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Ron Roehrich is a line supervisor at a Northrop Grumman manufacturing facility in the far reaches of western North Dakota.
He gave me permission to tell this story...
Ron is in his fifties, walks with a limp because of an almost useless left foot and has no use of his left hand. He's a very smart, insightful man, but his mind operates just a step slower than most. His reactions are a tad sluggish.
Sometimes confidence is an issue.
You see, Ron suffered a stroke when he was twenty-two years old. Let me repeat that: Ron suffered a stroke when he was twenty-two years old.
He had married his high school sweetheart just two years before. You simply never know what life is going to hand you.
He was told he would probably never walk again, the left side of his face was limp, the left side of his body all but dead.
In the ensuing years, Ron and his wife Julie went through awful emotional pain and stress. Ron's depression was at times suffocating. There were moments when this cruel trick of Mother Nature beat them so severely they could easily have tapped out.
But Ron preferred the idea of walking again. And Julie preferred that for him. It started with him dragging himself across parallel bars and, over the years, advanced to walking with a cane. Some years later still, he tossed the cane away. Julie was with him every excruciating step of the way.
And now he limps.
I tell you this story not so that you will feel sorry for Ron. I don't even tell it as an inspirational story about a "can-do" attitude. As a matter of fact, there were times when Ron, human as all of us, had a definite "can't-do" attitude. That's reality.
But I tell you this story because some years after his stroke, when Ron was physically and mentally able, he got a job.
Yes sir, Ron got a job. He began as a teacher.
What's the big deal you ask?
Think about it. Ron had the perfect out. He had the perfect setup to live forever on the public dole. Disability checks would have rolled in in perpetuity.
As a matter of fact, Julie tells me that they actually took a pay cut when Ron became a teacher. He made less as a teacher than he made on disability.
But he did it anyway.
When so many would have milked the system, Ron refused. When so many would have taken advantage of their circumstances, Ron didn't. When so many would have said that having a stroke at twenty-two was unfair and the world owed him something, Ron couldn't. When so many would have never gotten over feeling sorry for themselves, Ron did.
I sat listening to his story during our one-on-one coaching session last week when I visited there.
I asked him why. What got him, after years of rehabilitation and therapy, what got him to go back to work?
Somewhere in those years, Ron and Julie had children. In the end they had four of them. And Ron said to me simply this, "I wanted my kids to be proud of me."
That was it. And that was enough.
It was his example to his kids that sparked him. He didn't want to have to flinch when he gave them life advice. He wanted to be one that they could look up to. He wanted them to be proud.
His four kids have scattered. All are in varying stages of life. Some in school, some with jobs, some with families of their own. All of them contributors...all of them successful...all of them in college or...working.
And of their dad, I think, all of them very, very proud. | 
