About Cam
Award Winning Certified Professional Speaker
Who is Cam Calkoen
People say that actions speak louder than words, but small words, something we all have the ability to communicate, inspire big actions.
It was the words of my class-mate at college that saw me becoming an athlete when others, even myself, saw walking as a big challenge. It was the words of a fellow professional speaker that saw me climbing Mount Kilimanjaro when I once saw it only as a goal for other people. It was the words of my mentor that saw me becoming a speaker when others would have seen my speech as my biggest challenge.
Today I’ve had the greatest privilege of speaking all over the world, from the smallest villages of Vanuatu through to the biggest cities in our world.
After one talk I was driving back to my hotel and I saw a sign on the side of the road “Live more, Fear less.” What great words for now and always. I then saw people falling out of the sky with colourful parachutes and I thought to myself ‘hey hey hey I wonder what that’s like.’ So I called the skydive company and they said I could do it at 2:30 or I could do it now! I thought to myself there is NO time like the present…I’ll do it immediately. I drove to the skydive office where I was matched with my skydive instructor. A big seven foot tall German man, a little bit smelly but that’s okay. As I’m walking out to the plane with him he notices my Cerebral Palsy and that I move a bit different from most people. So on the way up to 15,000 feet where we’ll jump, I’m calming him down. We get to the top, we do the jump, everything goes smooth as and when I start speaking to people about it their main question to me is “WAS IT SCARY?”.
We often have moments in life that are ‘’scary’. I’ve certainly had many like when a massive bug landed on my lip when I was speaking at an outdoor event to over three hundred people. Or that first time I stepped out onto a stage in front of five thousand people. Or when I was half way through a speech and my nose exploded with snot from the biggest sneeze that I could not prevent.
I’ve found myself in these places because ever since I was a kid I have dreamt of a life where I could travel, entertain and connect. Connect people with inspiration, people with dreams, people with people.
As a teenager I was a full-time athlete aspiring toward representing my home country of New Zealand at the Paralympics. On the journey I had achieved some pretty awesome results, winning championships for the 100 and 200 metre sprints in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Sweden. I had made it into the top ten in the world for T36 category of athletes with Cerebral Palsy, where walking had once been prescribed as my biggest challenge, it had now become my biggest opportunity and my passport to travelling this world.
People wanted to hear about my story and as a teenager, schools found it especially inspiring. I remember competing in Sweden and my manager called me up. “Cam when you get home to New Zealand, would you do me a favour and come to speak at a school?” Now at this stage I was terrified of public speaking. I’m sure you know the saying ‘more people are scared of speaking than they are of dying’ and I was one of them. This is mainly due to the perception I had of myself at the time, that I TALK FUNNY.
This wasn’t just my perception, others told me that too. With that my manager shared with me a line from my favourite song at the time, ‘The Sunscreen Song’ – “do one thing everyday that scares you”. And if that wasn’t enough motivation he told me “it’s a girls high school”. What else could a teenage boy want…I was in! Between agreeing to give the speech and presenting I had got an awful flu. I was doing all I could to get better and went on to give the speech, which was going pretty well until about half way through when I felt an almighty sneeze coming on. I was doing all I could to keep speaking and not sneeze, which at the time wasn’t very pretty. I was screwing my face into all kinds of shapes and patterns. The more I thought about it, the reality of not sneezing was becoming impossible. All of a sudden my nose EXPLODED! Snot EVERYWHERE, my handkerchief, not in my pocket but underneath a note at home that said “Cam DO NOT forget your hanky.”
I was in a moment of dilemma and as I was standing on stage with snot swinging from the caves of my nose. Looking like something from Ghost Busters I heard my manager walking up on the stage behind me, not with his hanky, not with a tissue but his very own shirt for me to blow my nose on. SO I DID!!! People say that “support is the foundation to our success”. I would still say that allowing someone to blow their nose on your shirt is the ultimate in support. This support took me from the emotional I can’t…I can’t believe this is happening, I can’t continue, I can’t show my face, to the physical of course I can. In fact it showed a story to all the students that day, one that I could not have planned but demonstrated so many important lessons; resilience, support, adversity, not worrying about what people think, being real. It would also become a signature story for me.
I didn’t know it at the time but one day this experience would be spoken about to hundreds and thousands of people all over the world. Although that speech had not gone to plan, there was one key thing that I know allowed me to recover on the spot, other than the support of my manager Dean and his shirt. That key thing was preparation, preparation, preparation.
From here I exhausted every opportunity there was to speak and was given 40 minutes to speak at a national conference. Now at that stage speaking was just a hobby. But a hobby I was committed to turning into a professional lifestyle, I had a bit of coaching but no bureaus were picking me up as I had not proven myself.
I turned up to the speech that day to see celebrities speaking, personality emcees, the venue was massive and indeed world class. The audience of high performers had seen and heard the best of the best. And there I was, a 24 year old, supposedly different from anyone else and no experience within the industry I was speaking for. The butterflies were flying and the knees were shaking. I was not the main speaker…BUT… I had a dream, I had a strategy, I had tactics, I became the only speaker of that conference to receive a standing ovation. I HAD OUTSPOKEN THE SPEAKER, as in the speaker that always lived within me was out and ready for the world.
Fast forward 17 years; I’ve spoken throughout New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Europe, and The Pacific. I have spoken with brands such as Toyota, AMP, Heineken, McDonalds, KPMG, Harcourts, TEDx, Microsoft and The Icehouse. I am represented by the biggest bureau in Australasia. I am one of the most frequently booked speakers in Australasia. Oh and if you do not know it, I have Cerebral Palsy, something that affects my speech. I do not say this as a “mic drop..look at me…check out this transformation…” but maybe I do…because perceptions are the biggest things getting in everybody’s way with EVERYTHING… What perceptions are getting in your way of becoming gooder than good, greater than great!
