Amy Wood (Salesforce) & Tom Billington (Electric Umbrella, Britain's Got Talent)

And that was so exciting that we were able to make this happen because these two have never met.

And this is there's a lot of common themes around being seen and heard and you wanting to make sure your friends was thought about when you organize your fifth grade party.

Can we talk about when you lost your hearing when you were five?

Yes, absolutely.

Yes.

I lost my hearing at five months old.

I had spinal meningitis as a baby.

And to this day, I'm not sure if it was the meningitis or the medicine that made me lose my hearing.

It was the 80s, so things were a little fast and loose back then with medicine.

Anything could happen.

But I was born into a hearing family, so I learned more to lip read and follow, you know, body language, facial expressions and all of that.

I never learned sign language.

I learned a little bit, you know, a lot of us learn as kids, like please and thank you and milk.

And then I went to deaf school when I was in kindergarten, and they said, she talks a lot, so you need to put her in mainstream school.

So I was mainstreamed in a school where they didn't really have resources for people with disabilities.

So like I said, I really adapted to an environment that wasn't built for me.

And I'm grateful for those challenges.

It was definitely hard a lot of times, but I'm able to adapt to environments like this that are not built for people like myself.

Yeah, and that's interesting you say about the gratitude for the challenges because that's a common theme in this podcast is what I'm trying to get out of people is the idea that the challenge is the juice so that when you do get to wherever it is you think you're going or you get to, that reward feels so much richer because if you just got it on a plate, it would be a different situation.