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LAYTON — You can usually tell how well a motivational speaker is doing by how quickly the audience pays attention, and especially for how long they pay attention.
Whenever Gabe Adams enters a room, he knows he has his crowd right away. He starts his speech by going across the stage and then falling down.
“Sometimes in life, we fall down. But we have to decide to get back up,” Adams recently told a Life's Worth Living Foundation gathering.
It may sound like a gimmicky statement on paper, but in real life Adams has no arms and legs. When he falls after hopping, the crowd usually gasps.
“Who thinks I should get back up?” Adams asks the crowd.
When they respond "yes,” Adams is able to twist his body upright and the crowd cheers. If only he received cheers everywhere he went.
“I’m very familiar with the look. It hurts sometimes, but it’s definitely something that’s going to happen to me everywhere I go, no matter what,” Adams told KSL TV Friday inside his Layton home.
In airports, restaurants, stores or wherever he goes, Adams can feel everyone staring. “People are people, so you just got to let it go,” he said.
His biological parents left him at a hospital when he was born without his arms and legs. It’s a rare genetic disorder he has called Hanhart syndrome. But Adams' adoptive parents gave him love and confidence to do anything.
“I think the strength comes from my mom,” he said with a smile.
It takes strength when you’re on the brink of giving up. “I got bullied in seventh grade to where I had to switch schools and go to a completely different school,” Adams said.
That new school is where he discovered dancing and entered a talent show. Adams said he did a dance in front of the school and got a standing ovation. He said he'll never forget that moment when people saw him for what he could do.
“I found out that I could do hard things,” he said.
Things like cellphones are easy when you have lips to type on the screen, and writing messages on a piece of paper only takes a pen between Adam's chin and chest.
“That’s why I always have to laugh when people tell me my story is so inspiring, because it’s just my daily life,” he said.
I always have to laugh when people tell me my story is so inspiring, because it’s just my daily life.
–Gabe Adams, motivational speaker
Adams now travels the country motivating others to try and change the perception of what being disabled is. He shows off his dance moves, proving you don’t need legs to move around, or hands to touch a soul.
“Exactly. It’s what everybody wants,” Adams said. “I think whether somebody has a disability or not, all they want is to be treated like everybody else.”
As Adams often says: If he can do something, anybody can.
