Transcriber: Annet Johnson Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
(Applause & Cheering)
Wow.
I haven't even started yet.
(Laughter)
Hello everyone.
Before I do get started,
I wanted to address the elephant in the room.
I know what a lot of you may have been thinking
when you saw me walk across the stage -
and it's fine, I get it all the time.
So here it is:
No, I'm not single.
Sorry, ladies.
(Laughter)
Sorry. I'm sorry.
(Applause & Cheering)
Wow.
I'm glad we got that one of our chest.
All right.
Now we can get going, right?
Now, what you may not have noticed
is I have a physical disability called cerebral palsy.
For those of you who don't know what that is,
cerebral palsy is a condition
that is marked by impaired muscle coordination
and/or other disabilities,
typically caused by brain damage before or at birth.
Thankfully for me,
it really only affects my right leg.
So, when I was 22 months old,
my parents took me to the doctor
to find out why this [was] happening.
I'm not the oldest in the family,
and they wanted to know why.
The doctor examined me,
and said, "Oh, you're son has CP."
"Oh?"
"Oh, sorry."
"CP is ..."
And he explained it, he explained the condition.
And then he basically told my parents that I would never run,
I would never walk, jump, swim, climb, ride a bike, you name it -
basically, anything physically fun.
So my parents were shocked at this news
that they now have a son with a disability.
This is going to be a new challenge for the family, right?
But as they got on the elevator to leave the office,
my dad turns to my mom, and he says,
"No, my son will do all of those things."
And I have.
Seven surgeries later,
I can run, I can walk, I can jump, swim, climb.
I can even ride a bike for about 10 seconds
before it all just kind of goes south.
(Laughter)
Right.
Well, I don't want to make it sound like it's a walk in the park.
It's been really hard.
I fall over all of the time.
Ten years ago,
I was falling several times a day.
Now I fall maybe two to three times a week.
My grandpa taught me a very important lesson.
He'd always tell me when I was little,
he'd say, "Matthew, your disability is just a nuisance.
Your CP is just a nuisance.
That's all it is, son," he would say.
He'd put me in a headlock, and he'd dig his tooth in my forehead.
He'd tease me just like grandpas tease their grandchildren.
He treated me just like every one of the other grandchildren in the family.
The impact of that sentence on my life is indescribable.
What my parents and my grandpa were trying to teach me
was that CP for me was a nuisance,
but it wasn't me.
It wasn't a part of my character, my personality,
or who I fundamentally was.
It didn't get to dictate outcomes.
It was simply the context within which I'd live my life.
So here is my question:
how many of us have our own "disabilities,"
we'll call them,
that we consider as part of our character?
Let's remind ourselves of the definition of a disability:
a physical or mental condition
that limits one's movements, senses, or activities.
So that condition, or that disability,
could just as easy be the belief that you don't think you're good enough.
Maybe you come from a broken family.
Maybe you didn't have the same opportunities as somebody else.
Whatever it is,
how have you allowed that disability to become a part of your character?
And more importantly,
how have you allowed that disability
to inhibit what you really want to get out of life?
So, when we separate these obstacles, or these challenges, from our character
and we consider them as nuisances,
we allow ourselves to see more clearly who we really are,
and that lets us dictate the outcome,
not the disability.
So here's some things that I thought of
that have helped me
to separate the disability from my character and move forward.
The first is whenever I'm tempted
to not do something because I don't think I'm capable,
I have to ask myself,
"Matthew, how much of this is the CP talking versus just you?"
How much of this is about fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Basically, if it's not about my right leg,
then I'm forced to face up to the fact
that the reason that I'm not moving forward
is because of me.
That self-honesty, that's not easy.
And let's face it:
I have a grade-A excuse to get out of pretty much anything,
even the dishes.
Just kidding.
(Laughter)
But, you see,
I don't allow myself to use that,
because it's the easy way out.
And it's that honesty
that has allowed me to move forward
that let's me live such a happy life.
We all remember
the power of looking under the bed
to find there were no monsters.
It's the same logic.
Go look your monster in the face.
The second thing is about being able to separate
the extended super power vision beyond yourself
and recognize when other people have determined
that your disability is part of who you are.
This is what my parents did when the doctor said,
"You will never do this. You will never do that."
They separated the doctor's opinions of my disability
versus who I fundamentally was.
So you can see throughout my life,
I've been told I could never do something.
And, yeah sure, that's one outcome.
But that's all it is, just one outcome.
There's so many other alternatives.
Remember, when you dissociate the disability from who you are,
you dictate the outcome.
So you can kind of use this as a fuel
to prove other people,
but more importantly, prove yourself wrong.
Sure, it's easy to give in.
It's tempting to want to just say, "Oh, I can't do this."
But that let's the disability win before the fight even starts.
Ask that question in your own life:
how much of me not moving forward is because of "X" reason
versus me just being afraid, right?
Remember the monster under the bed.
So, now, if you follow my points one and two -
you separate yourself from your disability
and you separate other people's opinions about you as well -
guess what?
You're going to fail!
(Laughter)
Huh! You weren't expecting that, were you?
But, I mean, I'm not selling you a fairy tale here.
And I don't mean you're going to fail completely.
I just mean maybe the first couple of times,
hopefully followed by some success.
Maybe a great story for the grandchildren,
maybe a lesson learned.
It's important I manage your expectations here.
I've fallen a lot.
You're not just going to go out and get all this success.
I can promise you a couple of practice runs
and then hopefully some success.
So I mentioned I know this because I fail a ton -
just because I have -
and there's no greater parallel to failing in life
than actually falling down;
I mean physically falling down.
See the reality is when somebody with CP,
we fall all the time
unless you're in a wheelchair,
and we get really good at it.
But when you take an able-bodied adult,
and we fall over,
our natural instinct is to get up as quick as we can
and, "Oh, that didn't happen."
(Laughter)
Why do we do that?
Usually it's shame, it's embarrassment
because we're expecting -
we're not supposed to fall over anymore.
We're grown adults.
And that's our problem
is our expectation is just that.
But when you take somebody with CP,
the expectation is the opposite.
We fall all the time.
And guess what?
We're really good at it.
We fall over like pros.
An example of this
is when I'm holding my 10-month-old niece with both hands, okay.
Without my arms, I'm very vulnerable to falling over.
There's all these other children running throughout the house,
and I'm recognizing that it's only a matter of time
before the nieces and nephews decide they want to tackle the uncle.
And so I decide, "You know what?
I'm recognizing these are signs that I might fall over,
so I'm going to stand close to my wife."
And not if I fall over, when I fall over,
I'm going to pass this child right off.
And guess what?
That's exactly what happened.
(Laughter)
I was able to pretty much predict and plan that I was going to fall,
and I embraced it.
We can do this exact same thing.
When we fail in life, embrace it.
It's that simple.
Just embrace it.
Sure, get upset. If it helps, get upset.
But here's my top tip:
give yourself anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 days,
however long you want,
give yourself a time limit to be upset.
Go binge-watch Netflix, eat your favorite ice cream.
But after that time is up, move on.
You see, you can almost start to get more comfortable
with this idea of failure the more it happens,
and you can almost start to plan for it.
It's kind of a weird logic, right?
But what's your plan for when you fail?
I'm not talking about your plan B;
I'm talking about your plan.
Your plan is how you're going to fail with grace.
A recent mentor of mine put it this way:
if I have a fallback plan, it means I'm going to.
When we expect to fail,
it becomes a lot easier to embrace when it knocks on our front door.
Our fears, our inhibitions, and our doubts,
they do not dictate the outcome.
They do not dictate who we are.
We do.
Maybe you're just afraid
you're actually going to succeed.
I don't know.
But what I do know
is that you paint the picture of who you are,
not anybody else.
I'm going to leave you with this:
when we determine how we are going to fall with grace,
and we choose how we want to hit the ground,
you may actually find
that the view from the landing is a far better view
than the one from which you were standing.
Thank you.
(Applause & Cheering)