SPEAKING.APP

Yes, Amanda, thank you so much, uh, for the introduction. All the way from Limerick via Brussels in Belgium. Um, so greetings to everyone. Um, I'm a bit excited and a bit nervous at the- well, nervous anticipation to be the first speaker on, uh, We Can and We Will online. Right, so, um, that's, that's something that excites me. So yeah, a story that changed my life. So actually, Amanda, uh, all credit to you, because you shared something about five weeks ago, remember? Yeah. Uh, you shared a video of what you thought were two amazing, inspirational people that you saw a video of, and it, it makes- when you hear the story, it actually makes... The hair stands in your neck, and it gives you goosebumps. And, and when I saw that story, I said,"Oh, my God, I actually met those people." So I'm gonna tell you a little story about, you know, when they say, people, that you shouldn't meet your heroes? Well, I'm gonna convince you that sometimes meeting your heroes can change your life, uh, as it did with me. So, um, it's a story of love and commitment. I think that's a good way to tell a story. They're two good things to tell a story about, love and commitment. In 1962, in Holland, Massachusetts, in the United States of America, Rick Hoyt was born. Um, and immediately, from the moment this child was born, a dramatic event happened. The umbilical cord twisted itself around his neck, stopping the flow of oxygen going through his head, and the child survived. Rick survived for the first time, but he survived against all odds. The one thing that he kept from that is cerebral palsy, so Rick can't talk. He's still alive right now. Rick can't talk, and he can't communicate, they thought. He can't walk, because his cerebral palsy, so he ended up in a wheelchair. This was 1962, I remind you of that, in the United States. So all the doctors of the hospital where Rick was born told his parents that it would be better to institutionalize him, because in their words, and when I spoke to them, they made sure that these were the words that were used. The two parents, who were having a traumatic experience, they were told he would amount to nothing more than a vegetable, and that u- that word was actually used, um, in front of him and his parents in'62. So that institutionalizing Rick was the only solution they could see. All doctors, bar one. There's always one, right? There's always one. Bar one particular doctor who said,"Treat that child like a normal child. There's something there. I don't know what, but there's something there." And when he said that, the mother actually spotted that the child's eyes were moving, and as she took him home, she spotted that when they were moving around the room, that the child's eyes were moving. So she said,"No, I can... This, this child is alive. There's something in that child." So what she actually did was she made an alphabet of sandpaper letters, and she took stickers and put stickers on all the objects in the room where he was staying. So as- if it was in the kitchen, there was, like, a fridge sticker on the fridge, and there was a cup sticker on the cup, et cetera. And within a short amount of time, Rick actually learned the alphabet. So there was intelligence there. This guy could, could learn things. It was an amazing feeling for those parents. I'm gonna take a long story short,'cause I listened for two hours to these people when they gave their talk. And at the age of 11, after a long struggle of convincing people that this was worth building, and after fundraising that took years and years, a computer was built for Rick. A computer with which he could communicate, just tapping his head to the side, going through rows of letters, forming words, and from those words, forming texts. At 11, they discovered from the first text he put together, that he was actually quite intelligent. Imagine, that was a child that was told that he was gonna be institutionalized, and that he would amount to nothing more than a vegetable. He went to school. He actually went to a public school with the computer, being able to communicate with everyone around him. It took him some time, but he was able to communicate. So that child that was written off was now communicating with his peers. Do you know what happened? In 1993, 31 years after his birth, that particular child that was written off as a vegetable graduated from Boston University with a degree in special, uh, learning. Yeah. With a degree from the Boston University. Isn't that amazing? Then he went on to actually work, work-... at Boston College, where he helped develop communication systems for other children with disabilities. What a story! You're gonna say,"What a story, Patrick. That's an amazing story." From someone who was written off to getting a degree at Boston University, to working at a college and help other people by developing com- com- communication systems for the disabled. What a story. On its own, that is some story. I'm not finished though. There's more to this story. In 1977... We go back a bit now. So in 1977, Rick asked his dad, Dick, via the computer, could they please go for a, a fundraising run for a friend of his at school who was playing lacrosse? I don't know if you know lacrosse. It's, uh, it's an, a sport they play in America. It's quite physical. It's with these nets, with a ball, and you have to score a goal. It's a very physical sport, and one of the players of his lacrosse team from his school had gotten paralyzed playing the sport. So Rick asked his dad,"Listen, there's a fundraising run on for this guy. Can we not go run?" At this stage, his dad was 36, and even though he was an army officer, he wasn't really that fit, and he had never ran in his life. I've been there. I know what it is to never have run in your life and go for your first run. I think a lot of people in this group do, right? A lot of us have gone for our first run or our first Zumba class or whatever. So he had never done this before, but he convinced his dad to do this. It was only a 5K. You know, only a 5K. And I have to take this because I don't wanna change the words, but after that 5K, Rick turned to his dad and said, verbatim, on the computer,"Dad, when I'm running, running, it feels like I'm not handicapped." Will I repeat that?"Dad, when I'm running, it feels like I'm not handicapped." So the father, Dick, said,"Well, we have to do something with this," because, like, if that's, if that's the thing to make him feel like a human being, like a full-grown human being, as, as someone that is equal with everybody else, let's do that. Now, Rick was still going to school at the time, so his dad... And here is the story of love and commitment, I said. Do you know what his dad did? He took a cement bag, put the cement bag into the wheelchair of his son, and started training with the cement bag in the wheelchair. Love and commitment, that's what it took, right? So he began training and training and training and training, and then running races with his son, and 5Ks became 10Ks. And if I jump forward now again, 2016, at the last time I checked their count, these two particular human beings had participated in 72, and finished 72 marathons, of which 32 times the Boston Marathon. So they ran the Boston Marathon 32 times, right? That is him pushing his son for 26.2 miles in a wheelchair. You think that's a good story? We're not even halfway there yet. The dad said maybe he'd like to do something else than just the running, so he started looking at,"Can we do some- can we do these triathlons that everyone's talking about?" Yeah? Because triathlons are fun. You get to swim, then you get to cycle, then you get to run. So how does this work? And he was trying to figure out how it would work, and he came up with a lot of resistance. Nobody in the triathlon world in America would hear of them entering their races. So he said,"Listen..." In the end, one or two organizers said,"Listen, we're not gonna give you any special time. You need to finish in the, in, in the same cutoff times as normally able people and figure out a way how to do it." So you got a dinghy, a boat. So at the start of a race, he had to carry his son to the boat, put him in the boat, tie a rope around himself, and swim the length of the course with his son pulled in a dinghy. Then he had to tighten the boat off, drag his son off, put him in, into the front seat of a specially designed bike, and cycle the whole course. When he's finished with that, he had to lift his son up, put him back into the running wheelchair, and do the running race. In 2016, at the last count that I'm aware of, they had done 257, two, five, seven, triathlons. Finished 257 triathlons. They had finished seven Half Ironmans and six full Ironmans, all within the time limits given to fully able people. For people who don't know, a full Ironman is a two-mile swim with a boat attached to you, a 110-mile cycle with your son in the front seat of a bike, and then a full marathon of 26.2 miles. Six of them, they completed, including Kona, uh, and Kona is the World Championships Ironman Athletics. What a story, isn't it? That story after story after story is piling up what these people have done. A story of love and commitment. It's not finished. In 2013, they were one mile away from the finish of Boston Marathon when the bombs went off. They were lucky. They were one mile away from where the bombs went off. So they... Someone, uh, recognized them and took Rick, uh, out of his wheelchair, put him in an SUV, and drove him to the Sheraton in Boston. Where do you come into in all this story, Patrick? Well, here's a coincidence or a small little bit of a coincidence. In that hotel, around the hotel, in the aftermath of all this, Dick and Rick Hoyt bumped into Bob. Who's Bob? I- I'm gonna keep this, uh, th- this is the funny bit, right? Bob's actually a builder, believe it or not. I'm not making this up, right? Bob's a builder, absolutely. Yeah, I can see you all laughing. It's funny, is it? But Bob's a builder in Clonakilty, and Bob was there to take part in the Boston Marathon, and Bob is the organizer of the Clonakilty Marathon, which is on every first, uh, weekend in December every year.... the Clonmel, uh, marathon, as they call it, in, in West Cork. And Bob is a bit of a character. Bob actually believes Jesus comes from West Cork instead of Jerusalem, you know? So he's a bit of a character, this man. So he saw Dick and Rick Hoyt, and he went over to them and he said, like, um,"Lads, you..." And just had a chat with them. He knew who they were, introduced himself, and then he said, like,"Have you ever, have you ever been to Ireland?" And the boy said,"No." And he said,"Do you know what? I organize marathons. Why don't you come and run one?" Do you know, because he's a cheeky chappy. Who invites the Hoyts to come and run a marathon in, in West Cork? They got chatting, and the lad said,"Yeah, sure." They organized... It took a lot of organization to get the wheelchair over, to get him to fly, et cetera, et cetera, to, to travel them down from Dublin Airport all the way to West Cork, and to a place called Cork Macroom. And Cork Macroom, um, I don't know if you've ever been there. If you haven't, when you can travel again and you do a staycation, I would recommend that part of Ireland, eh? Cork Macroom is near, um, Timoleague, which is near in Donoughmore. You know that part of Ireland I'm talking about. So there was a, a marathon organized in Cork Macroom on the 25th of July 2015, and the Hoyts were gonna be there. Can you imagine the amount of people from the marathon world that wanted to take part in that? But there was only a few hundred places that were there to be gotten to run that race. So anyway, long story short, I actually got picked. I, I was able to do the race. I was allowed to enter the race. So we traveled up the day before, and that evening, the evening before the race, and they actually gave a talk, um, in the Quality Hotel in Clonakilty, right? And there was 200, uh, athletes in that, um, room, and there wasn't a dry eye to be heard. I have a bit of a French song, uh, that... One of my favorite French songs is by Zaz, Z-A-Z. And sh- the, the start of the song reminds me of the picture you're now seeing on screen, and it goes like this:'Rappelle-moi le jour et l'année. Rappelle-moi le temps qu'il faisait. Et si j'ai oublié, tu peux me secouer.' What that means is, rappelle-moi le jour et l'année means remind me of the day and the year. Rappelle-moi le temps qu'il faisait, remind me of the weather that day. And if I ever forget, Et si j'ai oublié, you can shake me to the core, tu peux me secouer. That was the day that, um, actually, I was picked as part of 15 support runners for two teams. On the left, you see Team Kerr, which is a team with, uh, Aaron in the seat there. He's cerebral palsy as well. They come from Northern Ireland, David, Sandra, and Aaron Kerr. And then beside that, you see Dick and Rick Hoyt, uh, but in the middle of that, Valerie Fogarty, who's the president of Marathon Club Ireland, of which I'm a member. And but on the right, um, between the red and the blue jersey, you see my, um, head popping out there. Uh, as a member of Marathon Club Ireland, I was selected... I was privileged to be selected as one of the 15 people to actually run that race with them in Cork Macroom, in county, in, in West County Cork. It was an amazing day. It was a day I will never forget. At mile 17, which is what the picture you see now, I was asked to push Rick Hoyt for that mile. We, we all took parts. It's a hilly course, and each one of us that were selected got to pick that story. Now, the funny bit was Valerie started running beside me, he was the president of the club, and I had heard this story before. We actually taught him three new words in that mile,'cause he's very perceptive. We taught him three new words to tease his dad with, and his eyes lit up and he started smiling. The three words we taught him was, feck, shite, and yeah, right. Three real Irish expressions that we wanted him to use to tease his dad when he got home. That was really, really, uh, an amazing day. It was, it was such an uplifting day. During that run, which it took us 5 hours and 53 minutes to complete, uh, to finish with the two wheelchairs over the hills in West Cork, that was my 27th marathon that day. The picture you see there now is Dick Hoyt, the father, handing me my 25th marathon medal, uh, for finishing my 25th marathon, which I'd done a couple of weeks previously, and it changed my life that day. I actually have ran... Since that day, I've ran another 97 marathons. I'm now at 124. Not that that's important, but what changed that day for me was four things that I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna leave you with. Four things that changed for me from that particular moment. One, I finally understood what living in the flow was. I finally understood what doing things in the flow meant. Doing things in the flow is doing what is in front of you with love. Every day I wake up now, the first question I ask myself when I enter my office is not,"Patrick, what do you have to do today?" Because of that day, I now ask myself,"Patrick, what do you want to do this day?" And I do what is in front of me with love and commitment. That's the first thing that changed. The second thing that changed was that I started living more intentionally from the inside out. I've done this before. You've seen me do this before if you met me. Living from the inside out means I know I have everything I need within me. I know that within me sits all the potential, and the love, and the commitment that I need. So living from inside out means that that's the way to do what I do- love doing most. I do what I love doing most in the moment, in the flow. Then from that, I start having a life while making a living, right? Not the other way around. Not making a living to have a life. From that day, I started to have a life to make a living.... That's a big difference. Start doing what you love, start doing what you're committed to, start doing it with passion, and people will pay you for it. That day changed that for me. And the last thing I also understood was, and I mentioned it already, that regardless of who you are, regardless of your circumstances, whether you're born with cerebral palsy and you're supposed to end up like a vegetable, you are a complete human being. So everyone who's listening to me here today, everyone that's in this room, this virtual room, let me tell you, you are enough, you are complete, and you are whole. And that's what I learned. That's the four lessons I learned from a day with Dick and Rick Hoyt, um, and that particular time. So, rappelez-moi le jour et l'année. Yeah, remind me of the day and the year, twenty-fifth of July, two thousand and fifteen. Thanks for listening.