Kicking off the 2019 NSC Congress & Expo with Mick Ebeling

Every year the National Safety Council puts on a Congress and Expo for safety and related professions to attend and enhance their efforts in their current job roles. For anyone who works in safety, like any job, there are many pros and cons. For many of us, one of the biggest positives about being a safety professional is that it enables us to influence many lives and aspects of the business.  One of our biggest challenges, however, is remaining unphased when our influence falls short and an injury is sustained. This can be discouraging and, for some, make them feel their job is ‘impossible’.

Kicking off the entire Congress and Expo this year was a motivational speaker and unintentional entrepreneur Mick Ebeling. Mick was a successful movie producer until 2009 when he created the ‘eye-writer’ for a man with ALS. Following his first successful endeavor with conquering what everyone said was impossible, in 2013 he under-took another impossibility with the commonly known, “Daniel Project.”  He now focuses his time finding and overcoming seemingly ‘impossible’ issues (i.e. the child hunger crisis in the US).

Although Mick’s story was awesome, I was curious why he was selected as the opening keynote speaker for a safety convention, until I heard him speak.  Then I realized why he took on his first challenge to begin with. You see, Mick loved producing movies and he was very successful.   Even so, when presented with the impossible (ALS wasn’t a new disease, yet NO ONE had even attempted to help remedy its effects), he recognized all it took for success was one person deciding not to stop trying until he or she was successful.  Couple this mindset with the mindset that we can ALWAYS continue to conquer the ‘seemingly’ impossible task of having zero incidents in the safety world, and you have the basis for a great opening speaker.

I encourage everyone to read-up on Mick’s endeavors and support his causes as they impact all of us either directly or indirectly in some manner. I also, encourage everyone to really take away his message:  Nothing is impossible if you believe it can be done.

Will you be the ‘ONE’ to believe we can overcome our incident-trend?