Gifted Unleashed

Natasa Heydra loves working within different areas of art, culture and design. She is a textile artist, teaches Visual Arts at the Kulturskolen in Viborg & curates and organises exhibitions, publications and art-projects. She has always been fascinated by cultural expressions of identity, like fashion, language, behaviour, music and art. The signs, the codes to help you uncover the multiplicit...

Carrie Pokrefke is an Audit Manager for BECU, the nation’s largest Community Credit Union, based in Seattle, Washington. She is an accomplished and experienced leader with over 20 years of experience in financial services as both an internal auditor and as a state and federal regulator. She enjoys building inclusive, high-performing teams through developing and mentoring employees, building relati...

Liz studied communication design with a sub-specialization in interactivity and multimedia where she focused on web design. She has been working in the corporate world for 4 years throughout that time she always had people who wanted her help in creating logos so in 2019 she created the brand Mytrudesign to provide brand design services to independent entrepreneurs. Creating designs from thoughts...

Tracy has been an executive and leadership coach for over ten years. She helps neurodivergent leaders become superstar leaders through nerd coach, her coaching practice. Tracy has coached up and down the career ladder, from job seekers to vice-presidents, and has worked in different industries, including technology, government, academia, and health care. Tracy helps her clients, individuals or tea...

Cliff Wigtil has been in giftedness circles for over twenty years, and has been formally studying giftedness for well over a decade. He provides coaching services and welcome clients from a diversity of backgrounds.  TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE: If you have such a profound perspective, you also need to have some kind of perspective on limitations Highly gifted people do sometimes become eminent bu...

Gabriela Alvares is a student majoring in Communications Media studies and minoring in Public Relations at Quinnipiac University, in Connecticut. She was born in South Africa to parents from Portugal where she calls home. She grew up as a third culture kid and has lived this global and inspirational experience which brought her to her purpose in life. At a young age she was diagnosed with dyslexia...

Isabelle Mosca, curator/creator for Life on the Bright Side and founder of the nonprofit FACES 4 Autism. She shines a light on families facing neurodiversity across the lifespan, encourages and uplifts caregivers to live their best lives with programs, events and workshops. Her programs are donation-based and open to all. Isabelle and her husband just celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary. Her...

Kanan Tekchandani is a Relationship Whisperer and an actually autistic specialist coach for exceptional individuals, their partners and families. After years of working with highly intelligent exceptionally wonderful individuals to declutter their homes, Kanan realised her true purpose lay in helping them to clear the misunderstandings that were cluttering their ability to experience connection, p...

Lucinda Leo is a hypnotherapist and coach based in Brighton, England. Although she always knew she was bright, Lucinda grew up believing that her intensity and quirks were totally separate and detracted from her intelligence. She became so good at camouflaging her ‘weirdness’ that she ended up in a job that leached her soul and surrounded by people who didn’t get her. It wasn’t until Lucinda went...

Ben Koch am an entrepreneur, educator, coach, healer, and mindfulness expert with 20 years of meditation experience. As co-founder and CEO of an education company based in Dallas, he has sought for ways to merge his role in the educational revolution with his passion for self-development, healing modalities, and practices that help one find and align with their deeper life purpose (IKIGAI). TAKEAW...

Erin Keeley has an inspiring life story of tenacity that began with studying climate change in Antarctica for her Master’s in Engineering and then took a sudden turn when her brother, also an engineer, took his own life in 2002. Instead of going on to complete her PhD, she decided to dedicate her life to understanding how our culture contributes to individual pain and suffering. She has since dedi...

Nadya Abo-Shaeer was identified as a gifted child but choose not to embrace nor identify with this label. As a gifted teenager and collage student she immersed herself into studying as much and diverse as she possibly could. She is leading a typical life of a multipotential gifted neurodiverse person but only realised that so much of who she is and her own story is tied to this identity. Now she i...

Femke Hovinga knows which challenges hyper giftedness can entail. Despite a hefty portion of potential, she underperformed for years and developed fear of failure. Femke obtained her diploma by hanging and strangling, after which she followed courses in journalism and business administration. Challenges became opportunities. She trained as a talent coach and from there she specialised in 145+ IQ....

Sophia Elliott is the founder and podcast host of Our Gifted Kids. She has had a career full of turns and new learnings but found her passion and calling advocation for gifted children and their education. She is a supporter and curator of information for parents of gifted children. She is the mother of three gifted kids and shares her journey and lets other parents of gifted children know that th...

Julie Skolnick is the Founder of With Understanding Comes Calm, LLC, through which she guides parents of gifted and distractible children, mentors 2e adults, trains teachers on how to understand and address 2e strengths and struggles. Julie serves as Secretary to the Maryland Superintendent’s Gifted and Talented Advisory Council , is an advisor for “The G Word” film. She is the SENG Maryland liais...

Pascal Mäser is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute and the University of Basel. In addition of being a brilliant scientist and a great guitar player, he is also a very good chess player! With the recent success of the Netflix miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit”, chess sales have skyrocketed in the last few weeks. I used this opportunity to invite Pascal onto the s...

Marc Smolowitz is a multi-award-winning director, producer and executive producer who has been significantly involved in 50+ successful independent films wearing many hats across the film and entertainment business In 2009, Marc founded 13th Gen, a San Francisco based film company that works with a dynamic range of independent film partners globally to oversee the financing, production, post-produ...

Born in France, Pascale moved to Norway about 25 years ago. After working a long time as a teacher, she decided that she needed a career change. She became a gestalt therapist and established her therapy practice in Arendal, the little town in Southern Norway: Arendal Psykoterapi og Utvikling (which translates as Arendal Psychotherapy and Development). Gestalt therapy is an approach which brings t...

Two weeks ago Laurence learned about the English term “giftedness” by listening to this podcast. After hearing a few of the guests describe their experiences she stared doing her own google research about this topic. She could relate to the stories and the checklists. A week ago she reached out to a gifted specialist in Munich for her own evaluation. Four days ago she had her appointment and the c...

After years of feeling “too much,” Aurora Remember Holtzmann finally realised that intensity, is the source of her greatest power. Now instead of beating herself up about not measuring up to her own self-imposed standards, she is on a mission to help gifted and outside-the-box thinkers befriend their brains and use their fire without getting burned through her Embracing Intensity Podcast and commu...

Daniel Bruce Levin tested in the genius level in first grade which makes him an intellectually gifted adult. His biography reads like he lived five lives instead of only one. Here is a short bio of what he did so far: He walked away from an opportunity to run a billion dollar business, to hitchhike around the world to find happiness and inner peace. He studied in a seminary five years and left one...

Saskia De Feijter is a conscious knitter, entrepreneur, podcaster and mom of two. Yes, she is definitely a multipotentialite and maybe also a gifted adult? She is currently on her journey of discovering giftedness as a topic and as an explanation for herself. I invited her onto this show to share with us her story and her struggles to accept the fact that she might be indeed an unidentified adult....

Paula Prober is a psychotherapist, consultant, blogger, and author in private practice in Eugene, Oregon, USA. Over the 35+ years she has worked with the gifted, Paula has been a teacher and presenter at universities, webinars, and conferences. She consults internationally with gifted adults and parents of gifted children. Her first book, Your Rainforest Mind: A Guide to the Well-Being of Gifted A...

Craig is an amazing person! He spent most of his life in the navy and travelled the world. But only when he retired from the military and worked in corporate America, he realised he was different. It turns out Craig is on the Autism spectrum with Aspergers and this is the reason why reading facial expressions and other communication cues do not come naturally to him. But he realised that communica...

I had the pleasure to speak to Jennifer Harvey Sallin. She is the founding director of InterGifted, an oasis for gifted adults in the neuronorm desert. She shares her incredible story of being an identified gifted child who grew up in an enriched classroom environment but who was never told that giftedness and all its attributes will be part of her identity for the rest of her life. Only once she...