You're listening to the Schillach's podcast, your guide to a more stylish life.

Welcome to today's SL-Man podcast with me Charlotte Collins. This week I'm joined by Stephen Gillen.

Stephen grew up in 1970's Belfast amid violence, unrest and trauma.

When his surrogate mother died of cancer, he was sent back to England and after a succession of children's homes

and having to survive London in his early teens, he was groomed into a life of crime going to a detention center for the first time age 14.

In his early 20s he received a 17 year sentence, eventually serving 12 was one of the UK's most dangerous offenders.

Having hit rock bottom, he decided to change his mindset to better manage his behavioral problems,

anger and violence issues. Today Stephen is the author of two books and the co-founder of

multi-award winning international media branding and TV company

Raw Media Creative Studios and he joins me here to talk about how he managed to

turn his life around, become a self-development expert, and how his story can be a source of inspiration for others.

Welcome, Stephen.

Hi, Charlotte, it's really good to be here with you.

A lot to unpack.

As we said before, before we started recording, you said it's kind of, it's Act 1, it's Act 2.

So naturally we're going to start with Act 1. Can you give us a kind of potted history about your early years. Yeah I was I was born here Shala

taken to Belfast as a six-month-year-old baby of course. my family come from there, so I was left there and all the

tends and purposes my mother come over here to make a better life for us, you

know as she said and I was left her with aunts and uncles. Of course it was in the middle of the war over there. So I was right in the middle of it, shoot out at night, from the flats all night, you know,

soldiers turning out bombs going off.

It was a regular occurrence in them days.

I mean I was young, you know, to me I didn't I didn't see any anything different about

...