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

at 2:00 p.m. On January 20, 2017, I was walking down the steps of London's High Court in handcuffs on my way to one of the most violent prisons in England without having been arrested, charged or convicted of a crime; in fact, not even the police knew that. I was going to prison a week before running a successful company with over 50 employees helping thousands of people and a week later I was practically out of staff and faced with losing everything I had, including my house, and thus began the most incredible adventure. . Have I ever had the privilege of living how I got there is not that interesting.

I was arguing a years-old business deal in court with a major multinational and one that had much deeper pockets to flex much bigger legal muscles than me and

when

I was presented with an application for contempt of court. I didn't give it much credibility. I remember an old friend and business mentor, Dan Peña, once telling me that

when

it comes to business litigation and civil actions they are nothing more than a tool and I thought. This was a chess move to try to pressure me into an early deal and I didn't really take it that seriously, it was a mistake.

I learned a lot about how the court system works, we should say, and when I was sitting in the hearing. My fiancé turned to me and told me that this was not going the way we thought it was going to go. Yes, whats up? You can even leave here and I'm like, I don't know why this is happening, honey, but this is what I. I know I have been very blessed and privileged over the past 20+ years to have millions of people around the world benefit from my work, but maybe the people who could benefit the most never get to hear about it because somehow they are. like jail, if the universal, whatever you want to call it, wants to send me to hold a light, let me go do my job and a quote from Tony Robbins reminded me of that, who I had the privilege of working with as an experience coach for over 15 years and said something profound, he said that the strongest force in human personality is the need to be consistent with how you define

your

self, in other words,

your

identity, for example, why don't vegetarians eat meat?

It is not because they have different teeth through different digestive systems it is because their identity is I am a vegetarian, now the reason why they can choose that identity is personal and varied whether for health reasons or for moral reasons, but once That you adopt that identity governs what you order from the menu, so I had the option to go down. the stairs as to which identity I wanted to adopt I could adopt the identity of a prisoner and evict him and complain about the courtroom antics or I could choose something more empowering for someone who was going on a mission as a secret agent of change.

I remember arriving at the prison and I had my medical exam, they gave me my clothes and I sat with a doctor for a while before they gave me a cell and he leaned over and said can I ask you a question? He said sure you said you were undercover and I Smile, I say, why do you ask?, he said he well in my entire career. I had never seen anyone so happy on their first day in prison. I thought it would be a good sign, but even I wasn't prepared for what was about to happen.

I set the scene for you Pentonville is a 200-year-old Victorian prison that has never been modernized. It was built to house more than 900 inmates when I got there, there were more than 1,300, including murderers, terrorists, drug dealers, armed robbers, to name a few, by the government itself. Statistically, more than one in five people in the prison population are taking antipsychotic medications and many more are taking antidepressants. Violence is epidemic. The drugs are sorted and many of the cells have their own pets in the form of cockroaches and rats, let's just say if it was a hotel it wouldn't do very well on TripAdvisor, in fact I remember going into the showers a couple of weeks later of my arrival and this is my first shower in four days and my cellmate went into one shower and I went into another. and three guys followed him and closed the door behind, one pulled out a gun, it was a toothbrush that had been sharpened like on the concrete wall and with razor blades stuck on the other side, crude but very effective and they didn't do it .

Now I wasted my time, luckily they weren't after my cellmate like someone who had just gone through his head and although I didn't witness the attack personally like he did, the blood coming out from under the shower doors was like something out of the ordinary. a horror movie, in fact, this is what it looks like on the inside and this was taken from a newspaper article about another person who was murdered just before I arrived. Welcome to Pentonville. Now I also firmly believe that one of the greatest. Days in the

life

of a human being on the journey towards emotional maturity is the day we realized that

life

is not a comfort-focused experience but a growth-focused experience.

I think we're in Earth School and for me this was a practical exam, you know? Was I really able to lead by example that I've been teaching for so many years in a real environment without cameras or 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 think that you know that can empower us if you can understand that the Earth school is here for everyone, but how is that environment handled in Pentonville? Positive thinking is simply not enough, you need a set of tools and fortunately after three.

Over decades of almost personal growth, I had a decent set of tools and I want to share some of them with you here today, not that you need to go to prison to try them, yeah, leave it to idiots like me, but if your son or daughter comes back to home. from having a hard time in school or not getting the grade they want or your spouse is suffering to having a downsizing or whatever, you may already be using some of what I was using to be able to help you and that's one of my main purposes here today now one of the first tools that I was using is often underestimated and that is the power of acceptance, most people do not reach acceptance because they confuse it with apathy or resignation, but if you complain about something that already happened, you are doing it. wasting time as soon as I got in there, I implemented a zero tolerance policy on my own thinking of any thought that started with if only or what if why, because you can't go back and change anything, milk can spill, but that en I'm not going to put it back in the bottle, sit there and feel sorry for yourself, but by disengaging the energy of resistance and accepting where you are, you can free that energy to channel it into the next

best

step you can take.

In fact, one of the first signs I wrote when I got there and put it over my cell door was taken from Napoleon Hill's classic Think and Grow Rich. In fact, this is the exact sign that says that every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit, the challenge for most people is that they are so busy focusing on the adversity that they do not water the seed and I firmly believe that Many of the gifts we receive in life are wrapped in a thin layer of trouble, probably to prevent someone else from stealing a gift, one of the other souls I was using were contrast frames.

Now contrast frames are very powerful and essentially stem from the fact that most of what we give meaning to is based on what we compare it to, for example, if you arrive at work on a Monday morning and your boss tells you. he calls and

gives

you a surprise 10% raise, you leave feeling pretty good, and then at lunchtime you're chatting with your colleague. -worker who essentially does the same job and you find out that they called him back and gave him a 15% pay increase now you don't feel so good you see that before you had nothing but now you only have 10% see the trick in contrast frame is always contrast where you are with something that empowers you instead of disempowering you.

Many years ago I ran a tough race, one of the toughest ultramarathons in the world through the Sahara desert, on the day of the marathon I saw it and I remember it on the day of the double. marathon you know we were at night getting ready to run 84 kilometers the next day and we were in our little sleeping bags in the middle of the desert it was very cold you know the sand storm was blowing in our faces we had already run better For a hundred miles, every part of our bodies bled or hurt and we could feel the camel spiders and scorpions crawling on our sleeping bag, ma'am, which would have felt like a prison bed.

They also sent me many books. Not only to stop the library, which is quite understocked, but also to be able to help the prisoners and give them something that I thought might help and one of the books and one that I was sent many copies of was Viktor's classic Man's Search for Meaning Frankl and I challenged many of the prisoners who were going through difficult times who were willing to be helped to read that book and not cry tears of gratitude for being in a place like Pentonville instead of a place like Auschwitz, one of the other things that I was making a big difference, I was teaching the prisons the difference between freedom and liberty, the only thing I really did was restrict my freedom as people who have free will and the decision space had just

become

smaller, that was all what I could.

I couldn't choose to go to the stores. I couldn't choose to go walk my dogs. I couldn't choose to show what was planned for my wedding, but freedom is a state of mind and no one can take it away from you, as Gandhi said. no one can do anything to you emotionally without your permission no one can take away your dignity you can only give it away I was freer in my small cell than many of the prison officers who came in that day and who hated their jobs or were returning to a dysfunctional relationship that they did not have the tools or the courage to fix.

I also wrote letters every two weeks to my seniors and my coaching clients, essentially documenting what was going on and teaching them a lot more tools that I was using and it was part journaling, part how-to manual, part, you couldn't make that up. , but it was real and it was also very raw, yes, I shared the times I cried, I shared the times I told myself if I wanted to, if I was really making a difference. and those letters began to have an impact not only for my coaching clients who read them and began to transform, but I also shared them online, they began to transform the lives of most of the people who read them and that began to strengthen me , that started to give me Conviction that what I was doing not only in my little private internal but also external mission was reaching out to people who could help, so I decided that from there I'm going to work harder and DoubleDown and started working with larger groups of prisoners.

In fact, the secret exchange agent job became a full-time deal and every time they let me out of the cell and there was a large crowd of prisoners, I realized that they had to take advantage of my time war, so I wrote a short story. and the story was called mud or stars, taken from the old saying that two men sat behind prison bars, one saw mud and the other saw stars and it was really teaching people that your environment never defines you, it just defines you. It

gives

you a chance to find yourself, but I wrote the story and I did it in a way that followed a fictional story of a guy who comes to prison for the first time, like a deer in the headlights, all you know, confused, angry and scared, and it turns out that he is sitting waiting. space to be processed and he sits next to a wise old prisoner who starts giving him advice and I chose that because a lot of times if we go to help someone and we offer unsolicited training or we really want to try to help, but if we get backlash because you know you don't know me, you don't know my story or even if they want help, the assumption is that you need to fix it and then that triggers the fear that we all have, which is the fear that we are not enough. and we put up a defensive wall and dismissed the advice, so I wrote this in a way that would allow people to sign up because if you sit next to a couple of people who are having a conversation, you're listening with surprise, that's really interesting .

What you're saying is really good: your defenses are down because it's not about you having your guard down, so you're more susceptible to information, so I had this story that I wrote by hand, but I needed help getting it into the book. prison and that's where the universe intervened again the next day. I found myself unsupervised in class. Now this never happens in Pentonville, but the teacher was waiting for a substitute teacher who didn't show up, so she had to leave and locked us in. the classroom that is protocol now I found myself in front of a computer and a printer and I did not need an invitation I began to write thestory out of my pocket and pressed print 50 copies and when she came back, I smuggled them out of class under my sweater and went to work for the next two or three days, there was the mystery postman slipping them in randomly, leaving them in desks, hanging them on bulletin boards and it didn't take long for the magic to

become

a reality.

After working in a few days, you can hear some of the more violent or depressed prisoners shouting at each other through the wings, model stars to try to cheer themselves up, they started to create a movement, in fact, I was very busy with the model stars and doing my others. What I rented it for the longest or the longest is that I managed to get a lot of people off drugs, stop suicides and really help work with some of the people who have been let down by the system and created such an impact that I promised that when If I came out I would be able to create something that could be given to new prisoners and that's why I created the welcome pamphlet for new prisoners because when you're faced with uncertainty now you need something to hold on to and the challenge is many of the systems in prison. , they disappoint prisoners because they follow an archaic principle of containing criminals, not trying to rehabilitate them, and if they try to rehabilitate them, it is always ineffective because what they do is try to improve their skills by educating them, not improve their thinking.

Now behavior follows mindset, not skills, if you educate someone without raising their level of consciousness, all you are going to do is simply give them more tools with which to implement the same behavior, so we essentially turn them into better criminals. , which is what most statistics indicate. It will show you in terms of how fast someone is going. Andrea commits a crime once she is freed, so this book was designed to really help people change their way of thinking and raise their level of consciousness to generate hope instead of giving them no options. for many it is all the option they had and a place to say this is now being implemented and used in several prisons across the UK.

I was on the phone to someone from a prisons boss in New South Wales who will be using it in Australia. I have been talking to many prisons and charities in the US. You can go to my website and download the source files along with all the image rights so you can customize it to your own prison or charity and I am very pleased to say that now It is making a difference for many people every month. Now I share it because each of us faces adversity, it is not because we are unlucky, my friends, it is by design.

Now we are here at the Earth's core to grow and contribute. Those are 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 worry. complain when they appear. We just have to go to the physical body to see that if you take it to the gym and push it beyond your limits, it is pre-programmed to come back a better version of itself, what do you think nature is trying to tell us?

When adversity strikes, you will begin to try to change your focus by asking better questions, looking at what you can learn or who you can become, instead of looking at what you could lose, it is the difference between a life of success and a life on the street. For many people and if we can focus on being able to see the positive no matter what, tear off the wrapping paper and look for the gift in adversity, then we all have the ability to live a life that is an example rather than a warning and, In doing so, we hope to leave a legacy that transcends not only ourselves but encompasses many more lives, thank you.