Meet Ryan Stephens

We recently connected with Ryan Stephens and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ryan, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
During my years in school, I faced bullying, which was unrelenting for over two years and left me with significantly low self-confidence and low self-belief.

I bounced back from this when I went to college and started learning more about myself and started thinking – “maybe what they said wasn’t all true, maybe I do have something to offer the world”.

When I was just turning 19, I started my first business, a tattoo studio. The sense of achievement that followed greatly boosted my belief within myself, and I started to recognise my own inner strength. However, after about a year, my business partner and I were falling out and there was a lot of toxicity in the business – this resulted in me falling into a very low place mentally, a sort-of depression. I didn’t know what to do but felt like I couldn’t walk away from the business I’d created, but at the same time knew it was tearing me apart mentally and within my soul.

When I was 21, around two years into running the business, this low point reached its pinnacle when I tried getting out of the toxic situation and the looming disaster of the business failing when the people working for me went to open up another studio. To stop this from happening, or rather to stop myself from ending up in financial difficulty when they left, I started selling drugs for a short period and ended up getting caught and sent to prison for 28 months (inside for 9 months).

This was without a doubt rock bottom for me. However, I realised after a few weeks inside, filled with self-loathing and self-defeating thoughts, that if I continued to beat myself up and think about how much I’d f*cked up, then I would never come back from this set-back, and it would forever define me. I decided that I would never let it stop me, and I would prove to myself, others and the world that it was the furthest thing away from who I believe myself to be.

Since then, I’ve coached and mentored over 20,000 people through 121 support, group workshops and motivational talks at 100s of schools, colleges, universities, and across all sectors of business including national government organisations within the UK.

I’ve been back in prisons and police stations delivering support and workshops around substance misuse and well-being support. I’ve also worked at two top universities providing entrepreneurial support and delivering lectures on business start-up.

I have created a business called Wild Minds Gower providing well-being activities and self-development workshops whilst incorporating nature as a means of empowering people to make positive and lasting changes in their lives. I’ve also created two communities centred around creating positive connections and improving their well-being, one of which is a sea-dipping community called The Wet Bandits and is still running successfully.

One of the things that has defined my life in addition to the above, is pushing myself through adversity and embracing challenges and discomfort in my daily life. I have done this largely through physical challenges such as running 100 miles in a day, flipping tyres up hills or across beaches for miles at a time, carrying cement bags up hills or scaling mountains 10 times within 24 hours etc. I have also challenged myself every day for the last 1200+ days by jumping in the cold sea, or rivers/lakes/waterfalls every single day without fail since 26th October 2020 – and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon.

I truly belief that resilience is cultivated not only through what happens to us and what we do with it, but what we push ourselves to do that breaks us from our comfortable armchair and throws us into the wilderness of discomfort – the people we are when we walk back through the door after putting ourselves to the test, is not the same person which walked out the door. We are changed and we are better for it.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
My mission is to challenge people to become better. To create change. To foster greatness in their own way and in their own lives.

I do this through 121 support, programs, motivational talks, workshops, and soon-to-be books.

www.RyanStephens.co
www.WildMindsGower.co.uk

Instagram:
@RyanStephens___

Facebook:
@RyanStephens.co

LinkedIn:
Ryan Stephens

YouTube:
RyanStephensuk

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1) Embrace Failure, Always Bounce Back & Persist 2) Remain Optimistic in the face of adversity
3) Challenge yourself and fight against comfort

My advice would be to embark on a life long journey of self-discovery by learning more about your thoughts, emotions as well as how to recognise, understand and manage them. A good place to start is to write things down in a journal and get more comfortable with being radically honest with yourself. Free from judgment between those pages you can release things that are held in your mind and would otherwise be wreaking havoc on your mental health.

I would also suggest reframing things, so instead of asking “why has this happened to me?”, you instead ask “why is this happening for me?” and look to find the answers. This will change everything for you.

Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?
Whenever I feel overwhelmed I turn to nature. I spend prolonged periods of time in the woods, on the beaches or out trail running for hours on end so I get lost within myself, in order to find myself.

Nature holds the greatest healing and also the answers we seek – expect we seek them by trying to push on and do through logic, however I believe when we turn our heads to nature, peace and calmness – the answers we seek instead find us.

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