Hi my name is Taylor Evans and I am on the team with Prison Professors.
This is the last video in the Straight-A Guide, and I want to first off thank you for taking the time to learn and help yourself out by applying these principles to your life and your journey to earning freedom.
The last video focuses on appreciation, and you may be questioning appreciation? What do I have to be grateful for? This was the most difficult journey of my life.
Michael shares the reason why he ultimately created the Straight-A Guide in this video. More than likely when you either researched or started this process you used it to try and reduce your sentence by as much time as possible. This could be during your trial, during incarceration, or even reducing time on probation or parole.
What you probably didn’t understand is that after applying these principles in your mitigation strategy that your thought process might be altered to be thinking about these steps and applying them in other parts of your life as well.
This could have been a conscious decision as you thought wow these steps are really helping me out, how can I apply them to my relationship or job? Or it could happen on a subconscious level as well, where you comprehend if you cannot define success in what your job search upon your release looks like, then you are not putting yourself in the best position for success.
The Straight-A Guide is a transformative life experience for a person. Michael explains how someone could originally use this to create a stronger mitigation strategy, but what he is really trying to illustrate to that same person is that they will have other upcoming challenges and moments of uncertainty. If they can apply the lessons of the Straight-A Guide to their mitigation strategy, why can’t they apply it to being a better father, or becoming a business owner?
That is why the last step is appreciation. You just went through one of the most difficult challenges of your life with some of the highest stakes, but you are still here. Give yourself a pat on the back. Give everyone who supported you a hug or a handshake and thank them and let them know how much you appreciate them.
Also, understand you have had the opportunity to learn a lot about yourself if you know it or not, and you now possess a toolbox of skillsets to help you plan to achieve any challenge or goal that you will face.
Michael shares how he received appreciation from a former captain who put Michael in the hole for teaching the Straight-A Guide. Michael was asked to be the keynote speaker for a judicial conference up in Sacramento where he ran into this gentleman. The captain is now a warden at a prison and was baffled and mind-blown about how Michael had transformed his life and asked him how. Michael talked about the ten steps in the Straight-A Guide and shared how sad it is that staff members are baffled by former inmates doing well after incarceration instead of the down-and-out attitude most prisoners have after being locked up.
That inspired Michael to create this program to partner with jails, prisons, and other institutions to explain to people that they can pick themselves back up. It does not matter what current challenges you face today, you can develop a game plan using the Straight-A Guide to put yourself in a position to achieve success in how you define it.
I can only speak for myself, but this Straight-A Guide has been a revelation for me and my life. I had used it on a subconscious level as I was going through my case, but I was not aware of the actual Straight-A Guide. I wish I was oh my goodness!
Now that I have studied it and am helping people go through some of the most difficult challenges they will face in their life, I would recommend everyone watch these videos and apply these steps in their life.
Adidas has the famous slogan “Impossible is Nothing” and that is the message Michael Santos is truly trying to share with you. No matter what your head is saying or what your attorney is telling you and your family, you can do something to help yourself out. It does not matter if this is pre-trial, during incarceration, or life after lockup.
You can define success, create S.M.A.R.T goals, develop the right attitude with 100 percent commitment to your mission, aspire to be a better person, follow through with strong action steps, hold yourself accountable, have the awareness to understand what you are doing and it’s impact, be authentic in all of your interactions, achieve what you set out to accomplish, and be appreciative of yourself and your team for you transforming yourself to being a person of action and change who hopefully wants to spread the message of the Straight-A Guide and be the person human they can possibly be.
I am so grateful to be a member of this team and I look forward to working with you moving forward, but first I must ask you. What are three things that you appreciate today?
