Winning the Speaker Slam is just one way Aurora's Lindsy Matthews is making this the best year of her life.
Matthews took part in the public speaking competition April 25 for many reasons, but one of them was to prove that you can do hard things — and in her case, it's remaining positive in the face of health challenges.
She grew up with an autoimmune disease called ulcerative colitis that inspired her to get into fitness. Then in 2018, Matthews was working as a fitness instructor in Newmarket and Aurora when she was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer.
She had a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and other treatments and was cancer free a year later.
However, two years later, she was still experiencing health issues and imaging revealed the cancer was back and had spread to her spine. Matthews was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer and she was back in treatment.
"It's dire in the sense that it's not curable at all," she said. "One thing that my doctors have been very clear about is that it will spread again, it doesn't stop. So that's what's particularly devastating about stage four breast cancer."
But Matthews was clear that this isn't a sad story. Instead, she is turning the worst year of her life into her best year.
She is leaning on her past as a fitness instructor and her love of helping people and has shifted now into coaching and sharing her story on her blog.
"It just takes one person to say, 'Oh, my goodness, I know someone who did that' or 'Thank you for sharing that' or you know, just something positive and it makes it really worth sharing my story," she said. "It's not always easy, you know, you feel exposed or you're nervous but everyone's always made it really worth it."
She got the idea to get into public speaking when she attended a speaking event in Toronto and met Speaker Slam co-founder Dan Shaikh.
"He said, 'What brings you here?' and I said, 'Oh, I hope to be an author and a speaker one day,' like just on a whim," she said.
He told her about Speaker Slam and originally she just wanted to attend to watch but after hearing more about her story, Shaikh encouraged Matthews to apply as a speaker, so she did.
"I was accepted to speak and I just had such a good feeling about it all, like it just felt so right," she said.
She wrote and rewrote her speech, practising really hard in preparation for the event. She delivered her speech alongside nine other competitors.
"For a long time, I've been developing this superpower where I will continue to crush life even when my world is coming down around me," she said in her speech.
Her speech was based on her story and facing this fight with positivity.
"We did things that we were putting on the back burner, we decided we're going to do it right away. Like we put in a backyard pool. We went on this vacation. I was so much more intentional with my time. I was so much more aware of the connections that I had with the people who are closest to me. And it turned out to be this really amazing year because so much good happened simultaneously with all of this really scary hard stuff," Matthews said.
"If everyone lived this way all the time, life would just be so different."
When asked where her positivity comes from, she said she has been like this since she was young, especially living with an auto-immune disease.
"I was taught that things are going to happen and you can either roll with it or let it stop you from living," she said.
However, as she said in her speech as well, she isn't positive all the time. She has dealt with depression following her diagnosis and she struggles thinking about the future but she said she tries to remain in the present and has found that meditation, music, spending time with loved ones has helped.
She used analogy and humour to share her message and despite going slightly over her allotted time she won the top prize.
Matthews was happy and surprised to have won, she said.
"I just wanted to get home to tell my kids and it sounds so cliche, but I just couldn't wait to tell them that what they had just watched me work really hard for, it paid off," she said.
Matthews told her kids, who are eight and seven years old, the next morning and said, "They were really proud of me. And they were chanting and celebrating and kept saying, 'I can't believe you won.'"
By making the most of this situation and trying new things like Speaker Slam, Matthews said she is hoping to inspire her kids to do things that scare them and make the most of life.
As the winner of this event, Matthews will be advancing to the Grand Slam in November, which brings the top two speakers from five events to compete against one another. The theme for that event will be given closer to the event and she said she is really looking forward to it.
