Read the full transcript of Stephen Gillen’s talk titled “The 6 Laws of Transformation” at TEDxYouth@HABS 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A Journey from Darkness to Light
Life doesn’t give us what we want; it gives us what we become. This story I’m going to take you through, my unique story from darkness, pain, and trauma into healing, transformation, and light, I believe is important in the telling as it may just save lives. Because there were many times as I navigated my personal journey that one miscalculation, one wrong understanding of my instincts could have meant life or death.
In the first half of my journey, I was unfortunately categorized as one of Britain’s most dangerous and notorious criminals and prisoners. I’d been groomed through violence and trauma into gang life very, very early on. This grooming continued from me going through a life of petty crime into serious organized crime. My people of the day who I looked to as family members and who were in my stratosphere, unfortunately, were some of the leading, known, notorious, serious target criminals of the day. My fall from grace in that terrible life happily came many years later.
The Fall and Imprisonment
After many sophisticated operations by top-level police forces, I was arrested and sent to the Old Bailey. After numerous trials, I received a sentence of 17 years as a Category A prisoner. The definition of a Category A prisoner to the Home Office is someone who is highly dangerous to the public, the police, or the security of the state and whose escape must be made impossible. I served 12 years out of that as a Category A, around some of the most notorious names of the day, people like Charles Bronson.
I was in prisons within prisons, serving probably five years plus in solitary confinement. So how did I arrive in this place of darkness? And what led me there?
The Science of Change
Science and physics confirm for us now that it’s not just epigenetics that propel us through our journey and what we inherited from what has come before, but that our environment, people, places, and things really shape our trajectory forward.
There is more evidence that experiences fused with our emotional intelligence and our examples to people, places, and things are firing, wiring all the neurons in our brains, creating pathways that are going to dictate the architecture with our choices in many ways of what is going to come next in our lives. It’s also a given that we know that we must change, that part of life is growth and progress, and like a blade of grass or any living thing, that when the seasons are set and the time is right, or the sun is shining, that we will reach out to be the best of ourselves, to be more, to do more, to become more.
Life also dictates, as everything is energy, everything is moving, everything is vibrating, that we may pause for a while on our experiential life journey to rest for just a moment, but if we become static, life continues forward, so we then would be going backwards. This dictates, of course, that we must always come forward, we must always change, we must always transform, but people only really change because of two things:
- Because they want to
- Because they must, or they are leveraged to
So, it’s really important, what is this landscape of hills and valleys that we must really navigate real-time towards the better us? And what about the people who have a tougher deck to deal with at the start? They have challenges that they must circumvent early on that are already directing them, maybe in a way that is not healthy or conducive to them finding the best of themselves.
The Seeds of Failure
For me, my history, and it’s always in the history, the seeds were already sown. Unfortunately, in many ways, I was already positioned for many failures. You know, I always say we must position and prepare ourselves for success, then if we get it, we won’t be surprised, but if we are positioned for something else, and storms come through in our lives, what then? How do we navigate these sometimes insurmountable challenges?
My history dictated a tough start. Born here in the UK, I was taken to Belfast as a six-month-old child in the early 70s, in the middle of the troubles and the war zone over there, you know, in the darkness. The environment there was filled with violence and martial law and hatred and bigotry and all of these things. This was outside the door, but inside the door, I had a kind, loving environment, really old-school people, and this would be my savior later on.
After my grandmother, my surrogate mother, died of cancer when I was nine years old, I was the little child with the case, coming over on the ferry back to England, back to London and back into the East End. It went downhill because of the abandonment, because of the violence, because of all of the trauma that I had carried with me from before. I ended up a feral child who had to go through homes. Some of these children’s homes were really, really violent.
Herein was the start of my integration of having to find the family, of having to find my own way, of feeling alone in this world, and that everything I ever had or ever loved was always taken from me. But what is the way out of this?
The Metamorphosis
Today, my metamorphosis is complete. I’m a best-selling author. I’m a CEO. I’ve built a few companies in diverse industries. I’m a TV personality. I’m an executive producer who deals with very high-level media, both sides of the camera. But the thing that makes my heart sing the most is in 2019, I was nominated for an international Peace Prize.
Now, the question always is, I’ve been on some of the biggest platforms in the world, and the question is always the same.