From Non-Verbal with CP to Motivational Speaker with Heart & Humour

AccessTALK with Trish

Meet Glenda Watson Hyatt, author, motivational speaker and a badass agitator. For Glenda, living with cerebral palsy has not meant a boring and unfulfilled life. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. She embraces the zest of life and goes for it with a “can do” attitude. An attitude that she demonstrates in her autobiography "I’ll Do It Myself" and, in her more recent book, "Emerging from the Cocoon of Silence: My Journey from Non-Verbal to Motivational Speaker". Both books are on Amazon. As a web accessibility consultant, she worked with governments, transit authorities and non-profit organizations to improve accessibility of their websites for people with disabilities; she had built a solid reputation for herself. However, even though there is still much left to do in the field, after fourteen years, she felt so burnt out, that if she had to explain the need for text descriptions of images one more time, she would surely stab her eyes out with a sharp, long pencil! Ziplining across a city block in downtown Vancouver – and surviving – gave her permission to switch her career direction and to follow her dream to become a motivational speaker, a most unlikely career path given her significant speech impairment. Using an iPad text-to-speech app to deliver her signature talk “Finding Your True Dream, The North Star for Your Life”, she motivates audiences to identify their true dream and to take action on following their personal guiding star. Glenda is also quickly becoming a strong, clear and passionate voice for Canadians with speech and language disabilities – a community that is typically silenced, overlooked and ignored, particularly when the conversation focuses on advocacy, accessibility and legislation. Listen in as Glenda shares with us her favorite, two-word response whenever barriers are at hand…