Who Is Janie Shepherd A Motivational Person

Janine Shepherd is a cross-country skier phenom turned motivational speaker and author. Born in 1962, Shepherd excelled at a number of sports, winning several national championships by the age of ten. She eventually settled on cross-country skiing as her niche. After being extremely successful at the World Circuit, she received an offer to train for the 1988 Olympics. Shepherd’s goal was to be the first Australian to win a medal at the Winter Olympics and she was well on her way to victory until the unthinkable happened. She was on a training bike ride with her teammates at the Blue Mountains in West Sydney on a beautiful autumn day with the sun shining down on her face, but with ten minutes left in the ride she was hit by a speeding utility

She broke her neck and back in six different places, broke five ribs, her right arm, some bones in her feet, and her collarbone. Her whole right side was torn open and filled with dirty gravel. The truck sliced her forehead open and exposed her skull and she had lost a total of five liters of blood. Shepherd was airlifted from the scene and was taken to a spinal unit in Sydney. She describes that for ten days she was torn between two dimensions. Part of her saw no point in returning to a body that was broken beyond repair and another part was telling her to hold on, to fight, and to stay. Janine chose to stay.
She awoke to a terrible good news bad news situation. Good news, her neck fracture was stable. Bad news, her spine had been completely crushed. Crushed so badly that thousands of shards of bone were shot into her spinal cord, paralyzing her from the waist down. Doctors operated and were able to rebuild her spine, but the damage was permanent. Janine Shepherd, future Olympic medalist, would never ski and never walk again. Janine was in complete shock. She was an athlete. Being an athlete was the only thing she had ever

I was beginning to get discouraged and even disappointed in myself. I was discouraged because there were these workouts that I could complete easily a few months ago, but now I can barely walk up the stairs without feeling tingling in my entire leg. Despite this, there was still an immense amount of pressure being put on me by myself and others. I could not do what those people, myself included, were asking me to do. I simply couldn’t. I was disheartened and I was frustrated. I wanted to give up, but then I watched Janine Shepherd’s Ted Talk. She proved to me that just because my physical abilities have changed doesn’t mean that I personally have changed. She proved to me that just because I cannot do the stuff I did before my injury, that doesn’t mean that I’m any less of a person. In her talk she said, “I know that I'm not my body. And I also know that you're not yours.” (Shepherd). That line really resonated with me because all my life I have focused on how well my body