Our next guest on the Empowering Leaders podcast is the remarkable Dr. Dinesh Palapana,
the first ever medical graduate with a spinal cord injury suffering quadriplegia.
It was an incredible privilege to catch up with Dinesh and to see someone turn what looks like
the ultimate negative into a positive and to look at his disability now as an advantage.
Remarkable person who I certainly learned a lot from on the back of this chat.
I'm really aligned with the passion that I love talking about, the work we're doing in Alita
with my great friend, Matt Wadowitz.
We started this business several years ago, inspiring connections and celebrating a world
of collaboration and what great leadership looks like.
And if you're motivated to start and improve your leadership journey, Alita Connect, our
signature program, I'd love you to have a look at it.
We're bringing together some inspiring leaders from sport, from industry, social venture
and the arts, people like the remarkable Dinesh Palapana.
I hope you enjoy it.
I hope you enjoy this chat as much as I did.
He's an incredible person who's inspiring many people.
Dinesh Palapana is a medical doctor working in the busiest emergency department in Australia
at the Gold Coast University Hospital.
Dinesh suffered a spinal cord injury in his third year at medical school in a motor vehicle
accident that left him a quadriplegic affecting his fingers and everything below his chest.
Dinesh had initially completed a law degree before finding his passion for helping others
Five years post his accident, Dinesh returned to complete his medical degree at Griffith
University, becoming only the second person with quadriplegia to graduate as a doctor
in Australia and the first with spinal cord injury.
Dinesh, it's an incredible life story.
I really appreciate you sharing it with me today.
It's great to meet you.
Hey, thanks a lot for having me.
I've been really excited to chat to you.
Hey, Dinesh, you're a third year medical student.
Take you back to then your top of your class.
You're fresh back, I understand, from snowboarding in Japan.
You've got a girlfriend.
Life's going really well for you, and then you have a life-changing moment.
Can we start with that night, and can you share with us what happened?
I went to visit my parents who lived in Brisbane.
I was living in Gold Coast at the time, and I often used to visit my family on weekends
just to chill out and eat mom's food and be a bit of a lazy person for the weekend.
And it was just wonderful.
One of those weekends, you know, it was good.
I got to hang out with everyone at home and relax a bit.
And I always think about serendipity and sliding doors moments.
You know, there are certain points in our lives where you just end up at a certain place
at a certain time.
But that day, it was the 31st of January, 2010.
It was raining through the day.
So it was one of those days where it rained and then stopped and rained and stopped.
And it was just generally wet.
And I was going to leave pretty early that day.
Actually, I wasn't even going to go home that weekend.
I was going to stay down in Gold Coast, but I decided to go.
And then I decided to stay till Sunday.
And I was going to leave early that day.
But then I stayed back and I stayed back and I stayed back.
And I ate dinner at home.
And then at this particular time,
I ended up leaving the house.
So I went to the garage.
I gave my mom a hug and hopped in the car, then drove out.
And I was driving down the highway and I was going to stop by a friend's house.
But I just I missed the turn off and I kept driving.
And there are two ways to get to Gold Coast.
And I was going to go.
But then for some reason, I forgot to take that turn off, too.
So I just kept driving towards Gold Coast.
And I ended up in the stretch of highway, which was a bit dark.
There were roadworks and it was wet.
And I came up to this.
I don't know what it was.
It looked like a water puddle or some oil on the road.
And as soon as I hit it, my car lost control.
I started spinning and spinning and spinning.
And for a second there, I thought I got control back, but I didn't.
And I just kept spinning again.
And then the car slid off the road, went up onto the embankment and then turned around
and came back down.
When the car came back off the embankment, the nose just slammed into the road.
And then it started flipping through the air, nose to tail.
And I was terrified.
I was freaking out.
At that point, because it was so fast, so violent.
I could hear so much noise and my body was just being thrown around.
But there was this point in time when I think I was hanging upside down in the car and everything
seemed to slow down for a bit.
And I just thought there's nothing more I can do now, right?
There is absolutely nothing I can do to get control of this car again.
So I just decided.
I decided that I would think about that situation differently, because that's all I can do at
that point is to control what my mind thinks and the way I perceive that situation.
So I just thought I'm going to have fun and think of this like a roller coaster.
So I thought about the thought about the crash like a roller coaster in the last little part
And I was I was actually having fun.
I was just yelling out and laughing and whatever else.
Pretty weird when I think about it now.
But when the car landed, it landed upright on the side of the road.
And I was stunned for a second when I went to get out of the car and I realized that my
fingers couldn't grab the door handle anymore.
And I didn't really understand what was happening for a second.
Oh, I don't know what's going on.
And then I just rested my hand back on my leg.
And I realized I could.
I couldn't feel my leg.
So that's when I can't explain what that felt like.
But I knew I was paralyzed.
I knew that my life had changed forever.
I was far enough in medical school to understand that this is a catastrophic injury.
And Luke, I can't even tell you what that feels like.
Like it's just a horrifying feeling.
Yeah, it's an incredible reflection.
And I know you have told that story before many times.
But hearing it in person with you, you can't help but feel the emotion attached to it.
And as you said, you're in this unique perspective.
One, for you to have that presence in a moment is quite an amazing part of the story.
But second part, to be a medical student, aware enough to be able to scan your body
and understand almost immediately.
Did your mind start to say?
Oh, I've lost the ability to walk again.
Was your mind able to get to there straight away?
Was that the sort of thoughts that were going through?
It did immediately.
And I knew about spinal cord injuries.
And I knew that it's an irreversible thing, most of the time at least.
And I think a couple of years later, it was a few years later actually,
I managed to reconnect with the...
the fireman that attended the accident scene because they were the first on scene.
And there were two things that they mentioned.
One was that their fire truck also ran over whatever I ran over and lost control.
Fortunately, they didn't crash, but they were able to reverse back.
And then the second thing they said is they never forgot because they said I was one of
the few people that they'd attended to who already had a diagnosis about the injury.
I was telling them not to...
It's an incredible part of your story.
And another beautiful part was there was a driver behind you who stopped and held your
head and sat with you.
And I know you ended up reconnecting with him.
He went on a search to find you for many years and had some trouble because of the privacy
And it's a beautiful moment if you see the Australian story on the ABC to watch Dinesh's
It's really worthwhile.
Along with Dinesh's TED Talk.
There's a lot of great stories.
There's some incredible reflection on that moment.
But can I shift from there, Dinesh, to the fact that, as you said, you're a third-year
It's probably thought impossible that you're going to go on unfinished medical school.
But you had some great leadership from a number of professors at Griffith University who really...
they were really chasing after you, from what I understand, encouraging you how you can
come back and do this.
You can get this done.
Can you tell us about their leadership?
And also the self-belief?
What was the self-belief in you that got you back onto the path of becoming a doctor?
I was really lucky to have people in my life that believed that I should have a chance,
believed that it was the right thing to do, and invested in me as well.
So this is something that...
Medicine is something that I love, right?
I found medicine through...
I never grew up wanting to be a doctor, but I found it actually through depression.
I had depression when I...
I initially studied law, and I did my law degree, and I had depression then.
And it was through that experience that I found medicine, and I loved it ever since.
So I never wanted to let it go.
And I always wanted to come back through it.
From the moment I had the injury, there wasn't a day that went by when I didn't want to come
But over the years, between the accident, between the accident and coming back to medical
school, there was a four-year period.
And in that four-year period, I was lucky enough to have professors from the medical
school who just kept prodding me and encouraging me.
And it's not an easy process to come back from something like this, you know?
There's a period of emotional adjustment.
There's a period of becoming strong again.
So the nice thing was they persisted over a matter of years.
And they kept prodding me, and they kept gradually upping the pressure to the point where, you
know, they're like, okay, you really need to come back now.
And from what I heard, there were divergent opinions on whether I could be a medical student
Because even today, right, with disability, there are so many barriers for people with
disabilities to pursue whatever else.
Just yesterday, actually, I got an email about a nursing student with a disability who's
having some issues.
So there are these barriers that people experience.
So there were some divergent opinions about whether I should come back to medical school,
whether I could come back to medical school, whether it could be done.
But fortunately, I had the leaders that were...
Champions, and they really put their neck out, and they really fought for me.
And their opinion, fortunately, won out, and I was able to come back to medical school.
But I know how much persistence and effort and patience that it took for them to do that.
But even me, you know, I had some doubts about how I would examine a patient, how I would
get through medical school, how I would structure life around it with the spinal cord.
And I was like, I don't know.
I was afraid of that.
I was afraid of that injury.
So even I had some, I guess, you know, doubts about how to do it.
But in the end, the things that we all thought were going to be challenges weren't challenges
It's an amazing, incredible story.
There's so much to touch on.
Danelle, I do want to pick up on what you just said a moment ago.
You're a law student initially, and you got yourself into a hole in that part of your
life to the point where you were depressed and suffering from anxiety.
Before you found that...
desire to help others and your passion to pursue being a medical doctor but i read with interest
because i think this is a profound statement that you know i think these words are accurate where
you said you were more debilitated and more challenged by depression than anything that a
wheelchair is thrown at you that the mind can limit you much more than the body can and can
you expand on those thoughts is that is that an accurate reflection of how you felt definitely
um definitely i i often think about things that um these days i think about
we we embark in a lot of things like the emergency department and medicine and
um sport or whatever else there are all these things that are about performance right
and i often wonder how much of that is the body and how much of that is the mind
because to me i think a lot of it is actually a large part of it is the mind i'd probably say
70 80 90 percent um uh so when i had depression my mind was so profoundly affected
and i was i was debilitated i was feeling down all the time i was depressed i didn't enjoy things i
wasn't connected to friends and society in the community i didn't go out i was feeling anxious
i was i was having panic attacks so all the time when i was out i'd have a panic attack and i'd
want to go home or to hide so it got it got so bad to the point where i was too afraid to go
outside the house and when i think back to those days i struggled academically i struggled socially
i struggled with relationships i struggled with friendships
and i struggled to really do anything in this world and
now i have a spinal cord
injury when i woke up in the intensive care unit i felt like a prisoner of my body because i couldn't
move i was stuck there i was stuck in bed and even if i wanted to run away from that situation i
couldn't physically so i felt like a prisoner but now we're 12 years down the track um i'm having
this conversation with you i'm about to go to work i'm about to you know this morning i woke up i
looked outside the window and i thought man like life is
good and i was happy so i think um being able to compare those two experiences
i know with confidence for me that it was far more paralyzing having depression than a spinal
cord injury ever has been this year i you know i mean the last few years have been amazing like i
work as a doctor i get to do so many interesting things and i get to um
hopefully make a contribution to the community and people with disability
i started flying again this year i flew a plane a couple months ago so like
it's you know i i feel unlimited but it's because i still got my mind
it's an incredible perspective that you've got and you're uniquely placed to have it danesh and
and i think you know to have that understanding and empathy that which i think that we're
getting better at that mental health issues which we really you know 20 years ago didn't
understand and we sort of compartmentalized people and went you know what you need to
deal with that we didn't quite understand how debilitating it was we know that it's a modern
disease and it's becoming an issue of western society in such a powerful way and the east as
well but as you said when you explain it the way you did you know someone that now has to deal with
a spinal cord injury living this brilliant life and and and i wanted to to go there because you
know one of the things i heard uh about which i loved that
you know danesh is a great doctor not in spite of his uh wheelchair but because of his wheelchair
that there's this magic that happens with you as a doctor that your patients love you and embrace
you because they have this incredible respect straight away you've probably dealt with something
far more challenging than most people are ever going to deal with is that your experience with
patients that when you wheel your wheelchair in there is this connection that is unique
when i before i came back to medical school
i had i remember having this conversation with someone and they said um it was a senior doctor
actually and they said i don't know if patients would take you seriously and um i even thought
hmm i wonder if i wonder if there's actually going to be a thing because i wonder what they
would feel when i i wander into their room in a wheelchair so even i thought about that for a
period of time but now i've seen thousands of patients and you know the thing is luke i even
surprised not a single one has ever said oh can you do can you do your job because of your
wheelchair not one but um i've had the opposite where i've had so many amazing conversations with
my patients um where we've been able to connect and some have said you know i remember this one
particular patient one night where it was like 2 a.m it was a busy department and they came in by
and they were also a wheelchair user with a significant disability and they
when i went into the the cubicle the patient said i'm so glad that you came in here because i know
you'll understand so i feel so lucky and privileged and there are many days when i go to work where my
heart is warmed um and i just i just feel incredibly
lucky to interact with the people that i do danessa as you said earlier you taught yourself
post the accident to you know without fingers you can put a needle in a vein as well as anyone you
can use a stethoscope you can stitch someone up uh you know with some assistance so you've worked
your way through the physical challenges which is a great story in itself but for me the underrated
part of medicine is is the empathy when you walk in and the doctor genuinely cares and you know
they care or they've got great bedside manner or
they're open-minded enough to collaborate with other professionals to help you get better i mean
sometimes that's rare in medicine it's clearly a strength do you think we overlook those parts
that may be more important than the the physical parts in some ways and that's the opportunity that
you're you know really showing people every day i've been having this conversation a lot lately
and um this is such a deeply human activity uh and i don't remember who said it it was
one of the um old philosophers like hippocrates perhaps or someone but they said that the biggest
mistake a physician makes is to try and treat the body without trying to treat the soul
so our job i think is to is it's it's a human activity and to to look after another human being
and to help them through that process and to work through their goals and support them through that
process and it is a collaborative activity with other professionals and if if i think if you are a
if you are mean to a patient and if you uh treat them poorly as a human being i think you end up
doing more damage to a person than than helping them um i spent eight months in hospital uh after
that i probably spent another cumulative three or four months over the last few years i hate being
a patient like i hate it i hate ending up in a hospital i hate um staying in the hospital and i
hated that whole experience because it was so disempowering and it was so scary and um there
were times when no one listened to me and it was out of control so now when i think about that i
think about how much damage i've done and i think about how much damage i've done and i think about
um you can do to a therapeutic relationship between uh a patient and a doctor so i think
about that all the time when i see patients and you know i just at the very least i try to be a
good human being to them and you can see that comes out in every uh essence of who you are
danesh you know pre and post accident that's something i think that that you know appears
to be just part of your dna being caring and being a good human being and we know
that is where you know the opportunities are aren't they to support people in a positive way
you know doctor or or not being a doctor i had a story that came to mind uh danesh when i was
thinking about you i caught up with in a very different space a guy called andy cohen on this
podcast he's the executive chairman of jp morgan's uh global wealth management um probably one of the
biggest handful of jobs in the world of finance everywhere but a great guy with great empathy and
and they have 275 000 employees in that business
they live diversity they care about it in a proper way and you can feel it tangibly and he shared
with um with me the story of a shish a great friend he called him who was blind at the age of
14 grew up in india went to a university in india but had this incredible ability because of his
sense of uh of sound to hear text much quicker than people could read it he became the number
one fx trader in their global business just the the but that opportunity wouldn't
have been thought of without businesses having an open mind to see the brilliance like that's
a competitive advantage in the end is that where we need to get to danish in some ways to not see
we need to do more to lend support we need to see the opportunity of what you're doing every day is
actually something that other people can't do and they're they're bits of gold out there we just need
to see them more is that is that a possibility oh man i love that yes yeah because you have this
model about particularly about disability but there are people with so many strengths and like
you said i love that you said there are there are things that you can do that other people can't
as well like that that's really cool um and uh i hope we can transition into into that kind of
thinking where we think about what someone can contribute um and and work on those strengths
because i don't think it just applies to me i don't think it just applies to me i don't think
it applies to disability i think it applies to everyone right if we can actually support people
through their strengths and um and and to help them develop that and to celebrate that i think
we end up a much better world um so hopefully we can get there and i definitely think there is
opportunity there i'm glad you told me that story i'm gonna i'm gonna use that and it's sort of the
essence really this what this podcast is and what i'm really passionate about which is that you know
identifying that self-reflective style of leadership and that's what i'm really passionate about
you know your strengths and we've all got them we celebrate them and we share them but then the
opportunity to collaborate with other people on the areas that you need to improve now that's
disability or not disability for me isn't it like it's it's just a broad spectrum if we understand
our blind spots but we know we can get support in them you know perhaps yours is a more extreme
version of that where you definitely need you know some some some support but no no more important or
less important than perhaps all of us it's a it's a it's a
maybe an interesting way to think about it yeah and i think um on that note too like i have two
thoughts about leadership and and performance i think good leaders understand that they're not
good at everything um and i read a book about warren buffett a little while ago where he says
that what he does is to surround himself with people that are experts on various things so he
knows that he's not an expert on everything and it's it's like i just try to put together an
amazing baseball team so we can win the game and i think that's a really good way to think about it
yeah so i think um good leaders pick people with different strengths and put the team together
but i think the other thing is um for us to grow and want for us to have
um for us to perform better uh as individuals too it's about understanding
um that we don't know everything and that we have to defer to others and we have to build
our knowledge in certain areas and to have that humility um so i think it goes both ways
yeah beautifully said uh yeah i think you've um got a great essence of uh of the passion space
we're in and and you know so inspired by seeing your smiling face and the life that you're living
and the contribution that you're having uh it's just an incredibly inspiring story danesh and you
know great privilege to be able to spend some time we're talking i have been talking around
different leadership and dimensions of what great leadership looks like and i'm fascinated to get
your thoughts on you just shared a bit of it then but we feel like
um the leaders that are making a big impact really understand the idea of self-leadership
to me your story is all about self-leadership and you're not sitting here today without that
what does that term mean to you when you think about self-leadership oh that's a that's a really
good question i think i've i've just been thrown into this situation um over the years i had to
make a lot of sense about what happened and what it means and um to
yeah to i guess think think about how i can make uh something good out of this and um i i spent a
lot of time thinking about what this means and what the spinal cord injury you know the thing
is initially i would have done anything to have my old life back um over the first couple months
to years and then now today i i wouldn't trade my life for the world but a big part of my life is
that i think is um this has been an opportunity for me to make a make a difference for the
disability community for the people for the group of people that go through so much um the people
that don't have opportunities for education and employment and whatever else so i think um
leadership is actually about about that i think it's about um taking what you have and the
experiences that you have and the experiences that you have and the experiences that you have and the
growing out of it but also using that to give back to the world and using that to give back to the
community because that's the other thing that i discovered through after going through depression
is that um happiness you know today we we often get distracted by these things like about
consuming and what we can get and what we can have or money and goods and whatever else social
status but actually happiness doesn't come from the world it comes from the world and it comes from
from accumulating things for ourselves and happiness comes from looking out into the world
and looking at what we can give to the world and how we can leave this world a better place and
what we can do for our neighbor and fellow human and colleagues so i think leadership and self
leadership is actually about um using the things that you have and using the things that you've
learned to be better but also to use that to give back to the to the world i think leadership is
never about us it's it's about
everyone else it's about how we can look after other people and how what we can do for our
community what a profound uh statement you know danish on every word that uh you're living and
expressing there is just it's just so relevant and and it's um you know beautifully said again
and i the next dimension i wanted to talk to you about was leaders conscious about how they
positively impact others in their environment and i think you sum that up you know beautifully i
know you founded doctors with
abilities you know every day every patient every interaction it feels as though you're living
exactly what you what you just said is that something you're really conscious of yeah all
the time i i think um we are really put on this in this world not for ourselves but to
but to do things for others like and that's that's it's partly selfish in a way as well
because it's where happiness comes from you know like those things that you do for others and do
for other people is where happiness comes from and i've learned a lot about leadership through some
of the people that helped me through this injury um so i had some friends who uh supported me and i
had and i had some doctors as well who were who were quite good and some of those doctors are in
the emergency department where i work today and they made a massive investment in me um i remember
coming across a lot of different people in my return to medical school
and some of them were a bit hesitant some of them were pretty supportive but um i had to go around
and meet all these different specialists right that i was going to be a student under but the
one i remember most clearly is uh the emergency doctor and i met her one day i was with my mom
because i was still learning to get around and uh she sat me and my mom down bought us a coffee
asked about our life
and um then at the end she just said we just can't wait to have you in our department and
we'll make it work and i just felt really welcome i felt valued and i felt like a human being
and from that point on like every time i worked in the emergency department they just
made me feel like a normal person made me feel welcome nothing was a challenge and they always
encouraged me to grow um they not just made me feel like a normal person they just made me feel
like a normal person they just made me feel like a normal person they just made me feel like a normal
person they just made me feel like a normal person they just made me feel like a normal person
they proactively checked on me and when i struggled to get the job after graduating from
medical school some of them actually offered up part of their salary to fund mine they just said
let's let's at least take money off the table so we will offer our salaries so when i think about
that and the investment and risk and the the chance that they took on me it's helped me to
get where i am but i take that now and what i learned from that is that i'm not going to be
i give to other people as well so it creates a snowball effect too i think but to me that that's
leadership you know it's it's selflessness and it's it's what they did for me i hope to do for
others as well yeah beautifully said once again and that opportunity to impact uh people you know
in that moment someone we're going to make this work for you in the emergency department i think
your mind would initially think that may be the most challenging sphere to take on but uh an
emergency doctor to say you know what's your story and abide by it and i think that's the
into you like that as you said and to be able to pass that on we all get that opportunity every
day don't mean to pass on positive energy and impact people and i love hearing stories like
that in such a profound way we see leaders are really conscious about how they go about
creating and sharing their vision you said it to me before you said i wouldn't have my old life
back what i'm doing now is really what i was put on this earth to do is is that how you feel about
this vision that you are really creating a pathway for people with disability in a unique way
i would actually love to see a day where we don't need to have these conversations
we're just like oh yeah it's just a guy you know you know with the spinal cord injury being a doctor
like you know it's not a big deal so i'd love to see a day where where people can just
do what they want they're accepted and we just we just have this beautiful inclusive
peaceful society where everyone can have all these opportunities and do what they want and
we're all thriving together so i'd love to see that and that's definitely a vision but i think um
at the same time like if you if you want to be a leader and apart from things like selflessness and
wanting to give back to the community and the people around you know those things but
i think one of the most important things is also um being an example and living a good set of values
i think those values are really important like things like
integrity and honesty all those perseverance so um i think modeling those values and living it
and being an example is really important as well like uh like they say you know you're going to be
the change you want to see full of incredible wisdom uh danesh and i i love you you know
mentioning values don't you without a sense of your own values it's hard to then lead other
people isn't it if you if you don't know what you stand for yourself and
you know that's something clearly that you have uh in spades we see leaders are really curious it's
a word that comes up all the time danesh that they use curiosity as a pathway to constantly
want to learn and grow does this curiosity resonate with you i have one of my best friends
um he i've known him for now 21 years or 22 years i think and he um he's also a doctor
one of the best doctors i know he uh
i was having a conversation with him recently and when when he actually finished his specialist
training he got like the he topped the state in his exams and whatever else so he he's he's
an amazing doctor but one of the things he mentioned to me when we're having a conversation
recently is that you know man i don't really uh i don't really need to know what i'm good at like i
don't need people to tell me what i'm good at i really want people to tell me about
what i'm not good at i really want people to tell me what i could improve on i really want people
to tell me what my weaknesses are because i'm interested in those things because i want to
become better so i think um curiosity um and also humility um to to build that curiosity on knowing
that okay actually i'm not not so good at this i need to learn a bit more and to be curious enough
to go and learn more to be curious enough to go and learn more to be curious enough to go and learn
enough to learn about things outside our own sphere as well um i read this really interesting
book called uh range recently and the book range is about uh how we need a world with more people
that are that have a broad set of knowledge outside of their own sphere of expertise as well
so if you think about people like leonardo da vinci and
um all those historical
greats they actually had a huge range of things that they were curious about
and learned and that's what make them amazing leaders you can't be you can't have tunnel vision
so i think curiosity um about your own about your own sphere wanting to wanting to learn more
backed by humility but also curiosity about other things outside our spheres is really important
it's a great book range dennis i had it given to me over the summer and i love the sort of idea of
uh debunking a little bit of malcolm gladwell's you know 10 000 hours that we need to get people
really young specialized and you know five-year-old violins uh that were put in their hand by their
parents they didn't really have a passion for it but i'm going to turn you into the world's
you know greatest uh you know uh concert violinist and you know clearly if you put the hours in early
you get some advantage but really the research now and range does a great job of telling that
story around if it's not coming through you know you're not going to be able to do it if you don't
or you know tell us a great story of roger fetter isn't he his mom was a tennis coach but wouldn't
let him play because he was a bad sport and so he went you know and did uh soccer and badminton
and table tennis and everything else and but when he came back to it all those diverse skills made
him arguably the world's greatest ever tennis player it's a it's a it's a fascinating uh read
worth uh picking that one up uh you're a great communicator uh danesh i've loved in my research
for this listening to you ted talk and i mentioned the
story before it's a beautiful story you should go back and and watch danesh tell it himself and
and some of the other great parts to it that we probably won't get to
today have you really put some time into how you communicate with clarity no
it's the lawyer coming out maybe those skills are yeah i know right i i've thought about this
and um uh because mom mom my mom actually asked me the other day
how this how this uh i don't actually see myself at that that good a communicator but
i think it's been a combination of things law school definitely helped
you know i remember um they used to have um moot court which is like the mock cases
and i actually remember some of my fellow students crying because it was they were grilled so much
by the people so it uh definitely put us through a crash course in communication
but medicine too uh one of the things that um we often have to do is like get
bits of information across about patients very quickly to whether it be to be a senior person
at like 2 a.m when you're on the phone to someone just being able to say things with clarity so it's
probably helped me um some of those things but uh no i'm i never see myself that way well it's uh
it's brilliant to hear the way you talk about it and i think it's it's a it's a it's a it's a
way that that you have and i think you know the message as you said that you're inspiring
you know others who perhaps uh you know facing the adversity that you've gone through and i
think it's a profound impact that you're having we see leaders are incredibly passionate about
collaboration now um the leaders that inspire us uh how do you feel about collaboration in your
world oh so important like in medicine it's super important but um one of the things that i think
often in collaboration is uh spinal cord injury research so um i lead um a group of spinal cord
injury researchers we have a lab um at our university and i'm trying to kill myself
the thing that we learn often is that we need to collaborate with others and we need to collaborate
with a diverse set of ideas and the the um
idea of having silos and trying to build your own thing and doing it alone like i think that's
an outdated concept we need to have different the collaborative effort is far more important
the cause is more important um so when you collaborate you get different ideas you get
access to different resources you get you can just grow and it's a it's a combined effort so
together you can go faster you can go better you can go harder so
it's critically important to collaborate across um across a range of disciplines it's yeah it's a
no-brainer and dinesh it's a great part of your story that is unfolding you're working you know
as a doctor every day uh in the emergency ward but also going back to griffith university as a
researcher and delving into paralysis and spinal cord injury it's a it's an amazing full circle
that uh that has happened for you i mean are you excited about the the the the the the the the the
where technology is going and are you hopeful in the future that there's
you know a really profound way forward oh yeah when i first had the injury there was
since then to now there's been so many developments in spinal cord injury and
we've even seen some therapies that have started to give people motor function back um where groups
of people in certain studies have been able to move their limbs again it's not perfect
starting to happen so um i'm very hopeful that technology and medicine will move forward um
you know just this morning too i was reading a medical article about a therapy for certain
cancer that's nearly curative now as well so we're making all these advances and we're making
we're doing good things for humans so similar to that i think spinal cord injury over the next few
years we'll see some amazing things um and uh that that would be pretty
cool i think look i love life and i love the life that i have but still that'd be that'd be a pretty
cool thing to achieve for humanity it'd be pretty amazing someone who has been on the receiving
end of a spinal cord injury to be part of uh the the solution to to find uh a cure effectively
would be amazing empowering leaders is the title of this podcast uh dinesh we've asked
all of our guests who has been the greatest leader in your life that's easy that's my
mom you know my mom is such an incredible woman she um ever since i was a kid um she always taught
me that anything is possible right you know when you're growing up sometimes you have people saying
that's really hard or you know you might not be able to be she was never that she was always like
you can do that you get you yeah if you want it you can do that you can do that this is how you do
them when i was 14 she helped me register for a surgery and i was like oh my god i'm going to be
my first business and set up a office out of the garage and all that stuff so she taught me how to
drive she taught me how to shave she taught me about uh bank accounts and all these things
she and then even when i came back to medicine you know just the other day i heard her telling
someone that when i wanted to come back to medical school after the accident it was just me and her
right um we everyone else left us for a period of time but
she said i didn't
really know how we were going to do it but i just said i told him that we would
and it'll be fine so she's that kind of person but she's taught me everything um and she's
taught me about perseverance and uh leadership because she's always been a leader in our family
um so mom for sure i had this feeling you might have uh gone there dinesh and uh she's just a
remarkable person your mom and you know you almost can't help but cry when you
watching the stories and her dedication to to you and i love this part of the story too that she
then went to griffith university herself and she's completed a degree in rehabilitation and
recovery on the back of her support for you and and and people might understand that you know
dinesh you know mom literally you know cook for you and feed you and and and was your carer you
know and for her and there's a great bit of it we see her the pride when you're a mom and you're a
graduate from medical school it's just as magic a moment so it's uh i could see the smile on your
face when i asked that question and and i'm assuming um you know every day she's still a
massive part of your life every day yeah um no she's uh we're a team she's she's awesome incredible
in in the spirit of collaboration uh dinesh we have been asking this question as well if there's
anyone in the world that you could collaborate in any of the areas that you're contributing is
there someone that springs to mind that you could collaborate with in any of the areas that you're
that you think god if i could connect with them and and collaborate does that have someone that
comes to mind oh that is uh that's an interesting question um i think uh a controversial figure but
um he has a lot of technology that's and probably resources too that can make it for but elon musk
is uh he's he's been doing that work with neuralink
the brain computer interfaces and uh it's probably it's applicable to spinal cord injury as well
has some parallels to the work that we're doing uh in our own lab so i think that would that would
be a very interesting collaboration hey dinesh you're not the first person to mention elon musk
in different categories and different thoughts you know and there it's something isn't it as you said
you know and people pause too and they go there's some controversy there but there is some sense of
reason there for you know whatever you you think of elon musk that he's been able to break through
in a in a number of different fields hasn't he things that you know car um manufacturers around
the world had the opportunity to go into electric cars for decades and didn't and what he's done with
uh the satellites and launching rockets and landing them back on the same takeoff uh facility
with which they were initially launched so he's clearly got a way of doing things that other
people think aren't possible is that what gravitates you towards him or not yeah i think so and um
again like you say like it's he's not been without controversy and he's not been without
things but like when you actually objectively look at the different things that he's done it's pretty
pretty impressive right like the electric cars and um i think even his work with paypal and
it's really changed the world and i think he currently is the richest man in the world right
it's like so he's uh he's done a bunch of impressive things and i think uh and i think
it's also when we look at um i think when we look at people from as a society and when we look at
people um i read somewhere that it's very easy to judge the person that's in the arena shedding
their blood sweat and tears um but it's a very different thing to be that person
in the arena who's actually doing the thing um so uh yeah he's he's in the arena doing the thing
yeah beautifully uh beautifully said dinesh it's been an incredible uh privilege to sit down and
and hear more about your story and uh inspired by everything that you're doing and the way that
you've approached it and and your mum and her influence as well it was nice to uh to hear that
your description of the two of you being a team there's only one issue that i've got dinesh and
i'm looking at your screen and it's thrown me
from the very start is that there's a brisbane lions jumper now on the back of your wall there
you can't get everything right dinesh you're barracked for the wrong team unfortunately but
uh that's uh you can't help bad luck sometimes where did that passion come from
i uh i was going to bring that up actually
strategically placed it's in my view the whole the whole time so i had to
to mention it and and then behind you is uh is actually the true uh the true trophy which is
titan's uh jersey oh wow yeah wow okay so you've declared your hand exactly no i um i went and uh
talked to the lions a few years ago just about the journey because they were going through some
hard times as you know as well so um the the team very kindly gifted me that so yeah now i've got
it strategically placed dinesh thanks again uh so much for sharing your story and uh hopefully get
to uh to speak to you again it's inspiring
uh really um couldn't be more um incredibly uh blown away by the way you approach life and
the messages that you've got to share are really profound so thanks again it's great to see you
oh thanks for having me luke it's been a blast empowering leaders was presented by me luke darcy
produced by matt dwyer with audio production by darcy thompson start your leadership journey i
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