The economy is stagnant, people are out of jobs, and home foreclosures continue, but it is important to remain positive. But being optimistic shouldn’t just apply to one’s financial situation.
Bonnie St. John is the perfect example. She overcame disability, sexual abuse, race and gender issues, and other obstacles to become a multiple medal-winning Paralympic skier, author, and former White House employee. In addition to running her own business, the Plainsboro resident spends her time trying to inspire and encourage others to stay positive — regardless of the challenges.
Her latest appearance will be on “The Dave Ramsey Show” on Fox Business at 8 p.m. on Friday, November 20. With the current state of the economy, Ramsey is hosting a series of shows with the theme of overcoming obstacles, and St. John will talk not only about the personal obstacles she has overcome, but also how she taught others to do so.
St. John grew up in San Diego. Her mother was an English teacher who went back to school for her Ph.D. and became a high school principal. Her father was an engineer, but he left her mother while she was pregnant, and St. John never knew him. St. John was born with pre-femoral focal disorder, a birth defect that stunted growth in her right leg. Doctors tried orthopedic shoes and braces until finally deciding to amputate the leg when she was five.
Nonetheless, St. John has found much success in her life. And it all began in high school, when a friend invited her on a skiing trip during Christmas vacation. St. John said the friendship and the trip idea were unique — her friend was from the wealthy section of San Diego, while she was from the other side of the city, St. John was black, and her friend was white, and most importantly, St. John had one titanium leg.
She wanted to try it, especially after having seen Ted Kennedy Jr., whose right leg was amputated at age 12, skiing on television. She knew other amputees had participated in the sport and was excited for the opportunity. Because of the mild weather in San Diego, however, she had neither ski equipment nor winter clothes.
St. John borrowed special equipment from a local amputee ski group and decided to try her hand at the sport. When she got to the hill, she fell repeatedly, and with one leg, falling down and getting up made the excursion that much more exhausting.
“Finally, I got enough balance and strength to where I started moving on the bunny hill, and I realized I couldn’t stop,” she said. “I was crashing into men, women, and small children. It was really hard. It took me three days before I learned how to turn right and turn left” before learning how to stop. She soon realized she was perfect at parallel skiing and made her way to intermediate slopes.
When she returned from the trip, she joined the group from whom she borrowed the equipment and began skiing regularly with the other amputees in the club. She began racing and training and realized she had the potential to make the U.S. Olympic team’s Paralympic team. “I wasn’t able to make teams for track or swimming in high school. Being in the ski race was my chance to really compete.”
In her senior year of high school, she received a scholarship to train at Burke’s Mountain Academy across the country in Vermont — a school specifically for ski racers. St. John was the only amputee.
It was no easy ride from there. On the first day of school, St. John broke her real leg. Six weeks later, she broke her artificial leg, and to make matters worse, the artificial leg got lost in the mail when she sent it out for repairs.
“I kept training,” said St. John. “People said, ‘Why didn’t you just go home when you’re so far away from home, and everything was going wrong?’ This was my shot at being an Olympian. I wasn’t going home unless they sent me home.”
Ultimately, St. John got the leg back, and she continued training with the coaches all winter and went on to work on a glacier in Oregon all summer. The following winter, she trained in Lake Tahoe, and returned to the glacier again in the summer. “I was virtually training year-round for several years.”
In the meantime, St. John enrolled at Harvard University and continued to compete in national and international races, which determined her ranking and landed her on the Paralympic team.
At the 1984 Paralympics in Innsbruck, Austria, she won three medals, becoming the first African American to win medals in a winter Paralympic competition as a ski racer. “Skiing helped me to feel good about myself,” she said, “but I love that what I did really showed other people that everything is possible, and that we can push through more obstacles than we think we can.”
After the Paralympics, St. John returned to Harvard, where she graduated in 1986. She won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University and began her career at IBM in sales. She then went to work in the White House under former President Bill Clinton, where she was a director for the National Economic Council.
“It was very intense,” she said. “You realize that what you read in the paper is the tip of the iceberg, and the work people are doing behind the scenes in the White House is amazing. I don’t care who’s in the White House — Republicans or Democrats. There are a lot of people working really hard to keep this country running.”
St. John then founded her own company, Courageous Spirit, in which she provides inspirational and motivational keynote speeches to business organizations.
“When I was younger, motivational speakers made a difference for me and helped me to understand that hard work and high goals could make anything possible,” she said.
In her third book, released in May, “Live Your Joy,” St. John writes about being joyful and positive no matter what’s going on in the world. “It was a great book to come out right now because it’s such a difficult time with the economy.”
“It gives you energy and fuels you to change your circumstance,” she said, adding that many people who encounter challenging situations tell themselves that once these situations are over, then they will experience joy. Rather, St. John said, “find your joy now — and that will help you to change your situation.”
In addition to talking about overcoming losing her leg, St. John discusses how she was sexually abused by her step-father for many years as a child, and about other obstacles she has encountered.
She is currently working on her next book, “How Strong Women Lead,” and plans to include her daughter in the writing process. St. John, who moved with her daughter to Plainsboro in August from New York City so she could start high school in the WW-P district, said her daughter is very motivational and a great fiction writer. “She’s interested in anthropology and different cultures, so I don’t know what she’s going to do, but she’ll be great at it,” she said.
On top of that, St. John spoke last month at a Novartis Pharmaceutical event in which the company invited disabled high school students to learn about job openings not only at the company, but in the pharmaceutical industry in general. The students were introduced to disabled employees of the company and heard St. John speak about “Choosing To Be Extraordinary.”
In addition, she volunteers with an adaptive sports program in Wyndham, NY, and plans to make an appearance on “The Hour of Power,” a weekly Christian television program, in early December. She also has a website —www.bonniestjohn.com — that offers resources for tips and guides to remaining positive.
St. John said her ultimate goal is “for people to realize that they have more strength inside them than they know,” she said. “They’re capable of more than they thought they can do. Normal is overrated. Aim higher.”
