Neurodivergent Unplugged; Messy, Magnificent Stories From Unlikely Rebels

Kelly Duffy has spent decades building companies - more than 340 of them, bought, built, and sold - and she'll tell you plainly that none of it made her successful. In this episode, she unpacks what changed after she stopped believing she was "stupid," found Human Design, and started living from unmasking rather than performance. It's a wide-ranging, unfiltered conversation about...

Dr. Tara Perry has spent her whole life being right before anyone around her was ready for it. She was giving patients omega-3s before most cardiologists had heard of them. She left the hottest talent agency in Hollywood — a job everyone in LA wanted — to go and study acupuncture, and her colleagues told her she was out of her mind. Years later, at the top of a 23-year medical career, she did it a...

Bob Bazley was diagnosed with ADHD at age six, in an era before ADHD had a name, spent a decade in residential childcare, and joined the British Army at sixteen. What followed: a career digitising a million paper files at Merrill Lynch, founding an IT company on the spot when a friend's provider went under, climbing the highest peak in every European country, and building a mental health platf...

Gina Conway arrived in London from California with no clients, no contacts and no reason to believe it would work - just a vision she could see clearly when nobody else could. Twenty five years later she has a salon in its twenty fifth year, a hairdressing academy, a wellness business and a manager who has been with her for nineteen of those years. She also has idea bombs. That is her word for wha...

Natalia Forster spent 25 years helping some of advertising's biggest brands find their voice - while quietly losing her own. In this episode, Nat talks about the kindergarten teacher who spotted something different in her at five years old, decades before she had language for it, and the mentor who later made it safe for her to stop performing and lead from her actual self. That shift didn&#39...

Dom Tyler runs Recycly, a lean team taking on much bigger, better-funded competitors in the IT asset disposal industry - and he says that's exactly what fuels him. "On paper it looks like we've got no chance," he tells Ania, but for Dom it comes down to the minds behind the decisions, not the size of the budget. That same drive runs through the rest of his story. A few years ago,...

Listener note: this episode includes open discussion of addiction and a suicide attempt. If that's tender territory for you right now, take care of yourself first. Peter John Mather ran multiple businesses for 20 years on a brain he didn't understand. Fast, visual, endlessly lateral - the kind of mind that could legally convert four firework shops into hardware shops in 15 minutes to survi...

Video games from the age of four. Food. Porn from twelve. Drinking, drugs, a spiral that peaked at seventeen. Jake Kastleman describes every one of them the same way: they were escapes - ways of trying to feel okay in a life that didn't. The turning point wasn't willpower. It was a spiritual experience that opened the door to something different: building a life he no longer needed to esca...

What does it look like to build your entire life around a kind of intelligence the world didn't have a word for? Charlyn Huss is a Pilates teacher of 35+ years, inventor of CoreSpring, classically trained actress, and Fulbright Scholar in Shakespeare. She discovered she had a reading disability at 25 - after teaching herself French, training at LAMDA, and building a career on a form of intelli...

He deleted his corporate career, gave himself three years of deliberate spaciousness, and came out the other side making documentaries in the Arctic and portraits of strangers in Paris. What does freedom actually look like for a neurodivergent creative who spent six years as a production engineer at Shell - the "well doctor," flying between Norway and Australia - before walking away from...

A startup founder who used to mask his OCD as IBS now runs a mental health company - and has spent six years learning to slow down without losing himself. This week Ania talks with Charlie Winton, founder and CEO of OK Positive, a Scotland-based startup using technology to support preventative mental health. Charlie built the business out of his own experience with severe OCD and panic attacks - a...

Nobody handed Chuck Borden a career in Hollywood. What he had instead was a brain that never stayed still, a childhood spent tearing through every sport imaginable, and the stubborn refusal to quit when everyone around him thought he should. In this episode, I sit down with Chuck Borden, professional stuntman, stunt coordinator, second unit director, and now producer and director with over 400 fil...

Workplaces love to say “bring your whole self to work.” But when a neurodivergent person actually tries, they are often asked to tone it down. In this episode, I sit down with Marie Chaproniere, founder of Behind the Mask, a community built for people who are done pretending. Marie spent 15 years in talent acquisition, employer branding, and diversity and inclusion, and she could see long before m...

She is intelligent, driven, but she was quietly falling apart. Not because something was wrong with her, but because the world she was living in had no room for who she actually was. In this episode, I sit down with Katja Staeheli, entrepreneur and author, to talk about late-identified neurodivergence, masking, burnout, and what it takes to finally stop hiding a mind the world never quite knew wha...

Some people spend their entire lives trying to fit into systems that reward performance, status, and strength, only to realise too late that what actually matters most is the quality of the people sitting beside you. In this episode, I sit down with entrepreneur and community builder Thomas Power to talk about neurodivergence, pattern recognition, empathy, entrepreneurship, and why modern business...

Being praised for being “gifted” at a young age can feel empowering at first, until you realise how quickly intelligence can become tied to perfectionism, performance, and the fear of falling short. In this episode, I sit down with Martina Niggli, conflict facilitator, educator, and mediator-in-training, to talk about neurodivergence, sensitivity, perfectionism, and the hidden emotional cost of co...

Being told you are intelligent but never quite living up to your “potential” can shape the way you see yourself long before you understand how your brain actually works.  In this episode, I sit down with educator, speaker, and consultant Chris Benson to talk about neurodivergence within the education system, not just for students, but for teachers too. We talk about why so many neurodivergent chil...

Most of us are trying to function inside an invisible “operating box” that no one has clearly defined, yet somehow we are all expected to fit into it. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Anu Patel, a medical doctor and transformational coach who explores the science of resilience, clarity, and performance through the lens of neurodivergence. We talk about what he calls the “operating box,” the un...

Addiction does not usually look like a lack of discipline. More often, it is a strategy that once helped you survive, long after it stops serving you. In this episode, I sit down with Patrick Devosse, who shares his experience of being diagnosed with ADHD at a young age without understanding what it meant, navigating childhood trauma, and developing a 15-year pornography addiction as a way to cope...

Understanding your neurodivergence early in life can shape how you see yourself, how you learn, and what you believe is possible for you. In this episode, I sit down with 19-year-old Solomon Cole, who shares what it has been like to grow up with ADHD while feeling different in traditional school environments. We talk about his early experiences of being misunderstood, getting into trouble for beha...

For many neurodivergent people, the question is never just how to succeed, it is how to exist in systems that were never designed with them in mind. In this episode, I’m joined by Kenneth Pennington, who shares his journey from corporate HR to building his own brand, “It’s Just a Fish.” We explore what it actually means to be neurodivergent in professional environments, from being labelled disrupt...

She was told she was not good with words, yet today’s guest was able to build a life around language and poetry.  In this episode, I sit down with artist, poet, and former healthcare think tank leader Leslie Reed. She shares what it was like growing up unable to read out loud in class, being told she was not smart despite a high IQ, and struggling with spelling across multiple languages. We talk a...

What if we stopped calling it neurodiversity and started calling it what it actually is — human diversity?  In this episode, I sit down with Joyce CoomberSewell, a 71-year-old late-diagnosed neurodivergent powerhouse. We Talk about her mission to shift the conversation from “neurodiversity” to human diversity , and her belief that visibility and representation are what move the needle, just like t...

The traits that made you feel like you didn't fit in when you were young, the ones you tried to hide or shrink, are the same ones that become your superpower as an adult. In this episode, I sit down with Pete Daly-Dickson, an actor, director, producer, and former software entrepreneur who was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 55. Pete shares what it felt like to always be told to sit still and sto...

Sometimes the skills that scare you most, the ones that could make you seem ruthless or cruel, are exactly the ones that need the strongest guardrails and the clearest purpose. In this episode, I sit down with Ravinol Chambers, a monk turned filmmaker who spent seven years in spiritual practice across East Africa, India, Ireland, and England before building Be Inspired Films, a company helping pur...