How Mike Stevenson turned adversity into a life’s work
Based in Edinburgh, Mike Stevenson brings a strong Scottish connection to a story shaped by hardship, reinvention and hard-won perspective. Expelled from school at 15 and later homeless on the streets of London, he has since built a reputation as a speaker on resilience, leadership and change.
Stevenson is the founder of Thinktastic, a TEDx speaker and author whose work has included major projects involving M&S, Sky TV, British Gas and Standard Life. His profile also describes him as a three-time winner of the Business in the Community Award for Raising the Attainment of Young People.
That lived experience sits at the centre of his work as an adversity speaker. His talks draw on reinvention, overcoming adversity, creativity and leadership, shaped by first-hand experience rather than theory.
In this exclusive interview with the Motivational Speakers Agency, Mike Stevenson reflects on how adversity shaped his outlook, the lessons he drew from life at its harshest, and why those experiences still inform the way he speaks to audiences today.
Question 1. You’ve spoken openly about early adversity, from expulsion to homelessness. How did those experiences shape what you now describe as an ‘unstoppable mindset’?
Mike Stevenson: “Adversity has had a huge impact in shaping my life, but also shaping what I do today, and I'll explain that. When I was at school I was constantly distracted. I could not listen. I could not take anything in. It was horrible. I was constantly fidgeting, moving about, looking out the window, replaying Stones and Beatles songs in my head. So, I was a hopeless pupil. And when I reached 15, I was expelled.
“And honestly, I was so happy. I stepped outside the school, and I breathed the perfume there. I was full of such relief. It was extraordinary. I felt released from a prison. That's how bad it was. So that taught me how I do what I do. And I'll come to that in a few moments. But at that time, I was being chased by a gang, and they kept beating me up wherever I went in the town.
“I faced this gang and they would start kicking me and punching me, and it was horrible, and I had no way to fight back against them at that stage in my life because I was very slight, very small. And so, with my parents splitting up and going through a horrible divorce, I escaped down to London, and I got a job within a day, which was fantastic, and I got accommodation as well. I got a bed and breakfast.
“Three days later, I got the sack from my job because my rather raw Scottish accent at the time was not understood by the customers, because it was a shop I was working in. So, I found myself sleeping out. And this went on for 18 months.
“Yes, it was cold. It was hard. It was dangerous. I got a knife at my throat. I got a gun pulled on me one night. I was thrown down the steps of Piccadilly Circus Tube Station when I was asleep. So, all these things happened, but at the same time I felt myself getting stronger and more resilient by the day.
“And I used a number of techniques to do that. I found myself needing to learn to talk to strangers because wherever you are in life, whatever is happening, if you can't talk to a stranger, you're going to find yourself in difficulties.
“But it's a great skill to have because I'd learned the vascular system of central London and used it to give people directions, tourists and actually people from London, because you found that a lot of people from London didn't know London as well as they perhaps should, but it's a huge city. And I learned this central part of London. I knew it like the back of my hand.
“I also knew, because I looked in restaurant windows, savouring the foods that were on offer and never getting access to them, that you can guide people. You can recommend restaurants even though I was sleeping out, and I got a few tips from that, and I mean financial tips, and one couple from America even took me for a meal. It's the best meal I've ever tasted. I can tell you that now because I hadn't eaten for days.
“But you also do learn to eat because I would go to Covent Garden fruit market very early in the morning when they were unloading their lorries, and I would volunteer and they would give me some bruised apples and oranges. So that managed to sustain me. So, all these tools that I was learning were absolutely invaluable.
“So, when I stand up and speak, I'm talking to a room full of strangers. Imagine how much that experience taught me. But also, going back to school, I began to think, how would I teach? How would I engage people? And you begin to realise that there's a way of doing that, which is what I practice now. Because engagement with an audience is a technique. It's a skill.
“But when you get it right, you are on the audience's side from the very first second and they're on your side. And that's really important because you're there to achieve something on their behalf. And that is my mission.
“But you think about different ways of approaching an audience, different ways of presenting. You tell stories. Stories are really powerful. You involve people by giving this sensory experience of being in your story.
“So, if I'm talking about standing in a desert, for example, people begin to feel the grains in their mouth. They feel the dryness in their throat because we learn things by sensory experience. That is how we remember smells from our young years. You pass a bakery and it brings back all kinds of evocations of when you were young, doesn't it?”
This exclusive interview with Mike Stevenson was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.