What If We Stopped Treating Disability and High-Performance as Opposites?

International Day of Persons with a Disability is a significant day on the calendar. This year's theme is all about how we can make society more inclusive.

With days like this, it's always important to check in and celebrate how far we've come. It's also recognising that we still have a long way to go, and working across all the different spaces in inclusion, I have to say that disability is sadly the protected characteristic that lags quite far behind.
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Whilst many things need changing on a policy level to achieve this, there are also things that everybody as individuals can do to create more inclusive environments.

​I believe this starts with a mindset shift and changing how we see disability. I want to get people to see that high-performance and disability coexist. It's two words that we don't see together very often, unless we're talking about the Paralympics, but when we look at society with a much broader view we don't often see those two sitting together.

This means we end up focusing on what people can't do, rather than what they can.

But, if we look at everybody as an individual, there are things that we're great at and things that we're not amazing at and that's okay because our successes come from making our strengths stronger.

Checking in with ourselves and reframing how we see disability, stopping thinking of it as an inability and focusing on the 'cant's', but looking at ability is a really helpful way of doing it. 

Disability is a complicated topic, and it can be easy to get wrong, but if you don't have the conversations around this, it makes it much worse.

My inbox is always open if you wanted to ask questions. I'm always happy to help - in a totally non-judgmental way - because this is how progress starts.