Discovering human power through adversity: the story of Michael Crossland
Michael Crossland has been defying the odds since the age of 11 months, when he was diagnosed with a rare cancer. Now as one of Australia’s most respected inspirational speakers, he tells features editor Makayla Muscat the keys to his success.
Michael Crossland was diagnosed with an incurable cancer of the central nervous system when he was 11 months old. The stage four neuroblastoma meant he had a four per cent chance of surviving. He was chosen as one of 25 children to trial a cancer fighting drug called DTIC. Within 90 days, 24 of the children died. By the age of 18, Michael had survived two heart attacks, glandular fever and bacterial meningitis. When he was 23, Michael became the youngest national sales manager for one of the largest companies in the world.
Michael was 25, when in 2010, his life again hit rock bottom. He left the corporate world and travelled to Haiti to build a school. He wanted to build a school after an earthquake hit Haiti, killing 316,000 people and leaving 2.5 million homeless. Michael returned to Haiti for three weeks in 2013 to rebuild an orphanage before coming back to Australia.
Today, Michael is an international best-selling author, humanitarian worker and one of Australia’s most in-demand inspirational speakers – sharing his story with more than 600,000 people around the world.
In 2019, Michael was on 186 flights, spoke across 22 countries and shared the stage with Sir Richard Branson. Photo: supplied.
“We all need to remember through great adversity and great darkness this is our discovery moment. We do not discover how unfair life is but rather we discover how powerful we have been created.”
Michael says we should not be driven by power, privileges or possessions, but rather the desire to simply make an impact on other people’s lives. Photo: supplied.
I am watching Michael speak from the WORLDZ Collective main stage, with 48,000 others from around the globe.
“I think there are two types of people in this world, optimists and pessimists; I like calling them victims and navigators,” he says to the audience. “Your adversity does not define you, but how you deal with your adversity does.”
I am wide awake as I listen to him narrate the story of his struggles.
He calls his mum, Kerri Crossland, his rock – the most inspirational, influential, and loving person in his life. “The doctors gave me a 96 per cent death rate, but she could only focus on the four per cent survival,” he says.
To give her son the opportunity of a future, Kerri had to make a choice to inject a drug into her child that had killed everybody who had ever taken it. “I was prepared to sacrifice everything. I was going to allow my son to suffer the horrific side effects of these drugs, knowing every dose was going to be worse than the last,” says Kerri.
“No one in your life is ever going to tell you what you can do; they will only tell you what you can’t.”
In his first book Kids Don’t Get Cancer: The Remarkably Inspiring Story of Michael Crossland, Michael describes the grievous effects of the drug. “We were all covered from head to toe in blisters. The nurses would wrap us up in bandages and lay us in baths of ice to try to control our temperatures and prevent our brains from frying,” he says.
Kerri carried the fear of her son dying for almost seven years, until one day the doctors told her she could take him home; everything was going to be okay.
“I say to people all around the world that I’m one of the lucky ones – but I never say I’m one of the lucky ones because I’m still alive, I say I’m one of the lucky ones because I wasn’t my mum,” Michael says.
Michael’s health challenges continued through his teenage years and into adulthood. Eventually stress caused Michael’s transition out of the corporate world.
“We should not be driven by power, privileges or possessions but rather the desire to simply make an impact on other people’s lives,” he says. “I’ve spoken to troops in Iraq, I’ve spoken to the 9/11 victims and their families, I’ve been lucky enough to work with the New York Mets, the Toronto Blue Jays and the San Diego Padres in the Major League Baseball world – but the one thing that has given me so much joy is when you can give back to somebody as opposed to take from the world.”
After the earthquake in Haiti left millions of people homeless, Michael saw an opportunity to make a global impact. Pictured are children from the orphanage he rebuilt. Photo: supplied.
Michael describes his first impression of Haiti as incredibly frightening. “Here is an island that has over 10 million people … with an unemployment rate of over 80 per cent. An island where people are fighting to survive and where 95 per cent of the population live below the poverty line,” he says.
Michael says he realised the importance of education and created a school for the children in the remote village of Bouvier. “I went there, and I rebuilt a school for 235 little kids because I found out that these kids were getting raped on their way to school in the morning, and raped on their way home,” he told the audience.
He says spending an extended period there over the past nine years, these kids have taught him more than he could ever teach them. “These kids have no mum, no dad, no laptop or iPhone yet they believe they have everything in the world. These kids are not existing, they are truly living, and I admire the courage and optimism towards the challenges and poverty that they face,” he says.
“We (Michael and his wife) were told that we would never be able to have kids, and this was a wonderful opportunity for me to be able to provide love and support to those kids who are extremely vulnerable and desperately in need of love and support,” he says.
Kerri says that her son’s health challenges put a strain on their family but that being told her son was going to die changed her whole perception of life. “Hope and faith became my strength,” she says.
Michael believes it is important to accept the things we cannot change. “I have been let down, disappointed and hurt many many times throughout my life. When I forgive, I can let go, not for their feelings but for my own inner peace,” he told his Facebook followers.
“I feel the biggest factor that has empowered me to achieve great success is the desire not to prove other people wrong but more importantly to prove myself right.”
In 2017, Michael and his wife Melissa found out they were going to be parents. “We had to go down the IVF route to conceive and after emotional, failed attempts it was hard to grasp that I was actually pregnant,” Melissa says.
In December 2017, Melissa delivered their first child nine weeks premature and fighting for life.
Michael spent over a quarter of his life in hospital but seeing his first son battling his own health challenges, “I finally get the chance now to walk in my mother’s shoes,” he told Nine News.
“We were told we would have maybe four days with our little boy,” he says – but just like his father, Michael and Melissa’s son defied the odds.
After the earthquake in Haiti left millions of people homeless, Michael saw an opportunity to make a global impact. Children from the orphanage he rebuilt. Photo: supplied.
Melissa describes Michael as an engaged and active father of two. “Michael is an exceptional father, so I absolutely look forward to watching his bond with our children grow,” she says.
“To have my son here, and now to see him as a dad is truly a miracle,” Kerri says.
Michael Crossland is a motivational speaker and the author of Kids Don’t Get Cancer: The Remarkably Inspiring Story of Michael Crossland and Everything Will Be Ok: A Story of Hope, Love and Perspective. His website is located at https://michaelcrossland.com.
This article was previously published in the Sydney Sentinel.