He has survived two horrific accidents. The first disfigured him for life. The second left him with a set of wheels. However, W Mitchell prefers to call these ordeals "being introduced to myself'', says Sandhya Rajayer.
W Mitchell is hard to miss, even in a crowd. He's the guy in the wheelchair. The one whose wheels, quite possibly, need to be retreaded often. That's because Mitchell and his wheelchair have chalked up more miles than most frequent flyers in recent years.
He has toured "Africa, Asia, Australia and Alabama'', as he puts it. He's a familiar face on TV on the National Geographic Superhumans series, The Today Show, Good Morning America and their international counterparts.
He has been featured in Time, Newsweek and the New York Times. Meanwhile, Chicken Soup for The Soul and Anthony Robbins's Unlimited Power are two of the many books that tell his inspirational story.
But his remarkable journey did not begin in a wheelchair.
W Mitchell ("W stands for Wonderful,'' he explains) has always led an adventurous life and taken on challenges with relish. Yet after his first accident, the nature of these challenges changed dramatically.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Mitchell dropped out of school and joined the US Marine Corps. After a protected upbringing, he enjoyed the exposure to different people and places that a career in the Marines offered. He was posted to California then went to Hawaii in 1960.
When he left the Marines, he turned his hand to radio, working at a local Hawaii station as a disc jockey, newsreader and later a talkshow host. After this, he returned to Pennsylvania.
Following another stint in radio, he moved to San Francisco and landed a job driving the city's famous cable cars. He loved this job and enjoyed regaling tourists with stories and banter.
Winds of change
Then came a watershed. July 19, 1971 was a turning point in Mitchell's life - the end of one pattern of life and the beginning of another.
Coming from an affluent family, Mitchell had his life made. He was 28, loved flying airplanes, had bought a new Honda 750 motorbike the previous day and was heading off to meet his girlfriend.
On the way, his bike rammed into a laundry truck. The impact popped open the lid of the bike's fuel tank and litres of petrol spilled over its hot engine and ignited. The ensuing fireball was 10 feet high and 4 feet wide. Fortunately, a bystander found a firehose and put out the fire.
Mitchell reached San Francisco General Hospital with horrific burns over 65 per cent of his body. His crash helmet had protected his skull but his face was just scar tissue. His fingers were charred black and had to be amputated.
Despite four months in the hospital, 38 operations and the best efforts of plastic surgeons, he was often referred to as a "monster'' because of his appearance. But that's not how he sees himself.
"It took me two years to be able to make my hands do something,'' he says.
"In the beginning, it was painful even to just feel the breeze on my hands. But not anymore. If before my accidents I was able to do 10,000 things - today I can do only 9,000. I can feel proud of the 9,000 things I can do, or I can brood about the 1,000 that I can't. I prefer to do the former.''
It was during his recovery that he began developing a philosophy that he today spreads as a public speaker. In Dubai for the launch of the Professional Speakers Association of the Middle East (PSA-ME), Mitchell stresses the importance of taking responsibility for your own life.
"We are adaptable creatures,'' he says. "We pretty much do what we want to do in life; we just learn to do it differently. And this is the message I try to put across at all my speeches.
Henry Ford said, 'If you think you can do something, you probably can. If you think you can't do something you probably can't.' That's my core philosophy too.
"Admittedly, it's not as easy and simple as I make it sound. But if you don't have a dream and don't point yourself in the right direction, then it's pretty hard to make your dream come true. I'm not saying that we're all going to climb Mount Everest, but I'm saying that everyone who did climb Mount Everest had to start at the bottom.
"What I've learned in life is that I can sit around mooning that my hands are different, but there are a lot of people in this world with different hands that do all kinds of things.
"I met a young woman at a speakers conference in North America a couple of years ago, named Jessica Cox, who had no arms. No arms! She can fly an airplane by herself. She drives a car, she makes breakfast, she goes to a phone booth … all by herself!
"People frequently talk themselves in and out of a lot of things. What I say is: it's not what happens to you, it's what you do about it!''
Learning to walk again
So with his badly burnt and disfigured body, how did he take his first step?
"It wasn't any different from what a baby does,'' says Mitchell. "I often give the analogy of a baby. How many missteps does a baby take before she can take her first step?
A baby probably falls thousands of times before she takes her first step. She struggles, crawls, rolls over, pulls herself up by the curtains, hits her head, falls down - she's unsuccessful but never quits. And finally one day she takes her first step.
You may think how many times she has failed before this first step. But fact is, she has never failed - because she doesn't know she has failed, she just knows she's learning.
"I'm not saying that I wasn't frustrated or hugely disappointed (after the accident). I was angry, sad and wallowed in self pity. But I had one burning desire - to fly an airplane. It had been one of my biggest joys before I had the accident and I refused to be robbed of that joy.
"Eventually, I went back to flying school and learnt how to fly again. But to achieve this I had to take that first step. And that was why I practically pushed myself to do it. It just took desire to do it.''
Mitchell felt that moving to a smaller, more intimate community might reduce the unkind barbs that often came his way in San Francisco. He moved to Crested Butte, a small town in Colorado, surrounded by abundant natural beauty.
There he used part of his accident settlement to establish a restaurant, which quickly caught the fancy of the locals.
But one day at the restaurant, a young boy, whose family Mitchell was friendly with, came up to him and said, "You can't do anything.''
Mitchell replied, "Now wait a minute, you've seen me around town. I do stuff. I even fly my own airplane.'' "No, you can't do anything with those hands,'' the boy insisted.
"He couldn't imagine how I did anything with my hands,'' recalls Mitchell.
"Then he challenged me to pick up a quarter lying on the table. He was right, because it's hard to pick up coins with my stumps … the boy knew he had me.
"I looked at the coin for a long time and finally put my thumb on the edge of the quarter and pressed down - the pressure lifted the quarter on the other side just a bit and I was able to get my other finger on it and pick it up. I handed the boy the quarter.
"Unimpressed, he said, 'That's not fair, you used both hands.' Nevertheless I proved to him that I could do it!'' laughs Mitchell.
There were other incidents that also spurred him on. "One day I went to a Chinese restaurant and was using a fork when a friend said, 'Oh Mitchell, it's sad you can't use chopsticks anymore.' I put down the fork and attempted to eat with chopsticks.
Now whenever appropriate, I only eat with chopsticks.''
At this, I sheepishly confess to Mitchell that I can't use chopsticks. Well, of course you can,'' he says.
"You just haven't chosen to learn it. There are tons of things we don't do. There are tons of things I don't do, but it's almost all because of choice. Life's a matter of choice. Stuff happens - and you get to choose. It's not what happens to you, it's what you do about it. We only have today.
"Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. In fact, you only know you have right now. So what do you want to do right now? Maybe three months from now you will be dead, maybe you won't. But three months from now isn't important to me - today is.
"And what do I want to do today? As William Jennings, a famous US politician said, 'Life's not a matter of chance, it's a matter of choice. It's not to be waited for, it is to be achieved'.''
Mitchell pauses for a moment then grins, "I think I completely misquoted him there. But you get the drift.'' That's the fun of being with Mitchell - he doesn't take himself too seriously.
Yet he speaks with such conviction that it becomes crystal clear that he's totally focused on the 9,000 things he can do. Perhaps because you are beginning to see only those too.
'Response ability'
Mitchell seems yards ahead of you in everything. He has a slight edge, of course - his wheels. And this additional edge hasn't fallen into his lap. It was born out of a sense of 'response ability'. Although this concept wasn't something he felt any affinity for in the beginning.
"I hated to hear about responsibility. (I'd think:) I'm not responsible for riding a motorbike that rams into a laundry truck. I'm not responsible for that accident. Or I'm not responsible if somebody drops a brick out of the window and it hits me on the head.
"But wait a minute, let's see - it's your head and you are the one with the headache. You can sit there and blame the guy who threw the brick for the next 60 years, but you are the one with the choice of how you are going to respond. Stephen Covey (author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) calls this being 'response able'.''
Mitchell then launches into a rendition of someone who always sees himself as the victim: "I hated that, I didn't want to hear that. I didn't want to believe it. Because you did this to me, you are the one who said all those horrible things to me - and do you know how that makes me feel?''
His voice then drops to a whisper; the change in tone accompanies a more 'response able' chain of thought.
"But I'm the one who chose to listen to your words. I'm the one who chose how I receive the words. And what if I decided that maybe those words didn't have anything to do with me?
"And that they really were more about you and your frustration, your sadness and the terrible things you are going through in your life right now and all kinds of circumstances over which I have no power.
"But the power I have is how I am going to receive those words. And maybe instead of saying, 'You made me feel so terrible', I can say 'Wow, that's interesting and I'm really curious about why we've had this exchange.
"Because you're a wonderful person and we've worked together well. And I'm wondering what it is that has caused this exchange right now.'
It's hard to question the wisdom of Mitchell's 'response able' option. It also seems like a very heroic thing to do.
But how easy is this option when you've had a second accident that has left you paralysed from the waist down, barely four years after you've recovered from another gruesome accident?
Another accident
After several years at Crested Butte, Mitchell and some friends invested in a venture that manufactured wood stoves and the investment paid off handsomely. Having once again qualified for a commercial pilot's licence, he regularly flew passengers in his personal Cessna 206 to pay for the fuel of his flying hobby.
On a fine November morning in 1975 he set off to fly three friends to San Francisco, a flight he'd made countless times before. But after being briefly airborne, the aircraft had difficulties and slammed into the runway, its fuel tanks bursting open.
Fearing another fireball, Mitchell urged his friends to evacuate but when he tried to climb out himself, his legs wouldn't move and there was an excruciating pain in his back.
Later in the hospital, he learned that his spine was crushed and he would be wheelchair bound for life. Devastated by this, Mitchell wallowed in misery.
But he was soon snapped out of this by a phone call. One day a young girl called him and asked him a question: "You told me it's not what happens to you, it's what you do about it. Do you still believe it?''
"I wasn't prepared to answer her. I wanted to whine some more,'' recalls Mitchell. "But it's interesting and wonderful how sometimes your words come back to bite you. And this is why we need speakers … to remind us of what we can do again and again. That it's not what happens to you, it's what you do about it.''
The following morning Mitchell asked if he could start his physiotherapy sessions. This was the second time he had to rebuild. And slowly, he worked towards being able to do 9,000 things.
Politics and speaking
In the early 1980s Mitchell took on a huge mining company that wanted to establish a mine at Mount Emmons, a project that could potentially affect the ecology, natural beauty and tourism industry of the area.
He organised various protest events, roping in celebrities, politicians and towns people, resulting in the mining company pulling out. This gained him a great deal of popularity and eventually led to him being elected Mayor of Crested Butte. Mitchell later ran for US Congress in 1984 but was unsuccessful.
He then became a talk show host on local radio and completed a master's degree in public administration at the University of Colorado. Gradually, people started to invite him to speak to groups and thus his public speaking career was launched.
Today based in California, Mitchell travels the world reminding people that all of us at one time or another get knocked down. That it's hard to live a life without slipping and falling.
"My job is to say something in a powerful manner to grab your attention. It's not unlike trying to feed a child who is reluctant to eat. You find ways to engage his attention so he will do what you want him to do.
"The idea of speaking is entertainment, excitement, weaving a good story and in there are messages I want the audience to take with them - and perhaps they'll say, 'Wait a second, I can do that'.''
'Who here has been in prison?'
In keeping with his conviction, the opening to Mitchell's talk is a crowd stopper. He asks the audience, "Who here has been in prison?'' Naturally, he gets their undivided attention.
"Then I tell the audience that the reason I ask the question … is because I have,'' says Mitchell.
"I explain that my wheelchair was once a prison for me and I go on and talk about that and tell them about my life. I tell them I'm here to help them stage a jailbreak.''
In his speech, Mitchell explains that everyone has a different prison - that jobs, schools and even families can be prisons. "After this, I ask if there is anybody who hasn't been in prison. There are very few hands that go up!''
While his talks are entertaining and compelling, Mitchell gets a range of responses to them.
"It's difficult to know how each person is affected, because some people will leave still not conscious of my message, yet others say that I changed their life. But it isn't true. I have never changed anybody's life. Ever.
"I have no special powers; I'm not a magician, not a Merlin. I'm Mitchell. I tell stories about my life and lessons I have learned along the way and some people choose to use that as a tool or key to change their own world. That's their business. I didn't do it, they did it.
"But I love it when people say nice things to me and I believe that some people do benefit from my talks. But I don't change anybody: they change themselves, or don't change themselves. It's their choice.''
Mitchell can be contacted at Jackie@WMitchell.com
