How to Become Your Best When Life Gives You Its Worst | Peter Sage | TEDxKlagenfurt

[Music] at 2:00 p.m. on January the 20th 2017 I was walking down the stairs of the High Court in London wearing handcuffs on my way to one of the most violent prisons in England having never been arrested accused charged or convicted of a crime in fact not even the police knew that I was going to prison a week before I was running a successful company with over 50 staff helping thousands of people and a week later I was down to virtually no staff and faced with losing everything I had including my home and so began the most incredible adventure I have ever had the privilege of living how I got there isn't quite as interesting I was arguing in years old business deal in court with a major multinational and one that had far deeper pockets to flex far bigger legal muscles than I did and when they threw a contempt of court application at me I didn't give it much credibility I remember an old longtime friend and business mentor Dan Pena once told me that when it comes to business litigation and civil actions are nothing more than a tool and I thought this was a chess move to try to pressure me into an early settlement and I didn't really take it that serious that was a mistake I learned a lot about how they the court system works should we say and when I was sitting in the hearing my fiancee turn around to me and said this isn't going the way we thought it was going to go yeah what happens you can even go away here and I'm like I don't know why this is happening honey but here's what I do know I've been very blessed very privileged over the last 20 plus years to have millions of people around the world benefit from my work but maybe the people that could benefit the most never really get to hear it because they're in some way like jail if the universal whatever you want to call it wants to send me in to hold a light let me go do my work and I was reminded by a quote by Tony Robbins who I had the privilege of working alongside as a experience trainer for over 15 years and he said something profound he said the strongest force in the human personality is the need to remain consistent with how you define yourself in other words your identity for example why do vegetarians not eat meat it's not because they have different teeth through a different digestive system is because their identity is I am a vegetarian now the reason they may choose that identity is personal and varied for either health for moral reasons but once you adopt that identity it governs what you order off the menu so I had a choice walking down the stairs as to which identity I wanted to adopt I could either adopt the identity of a prisoner and evict him and complaining about the courtroom shenanigans or I could choose something more empowering someone who was going in on a mission as a secret agent of change I remember getting to the prison and I had my medical they gave me my clothes and I sat with a doctor for a while before they gave me a cell and he leaned over he says can I ask you a question said sure you said you undercover and I smile I says why do you ask he said well in my entire career I've never seen anybody so happy on their first ever day in prison I thought that would be a good sign but not even I was prepared for what was about to happen let me set the scene for you Pentonville is a 200 year old Victorian prison that's never really been modernized it was built to house over 900 inmates when I got there there was over 1,300 including murderers terrorists drug lords armed robbers to name a few by the government's own statistic over one in five people in the prison population there are on anti-psychotic medication with many more on antidepressants violence is epidemic drugs are to order and many of the cells have their own pets in the form of cockroaches and rats let's just say that if it was a hotel it wouldn't do very well on TripAdvisor in fact I remember walking into the showers a couple of weeks after I arrived and this is my first shower in four days and my cellmate walked into one set of showers I walked into another and three guys followed him in and closed the door behind on one pulled out a weapon it was a toothbrush that had been sharpened to a like on the concrete wall and with razor blades glued into the other side crude but very effective and they didn't waste time now luckily they weren't after my cellmate as somebody that had just walked in the head of him and while I didn't witness the attack personally like he did the blood coming from under the doors in the shower was like something out of a horror movie in fact this is what it looks like inside and this was taken from a an article in the paper of somebody else that was murdered just before I got there welcome to Pentonville now I'm also a great believer that one of the greatest days in a human beings life on the journey of emotional maturity is the day that we realized that life is not a comfort centric experience but a growth centric experience I believe that we're in Earth School and for me this was a practical exam you know was I able to actually walk the talk that I've been teaching for so many years in a real environment with no cameras no second takes and obviously learn my own lessons that I needed to learn also about my own ego and some of the things that happen in court but I believe that you know we can be empowered by that if you can understand that earth school is here for everybody but how do you handle that environment in Pentonville positive thinking just isn't enough you need a toolset and luckily after three decades almost in personal growth I had a decent toolset and I want to share a few of those with you here today not that you need to go to prison to test these yeah leave that for the idiots like me but if your son or daughter comes home from having a tough time at school or not getting the grade they want or your spouse is suffering through having work downsizing or whatever you may really already use some of what I was using in order to be able to help you and that's one of my main purposes here today now one of the first tools I was using is often underrated and it's the power of acceptance most people don't get to acceptance because they confuse it with apathy or resignation but if you are complaining about something that has already happened you are wasting your time as soon as I walked in there I implemented a zero-tolerance policy on my own thinking of any thoughts that started with if only or what if why because you can't go back and change anything the milk may be spilt but that's not gonna put it back in the bottle sit there and feel sorry for yourself but by unhooking the energy of resistance and being coming to terms with where you are you can then free up that energy to channel into whatever the next best move is to deal with what's happened in fact one of the first signs that I wrote when I got there and I put over my cell door was taken from the classic Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill in fact this is the exact sign it states every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit the challenge is for most people is that they're so busy focused on the adversity they don't water the seed and I'm a great believer that many of the gifts in life that come to us are wrapped in a thin layer of problems probably to stop somebody else from stealing a gift one of the other souls I was using was contrast frames now contrast frames are very powerful and they essentially derive from the fact that most of what we give meaning to is based upon what we compare it to for example if you walk into work on a Monday morning and your boss calls you in and he gives you a surprise 10% pay rise you walk out feeling pretty good and then at lunchtime you're chatting with your co-worker who essentially does the same job and you find out that they got called in and got given a 15% pay rise now you're not feeling so good see you had nothing before but now you only have 10% see the trick with contrast frames is to always contrast where you are with something that makes you empowered rather than disempowered many years ago I ran a tough race one of the world's toughest ultra marathons across the Sahara Desert the marathon day saw it and I remember on the day of the double marathon you know we're at night preparing to run 84 kilometers the next day and we're in our little sleeping bags in the middle of the desert it was freezing cold you know the sandstorm was blowing in our face we'd already ran best part of a hundred miles every part of our body either was bleeding or was aching and we could feel the camel spiders and the scorpions crawling over our sleeping bag ma'am what I would have given for a prison bed I also had lots of books sent in to not only stop the library which is fairly under stocked but also to be able to help prisoners and give them something that I thought would be able to help and one of the books and I had many copies sent in was the classic man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl and I challenged many of the prisoners that were having a tough time that were open to being helped to read that book and not cry with tears of gratitude for being somewhere like Pentonville rather than somewhere like Auschwitz one of the other things that I was doing to make a big difference there was teaching the prisons the difference between liberty and freedom you see all that really done was restrict my liberty as people who have free will and a decision space had just been made smaller that was all I couldn't choose to go to the shops I couldn't choose to go walk my dogs I couldn't choose to show what for my wedding that had been planned but freedom is a state of mind and nobody can take that away from you as Gandhi said nobody can do anything to you emotionally without your permission nobody can take your dignity you can only give it away I was freer in my little cell than a lot of the prison officers who were coming in that day that hated their job or were going back to a dysfunctional relationship they didn't have the tools or the courage to fix I also wrote letters every two weeks to my senior students and coaching clients essentially documenting what was happening and teaching them a lot more of the tools that I was using and it was part journal part how to manual part you couldn't make it up but it was real and I was also very raw yeah I shared the times that I cried I shared the times that I counted myself if I wanted if I was actually making a difference and those letters started to have an impact not just for my coaching clients who read them and started to transform but I also shared them online it started to transform the lives of most people who read them and that started to bolster me that started to give me conviction that what I was doing not just in my little her private mission inside but on the outside was also reaching people that could help and so I decided that from there I'm gonna work harder and DoubleDown and I started working with bigger groups of prisoners in fact the secret agent of change job got to be a full-time deal and whenever they'd let me out of the cell and have a big crowd of prisoners and I realized they had to leverage my time war so I wrote a short story and the story was called mud or stars taken after the old adage that two men sat behind prison bars one saw mud the other saw stars and it was really teaching people that your environment never defines you it simply gives you the opportunity to to find yourself but I wrote the story out and I did it in a way that followed a fictional story of a guy coming to prison for the first time kind of deer in the headlights all you know confused and angry and scared and he happens to be sitting in the waiting room to be processed and sits next to a wise old prison that starts giving him advice and I chose that because a lot of the times if we go to help somebody and we offer unsolicited coaching or we really want to try and help but if we get kickback because you know you don't know me you don't know my story or even if they want help the presupposition is that you need fixing and then that triggers the fear that we all have which is the fear that we're not enough and we put up a defensive wall and discount the advice so I wrote this in a way that allowed people to be enrolled because if you sit next to a couple of people that are having a conversation you're listening in wow that's really interesting what they're saying is actually good your defenses are down because it's not about you your guards down so you're more susceptible to taking on the input so I had this story I've written out by hand but I needed help to get it into the prison and that's where the universe stepped in again the next day I found myself unsupervised in class now this never happens in Pentonville but the teacher was waiting for a supply teacher that didn't show up and so she had to go and she locked us in the classroom which is protocol now I found myself in front of a computer and a printer and I didn't need an invitation I started typing up the story out of my pocket and I hit print 50 copies and by the time she came back I smuggled them out of the class under my sweater and I went to work over the next two or three days there's the mystery mailman sliding them undersell doors at random leaving them on desks pinning them up on noticeboards and it didn't take long for the magic to work within a few days you can actually hear some of the most violent or depressed prisoners shouting to each other across the wings model stars to try to cheer themselves up they started create a movement in fact I was so busy with model stars and doing my other things I rented it the longest or long and short is that I managed to get a lot of the people off drugs are stopping suicides and really helping work with some of the people that have been let down by the system and it created such an impact that I vowed that when I came out I'd be able to create something that new prisoners could be given and so I created the new prisoner welcome booklet because when you are faced with uncertainty now you need something to hang on to and the challenge is for many of the systems in the prison they let prisoners down because they're following an archaic principle of containing criminals not trying to rehabilitate them and if they do try to rehabilitate it's always ineffective because what they do is they try to raise their skill set by educating them not raise their mindset now behavior follows mindset not skillset if you educate somebody without raising their level of consciousness all you're simply going to do is give them more tools with which to enact the same behavior so we essentially make them better criminals which is what most of the statistics will show you in terms of how fast somebody goes Andrea commits a crime once they're released so this book it was designed to really help people shift their mindset and raise their level of consciousness to engender hope rather than give them no choice at all which for many is all the choice they had and a very place to say this is now being rolled out and used in several prisons across the UK I was on the phone with somebody from a head of corrections in New South Wales that will use it in Australia I've been talking with a lot of the prisons and charities in the US you can go to my website and download the source files for this along with all of the image rights to be able to customize it to your own prison or charity and very pleased to say is now making a difference to many people every single month now I share that because every single one of us faces adversity it's not because we're unlucky my friends it's by design now we're here in Earth's core to grow and contribute that's the two laws of nature and the strongest trees don't grow in the best soil they grow in the strongest winds so if you want to become the best version of yourself start praying for some strong winds and don't complain when they show up we only have to go to the physical body to see that if you take it to the gym and pushed it push it past your limits it's pre-programmed to return with a better version of itself what do you think nature's trying to tell us and so when adversity shows up as it will start to try to shift your focus by asking better questions by looking at what you can learn or who you can become rather than looking what you could lose is the difference between a life of success on a life on the street for many people and if we can focus ourselves on being able to see the positive no matter what to tear the wrapping paper off and search for the gift in the adversity then we all have the ability to live a life that's an example rather than a warning and in doing so hopefully leave a legacy that transcends not just ourselves but it packs many more lives thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 382,356

Rating: 4.9079084 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Business, Personal growth, Prison, Psychology, Struggle

Id: I4svF7J6MWg

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019