Ep. 50: Brad Snyder - Manifesting Opportunity - Five Time Gold Medal Paralympic Athlete

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Brad Snyder calls himself a dreamer and a doer. He is a retired U.S. Navy officer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan after a battlefield injury that resulted in complete blindness. Brad began his second career as a U.S. Paralympian. Brad has competed at two Paralympic Games, earning five gold medals, two silver medals and a world record at all. He is a wonderful, remarkable man.

After his injury he and his family found comfort and freedom in his childhood routine of swimming. Once he learned to navigate the water, Brad Snyder won a gold medal on the anniversary of the day he lost his sight.

Brad explains that once you have a near death experience, you emerge on the other side thankful, and ironically gaining more than you have lost.

In this podcast you will learn to give up on the things you can not control, (such as what people think of you), and make the most of the things you can control. Persistence and a positive outlook are not always easy, but the outcome certainly is stunning.

Show Notes

[01:31] I swam from the age of around 11 years old competitively.
[02:21] I had the opportunity to train with a guy who was trying to make the Olympic team at that point. I would argue actually this guy is the best male swimmer in the United States ever to make the Olympic team. His name's Robert Margulis. I kind of joined his dream for a while, wanting to be an Olympic athlete. Dreamed of that from the age of eleven on up to about 17 years old when I realized I probably was never going be able to make the Olympic team.
[03:42] I was an EOD officer and explosive ordnance disposal officer. My job was to mitigate explosive hazards and the variety of ways that we encounter them and the operations, the military. And my particular job on that deployment was embedded with an assault group that was charged with helping get the Afghan Special Forces program sort of going. So we would train these Afghan commandos on how to do special operations and then we would actually go on missions with them.
[05:07] Unfortunately your eyes are these really delicate, miraculous things that take a lot of small, nuanced steps to work. And unfortunately, both my eyes were damaged beyond repair and I was blinded as a result. And that happened on September 7th, 2011.
[00:05:23] And we've heard you say that you thought you were going to die, right? That you looked down and you saw your body. There was no blood. It wasn't damaged. And you were just sort of waiting to see if you're passing over.
[07:06] Anybody who's had all these near-death experiences, you think through your whole life, you think about all the good stuff you did and the bad stuff you did. And I remember thinking that I think I lived an honorable life.
[08:44] I was able to adapt pretty quickly into my new life.
[09:12] Everything feels so foreign in the hospital. I loathe hospitals. Before that, I had never really had anything majorly wrong with me. I didn't like to be down. I didn't like to be in a hospital. I didn't like to have so much attention on me. I didn't like to be incapable of certain things. And so the hospitals are very foreign, uncomfortable, strange experience and blindness is even crazier. Like you never really imagine what it's like to just exist in the dark perpetually.
[10:44] My mom had to sort of go through this injury and then rehab process along with me.
[11:14] The more I could normalize my injury, the more I could normalize blindness, the more I could just make everyone feel comfortable with it. That was really important to me.
[11:28] And I think it was if you asked my mom that question, if there was a sense of satisfaction for her to watch me swim and to be free and to not be so dependent on a cane or a dog or a talking phone or anything like that, just to be free in the water, to go back and do what I used to do so often.
[13:21] I actually won that race and won a gold medal on the anniversary of the day, I lost my vision. And it was a really powerful experience for me to kind of prove to myself that this is not going to be an obstacle. There's a world of opportunity out there, and all I need to do is, you know, keep working at it. And things will kind of manifest.
[18:26] I can only control what I can control. So I'm going to to make the most of the things I can control, to make the most of the variables I can control. But at the end of the day, you know, I'm not Superman. I don't have superpowers. There are a lot of things out there that I can't control.I can't control how other people think of me. I can't control what opportunities are out there. What I can do is make the most of what I have make the most of the opportunities that are out here, maintain a sense of gratitude, maintain a positive outlook and just keep on trucking, never give up.
[19:09] I can control my mindset and my work ethic. I just decided I'm going to succeed. It was by optimizing those things and letting go of the things that I don't have control over.
[20:29] And we all face challenges. And we all have to sort of rationalize and put things into perspective day in, day out. But my life is totality a really beautiful, amazing life. And reflecting on the whole experience, my life is so much more rich. Having gone through that experience, that injury experience and the rehab experience and the Paralympics experience, I've gained so much more than I've lost. And I'm really thankful for that. And I think most people who have suffered these sort of traumatic injuries in these traumatic near-death experiences will probably say the same thing. Once you emerge on the other side, you're kind of thankful in a weird way.

Thank you for joining us on HealthGig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

“Hospitals are very foreign, uncomfortable, strange experience and blindness is even crazier. Like you never really imagine what it's like to just exist in the dark perpetually.” - Brad Snyder
“You never really imagine what it's like to just exist in the dark perpetually.” - Brad Snyder
“I actually won a gold medal on the anniversary of the day I lost my vision. And it was a really powerful experience for me to prove to myself that this is not going to be an obstacle. There's a world of opportunity out there, and all I need to do is keep working at it. And things will manifest.” - Brad Snyder
“I can only control what I can control. So I'm going to to make the most of the things I can control.” - Brad Snyder
“I can control my mindset and my work ethic. I just decided I'm going to succeed. It was by optimizing those things and letting go of the things that I don't have control over.” - Brad Snyder
“We all face challenges. And we all have to sort of rationalize and put things into perspective day in, day out. But my life is totality a really beautiful, amazing life.” - Brad Snyder
“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.” - Miyamoto Musashi

Keywords

#RobertMargulis #neardeath #NDE #Neardeathexperience #WalterReed #usaba #UnitedStatesAssociationofBlindAthletes, #blind #Navyspecialoperator #Stoicism #fate #triathlon #ParalympicGamesin 2020 #USOlympicCommittee #theBradley #Eone #inclusivedesign #Toyota #self-drivingcars #opticalcamerarecognition #projectblade #ergonomicallystabilizedwheelchairs #zenBuddhism #firstprinciples #Battle ofTroy #AchillesandHector #StPetersburgFlorida

Ep. 50: Brad Snyder - Manifesting Opportunity - Five Time Gold Medal Paralympic Athlete

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