A Successful Blend of Work, Play and Indomitable Spirit

Having it all is a concept Bonnie St. John Deane knows well. Just 36 years old, she’s already won a Paralympic silver medal as a disabled skier, attended Harvard, earned a Rhodes scholarship, been an award-winning IBM saleswoman and a White House economic policy advisor and started her own business. Not to mention she also found time to get married and raise a daughter, now 6.

But this rich life came at a price.

“I worried that I’d become an achievement junkie,” she said. “And I realized I had to downshift to improve the quality of my life.”

St. John Deane read numerous self-help books about “balancing” the elements of life: work, family and recreation. She said their messages were irritatingly similar: Individuals should methodically apportion time to each of their interests. St. John Deane tried, but her efforts always had the same result: Something--a project, a family goal--had to be sacrificed.

So St. John Deane devised her own life formula. She calls it “blending,” integrating life elements, rather than separating them. This means that she can take her daughter to work and teach her about responsibility and ethics. She can exercise with her husband. And she can brainstorm ideas for her business while taking a refreshing walk on the beach by her San Diego home.

“My natural inclination is to be 100% committed to something,” she said. “But I always ended up overcommitted somewhere, undercommitted elsewhere.”

Blending, she said, has changed that. She’s now able to pay attention to important tasks, sometimes simultaneously, and not feel she’s neglecting others.

St. John Deane learned to think creatively at an early age. Born with a right leg markedly shorter than her left, she was informed at age 5 that doctors had to amputate the shorter leg. She was told a wooden prosthesis would enable her to walk more easily.

At first, she was excited about this news; she desperately wanted to walk like everyone else. For years she had been wearing a heavy metal brace and orthopedic shoes. But after the surgery, she found herself ostracized by her peers.

“I was called ‘wooden leg’ and excluded from games,” she said. By second grade, she was convinced that she was ugly and undesirable, she said. At lunchtime, she sat in a playground corner and read books.

“Another way for me to escape it all was to live in my imagination, where I could go anywhere and be anything I wanted,” she said. “I guess the whole thing, it makes you very tough.”

St. John Deane heeded her mother’s advice to use positive thinking techniques to counteract the harsh words. Her mother, a San Diego school vice principal, reared St. John Deane and two siblings on a tight budget while earning a PhD at night.

She showed St. John Deane that there were inexpensive ways to keep one’s mind positively focused: She collected inspirational books, wrote affirmations and attended motivational speeches with St. John Deane in tow.

“I began giving myself inner pep talks,” she said. Rather than focusing on her isolation and challenges as an amputee, St. John Deane directed her energies to excelling at her studies. Despite others’ concerns, she also pushed her physical limits. She took up water skiing and horseback riding. As she racked up accomplishments--success at school, mastery of sports--she trained herself to walk and talk with confidence.

But when a friend invited her to ski in Mammoth, St. John Deane found herself insecure and afraid again. Could an amputee ski? To allay her fears, she called organizations for the disabled and interviewed the president of Amputees in Motion, a San Diego club. She read the “Guide to Amputee Skiing” by Hal O’Leary. She investigated the challenges she’d have: getting on and off chairlifts, standing and falling. And, with the newfound knowledge, she conquered her fears.

“That’s something about Bonnie,” said Kirk Bauer, executive director of Disabled Sports USA in Rockville, Md., who’s known St. John Deane for 20 years. “When she goes after something, she does it with a vengeance and she makes sure she learns everything she needs about it. She was very organized about her approach to life. She set goals and went after them.”

Her ski trip turned out to be life-changing, but only because St. John Deane persevered with her ski instruction. At first she fell constantly. Then, when she finally could stay upright, she faced another obstacle: As an amputee, she couldn’t snowplow, which made slowing down and stopping very difficult.

“The better I got, the harder I crashed,” she said. Again, she challenged herself to focus on the positive: On skis she could travel “like flying,” she said. “I could be graceful and go fast for the first time in my life.”

By her fifth day, she was tackling intermediate slopes. She decided to train for racing. She was accepted into an elite Vermont ski school, but she fractured her left leg in a skateboard accident and, six weeks later, broke her artificial leg. Her replacement prosthesis was lost in the mail for three weeks.

Each time St. John Deane felt like giving up, she reminded herself that she had the power to achieve her goals, or reject them in defeat.

St. John Deane went on to win six medals in a national competition. She hoped to win a place on the U.S. Disabled Ski Team and travel to Innsbruck, Austria, for the Paralympics in 1984. While training at various sites in Nevada, Oregon and Colorado, she waited tables and worked in gift shops.

Her determination paid off. St. John Deane earned a spot on the U.S. Disabled Ski Team and competed in the Paralympics. She was in first place after her initial slalom run, but she fell on an ice slick during the second run. Jumping back up, she reminded herself that she had to finish the race. Amazingly, because several competitors were downed by the ice slick, she still managed to earn a bronze medal. She also learned an important lesson.

The Austrian gold medalist who beat St. John Deane had fallen too.

“But she had gotten up faster than I did,” St. John Deane said.

“Winners aren’t people who never make mistakes,” she wrote in her book, “Succeeding Sane: Making Room for Joy in a Crazy World” (Simon & Schuster, 1998). “Winners are those who get up and finish. Gold medal winners get up the fastest.”

St. John Deane earned a second bronze in the giant slalom competition and placed seventh in the downhill. Her overall performance earned her a silver medal.

“I did really push myself,” St. John Deane said. “To even have expectations of becoming an Olympic hopeful--it was such a contrast to my childhood. Going to the Olympics and winning really gave me something to celebrate. I mean, particularly when years before, I was told, ‘You can’t be on a high school sports team.’ ”

St. John Deane changed her focus from athletics to education and career. She returned to Harvard, where she studied politics and economics, took a summer job with Morgan Stanley & Co. and won a Rhodes scholarship in 1986.

Again, she faced challenges. At Oxford, St. John Deane tried to enroll in an economics program. But an administrator turned her down, saying she wasn’t qualified. She asked permission to sit in on the classes. And she kept applying to the program until, nearly a year later, she was accepted.

“I learned that if you want an education, nobody’s going to give it to you,” she said. “You have to make it happen.”

While overseas, she met an aspiring oceanographer, Grant Deane, who was impressed by her intelligence and ambition. They married and returned to San Diego, where St. John Deane took a sales job with IBM.

She sold computer systems to corporations, but, seeking more of a challenge, she created workshops for her customers, which helped executives, workers and companies more sharply define their goals to increase their productivity.

Then she was offered a position as director for the White House’s Economic Council. The job was exciting, high pressured and glamorous, St. John Deane said. But it required her to make big sacrifices: She had to leave her husband in San Diego, as he pursued his science career, and put off starting a family.

After a year, St. John Deane felt as though she were “choosing success over sanity.” She resigned from the job and returned home to her husband. She gave birth to a daughter in 1994 and launched an inspirational speaking company. She also began to work on the concept of blending.

“I was defining my success by externals,” St. John Deane said. “But with blending, I could integrate body, spirit and mind, which is far more fulfilling.”

Today, St. John Deane gives speeches throughout the United States and gets great satisfaction from helping others find fulfillment in the many areas of their lives.

“[Integrating life elements] has helped a lot,” St. John Deane said. “I tell people, ‘Don’t try to balance, because it’s a concept that misses out.’ ”

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Blending Your Life

An amputee at age 5, Bonnie St. John Deane has managed to create an enviable and fruitful life. Her prescription for success? “Blending.” Rather than trying to juggle work, family life and recreation, St. John Deane strives to integrate the three. Here are some tips she has on blending the elements of your life:

1. Ask questions differently. Instead of saying, “Should I work out or go home and be with my family?” ask, “Is there a way I can exercise and be with my family too?”

2. Use blending to help your children. Find ways to educate them through your work and to expose them to the values you hold dear.

3. Think “blend,” not “balance.” When you try to compartmentalize the elements of your life, you make yourself a candidate for burnout.

4. Pay attention to mind, body and spirit. Together, these are your sources of strength.

5. Determine your strength and try to emphasize it in all you do. If you are spirit-centered and appreciate nature and peacefulness, abandon your gym workouts and do your exercising in a beautiful spot outdoors. If you are body-centered, consider finding ways to be more physically active at work.