Paul Daniels: Dyslexic Super Speaker

Paul is a keynote speaker, board advisor, and international bestselling author and the founder of Peripheral Thinkers™— a collaborative where leaders learn, share, and apply lessons that change the trajectory of industries worldwide. His unique perspectives on challenging conventions and creating unlimited paths to success have influenced companies including GE, UnitedHealthcare, WebMD, and AT&T. Paul’s achievements as an executive, entrepreneur, board advisor, inventor, author, and speaker span clients in two dozen industries and 27 countries and generated more than $2.5 billion in new annual revenue

Olive Hickmott, Dyslexic ADHD Super Coach and Neurodivergent Advocate

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.

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Ana Melikian, Dyslexic Super Coach

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.

How Ana is Successful 

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.

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Gail Kraft: Dyslexia Super Coach

Gail Kraft, motivational speaker, podcaster, author of The Empowering Process, and Empowerment Master runs retreats and seminars offering various approaches for accessing self-awareness, focus, and emotional balance for healthier and happier living.

Dyslexia has allowed Gail to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, letting her go full force when she decides to take a risk. She no longer cares about judgement from others, as she has learned that is their issue, not hers.