hopefully you have it and to make the new connections at your table at this time we would like to think back at our area coordinating council for sponsoring the coffee for a morning mingle which gives you additional time to make connections before and after breakfast we would also like to give a special thank you to our breakfast sponsor macca taliban i would like to invite matt matt hoeksema achieve commercial banking officer in senior vice president good morning i'm nervous too because i have one of my former professors at hope college at my table so i guess twenty years post graduation but i hopefully i can show him that i can stand up in front of the microphone and  ok so you know how a bake is a community bank and i think sometimes that community word gets overused and i thought to myself this morning instead of using the word local means we have twenty six branches in kent allegan counties ensuring that you have a branch or service provider local to you local means three hundred fifty employees that live and work in your communities in our party your chamber of commerce local means decision making right here in west michigan and leadership that lives within your community local means doing business where you do business local means doing business where you live local means doing business with local partnerships like city flats lighthouse insurance group which is restaurant knew company and no one t v ale local means having a full service bank right here in your community that provides not only traditional retail and commercial products but offers a full service trust in brokerage department local means local employees that volunteered over thirty seven hundred hours last year for three hundred fifty local organizations please look on your table we've got candidate a great privilege to teach and hope college i i was pretty fortunate to have my feet in two sides of a career most of my days were spent in grand rapids leading communications for priority health in the corporate world and on monday and tuesday nights i got to come into the classroom and turn minds of mush into finely tuned thinking machine and the reason that i'd love to teach in hope college is simple it's the students because most of the students that we attract to this community bring with them a myriad of wonderful qualities most of the students we attract are respectful most of the students we attract are compliant most of the sims are just eager to please their professors their coaches their advisors that's most of the students and then you get students like w and for the past two years wade has frustrated that the jeepers out of me and he challenges being he challenges every single pearl of wisdom that rolls off my tongue he's there to confront me at every single corner he listens he forces me to look at things an alternative in fact unrealistic ways and he smashes kind of every stereotype that i've had and it's because of those exact qualities that it's so special privilege to have students like wade in the classroom that challenge me to be at my best they help me look at the obvious with a new set of eyes and they seem to just really destroy all of those beliefs that i as a professor believe are my inalienable rights and spur that thank you today you were going to hear from wait hold and as you do i want to know that as his speech professor i have worked hard to get him to slow down and at pause i am convinced that it's physically impossible because his mouth is just trying to keep up with the rate at which his brain he listen to me just as professor and he's going to do with the weight way which by all kind of measures that i deem important is working out pretty well for wade and for those of us who enjoy his company so fasten your seat belts get ready to enjoy your ride and have your stereotypes smashed as they turn the microphone over to my student and my friend so now i'll introduce you all so wait hogue three years ago on august fourth two thousand and fifteen three months before this picture was taken i graduated from high school i was looking forward to coming and playing lacrosse i hope figuring out what i want to do with my live parting with my friends and just sort of the regular kid thing that you do when you're eighteen years old it would turn out the august fourth two thousand and fifteen would end up being a day that changed my life forever i worked construction in the summer times and between high school on this particular day i went to work and i was working on a project in northern california and i was installing the window a window on the third story of a home and i'd stepped onto the lift onto the platform to install the window on the operator of the floor of the lift that unfortunately forgot to attach the platform it was about thirty feet off of the ground and when i picked the window up to install it into place the platform fell off and then i hit the ground and i remember blacking out and then i woke up and my body was cut in half wasn't just like not being able to feel my legs it wasn't there and i was in shock and i was panicking splashing and come down and landed on top of me and i reached around to feel my back and as though there was a the bottom of a beer bottle sticking out of my out of my spine and that was when i knew that my life was going to be changed forever that was when i knew that i probably wouldn't play lacrosse in college that i probably wouldn't do all the things that i was planning on doing and looking forward to doing that was when i knew that i was going to have some obstacles and so by the end of the day on august fourth two thousand and fifteen this is me getting getting care flighted from the for the third time from field hospital in the mountains to an emergency center to a rehabilitation hospital where they could stabilize my spine and do some surgery and then i spent about six months in the hospital and then i came to hope and so that's the story of how this great obstacle got in my way and now i get to share with you the three things the three most important things i mind you that i've learned throughout this experience number one community is something that we draw strength from and give strength back to think about all the people in this room today think about your families your friends your customers these are communities that we're a part of these are communicating communities that we get to participate in on august fourth i was in the only day that i wasn't the only one that lost right my my family lost a version of their son and their brother my friends lost a version of me that was not coming back and it's important to note that because when you're a part of a community it is never just you who loses and it's also never just you who wins less than one embrace community over yourself think about what happens when we decide to put a community of ourselves what happens when we put our customers first what happens when we put our employees first what happens when we put our families first everybody moves lesson number two except transitions and they're in the middle and this is a team that i never got to play on but i promise you i have a more i've had a more important role than i ever could have on the field because these guys are far more talented than i ever was transitions are harder and they're a part of life whether we like them or not i remember being in the hospital learning how to dress myself again when i first started it would take me two hours and twenty two minutes every single morning to get showered dressed myself and get out the door now it takes me about twenty minutes it's taken a long time and i remember sitting on the edge of the bed and the nurse was watching me and she's i'm struggling to put to put my pants on fire legs don't move and it's all weird and operates like the first time ever done it my mind knows what to do of of my body just can't do it and i have these like sticks and clips and poles and whatever and i'm trying to figure out she's watching me and i know that she knows how to help me but she's not going to and that was when i realized i have to accept this transition i have to if i ever want to participate in the world around me if i want my life to be good again i have to accept this transition because i'm going to situations is not going to change and so now it has to be me that changes so that's why i said to myself i have to accept this few months after that it's january of two thousand and sixteen and i hope college and i just completed my first ever college writing assignment which i did really  bad and it was for bill monroe's class i'm sure some of you here know him or i've had him as a professor and it was due at twelve pm at twelve noon and so i go into lubbers hall and he's at his offices on the third floor and i have the paper in my hand and i had the elevator button you know normally supposed to light up it's in light up so i had it again it's eleven fifty five papers do at noon getting emotional at this point about it the elevator is broken i have five minutes to get the paper to him and so i roll over to the stairs i put the paper in between my teeth and i crawl up every single one of the stairs and that was when i realized i don't just have to accept this transition i actually have to love all of them i have to love the transition i have to become the transition as it's happening think about businesses that don't make a transition think about employees that can make a transition think about customers that can grow with you transitions are important it's almost everything it's almost why business exists right it's most were put on this earth to do is to change adopt a new way of giving yourself to the world around you don't just accept these transitions love them then you get to decide how you are going to deal with what's been done to you less number two love transitions adopt a new way to give yourself adapt a new way to serve your customers adopt a new way to serve your family adopt a new way to embrace your community with every single phase that comes embrace that storm the third lesson perhaps the most important step that the impact that we have on others is much greater than we think think back to the first picture that i showed you think of some of the adjectives that might have come to your head strong fortified independent but the downside is i was alone in that picture and yes i miss my life before but i'm not certain that i missed myself that much because if you look at this picture yeah my body doesn't look like that and i can't go back there but the number one thing in this picture is that i'm not alone that a very young age of been able to have an impact bigger than anything i could have ever imagined and impact is the most valuable currency that there is going to work being with your family being with your friends no one is holding a gun to our head making us do the stuff we get to do this we get to especially when it's hard even when it's hard we get to do this we get to be here i don't have to be here i get to be here we all get to be here and the impact that we have you can never under estimate the value of who you are to someone else or the value of who someone else might be  you even if they're an obstacle of first so around the room here how many of us come in here today with obstacles or maybe we know someone has obstacles put them up pretty much everybody has those right i'm not the only person in this room in a wheelchair everybody has one of some sort everybody's got a wheelchair for me it's very physical it's obvious this obstacle is is in my way and it is here to stay it's not going anywhere but for you all might be something else a fear and anxiety trouble at work trouble trouble with relationships maybe a child to their face with your faith or your face or your face whatever that thing may be i understand that it's very difficult and i understand it's very painful and there are slash were a lot of days where i would wake up in the morning and say to myself man i wish that platform would have just landed on my head and i would have died so i  here and deal with this how many of us felt like that before like this is just too much i don't want to be here i don't have to do this i was on the clip too hard it sucks right underneath all of this inspiring story is a really important footnote it sucked and it's really hard but i'm here to say that on the other side of whatever that thing is that you're going through on the other side of that wheelchair it is an opportunity that is in fact greater than what you're going through as an opportunity to draw strength from your community and an opportunity to give strength back an opportunity not just to accept transitions but to love them and then become them for other people and an opportunity to have an impact on the world around you that i guarantee is greater than what you're going through that doesn't mean that it's easy though are transitions in life whether we want them or not grow into them love them embrace communities over yourselves people help yourself and never underestimate the value of who you could be to someone else even if that person starts out for us an obstacle kind of like me and rob because on the other side of what you're going through this is an opportunity and if you quit or if you give up or if you say i'm done you're never going to find out what is this i'm sitting here today i'm the pro man in the wheelchair i'm the man on the stage but it's not all about me i'm representing hundreds hundreds of people who have poured into me their love and their patients and their kindness and their generosity today i'm representing them and i'm here for them because without them this great obstacle would have just ended at that just an obstacle but in fact it has become an opportunity the most profound opportunity of my life the most painful opportunity of my life and the most amazing one and on the other side what we're all going through lives all of that we're going to take questions so i hope that you're thinking those questions and kind of talk about it and anything is fair game he's only partly on the other side here yet my opinion so we're going to keep work about that and pushing him to do that so as you're kind of thinking of some questions i think that one of the things way that you and i have discussed before is i've had the privilege to talk and work and meet with a lot of students and not everyone has that inner it whatever that it is to face the obstacle as you did as you reflect on that do you think that comes from parents from faith from outstanding professors from you know whatever that might be i mean what you know if you were to coach others where did that come from for you so the short answer is yes but i guess what i don't make presentations about is that there's a lot of days there were a lot of days where i just laid in the hospital and asked myself why me at the sox why me why why should it be me who has to go through this and it started to change the narrative started to change when i realized how many people were impacted by just simply what i was going through right when you go through a hard thing or when something big changes in your life it could be a great thing every everybody in the world is watching it right and so for me it's sort of starting to ask myself why me when the good things are happening and i know we've talked about this before and so i asked my mom you know what where does that come from why i am by the caring to write a letter to her to encourage her to embrace what she was going through and i can't tell you her much that meant to her and the fact that as a young man struggling with what you've had to struggle with that you still reach out to others to left that's for sure and i but i would say that unless invincible as invincible right up until the point when i hit the ground literally and it's my favorite thing is being able to be with the lacrosse team and talk to those guys and spend time with them and saying you know so i've have never felt like i've been playing more lacrosse then lately business has become a new way for me to get up and run around right to take hits and to score goals and then to also lose a little bit right it's all very much the same so helping people make that transition it's hard when you're an athlete and you've just got to stop playing right it's a big part of your life it's like it is similar to retirement and so helping these guys make that transition into the next phase of their life and saying this is not something that you're moving on from you're carrying all these things on with you onto the next thing because you're really never going to stop facing off you're never going to stop scoring goals you're also never going to stop getting beat and those are all the great things that you learn from sports  and it makes it so i really if i close my eyes a lot of time when i'm working i might as well still be playing lacrosse please has so much to do with what's between our ears right and as you think about that are there particular books any books that come to mind or disciplines that you have practiced to try to keep your mind in the right place so that's a great question and it's taken a really long time to learn how to do that i start with putting my socks on which sounds kind of funny but that's the it takes me about five minutes every morning for my socks on my feet twitching their swollen and during that time i get so frustrated because i'm incredibly impatient and that's when i have to slow down and i have to count in those five minutes all of the things that i'm grateful for and that's sort of the key to battling the need to want to give up right gratitude unlocks the fullness of life and in some huge ways and  books go i actually had the opportunity to contribute to a book called spinning into control by patrick finley and it is about what do you do with what's been done to you and we unpack that pretty well and he's a pretty amazing  story so that was one that and i started working on that while i was in the hospital and so writing it helped me a lot i don't know if reading it has helped anybody and besides that obstacle is the way by i think it's by david brooks that is like the the the bible for getting through this stuff it's really been helpful to me so that's a great question you said it was hard for you to understand that obstacle even though it already happened i have a family member that has a health obstacle that they want except how can you get somebody to say hey you need to deal with this in your life that's a that's a great question and i really don't know it's ok not to know but i would say that it's not so much about accepting it when i see things really changed for me when i decided to love and this is similar to this gentleman's question over here when i decided to love what i was going through even though that was very hard and extremely painful as like things like cleaning my wheelchair things like paying more attention to the things that i really didn't like taking better care of the stuff that i didn't like and i startle it it became more likable and so saying how can you grow into this because this is an opportunity and you know that you can't waste it but i think for family members and for friends the  underlying narrative is that this is really hard and it sucks you cannot let yourself grieve because you're grieving the loss of someone that you can't be anymore right and so entering into that process is difficult it's complicated and it's really messy on the other side of it is always something good but you've got to have a solid community to embrace and be able to love those transitions and and also once yes soon as you can see the impact that you can have another people it's like addictive because if you're making every but you're elevating all the people around you you're organizing your desire around something that it can't be taken away  growing up as an athlete if you're a little cross athlete your identity i'd have to imagine all the way up until the accident your identity was look wrong's everybody knew you as a low cross player once the accident happened that identity is gone so kind of like yon a challenge to us to think of a song they represent us to challenge you what is your identity how do you see your identity now changing in an instant before i get to be weighed i'm the guy in a wheelchair you can't not it's like before you get to be yourself you there have hair or you don't and that's it people notice that about you right and so a lot of it is just been sort of battling a preconceived notions of of who i'm going to be right and a lot of that is turned into you know business is something i can really lean on and it can fill that void but then at the end of the day when i'm late i bet a nice list of who am i going to be and how i'm going to get it going to get there right and sort of morphing that identity into something that is not dependent on things outside of myself and not outside of my life who i am is who i am and i could have my arms cut off and i still want to be that person so i never really thought about it like that before it was always something outside of myself right now it's turning it's turning to the things that i can change to gain the sort of that strength within myself to be who i actually am and to embrace that as fully as possible  o i have a really good question i'm going to learn a lot from thinking about that if it gets of something like this happening to you in the community around how has this event impacted your family and what has changed in that nucleus as you've gone through this transition wonderful question wendy what's really interesting and actually sort of spooky about this whole thing is that some my grandfather who i'm actually named after when he was nineteen years old same age as me in he was storming the beach on normand and was paralyzed at the exact same level that i was at and then afterward and we carry right we look alike we act alike spooky and so from a accessibility standpoint it was a sort of business as usual but for you know my my mom loved watching you play sports my dad and i the way that we participated in things together hunting fishing all of those things that really changed we're still grieving that loss probably will be for a very long time but i can honestly say that i have a better relationship with everybody in my life because of this and i'm not going to say that that's worth the right i would never going to be happy that this happened but that's a that's a pretty good upside you know being able to have a close relationship with them all of that time of that those conversations of well what if you know when you're so close to something really really bad happened what if i was going to be here right what if i don't get to participate with you guys anymore and live with you guys so it's really brought my family of three older sisters really brought all of us very close much closer together but certainly a painful way to do that so from kind of changing this to a practical standpoint thinking back over to climbing up the stairs and lubbers today while we made sure there was a ramp to get up here the ramp is it and then klein that did make it easy for you to get up here you know  for for the employers here you know we have eighty eight requirements what have you experienced that you can give suggestions to make the workplace friendlier for employees who are in cha todd whitman and i were having a great conversation about this beef before the event started and it's having a good culture at work is free doesn't really cost anything and some more of it is a cultural thing you know i if you can feel comfortable enough at a place to sort of look like an idiot crawling up the stairs it's a pretty good culture they're going to buy otherwise as i call someone and so i think it starts with culture and saying ok this is rare and if it's rare than it's an opportunity this is an every day we get to learn something from this sort of transition we get with this is an opportunity to learn something and that's not just disabled employees that's all of them right so it's this level of vulnerability of can you come can you come here and bring your weakness here and can we handle it and then from a physical standpoint it's being the a d a s not it is the best bad option right it's kind of like democracy and it's not always going to be perfect right and so i think that there are some really great resources especially for all of you know who may know todd whitman and what he's working with at the lakeshore disability services there are a lot of really good resources out there to educate yourselves because most of it is just ignorance right we grow up and we're taught you know don't stare at that person in the wheelchair or if they look different don't say anything some of it is opening up to that so that we can really help each other so that's a really good question another so i was there one more over there hope college as this thing called degree works and i'm actually seventy eight percent finished with it which is pretty cool and i didn't know that one could actually know that kind of information and so i have taken the l sat in june to investigate what law school looks like the first business that i had started as a restaurant business and i sold out of it in april and have done some different investing in and it had a chance to work with my dad a little bit which has been a blast but for me it's just kind of hopefully slowing down a little bit so i can be twenty one for a little while have a really good time and build some really good relationships and you know i just bought a bottle home here in holland so i have a sort of plugging in here and i really love it here so just sort of embracing whatever come next and trying to have fun so i remember one of the first presentations that you did in class was pointing out the fact that no handles back here on this wheelchair because no one's going to push  to thank you for pushing us today to have a slink about as a chamber what it means to embrace community and to accept those transitions and most importantly to really value what we bring to others thanks for filling our lives today we thank you wade and rob thank you wade we appreciate you sharing your vulnerability what a powerful story your honesty i'm anxious to see what happens in that final twenty two percent of your college career and then what the future holds and we certainly hope you make holland your permanent home so thanks everyone for being here we want to come back a month from today we have john le duke up with us he's going to be talking about emotional intelligence i know it's going to be a great program we opened today with that four minute of networking time we want you to continue that networking and making connections the four year will be open for our morning mean go hang out meet other chamber members and we'll see you back here a month from today make it a great day