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Liz Johnson
L-R AccountingWEB's Joanne Birtwistle interviews gold medal winning Paralympian Liz Johnson

Paralympian Liz Johnson tells AW Live Expo: ‘Our differences are our strengths’

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In the Day Two keynote at AccountingWEB Live Expo, Paralympian Liz Johnson encouraged accountants to open their eyes to the benefits of being authentically inclusive to disabled job seekers. 

7th Dec 2021
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Liz Johnson won Paralympic medals for swimming in Beijing, Athens and London. But it nearly didn’t happen. 

She thought she was going to be an accountant, just like her dad. When she told her parents about her dreams of Paralympic gold, he used his risk-averse background to suggest a career in finance as a back-up plan.  

So Johnson studied accountancy to back up her degree in business management.

But the gold, silver and bronze paralympic medals Johnson carried with her to the stage on Day Two of AccountingWEB Live Expo showed that the profession’s loss was Team GB’s gain.  

As Johnson explained in an interview with AccountingWEB’s editor-in-chief Jo Birtwistle, she was able to succeed in the Paralympics by being treated equally and inclusively. 

“I had the same potential, I just had to do things differently,” she said. 

Normalise differences

Johnson was born with Cerebral Palsy. But she never saw herself as ‘disabled’. “As I’ve gotten older, I've realised that my mum created a safe environment,” she said. 

Her mum let her head off on her mountain bike, even though she may have worried that the young Johnson could have fallen off. She was allowed to be herself.  

“You can’t do anything by yourself,” she said. “Often people you are supposed to rely on don’t get it. That’s true in the workplace. The reality is, if it was that simple, all differences would be normalised and everyone could reach their full potential.”

This is an important point for accounting firms when it comes to their own recruitment policy. Throughout her 45 minute keynote she emphasised the need for employers to normalise differences in the workplace. 

But employers or team managers don’t see these differences as assets. And this creates a less inclusive workforce. “It’s difficult for them to accept that because you’re looking for someone that is like the person that did it before.”

Do what you want to do

For her, she reached this potential when she joined a disabled swimming club. She described this as the “single most liberating thing because I’d carried this burden of trying to be like everyone else”. 

She added, “If you try being like everyone else you’ll never be happy, never be successful and do what you want to do.” 

But Johnson felt as a child she needed to explain what was different about her and was trying not to make others feel uncomfortable. “I would take a route for self preservation,” she said. “As a child I didn’t understand the impact it had on me, but we play down how potentially good we are for a sense of embarrassment.”

And this is why many people’s potential is stifled before they’re able to reach their full potential. 

When she got older she was given more independence and her cerebral palsy became obvious to the outside world. “But I was never ashamed of who I am. As I got older I realised ‘why should I’, it’s nobody’s business.” 

Ability People

It’s for this reason that Johnson co-founded the Ability People, a social enterprise dedicated to empowering people with disabilities in the workplace and works with companies to enhance processes and adapt cultures for a more inclusive environment.  

She realised that she owed it to those that still face traumatic questions like ‘what happened to you?’ to educate the wider population. “It’s not about what you say, but how and why you said it,” she said. 

Often, she said the way disability is portrayed is that it’s “less than”, and it’s like “some one without the disability is trying to bring that person in”. But, she said: “Newsflash, my life is no worse off.” 

“I have cerebral palsy, I am Welsh, I married a Brazilian and all these differences influence who we are, but doesn’t define who I am.”

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