Ilja Abbattista is not your typical speaker or consultant. She is a trauma informed changemaker, a multiple business award winner, and a powerful voice for those navigating neurodivergence and trauma.
She’s a multi-award finalist (Speaker of the Year and Overcomer of the Year), and a multiple business award winner. Ilja speaks from a place of lived truth and entrepreneurial leadership – blending personal insight with practical strategy. A survivor-advocate, business owner, and neurodivergent changemaker who brings real-world insight to every room she steps into – from corporate boardrooms to community centres and classrooms.
Whether you’re hosting a national conference, awareness campaign, training event, or fundraising gala, Ilja brings powerful storytelling, emotional depth, and practical tools that shift perspectives.
She speaks on:
These are more than keynotes – they’re lived truths, liberating insights, and powerful invitations to do better.
Why so many women go undiagnosed – and what masking really means for those with ADHD, Autism, and trauma. Ilja reframes masking as a survival strategy, not a flaw – and offers a new path that honours both protection and liberation.
Ilja’s personal journey – from surviving sex trafficking, childhood abuse, and institutional failure to becoming a multi-business founder and national speaker. A deeply moving talk on reclaiming identity, voice, and
power.
Powerful for anti-trafficking conferences, survivor-led spaces, schools, police/community events.
A raw, relatable look at how trauma, ADHD, and CPTSD shape who we love and how we show up. Based on Ilja’s podcast, this talk explores why safe love can feel unfamiliar – and how to unlearn performance in dating.
What happens when women with ADHD or trauma try to follow “mainstream” business advice? Burnout. Ilja offers a new model – one that celebrates fast ideas, deep empathy, and nonlinear growth. Ideal for women in business, inclusive entrepreneurship events, or coaching collectives.
A call to action for councils, NGOs, and organisations: stop “consulting” survivors and start co-creating with them. Ilja explains how to meaningfully embed lived experience into systems, strategy, and service design.
Instead of repeating buzzwords or box-ticking, Ilja shows what it takes to build safe, clear, emotionally intelligent spaces – in leadership, education, and community. It’s about leading with presence, not performance.
Ilja delivers training, workshops and reflective sessions for professionals, teams and organisations who want to understand what may be happening underneath the surface.
Sessions can support frontline practice, workplace understanding, lived experience work, communication, masking, trust and safer support relationships.
Ilja doesn’t just talk about change – she helps shape it.
She actively serves on a number of national and community-based advisory boards and panels,
founding member and designer of the logo.
and various universities supporting survivor-led research and systemic reform amongst others.
Her involvement helps shape survivor-centred policy, programme design, and research with a trauma-informed, neurodivergent-aware lens.
Organisations hire Ilja when they want insight that’s:
Ilja brings a rare combination of lived experience and business acumen – with over a decade of entrepreneurial leadership in sectors including education, food & catering, coaching, packaging, and creative consultancy. She partners with organisations who want to move beyond performative inclusion and into real, actionable change.
