of something, I thank God for giving me another day to be a better version of who I was the day before. And I acknowledge that we live in abundance and not scarcity. Now, here's the interesting thing about the law of vibration.

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So we've learned that magnets attract. Well, opposites attract. That's only in magnets. Because in the universe, like attracts like. And so if you're operating from a vibration of abundance and gratitude, the universe is neutral.

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It's not good, it's not bad. It just says, oh, okay, you're living in abundance. You want more of that, I'm going to give it to you. But consequently, if you want to be a person that's wealthy, but you're always walking around going, I can never get a good job. Screw that guy.

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What does he got that I can't? I'm always broke. All the universe hears is, oh, you're living in scarcity. You want more of it. And so it gives you the very thing that you don't want.

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And when you live in abundance, it does some interesting things. First of all, you're rooted in the present. You're not worrying about the future. You're living life moment to moment. That doesn't mean not preparing for the future.

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It doesn't mean not keeping an eye as to what's coming your way. But it means not fabricating and creating possibilities that most of the time don't even manifest, other than if you manifest in yourself. And I find that it's a way to keep you humble and focused. Keep me humble and focused. Know, have the universe match me with a vibration that I want.

00:23:53
That was so beautifully stated, Sean. Thank you for that. I'm very much into the map of consciousness and things like that, and I'm working with a new mentor right now, and she's teaching me about the quantum and all of that, which I'm still very. I couldn't even explain things to you because I'm still early in learning about this. But it really comes down to we have two states of being.

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We're either in consciousness or we're in ego. Absolutely. And when we can remember that, it's like, oh, that's my ego. That's not consciousness.

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Learning to slay the ego is, I think, one of the great challenges and journeys that if most humans undertake it, it has a profound difference and change on your life. Oh, yeah. It teaches you to get out way. There's all sorts of things that you learn. It's almost like you live more in a flow state where you're in sync with things instead of swimming like a salmon upstream.

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Beautifully said. Amazing. I don't want to keep you because I know you have so many amazing things going on. You're writing another book. Pleasure.

00:25:10
Incredible. Thank you. I'm writing so much writing this one with my wife. Oh, no. We're writing the third book in the way, the Cobra series, which is called Cobra Couples.

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Oh, my gosh. I love it. We've been together for, I think we've been together 13 years. We've been married for eleven in Hollywood. Not the easiest place to be married.

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And we've learned a couple of things along the way and want to turn the way the Cobra audience onto something that's a little bit different but still done within the framework of the other two books. That's brilliant. I love it. Well, when the book is ready to be released, if you'd like to come back on with Michelle, we could talk about it because I tell you, all of my episodes that get the most listens are especially ones about relationships because. Oh, really?

00:26:02
Okay, well, yeah, with my wife Michelle, I'd love. Perfect. Okay, well, thank you, Sean. Good luck with everything that you're doing. And again, all right, you too.

00:26:13
Thank you. Bye.

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