PEGGY O'NEILL: The bottom-line aim of Disability Awareness, or ABILITY AWARENESS Ability (as it is more commonly referred to nowadays) is to understand, first and foremost, that people with disabilities are first and foremost PEOPLE.

We are all human beings. Additional goals may include:
- Becoming free of stereotypical attitudes and pre-judgments about people who are different
- Using 'People First' language: a form of structuring one's language in a way that honours the person before mentioning his/her difference/disability, hence the concept's name: People First. (For example: 'people with disabilities', vs 'disabled people', 'people who are deaf' vs 'deaf people', or 'she has a learning disability' vs 'she is learning disabled'.)
- Including and incorporating all members of one's community
- Providing what is needed for all persons to experience equal opportunity and equal access
- Accepting, appreciating, and honouring the dignity of all humans
- Recognizing the value each member contributes to a group or community

Most of us naturally aspire to these goals of respect and inclusion in all our relationships. However, many times, we find that we fall short. Here are three tips that can help grow your Ability Awareness:

1. Increase Self-Awareness
With greater self-awareness comes greater understanding of others, as well as an awareness of how you impact them. To become more self-aware, you can expand your attention from what's going on in your mind to what's going on in your body. Sense your arms and legs. Look and listen attentively. This simple practice helps grow awareness. You can grow this awareness from mind to body to emotions to spirit. The more consciousness you have of the 'now,' your moment-to moment experience, the more sensitivity you will have with your self and your surroundings. Increased sensitivity yields heightened understanding and compassion - for yourself and of others and what they are experiencing. The result is the growing ability to see what is needed in the moment and to respond in the most appropriate, life-supporting ways.

2. Reframe the notion of disabilities
Reframing means to see something from a 'new' perspective. People with disabilities have, culturally, long been seen through glasses that proclaim: 'something is wrong with them'. Within this victimized paradigm, we lose an objective view point of individuals, and our common response is pity. How could, how would, this perception and response change if we considered that all humans go through periods of life when they experience disabilities or limitations of some sort, most typically at the beginning and end of life? Ability Awareness suggests that differences are just as natural among people as they are among snowflakes.

3. See with your heart
When speaking to people in businesses and kids in schools, I remind them that that it is possible to see others with more than our mind, which emphasizes differences. The mind discerns, separates and differentiates. That's its job. The heart, on the other hand, perceives unity, sameness and commonalty. When we see others with our heart, we can actually sense and feel our connection with them. People who are 'BIG inside' see themselves and others with both their mind AND their heart. They see that we're all different AND we're all the same! When we are able to see and interact with others from our heart, we are able to feel our connection to them, which then gives rise to the natural expression of inclusion, caring and respect.

Ability Awareness is no longer just about 'tolerating' differences. (Who made up that term up anyway?) Ability Awareness is about growing our self-awareness, reframing disabilities and seeing with our heart. By practicing these three simple techniques, we can grow our Ability Awareness and evolve from tolerating differences in others, to appreciating them, to valuing them, and eventually, to celebrating differences among all people.