Kamran Mallick is CEO of Disability Rights UK, the disability justice charity. Previously he had worked in social services for a local authority, was Head of Training and IT for spinal injuries charity Aspire, before becoming CEO of Hammersmith and Fulham Action on Disability.

I got polio when I was three. That changed my life completely, of course. And that of my family. That one incident shouldn’t determine my life direction, because society now sees me as different. I’m contributing, but there are times because of my health condition that I might need extra support. And that is the contract that we should have as a society, that we look after one another, that we contribute to a central pot so that at whatever stage in your life you need that support, it should just be there.

I had taken on the ableist view of who I was. What that was saying to me was that actually I wasn’t good enough, that I shouldn’t expect to be treated just like the next person, because I wasn’t the same. That was incredibly demoralising. It affected my wellbeing. It affected my outlook and ambition.

Believe in your inner voice. There was a part of me inside that was saying, ‘this isn’t fair. this isn’t right’. But I didn’t feel empowered to say that. When I was young, I was pushing away from the disabled community because I was thinking, ‘well, why would I want to be associated with a community that’s so awful and negative and bad?’

I wish I’d felt confident enough to be more challenging, more direct, more outspoken. I wish I’d done that sooner. We all have this imposter syndrome, but for me, it was particularly powerful. I was trying to shift from thinking of myself as inadequate, to feeling confident enough to demand rather than just ask.

See the ability, not the disability. As a society, we have a deficit model about disability. What we see is a group of people with something wrong with them. If instead an employer was happy to bring in different people’s experiences of delivering a service, suddenly that service becomes more enriched because it understands that not everyone walks through the same door. And so you get a better product, a better service. There’s money to be made.

It’s OK to make mistakes. I say that to my team and our staff and colleagues: it’s all right to make a mistake because it’s about what we learned from that. And anything good that’s ever happened has had a history of attempts that haven’t worked, and you’ve changed it as you’ve gone along.

We can create a better society that truly embraces the diversity of people.What I’d love to see is a dramatic shift in the inequality that disabled people experience. Both the inequality that I have experienced and continue to experience, but also making a dramatic change for the next generation of young disabled people, who are amazing in terms of their activism and passion for equality, justice and equity.

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Cause & Effect is a series from Hope, in which leading figures who have been involved in building and promoting good causes tell us what they’ve learned from their experiences. Interview by Michael Isaacs.