Shane Krider and Rachel Krider interview Oz Sanchez as he is headed to Rio to compete in the 2016 Paralympic Games. 

Based on a podcast by Shane Krider

What does it really take for somebody to achieve a high performance lifestyle in spite of adversity?

Not a lot of people have faced as much adversity, and come out the other side as powerfully as Oz Sanchez. He is a world champion hand-cyclist who has won two gold medals and two bronze medals at the Paralympic games in Beijing and London; and is heading off to Rio in a couple of weeks to go for gold again!

Oz Sanchez has endured hardships, and overcome catastrophic injury to achieve fantastic results in his life, not just in the sporting arena, but across the board. Shane Krider’s Mind Power podcasts frequently invite guests to discuss personal development and entrepreneur success, but none have surpassed all limitations quite like Oz Sanchez.

Shane Krider first learned about Sanchez when he was approached to become an Executive Producer on the 2009(?) documentary Unbeaten. This film follows hand-cyclists throughout the Saddler’s Challenge of Alaska, a 267-mile stage race that includes 1400ft of elevation. A massive feat of endurance and mindset.

Read more about Unbeaten here. 

 

 

Krider shares how he aligned his own near-death experience and brain trauma to that of Sanchez’s rise over adversity, and they both agree that a change in mindset was crucial for their growth and development that has led them each to achieve great wins, but Krider admits to being blown away with Sanchez’s accomplishments.

Sanchez had overcome multiple difficult situations throughout his life including growing up with violence in the streets and at home; multiple military accomplishments, but not without challenges; and then his motorbike accident that left him with a spinal cord injury, paralysis and related depression. So how did he get through it all to be heading to his third Paralympic games in Rio 2016?

Train the mind, and then train the body. Your body doesn’t grow without challenges. A weight lifters body grows by lifting more and more weight. Hardships in life are there for our spiritual and mental growth. The more you go through, the more opportunities you have to grow. But if you resist them, you miss the opportunity.

Oz Sanchez stated “I always seek out the lesson and know I’m going to grow from it. And everybody experiences pain, but suffering is a choice.” This is a great point to meditate on.

“I need to focus on my WHY. And at the moment that is to set a standard, achieve, accomplish, embody and epitomize for others what they can do. If people learn my story, and they have gone through a challenging experience and see I’ve come out and done better. That is usually the first granule of hope for a lot of folks.”

In previous podcasts, Krider has shared that overcoming the adversity of his brain injury brought him absolute clarity of his purpose, of his WHY, which was to share the importance and endless possibilities of the mind. He felt driven to share this with others through personal development practices and spread the knowledge he knew for himself to be true, and which would lead to growth, happiness and a more prosperous life.

 

Sanchez’s story parallels this philosophy, and he has used every adverse event to achieve something better for himself and create a high performance lifestyle. He shares the two major stages of his story of recovery after his motorcycle accident:

“First, I started watching other athletes with disabilities that I considered more severe than mine, and in my eyes had more reasons to complain about their circumstances, and yet didn’t. They had really positive attitudes. That was the time I stopped complaining and started the attitude of gratitude.

Second part of therapy happened when Rachel Krider and Shane Krider invited me to Australia to present at a Polaris (Prosperity of Life event.) It was here I realized I was getting my therapy by sharing my story with others. I want to help people when I tell my story, so I’m not saying what I was actually feeling – depressed and miserable and want to drink myself to death – I would share the positive story. I said it so many times and inevitably I started believing the positive version. I had been selling the story of depression to myself for so long it became my reality, my prison… but then I started to believe in the new positive version, I let the other one go. I literally healed while on stage telling my positive story.”

Sanchez and Krider both reiterate continually that the words we speak create our reality. Thoughts are things. And both have led lives that absolutely back this philosophy and achieve remarkable accomplishments.

Since their respective accidents, Krider and Sanchez have achieved a lot of wins in completely different fields, and yet they both come out with an aligned greater purpose: to help people embrace their current circumstances and life by showing them a different lens to see it through.

And when the grand question was raised of ‘if you could change your circumstances, rewind time and take back your accident would you?’ They both agreed – no.

Sanchez says “we can all speculate but I choose to believe that I’m a better, happier person because of my injury. And as long as I choose to believe that, it will continue to be so. The grass is not greener on the other side, so I water the grass in front of me.”

Shane Krider and Oz Sanchez both promote the necessity to train the mind, as much as the body, to change your life and circumstances and that starts with personal development talks, books, podcasts.

Sanchez is a highly coveted motivational speaker – please head to his website for more information on how to book him for your next event.  

Movie review of Unbeaten.

For more personal development podcasts head to Shane Krider’s Mind Power.