For years, I was the person other people warned their children about. My name was in the newspapers. On Google, if you typed it in, you’d read about weapons, drugs, and a criminal case most Norwegians still remember. I was 28 years old, and I thought I had figured out how the world worked. I was wrong about almost everything.
I had grown up in a small place, on a small island, and as a kid I was bullied for being a farm boy. When I was 14, I moved to my grandfather’s house in the city. He was kind, but he had no rules, and one of the things I discovered there was that money could buy me things I had never had before. Friends, respect, a sense of belonging… I started stealing from him. That was the first time in my life I remember feeling deep shame, it would not be the last.
From there, life moved quickly in a direction I did not fully choose and did not fully understand. By my mid-twenties I was deep into a world where drugs, violence, and money all went together. I delivered weapons that were later used in one of the most well-known murder cases in Norwegian history. I was not the one who pulled the trigger, but I had handed over the guns, and that was enough. For a long time, I cared more about my reputation than about what I had actually done.
I hit bottom more than once. I overdosed so many times that I stopped taking the hospital wristband off, because I knew I would be back soon. One New Year’s Eve, I sat alone in a prison cell and tried to swallow a bottle of dish soap. I told myself it was a suicide attempt, but I think now it was just a cry for help that nobody was there to hear.
And then, eventually, someone was.
There were three of them, really. A police officer named Kjellbjørn walked into my kitchen one night when everything I owned was illegal and everything about me was falling apart. He did not lecture me, he did not read me my rights with contempt, he just sat down next to me and asked: “Arman, are you sure your life needs to be like this? Could there be another way out?”
A prison officer named Mette did something similar later. She told me I had to swallow my pride and ask for help, and she made sure I got into rehab when I finally said yes.
And then a woman named Kari, who worked in the public sector, hired me as a financial advisor even though my name came up on Google as a weapon dealer. She decided to see a person instead of a headline.
None of them rescued me, that is not how it works. What they did was smaller, and much more important: they made it safe enough for me to ask for help. And asking for help was the hardest thing I had ever done.
I spent the next fifteen years working as a financial advisor for people drowning in debt. I used my own story to connect with them, because shame is what keeps people silent, and silence is what keeps them stuck. I was not better than them, I had been where they were and that was exactly the point.
Today I speak on stages around the world about what I learned in those kitchens and cells and waiting rooms. I talk about leadership, about hiring people with gaps in their CV, about building workplaces where honest conversations are possible. But underneath all of it is one simple idea: three people asked me how I was actually doing, and it changed everything.
I call it Brave Conversations now. It is a method, but more than that, it is a belief. The belief that small moments of real human contact are not small at all. That asking for help is not weakness, it is the doorway through which everything else becomes possible. And that when we give someone the chance to help us, we are not taking anything from them. We are giving them something.
That is what those three people gave me, without knowing they were doing it. A chance to matter. A chance to be seen as a person, not a case.
If you are reading this and you recognise yourself in any of it, whether in my story or in your own, I hope you find your own version of that moment. And I hope, when it comes, you are brave enough to answer honestly.