Meet CJ
CJ Janzen | The Singing Speaker is the founder of Beyond{dis} – Reinvention & Resilience Coaching, the creator of {dis}ABILITIES Unleashed, and is a #1 International Bestselling Author. Based in Cambridge, Ontario, she is an award winning keynote speaker, coach, and community advocate whose work focuses on resilience, disability inclusion, recovery, and rebuilding identity after a major life disruption, disability, disease, or loss.
Learning How to Begin Again
There are people who build their lives in straight lines, carefully mapping each next step. Then there are people like CJ Janzen, whose life has unfolded through rupture, reinvention, grief, and extraordinary persistence. Her story is not one of easy inspiration. It is a story about surviving what should have broken her and then choosing, repeatedly and deliberately, to keep creating meaning anyway.
Long before she became known as a speaker or advocate, CJ understood adversity intimately. As a child, she spent years caring for her mother during a long battle with cancer. She endured trauma early in life and quietly carried pain she did not yet have language for. By the age of seven, alcoholism had already entered her story, though she would only later understand the genetic predisposition that shaped those years.
Even then, she kept moving. She became a paramedic, later drove eighteen wheelers across Canada and the United States, and eventually left that life behind to follow a dream that felt wildly different from everything before it. She began traveling the world as a scuba instructor, teaching others beneath open skies and deep water. For the first time in a long time, life seemed expansive.
Then everything changed overnight.
When the Body Stops Cooperating
In 2012, while working as a PADI Master Instructor and diving multiple times a day, CJ contracted a virus that developed into Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a severe neuro immune disease that radically altered her life. Within days, she went from an active global traveler to someone who could barely speak a few words at a time.
The collapse was swift and unforgiving. She lost her health, her work, her financial security, and many of the relationships that had once defined her world. Forced to return to Canada, she found herself battling not only chronic illness but also alcoholism, depression, and an overwhelming sense of disconnection from herself.
At one point, she no longer felt useful or valuable. Her body had become unreliable. Her future seemed impossible to picture. The woman who once taught people how to navigate oceans now struggled to walk across a room.
Yet somewhere inside that devastation, a quieter decision began to form. Five days after choosing to fight for her life, she made it into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. That moment became one of the first small openings toward rebuilding.
Recovery did not arrive dramatically. It came in fragments. Through community. Through faith. Through counselling. Through learning how to survive one day at a time.
She remembers noticing how stories affected people in those meetings. Some speakers offered honesty and hope. Others seemed trapped in glorifying destruction. CJ realized she wanted her own story to serve a different purpose.
“I decided I wanted to become a GOOD speaker.”
That realization became unexpectedly transformative.
Discovering a Voice Through Fragility
Joining Toastmasters International changed the trajectory of CJ’s life in ways she never anticipated. Within three months, she won her club speaking competition, advanced through the area level, and placed second at the district level.
For someone who had once struggled to speak more than a few words at a time, standing on a stage became both an act of rebellion and restoration.
Speaking worked with the rhythms of her illness. She could conserve energy, prepare carefully, step onto a stage, and then retreat to recover afterward. More importantly, it gave her back a sense of purpose. She discovered that even while mostly bed bound, she could still reach people.
Over the next twelve years, she slowly rebuilt her life piece by piece. There were periods spent in a women’s shelter, later in a seniors home, and eventually in low income housing. Stability came gradually rather than all at once. During that time, she focused not on massive leaps forward but on consistent, manageable effort.
Some days, success meant answering a single email. Other days, it meant posting one message online or helping one person feel seen.
What sustained her was not perfection. It was movement.
CJ often speaks about learning to live in gratitude without pretending pain does not exist. Her philosophy was shaped partly by watching her mother continue living fully while facing terminal illness. It was also shaped by the many people who carried her through moments when she could not carry herself.
Her personal mantra emerged from those years of rebuilding:
“Choose to live Joyously within the tempest of adversity.”
That sentence is not motivational branding for her. It is survival language.
Building the GRACE Method
As CJ’s life stabilized, she began recognizing patterns in her own recovery journey. Over time, those experiences evolved into what she now calls the GRACE Method, a framework rooted in emotional honesty and practical resilience.
The method encourages people to grieve what was lost, reframe through gratitude, act fearlessly, connect with community, and embrace new passions and purpose.
Unlike many resilience frameworks, GRACE does not demand relentless positivity. It allows room for grief and uncertainty while still moving toward possibility. That balance reflects the way CJ herself has learned to navigate life with chronic illness.
Her work today centers on helping people reconnect with purpose after loss, trauma, addiction, disability, or major life transitions. Through keynote speaking, coaching, and live events, she creates spaces where vulnerability is not treated as weakness but as evidence of survival.
She is especially passionate about supporting people with disabilities who often feel excluded from conversations around ambition, leadership, and visibility. Having experienced the isolation that can come with disability and chronic illness firsthand, she understands how quickly society can erase people once they are no longer able to perform productivity in traditional ways.
Instead of retreating from that reality, she began building platforms designed specifically to elevate disabled voices.
Creating Space Where None Existed
One of CJ’s most impactful projects is {dis}ABILITIES Unleashed, a live show created to celebrate disabled performers, artists, speakers, and creators. What began as a local initiative in the Waterloo Region has steadily grown into something much larger.
The events have helped push accessibility conversations forward in tangible ways. Because of her advocacy and programming, venues introduced better stage access for wheelchair users and added accessibility infrastructure that had previously been overlooked.
Her work also extends into public service. CJ serves as vice chair of the City of Cambridge Accessibility Advisory Council and contributes to the Consumer and Family Advisory Council for Independent Living Waterloo Region. She continues advocating for more inclusive public spaces, equitable hiring practices, and stronger visibility for disabled communities.
At the same time, she has helped raise thousands of dollars for charitable initiatives, including food security programs, ALS awareness efforts, housing initiatives for seniors, and local accessibility causes.
Recently, CJ’s impact was recognized nationally when she received a Hummingbird Award for her work within the disability community, a milestone that reflects years of advocacy, visibility, and service built through lived experience.
What makes her story remarkable is not simply the volume of work she has accomplished but the conditions under which she continues doing it. CJ remains approximately seventy five percent bed bound. Much of her business is still run from her bed, one task at a time, one conversation at a time, one appearance at a time.
And yet her world continues expanding.
Recently, she has begun breaking into larger speaking opportunities, moving from unpaid stages to professional engagements commanding increasingly significant fees. She sees these milestones not as symbols of fame but as evidence that disabled voices deserve space in professional and public arenas.
“This is my breakthrough year.”
There is excitement in that statement, but also relief. After years spent surviving, she is finally beginning to see sustainability on the horizon.
The Future She Wants to Build
CJ’s ambitions stretch far beyond personal success. She imagines a future where disability communities are celebrated visibly and consistently rather than acknowledged occasionally.
She hopes to take {dis}ABILITIES Unleashed on the road and eventually transform it into a television program. She dreams of creating an annual disability expo aligned with the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities. She wants to establish speaker bureaus, community gatherings, mentorship spaces, and opportunities where disabled individuals are not tokenized but fully valued.
One of her deepest goals is ensuring these events remain accessible financially. She wants disabled attendees to experience them free of charge while performers and contributors are compensated fairly for their work.
There is also a quieter dream woven through everything else. CJ wants financial independence. After years spent navigating disability support systems and low income housing, she hopes speaking and coaching will eventually allow her to sustain herself fully through work she genuinely loves.
That desire is not rooted in ego. It is rooted in dignity.
Throughout her journey, she has remained deeply aware of how many people helped keep her alive physically, emotionally, and spiritually. She speaks often about the role community played in her recovery and how healing rarely happens alone.
Church communities, counsellors, sponsors, friends, biological family members she eventually connected with, mentors, and strangers who offered support during impossible moments all became part of the scaffolding that held her together.
Rather than seeing independence as complete self sufficiency, CJ speaks about interdependence with honesty and gratitude. She understands strength not as isolation but as the willingness to receive help while continuing to move forward.
A Different Definition of Success
There is something deeply grounding about the way CJ measures success. While she dreams of commanding larger speaking stages someday, her daily motivation remains surprisingly simple.
Waking up and doing one thing to make the world slightly better still matters to her.
That mindset traces back to one of the smallest but most meaningful practices she developed during recovery: giving herself one daily responsibility, making one person smile.
At the time, it was a survival strategy. A manageable task in a life that often felt unmanageable. Over time, it became a philosophy.
The cumulative effect of those small moments now stretches far beyond a single interaction. Through her speaking, advocacy, music, coaching, and community work, CJ has helped reshape conversations around disability, resilience, and human worth in her region and beyond.
Her story challenges the idea that value is tied to physical productivity or conventional success. She reminds people that purpose can survive even profound loss. That reinvention does not always look glamorous. That healing is often uneven, deeply human, and unfinished.
Most importantly, she reminds people that adversity does not erase identity.
It can deepen it.
And perhaps that is why her message resonates so strongly with audiences. CJ Janzen does not speak from a polished distance. She speaks from inside the storm, still navigating it herself, still learning, still rebuilding, still choosing joy anyway.
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