Ryan Sheckler on vulnerability, growing through pain, and what it means to be the change

meet ryan,

you may know him as a skateboarder, but he’s so much more than that - Ryan is a believer, a son, a brother, a philanthropist.

without downplaying his numerous accomplishments, records, wins, and gold medals, i hope that this conversation reveals what the heart of success is all about: living with love, motivating others around you to be their best and do their best, helping others, and wearing your heart on your sleeve.

Ryan not only inspires others to be the change through The Sheckler Foundation, he does it, day in and day out. he’s real, he’s honest, and there’s so much that we can all learn from him.

So I want to start slightly backwards if you don’t mind. In 2012, you said your top priorities were to, “Stay healthy, as much as I can; be a good brother; be a good son, to my parents; make sure I can do anything to keep my family safe; finish this Plan B part and just keep skating—keep filming video parts; be me, I guess—just be myself and not worry about what people think.” You’re now 30. Would you say any of your priorities have changed? Where’s your mind at now? 

Damn, it’s crazy hearing that because that still aligns with what I believe and what I practice today. If anything, I live with a lot more love these days. I just feel so blessed to be a skateboarder and to be at the stage in my career that I’m at where, you know, any skate park I go to, the kids know who I am. And that’s so crazy because skateboarding for me has always been my form of freedom and my form of being able to express myself. All these years later, it’s still the same thing, you know? Both my parents are happily remarried and I’m still being a good son to them. I’m still being a great brother to my brothers. Kane is 20, and Shane is 27, so we don’t have the kid relationships anymore - we have adult relationships which are so awesome. Everyone is growing up and doing their own thing but I don’t think anything’s really changed. 

I believe in Jesus Christ and I believe He is the reason I am able to do what I do. I truly believe He died on the cross for our sins. 

I really still want to do the same stuff. I train way more these days. I work out Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday every single week. I try to skate and surf and handle business, but I just try to go daily just cruising, you know? Just living with love, and it seems to be working. 

Yeah, of course. Do you think you’ve become better at not caring about what other people think?

Yeah, at this stage in my life, because I have nothing to prove anymore. I’ve realized and I’ve come to a point [where] if I want to prove anything, it’s just to myself. It should have always been that way, but when you’re a kid and you grow up… for me, I grew up pro, you know? I didn’t have an opportunity to figure out how growing up worked. It was just, “Boom, 13, here. You’re a grown up.” It’s been kind of a wild ride, actually. 

You’ve been skating longer than some of the people skating now have been alive - not to make you sound old.

That’s the thing, though! I’m not old. I’m thirty. And right now, honestly, I feel like I’m tapping into the ability and the comfort level on my skateboard that I’ve been searching for. It’s taken me twenty-eight years of being on a skateboard to feel as comfortable as I do right now. I think my best years are coming. Honestly, I do. I really think that the way I feel on my skateboard and the way I’m looking at skateboarding and going out and street-skating and filming video parts… my creative eye is still running at 100%. I’m excited. I’m excited for the future. It’s going to be fun, it’s cool.

So you’ve been skating for twenty-eight years. People kind of highlight the successful points, but in between it all, there are injuries, failures, criticisms. Within your career, what have you learned about perseverance?

Perseverance is one of those things that comes from within. You can have the biggest support team around you, you can have the best doctors – which is definitely highly recommended – but at the end of the day, you’re the one sitting on the couch in that full recovery mode where you’re going through every single scenario in your brain of, “Is this alright? Am I going to be alright? Can I get back to the place where I was? What tricks are my competitors learning?” There’s a million things that go through your mind, and you have to shut it down. You have to trust that you’re going through the right steps to heal properly to be able to get back to where you want to be. That’s been a practice of mine over twenty-eight years of breaking bones after bones, year after year. I think it comes down to anyone’s sport or activity that they do well… it’s all passion. When I get hurt, all I’m thinking about is skateboarding, so there’s no way I’m not going to skateboard. I think it’s a mental thing. Perseverance is really one of those things where you’ve gotta dig deep and find your heart and really figure out what you want to do with your life.

Yeah. I really think with injuries, it’s not so much the physical aspect as it is the mental part. It’s all you, and not something anyone can help you out with, per say.

Yeah, so you know. I’m not psyched that you know, but you do know. That’s the point I feel like, too, where these kids are starting to skate, whether they’re skating for themselves or whether their parents want them to be skating... a lot of the times, the first big injury that these kids get, if their heart really isn’t into skateboarding, they stop. It’s like any sport. If you go a little bit too hard and you actually find the edge and it breaks you, I think that’s where the perseverance is. It’s like, “Are you going to let that injury take you down, or are you going to conquer it?” It’s really only two options: you can lay down, or you can get up. That’s how I’ve always looked at it. I don’t want to lay down. I don’t want to let these injuries beat me. And everything is a learning experience. Everyone kind of learns through pain, whether it’s, physical, emotional, mental. 

My growth has always been through pain. 

My life has been these injuries, and then I learn from them. I’m not mad at any of them because I’ve learned. I’ve taken what has happened through the process of being injured and adapted that to the next injury, or just to life and the problems I have in day-to-day living. My injuries definitely represent who I am as a person.

And after the injuries comes a success or that period of, “I did it. I came back.” That being said, how do you define success?

I define success through others, honestly. I define success through my foundation. It’s hard to explain because it’s not greed. I’m not like, “Oh, this is me, I’m successful.” It’s the fact that we have such a message going on and we have been trying to really help the youth, the adaptive sports athletes, at-risk youth, and injured action sports athletes. 

That’s where my success is coming from these days: it’s from helping. It’s from being a human and showing love and listening. Going to the hospitals and hanging out with these kids. For me, that’s where the success is right now. It’s helping others. 

Absolutely. The Sheckler Foundation has been around for over ten years at this point, and your impact goes beyond what I think people might assume – you really do the work and you help so many people. It’s probably hard to pinpoint, but what is your favorite aspect of the foundation, or where the heart of it lies for you?

The heart of it lies, for me, in knowing that we’re getting bigger each year. By bigger, I mean that there’s more people coming to our golf tournament and gala to help us raise more money so that we can actually start going on more of these trips that we’ve been doing. We just finished a ten-stop tour last year, which was the first time we ever did that. It was absolutely incredible. It gives me goosebumps right now talking about it. It was so fun and so connecting, you know? We’re not doing huge, thousand-people demos – we’re doing really small, intimate settings where I can talk to everybody that shows up to each event. I really enjoy doing that, because that’s why I’m here. To this day. I have had the most unbelievable and loyal fan base for my whole career, and for me to be able to give back and help communities build a skatepark, or build a safe school for kids to go to, that’s what I’m all about. There’s a lot of big reasons I do the foundation. It just feels right, you know? At the end of the day, it just feels right. It’s where my heart’s at, and that’s why we’re doing it. And we’re going to keep doing it. 

It’s a lot of work, but it’s the most gratifying work. There’s work where you go and do your thing, and get a check, and that’s cool, but when you actually go and see a kid who has been going through chemo, and it’s the first day that he actually decided to stand up and try to get out of the hospital, and you get to see the kid that day and he’s smiling, and he hasn’t smiled in two weeks… it’s like, that’s it. There’s no better feeling.

That’s all that matters. Everything else is noise or a distraction when it comes down to it. 

It really is. Just like, the more we can get to the point where we love each other, and we don’t judge and we’re not quick to judge. 

When we don’t look at people through a different lens, we just look at people as human beings, that’s when it’s all going to start making sense. 

And that’s just what I want to do, you know? I just love humans. I love that we’re all unique; we’re all different. Everyone has a spark and some people just haven’t been able to find their spark yet. It’s one of those things where if we can supply that spark, holy… you know, we’ve just changed someone’s life. And I really feel we’re being directed by Jesus Christ to do this work, and the people we’ve met are direct influences from God. This is what we’re doing. We’re just listening and we’re putting the work in.

And the foundation challenges people to “Be the Change.” For you, what does it mean to be the change?

To be the change is to bring a smile to someone else, not because you have to, but because you just did and it worked. That’s what being the change is. It’s just bringing love to your community. Be the change you want to see in your community. If you don’t like that there’s always trash on one corner of the street, no one else is going to pick it up, you know? Pick it up and see what happens. It’s one of those things where it’s like, you have to be the action. We’re calling society to be the action to look out for your fellow man. If you see someone on the street and you feel it in your heart to give them some money, go ahead. Don’t second guess it. I really believe that people need to listen to their hearts. Listen to your intuition. Your intuition is always pretty on point, but sometimes it gets muddied and people can’t realize or determine whether that’s their conscience or that’s actually their heart and they really feel that way. For me, I just try to follow my heart and what I feel in my heart. Not my mind, and not let anything kind of cloud my judgement on things. I really try to go from, “How do I feel about this, or about that situation?” Be the change. Do good. Just be good.

Something that I respect about you, even in the last eleven minutes that we’ve been talking, is how honest you are. People can criticize or say whatever, but they can’t say they don’t know where your heart is or where your intentions lie. And especially over the last few years, you’ve turned away from external validation, and now it’s just about God. I don’t know about you, but I’ve personally found that when you go through these sorts of transformations, a) you figure out who you are and what you stand for. And b) you shake the tree, and all the leaves fall – all the people that aren’t really meant to be there. And it’s hard but it happens. You also got sober, and I think, for me, when I did that, there were no leaves left, kind of. What would you say to someone who is going through one of those times in their lives and turning to God when other people might not get it, so to speak. 

They’re on the right path. You are on the path to full enlightenment if you continue with that. The second you drop your ego, you drop thinking that you are the top of the mountain. And once you drop all that, you realize that you have problems just like everybody else. 

You realize everybody else just wants to be vulnerable, but it’s so hard. 

So you have to set the example. For me and my crew, I set the example. I was vulnerable. I said I had a problem and I handled it and like you said, the main thing I was worried about was, “Oh, man, I’m not going to have any friends. I’m going to have to tell all my friends I can’t hang out with them because I don’t do this anymore.” And the Lord took care of all of that. I didn’t have to tell one person anything. It just happened. People just started noticing my actions and my energy and what I was talking about. And they were like, “Oh. Whoa, whoa, whoa, this is not the same dude. We’ve got nothing in common anymore. We’re out.” And that was perfect because I didn’t have anything in common with these people anyways. They just wanted to party and waste all my money that I worked for. It’s definitely a transition, but it’s also one of those things that takes being vulnerable. You’ve gotta be vulnerable and understand that the people who are supposed to be in your life will be in your life and they will stay. And the people that aren’t? Just let them go. It’s hard, because you can go from having forty friends at any time, which I did, and back down to five. I have five close friends. I don’t even hang out with anyone else. It all gets better. It gets better but you have to submerge yourself into the process and you have to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is the huge thing. You’ve gotta just drop the ego. You drop the ego, and life starts working.

Definitely. Do you have a favorite verse, or book in the Bible?

My favorite verse is, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” It seems like that’s a verse that a lot of people like, but I believe that verse. I believe it so much that that’s why I’m here today and the situations that I’ve made it through, from MTV days and being a wild teenager and never getting arrested and never going to jail, God has always had my back and He has always been there, and now that I fully acknowledge it again – I was never not a Christian, but there were years that it just kind of, I fell out of the practice, you know? I fell out of the practice and I was living on my own and trying to do things by myself, and it turned out that that’s not the way things are supposed to be done at all. With Christ, I really can do everything and anything. That’s my verse.

It’s a transformative process when you go from growing up in faith, to choosing it, deliberately.

I was always a Christian, growing up as a kid. But I got baptized when I was 28, so that’s where I made the choice. I made the choice to 100% give my life to Christ. If I would have gotten baptized when I was a kid, yeah, it would've been cool but it wouldn’t have had the same meaning as me deciding to surrender completely. It’s growth, and that’s what the Lord talks about. We’re getting older and that’s where we gain our wisdom and the best thing to do is be able to share wisdom and bring people to Christ. I just feel comfortable. I’m comfortable and I’m happy.

You really do sound like you’re at peace. Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of young people struggle to figure out what they want to do when they grow up. You touched on this earlier in that you grew up pro - your identity was established before you established it. I think some people from the outside looking in would call you lucky because you didn’t stumble to find your career. But would you say there’s a difference between knowing what you want to do and knowing who you want to be?

That’s a really good question. I think it’s tough for kids to know who they are, you know? I think that kids are going to base a lot of what they learn and who they are off of their parents. My mom used to raise horses. My dad rode dirt bikes and skateboarded and surfed, and so there were always those things around the house. I just knew that I liked… I don’t know, I guess, danger. I liked things that weren’t the typical kids things. I liked knowing that when I was doing something where I could get hurt. And I didn’t even know that that was a thing when I was a kid, but that’s how I was. I’d jump off my bike - didn’t know I could make the jump, but I tried it anyways, you know? That’s just how I was. So for me, as a kid, it was tough, you know? That’s why I really 100% believe in Jesus as well because this is God’s plan. This is 100% God’s plan to have me right here, on the phone right now, talking about what I have learned through my life. And it had to start when it started. For kids getting ready to go into their freshman year, that’s tough. It’s hard for me to even put my brain in that situation because I did private homeschool for high school, so I didn’t even really get to do the high school experience, and I don’t know. But I do know that kids are mean and bullies, and there’s a lot of things going on where kids might not be comfortable saying what they’re into, or saying that they want to go to drama class or be a dancer or whatever it may be. There’s so much hate going on that kids are so evil and [such] bullies that I feel like a lot of kids aren’t even getting the real opportunity to be able to try what they want to do because they’re so scared, you know?  

I think you need to be confident with yourself. And it’s so hard to say as a kid in high school. But keep the faith. Pray. Believe in Jesus Christ, and then try to live out His will for your life. Just plead to Jesus to show you His will, and then just try to follow it. See what speaks out.  

I think it’s a really interesting time right now, too, with social media and everything on the internet. Everyone’s a YouTuber; everything is about comparing. Everything’s about the biggest thing in the Bible: don’t compare. We’re not the same. None of us are the same. And everybody is comparing everything in the world. Everything is being compared, and I don’t even know if you can get the message through that you can do whatever you want to do. And don’t care about what people say. But it’s hard not to care when someone is talking crap about you. It’s really hard, you know? That hurts. That hurts your feelings. It will never not hurt your feelings to have someone talk down about you.  

Right. I grew up before social media, but now, kids can’t escape it. To hear young kids not want to go to school, and to on top of it have that bullying follow them home on their screens, it seems to be a never-ending cycle. There’s no heart there.

It’s so evil. And that’s what we see with the foundation. Our work is geared mostly towards kids and them being able to have a fresh start. And it doesn’t have to be through skateboarding, but skateboarding teaches so many lessons, you know? If you actually get into skateboarding and you start trying to learn a trick, you’re going to fail. You’re going to fail a thousand times. You might fail ten thousand times, but when you land that trick, it’s all worth it. That’s the message I’m trying to really show skateboarders and kids that are starting to skate. Like, “Hey guys, you’re already doing this in skateboarding; do it in school. Fail a couple times and then get it right.” 

It’s the same thing as skateboarding. You’re going to fail, fail, fail, and then you’ll get it right. You’ll land it. So, just like you’re going to land anything in your life, just don’t be scared of failure. Failure is growth! I have failed all my life and then I’ve succeeded through them. That’s how it goes. That’s life. You’re supposed to learn from your mistakes. 

You are. Speaking of, what is one thing everyone should know how to do?

Trust themselves. Love yourself. Be able to listen to your inner voice. 

Definitely. And no two days are the same, but what does a day in your life look like?

Let’s call it a Monday. I wake up at 7 o’clock, and I take my dog on like a mile walk in the morning. And then I come home, I feed him, I take a shower. Then I head to breakfast and I eat, and then I go down to Carlsbad, which is a thirty-minute drive. I work out from 10 to 11:15, 11:30ish, and then I get more food after that. Then I come home, and it kind of depends. I’ll check in with my mom and see what’s up with the Foundation, see if I need to go in and do anything at the office. And if I don’t, then I go surf. And I wait for it to kind of get dark and go skate at my park. It’s pretty much about being active. I just stay active. And if I don’t go skate, then I’m doing something else, but I like to be moving and I like to keep the adrenaline going.

Momentum. And to bring things full circle – we first started talking about something you said in 2012, and now you’re thirty. What is something you want to achieve by 40?

I would like another X Games gold medal; one of my goals is to get another gold. Hopefully that happens in the next ten years. I think that’ll be my only window. That’s like a competition thing, but you know.. in the next ten years, I really don’t know. I’m working on Sandlot Times, which is a production company, a kind of media house. We’re getting ready to launch that. I’ve invested in some pretty cool companies – Art of Sport, Kopari, Stance. I’m kind of just waiting to see what happens with those, and I really just know that we’re going to do the foundation. In ten years, the foundation will have run for about twenty-two years. I hope we can donate millions of dollars and create safe places for kids to learn and go to school. I just hope to help over the next ten years, a lot.  

You will. I hope you know that.

I feel that in my heart that that’s what is going to be going down. 

I’m not opposed to anything. Actually, I think this is the first time my heart is just open to what God brings me. I’m open to opportunities. I’m not going to pigeonhole myself into any decisions or anything. I’m really just letting all the options come through and gotta see what speaks to me and speaks to my heart. And just run with it. 

I’m so stoked for you. That’s when the magic happens, you know?

That’s the glory zone. 

seven questions with ryan sheckler:

I can’t go a day without… Chapstick.

Everyone should read… “No Limits to Learning.” It’s pretty intriguing. It’s kind of a tough read, because it’s really thought-provoking. You’ll spend ten minutes on one page just trying to break down what you’ve just read. It’s pretty interesting.

Life is better with a little… love.

Everyone in their 20s should… live it up.

One insider thing to do in San Clemente… go on a beach walk. Go check out the city. Check out the coast, and say, “What’s up?” to a bunch of friendly people walking their dogs and chilling.

What the world needs right now is… love. love. love. love. love.

One way to spread love is… listening. Honestly. So many hurt people just want to be heard. And you don’t even have to say anything. They just want to know that they are heard, and it helps so much. Be a good listener to people that are struggling.

You can follow Ryan on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Be sure to check out the Sheckler Foundation, where you can donate to help Be the Change.

You can follow the Sheckler Foundation on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

All photos credited to Mark Tedi.