We were lucky to catch up with Chris Mitchell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Chris, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
As a person with multiple disabilities: I am physically disabled, visually impaired, neurodiverse, and a battler of depression there are many obstacles to traditional employment. The first obstacle for many people who are disabled, including myself., is transportation. When you are unable to drive a car, you must find alternate transportation to get to a job or even a job interview. You want to feel independent by not relying on others to get around just like your able-bodied peers do, the closest to that independence for many is public transportation. This is less of a problem in large cities where they have robust bus systems that operates from before sunrise until late after sunset. When you live in a smaller community the public transportation system may be limited, or even non-existent.
The second obstacle is accessibility. This includes every inch from a person with a disability’s home to not only their place of employment but where they are to work at their job. For a person with a physical disability that requires them to use mobility equipment, the obstacles that can limit or prevent them from traditional employment include accessible sidewalk and curb cuts, accessible bus stops, a bus stop that is close to their employment, and accessible sidewalks from that bus stop to their place of employment not to mention the building where there are to work.
The third obstacle is reasonable accommodations. Although the ADA laws require companies to make reasonable accommodations to make a job accessible for a person with a disability, there are hurdles one may have to overcome to get a company to pay for reasonable accommodation.
Then there is the fear of discrimination. Persons with disabilities both face and fear discrimination from the HR manager conducting an interview and if we can get the job we fear and sometimes must endure discrimination from coworkers and the constant feeling we must prove ourselves to others daily.
I did work in the traditional job force for a while, but with limited success primarily due to some of the challenges I have already mentioned along with challenges that were caused by my various disabilities.
When I was not working in the traditional workforce, I felt less of a person, inferior to others who were my age. As we often do in our society, we compare ourselves to others and when I did that, my self-confidence took a blow.
To prevent depression from winning, I worked for myself when I was not traditionally employed. I ran a software consulting and training business and a website development business and even started an eBay business all from my one-bedroom apartment. When I lost my last traditional job due to an incident caused by unmanaged ADHD, which was a devastating blow to my self-confidence and an embarrassment to me, I went all in with my eBay business and made it a success in the early years of the 21st century. That success earned me the privilege to create and teach a successful eBay course for a community college and that led to me being interviewed on radio programs, in newspapers, and by Entrepreneur magazine.
Although the success did fulfill my and the needs of many people in the disabled community of being a productive and contributing member of our society, it did not satisfy my passion for helping other people.
My craving for helping others started early in my life when I was a child in church. I was a disruption in my Sunday School classes that my teacher had another adult take me out of the classroom and have me help collect the attendance cards from the other classrooms. The first time I helped collect attendance cards I fell in love with helping others and knew that was what I wanted to do in my life.
At the end of 2010, I closed up my eBay business and started to write my first book, “It Doesn’t Define Me”, a memoir about how I survived an incomplete spinal cord injury in 2002 and how I fought to get my life back. I wrote it for others who experienced a life-changing disability to know that it is not the end, they can overcome the challenge.
Writing that book and being invited to speak to support groups was good, but I knew that there was more I could do to help others in the disabled community.
I knew going back to the traditional workforce was not a viable option, so I decided to take my experience and knowledge of self-employment and use it to help others in the disabled community do what I do, find their way to be productive and contributing members of our society and make some money at the same time. That decision became #DefineYourself.
When I started #DefineYourself, I looked back at my entire life and asked, “What did I overcome to be a successful person with a disability?” My answer was low self-confidence, then I asked myself, am I the only person with a disability who had to overcome self-confidence?
I knew my answer after joining several groups on social media for persons with disabilities. In these groups, I have heard many complain about how hard it is to be a person with a disability and how everyone who is disabled is oppressed by society.
I instantly knew that many were struggling with self-confidence as I had in my life for many reasons, including what I call the 3 big A’s: ableism, ableism, and the ableist society – all of which tell us we are not good enough as our able-bodied peers.
The clincher was the night that someone posted a request for others to submit their horror stories of interactions with the non-disabled community, I snapped. I said to myself, “All of this is victim mentality and victim mentality is damaging if not destroying their self-confidence, and without self-confidence, their success will be limited at best, if not non-resistant at worst.”
Through hashtag #DefineYourself I knew I could give others in my community the greatest skill they need to succeed by helping them discover, develop, and grow their self-confidence and start the journey of being self-employed by starting online businesses from their homes.
I knew that it would work because it worked for me. I want to help people in my community reach a level of self-confidence that took me decades to reach in just a few years or sooner. For that reason, I share my knowledge and my experience through my latest self-published book, “Success Starts with Self-Confidence: 10 Steps to Confidence for the Self-Employed Person with a Disability” which is based upon my coaching program.
I knew that there are a lot of life coaches out there that work on helping their clients with self-confidence, but I did not find any that specifically work with persons with disabilities and I know I can bring to the table something no other life coach can bring, a first-hand experience of overcoming self-confidence as a person with multiple disabilities.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a person with multiple disabilities: I am physically disabled from an incomplete spinal cord injury acquired during cardiac surgery that requires me to use mobility devices, visually impaired from cataracts that left me legally blind with vision measures at 20/200 in my left eye and 20/300 in my right eye, neurodiverse with ADD/ADHD, and a battler of both severe reoccurring and seasonally affected depression. I have never wanted to allow my disabilities to limit my success in life and to that end I have always wanted people to see me and my accomplishments first before they noticed my disabilities.
I first got involved in serving the disabled community in college as it has been my passion to help others since I was a young child.
Through my business, #DefineYourself, I offer support for persons with disabilities who are aspiring to be, or who are currently working, as self-employed persons running a disabled-owned business or non-profit, I offer help in discovering, developing, and growing self-confidence through my latest self-published book “Success Starts with Self-Confidence: 10 Steps to Confidence for the Self-Employed Person with a Disability”, my video series “Success Starts with Self-Confidence” and my coaching program of the same name.
Through the #DefineYourself community, I offer support for potential and current clients along with members of the community supporting and encouraging others in a judgment-free and safe environment.
For anyone skeptical that they can successfully start and run a disabled-owned business or non-profit, I produce and host a podcast and video series entitled, “Successful, Self-Employed & Disabled.”
Through #DefineYourself, to further support disabled-owned businesses and non-profits, I encourage the disabled community to support disabled-owned businesses and disabled-owned non-profits.
#DefineYoruself is the only place, I have ever found, that offers a certified confidence life coach who serves the self-employed disabled community who is also a self-employed person with a disability and can relate to the unique issues that a disability causes to a person self-confidence and will support them from concert to success as a disabled business or non-profit owner.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
In early 2001, I was a student at a community college where I also ran a computer lab for the Allied Health department. During the second week of the semester, during an English Lit course, the instructor asked me to pick the name of a famous author from the image on the screen to research and present a report on in a future class. I was embarrassed to admit that I could not read the names due to my vision impairment, so I told him it did not matter to me. He kept pushing me to choose a name and I kept refusing until he asked me to step out into the hallway.
In the hallway, I could have explained to him my vision impairment, but instead, my ADHD kicked in and I said a few things that I should not have said and was sent home.
That incident wound me up in a meeting with the college dean which resulted in me being expelled from college and the termination of my employment in the Allied Health department.
My girlfriend had to drive me home. I cried all the way there and for about half an hour after she left to return to her job at the college. I sat down at my computer, wiped away my tears, and decided to go all in on my side hustle of trading on eBay which I started a week earlier.
I was all about eBay. I learned everything I could about trading on eBay and the only thing that slowed me down was my incomplete spinal cord injury, but 2 months after my injury, I was back at it trading on eBay.
Less than 4 years after being expelled from the college as a student, I was hired by the same college’s community education department to teach a course on how to trade on eBay – a course that became very successful.
A few months after starting that course I was interviewed for a local news program, a radio show, the local newspaper, and by entrepreneur magazine – all the media coverage shared how I was building success as a person with a disability.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
I am both fortunate and blessed that my business partner is also my wife. I had reached a point in my life where I knew I did not want to be single any longer, I wanted to share my life with someone and be the person that someone shares their life with.
I do not drink so meeting someone at a bar was not an option and as a person with a disability, I had already experienced the pain of rejection from girls simply because they saw my disability first. This led me to post a personal ad on Yahoo and search their site for potential dates.
One night I found an ad from a girl named Kimberly that caught my eye and I sent her a message. She replied and we started talking online at first, then via the phone.
During one of our conversations, we discovered that we had already met, or at least seen each other before. A few months prior I was taking a college course on researching on the Internet that used the computer lab that she ran for a classroom. That day I saw her I thought she was cute, and little did I know that same day she thought I was cute. Unfortunately, I was too shy to walk up and talk to her in her computer lab. So, I decided to raise my hand for help but instead of her coming over, my instructor kept coming over. I left the computer lab thinking I would never see her again.
After a few weeks of phone calls and several rejections by her to meet at a Christian bookstore, she called me out of the blue at my job and asked me if I wanted to go out that night. I of course said yes, and she came by and picked me up in her car.
The next day I could not find my wallet and called her asking if it was in her car. It tuns out that it had fallen out of my back pocket in her car. She to this day likes to tease me that I did that on purpose to get a second date with her.
Two and a half years later I proposed to her and a year later we were married.
During our relationship, engagement, and marriage she has always been there supporting me with my business. She has taken time off from her traditional job to drive to conferences I attended, and she attended them with me. She has also helped me present at events and set up and run booths at expos and fairs.
Today she is in charge of social media for #DefineYourself and is involved in the decisions I make in the business.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thechrismitchell.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheChrisMitchellOfficial/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thechrismitchellofficial/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dfysstream
Image Credits
Chris Mitchell/#DefineYourself