I spent years surviving my story. Then I learned how to use it.
I’m Shaun McClure—mental health advocate, speaker, educator, coach, CIT Coordinator, NAMI leader, former radio host, and creator of the Five Gears framework.
My work is simple to explain: help people understand where they are, what they’ve lived through, and what their next shift can be.
I know what it means to believe your life has already been decided.
My life was shaped early by trauma, violence, poverty, addiction, and eventually incarceration. I spent more than two decades of my life in prison.
For a long time, survival was the whole strategy. You learn how to read a room, how to stay guarded, how to keep moving, how not to look weak. Those skills can keep you alive. They can also follow you long after they stop serving you.
What changed was not one dramatic moment. It was understanding. Mental health gave me language for things I had spent years calling anger, weakness, bad luck, or just “the way life is.”
That question became a doorway. Education, peer leadership, discipline, fitness, recovery, advocacy, service, and eventually purpose began to stack on top of each other.
From survival to service.
Stigma Shift did not come from a branding meeting. It came from a pattern I had already lived.
Trauma, addiction, incarceration, anger, and learning to live in environments where vulnerability could feel dangerous.
Beginning to understand mental health, trauma, behavior, addiction, and the difference between surviving and healing.
Education, peer leadership, accountability, physical training, communication, and building habits that could hold up under pressure.
Moving from changing my own life to helping other people understand theirs through advocacy, education, and conversation.
Turning lived experience into something useful—programs, speaking, coaching, community work, media, and the Five Gears.
Experience from both sides of the table.
I have been the person systems were talking about. Today, I also sit in rooms where systems are trying to figure out how to serve people better.
Mental Health Advocacy
Leadership and community work through NAMI, public education, stigma reduction, peer support, and youth mental-health programming.
CIT & Crisis Response
CIT Coordinator training and lived-experience perspective on crisis intervention, de-escalation, mental health, incarceration, and human-centered response.
Public Speaking
Keynotes, panels, classrooms, conferences, community events, radio, podcasts, and conversations built to reach people rather than impress them.
Stigma Shift Media
Former host of Stigma Shift on KRIM 96.3 FM, now evolving the show into an on-location and trail-based podcast.
Community & Trail Work
Programs that move mental health conversations out of clinical rooms and into real life—on trails, in classrooms, and in community spaces.
The Five Gears
A practical framework built from lived experience for awareness, help-seeking, healing, discipline, purpose, momentum, and legacy.
Healing should be useful in real life.
I believe mental health conversations work best when they are honest enough to be uncomfortable and practical enough to be used tomorrow morning.
Different rooms. Same work.
Everything under Stigma Shift comes back to the same idea: help people recognize where they are, build the tools to move, and create momentum toward something better.
Speaking
Keynotes, workshops, panels, schools, conferences, justice-system audiences, behavioral health, and community events.
Explore Speaking →Coaching
One-on-one, forward-focused support using the Five Gears to identify where you are and what comes next.
Explore Coaching →Fitness & Accountability
Physical training built around consistency, confidence, discipline, strength, and showing up for yourself.
Explore Training →Trail Sessions
Real conversations, movement, Sedona red rock, and the Five Gears outside the walls of an office.
Explore Trail Sessions →I still believe movement can change a conversation.
Some of my best thinking has happened while lifting, hiking, teaching, talking around a campfire, or walking a trail instead of sitting under fluorescent lights.
That is part of why Stigma Shift keeps moving into different spaces. A stage can be powerful. So can a classroom, a gym, a trail, an art table, or a microphone.
Your story may explain how you got here. It does not have to decide where you go next.
If you are looking for a speaker, a collaborator, a podcast guest, a coach, or a different kind of mental health conversation, reach out.
Stigma Shift combines lived experience, mental health advocacy, education, speaking, coaching, fitness, media, and community programming. Coaching and educational services are not psychotherapy, diagnosis, or medical treatment.