David Henzel is the CEO of Upcoach and a veteran entrepreneur who has been building in the saas and e-com space for over 20 years. He had multiple exits, including MaxCDN.
His passion is to help individuals and their organizations reach their full potential.
Aside from Upcoach (Coaching Delivery System), he has a small portfolio of companies including LTVplus, (Outsourcing for e-commerce & saas), TaskDrive (Sales Development), Shortlist.io (Digital Marketing Agency), and his passion project Managing Happiness (Peak Performance Group Coaching for entrepreneurs)
David credits some of his success to his neurodiversity. He has aphantasia, which allows him to disconnect from the stress that many entrepreneurs feel when riding the entrepreneurial roller coaster. He says it makes him PTSD-proof.
What is Aphantasia?
David’s aphantasia makes it so that he can’t recreate images, sounds, tastes, smells, or emotions in his head. So, basically, once a stressful moment has passed, the emotion associated with it is gone. It can’t creep back up and make him anxious again. The memory of the event is there, but not the emotion.
Jackie Woodside is a USA today and Amazon bestselling author, TEDx speaker, trainer, and coach. She is the founder of the Curriculum for Conscious Living and the Conscious Living Summit and trains coaches around the world.
Her expertise is widely sought-after as a speaker and teacher. Jackie is certified as a coach and licensed psychotherapist with 30 years of experience in both fields. Ink magazine selected her book, Calming the Chaos, as one of their top 10 motivational books, Jackie offers special development training, keynote speeches, and retreats around the globe.
There’s such a need in our world for people to be talking about this space. Everything about neurodiversity was gloom and doom. Woe is me. It’s so hard. There’s so many challenges. And meanwhile, I’m meeting all these people who are successful. They’re like, my ADHD made me a millionaire. My autism made me a millionaire. My dyslexia made me a millionaire. I’m like, where are these stories for the kids who get their autism or ADHD diagnosis in school?
So that’s what we’re doing there. Dyslexia is another, another big one. The dyslexia, ADD, anxiety disorder triad comes with a lot of kids who have neurodiversity. Not only is Jackie neurodiverse, she’s raising a neurodiverse teenage young man. She has a 17 year old son who goes to the Landmark School in Beverly, Massachusetts, which is a school for kids with neurodiversity, language based learning disabilities, and ADHD or ADD.
Jackie was diagnosed with adult attention deficit disorder by the man who wrote the book about adult attention deficit deficit disorder, Ned Hallowell, who has the Hellowell center in Sudbury, Massachusetts. In her thirties, Jackie’s friends were teasing her about the fact that she probably had ADD, so she got in touch with Hallowell to prove them wrong. She had already, in her 20’s, been diagnosed with PTSD, chronic depressive disorder, and recurrent depressive disorder. Trying to heal herself from her neurodiversities led her into addiction, which she has since recovered from.
Frank King, Suicide Prevention speaker and Trainer was a writer for The Tonight Show for 20 years. Fighting Major Depressive Disorder and Chronic Suicidality, he has turned that long dark journey into 5 TEDx Talks and shared his insights on Mental Health Awareness with associations, corporations, and colleges. Depression and suicide run in his family. He’s thought about killing himself more times than he can count. Frank uses his life lessons to start giving people permission to give voice to their feelings and experiences surrounding depression and suicide by standing in his truth and doing it with humor.
Where there is humor there is hope, where there is laughter there is life, nobody dies laughing. The right person, at the right time, with the right information, can save a life.
Olive Hickmott is a forensic health and learning coach, author or the New Perspectives series of books and a neurodivergent advocate.
She looks behind the behaviors of children, especially neurodivergent ones, to understand what is challenging them. She is a world leader in understanding the role of mental imagery and particularly interested in how sleep, breathing, grounding, energy, anxiety and safety contribute.
Olive Hickmott, Dyslexic Super Coach and Neurodivergent Advocate
Olive Hickmott has dyslexia, but when she was going through school, the concepts of dyslexia and ADHD hadn’t been invented yet. She was very good at math, however, so she focused her attention on that and got a math degree. During training in Neurolinguistic Programming, she was amazed to find that other people could visualize words. A concept completely foreign to her.
Learning by Teaching
She went into her local special needs school and asked to work with children who were having literacy issues. They were happy for the extra support and so Olive began her path from corporate consultant to coach, trainer, author, and advocate for improving the lives of neuro divergent people, but not making them neurotypical.
As a Berkeley-educated acupuncturist who suddenly turned stand up comic at the age of 50, Jennifer found unexpected confidence and joy in finding her voice after a divorce. Now she helps midlife women and other unlikely comedians to be bolder, marketable, and more memorable speakers through stand up comedy.
Ana Melikian was born in Portugal and almost had to repeat the fourth grade due to bad spelling. Despite being diagnosed with dyslexia, she earned two master’s degrees and a PhD in psychology. She taught at universities in Portugal and Spain. Now living in the U.S., Ana combines her expertise in psychology with her trademark optimism to help audiences explore and embrace possibilities beyond their comfort zone. As a keynote speaker and the host of the Mindset Zone podcast, Ana helps audiences break through their mindset limitations, upgrade their minds’ operating systems, and achieve better results than ever.
Ana lives the life she has created for herself. She says that is her best definition of being successful. There are challenges, but that’s part of the beauty of it. She has the freedom of having control of her time to spend with her family, to travel, to visit her family in Portugal. Her business aligns with her purpose as she serves her clients.
How has dyslexia helped Ana find her success?
Originally, Ana thought her dyslexia was a handicap. She struggles mainly with spelling. She was a good student in general, but her spelling almost kept her from moving up through the grades.
Luckily, her teachers realized that spelling was her only problem, and so they let Ana progress. She kept improving as a student, but people around her saw there was something different about her. Portuguese is a phonetic language, and Ana could not differentiate certain sounds, even in high school. The psychologists in the school worked with her, but there was no specific program for dyslexics. Nowadays, she would have gone to a speech therapist.
Ana went to college and learned to speak English and Spanish. She studied and worked in Spain. She always believed she could overcome this challenge and still do what she wanted to do. It was relatively recently when she started to learn more about dyslexia, and understand the superpowers of it. One of the things that she didn’t realize before is that most dyslexics have problems with left and right, but at the same time, they have the tendency to see patterns, so math was easy for Ana. She didn’t know that that was one of the characteristics of many dyslexics. Because details are challenging, dyslexics have to see the overall picture to make sense of things. That always gave her an advantage that she absolutely leveraged even before she realized that was a superpower in her academic and professional life.
Carol specializes in helping her clients clear the clutter of their minds, offices, calendars, and lives so that they can experience their dream life: in business, personal pursuits. Her motto is, “If I can do it, you can too.”
When she’s not powerfully serving her coaching clients, Carol speaks professionally and plays in the outdoors near her home in Sutton, NH. She loves art, design, and dancing.
Jennie Bellinger is a Certified Professional Coach and the host of the Badass Direct Sales Mastery Podcast. She works with direct sales moms who are ready to double their monthly income. An entrepreneur since 2010, she understands the desire to contribute to your family’s future and be present with them in the here and now, and how difficult balancing those two can be. Jennie has learned how to fulfill that need to contribute and be there for her children.
Jennie is also known as The Direct Sales Domme. Luckily, as a Certified Professional Coach, her methods are very effective, not painful.
Tiffany Taylor is a Global Speaker, Coach + Mentor for powerful business leaders. She can make any highly-effective CEO collapse their financial trajectory by becoming so effective they never have to use a to-do list again – even if they have ADHD. She helps clients reclaim up to 40 hours of their week, so they can refocus on intentionally structuring their growth and their brand story. Her private clients generally 3-5X their revenue in under 6 months while feeling supported in fully embodying the most successful, future version of themselves.
Tim is a lifelong inventor, and student of everything.
He lives in Japan while helping business leaders and their senior leadership use their brains better. He teaches them to use simple modern & ancient techniques that are verified by cognitive neuroscience.
He also just happens to have ADHD, which he only discovered at the end of his B.Sc. in Psychology Neuroscience while doing his 4th year term paper.
He is very passionate about science, success, and helping people achieve their ikigai through scientific principles.
