Kelsey Tainsh: It’s Not a Limp, It’s Swagger
Motivational speaker Kelsey Tainsh spoke to St. Joseph Academy students in an all-school assembly today, November 4, about her journey overcoming a brain tumor when she was only five years old to becoming a champion athlete as a teen, only to experience a tragic setback at age 15 when the tumor returned. During surgery to remove the tumor, she suffered a crippling stroke that left the right side of her body paralyzed.
With her life turned upside down, she found herself going down a dark hole, especially when she returned to school in a wheelchair. Her friends had disappeared, she couldn’t function on her own, and she became paralyzed with fear and self-doubt. Despite her significant physical challenges, she worked hard to pull herself up and charged back into life. She graduated with honors from the University of Florida and worked for several of the most recognized companies in the world, including Coca-Cola. Now, at 32, she is a professional speaker, spreading her personal message of how she overcame fear and rose above her physical challenges to become a para snowboarder and professional speaker.
“I believe that when we change our attitude and perspective, we can change the way we react. And, when we change the way we react, we can change the outcome,” Tainsh told students.
From the moment she realized she was able to lift her right leg in the hospital long after her surgery, her attitude changed. She became a fighter, fully believing that when there was a chance things could get better. Today, while her right-eye vision is impaired and she cannot move her right arm and hand, she has adapted to those challenges and returned to an active physical life.
When she was in rehabilitation, her therapist told her she would never be able to tie her hair back into a bun because she couldn’t use her right hand. She demonstrated how she adapted by learning to use just her left hand to complete the task. “When someone says to me you will never … I say, ‘Watch me.’”
With a can-do attitude and perspective, and the support of her large family, she overcame challenges that seemed, at first, insurmountable.
“We are all paralyzed in some way,” she said. “We all have things that we hide from others and that we don’t want people to see that affect our self-worth. I used to try to hide my disabilities so that other people would think I was normal. But being different,” she said, “does not mean you are less than.”
She told students that if they are facing a major challenge, she encouraged them not to let it get them down. “I encourage you to use it to rise up and to help others rise up,” she said.
She asked them to practice empathy instead of sympathy when interacting with people who are facing challenges. It is better to put yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand what they are going through rather than express sympathy by feeling sorry for them, she explained.
As an example, she asked several students to come on stage and wear special glasses that blocked them from seeing out of their right eye and then asked them to give each other a high-five, which they couldn’t. The exercise helped students understand the challenges some people face and to empathize with them rather than sympathize.
Her parting message to students was to be supportive of each other: “It is important you are there for each other. We are all in this together,” she said. “You never know when someone is going through something challenging, and it is important as a community that you stick together.”
