2024
Dare to Do

What if the hardest thing wasn't the diagnosis but choosing how to carry it?

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Yvonne Ulrich has been through breast cancer twice. The first time taught her a system: running, nutrition, meditation, deliberate emotional boundaries. The second time, nine years later, proved it worked as she moved through chemotherapy with less fear and more clarity than most people bring to far smaller challenges. As Head of Clinical Operations and Global Head of Patient Experience at YES!CON, she has built a professional life around what patients actually need. On stage, she makes the case that how we communicate about illness to ourselves and to others shapes the experience of it entirely.

What if the artistic mindset was the most practical tool you never learned to use?

Joseph Sieber, Swiss pianist, conductor, and music mediator, soon to take up the baton as Assistant Conductor at the Basel Sinfonietta, argues that great artists are not a category apart. They operate by a set of principles: presence, commitment, the willingness to serve something larger than personal gain. In this talk, he traces those principles back to their source and asks a question that lands well beyond the concert hall: what would change if you approached your own life the way an artist approaches their work? Not as metaphor. As method.

The magic isn't in the plan. It's in the first move.

Pelumi Nubi drove solo from London to Lagos.

Not with a flawless itinerary, not without setbacks, but with a framework she had built the hard way: initiate momentum, complete small things fast, reflect and move again. In this talk, she unpacks those three steps through the lens of her own life : a woman who navigated dyslexia, crossed a continent alone, and came out with a precise, transferable argument for why action is not the reward at the end of the process. It is the process. Her road is the proof. Your starting point is wherever you are right now.

The Soviet Union gave her resilience. The industry took it. She took it back.

Darja Gogunova, Chief Product Officer at Denizen, arrived at the TEDxEHL stage with a biography that reads like a study in reinvention. Raised in Soviet Latvia, shaped by a culture that demanded ownership and endurance, she carried those values into a startup world that rewarded neither, at least not from her. Facing gender bias and the slow erosion that comes from years of not quite fitting, she stepped back. The sabbatical that followed was not a retreat. It was the moment she stopped performing a version of success someone else had written. Her talk is a call to the next generation: challenge the norms, define your own metrics, and bring your whole self because that is precisely what the table is missing.

What if the principles that make someone exceptional at selling are the same ones that make someone exceptional at living?

Sabir Naghiyev has spent eleven years inside the mechanics of high performance, first as a practitioner, now as the founder of Chrysales and a coach to others. What he keeps finding is that the principles separating top performers from the rest are not industry-specific. They are relational, behavioural, and transferable far beyond any deal or pipeline. In this talk, he pulls those principles out of the sales context entirely and asks a broader question: how do we show up in our interactions, and what is the actual impact we leave behind? The answer, it turns out, has very little to do with closing.

She spent years trying to make sense of a world that didn't quite fit. Then she got a diagnosis and everything shifted.

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Sophia Hess, student at EHL, raised across four countries, carrying a biography that already defies easy categories, received her autism diagnosis and found in it not a limitation, but a language. In this talk, she unpacks what it means to move through an overwhelming world without the map most people take for granted, and what self-acceptance actually looks like when the stakes are that personal. Her message is one of awareness and inclusion, delivered without abstraction: just one person's precise, lived account of what it costs to mask, and what becomes possible when you stop.

What if the struggle isn't the obstacle — it's the point?

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Emmanuel Leclercq's biography is not a metaphor. Born in the slums of Mumbai, abandoned, taken in by Mother Teresa, his life began in conditions that most people only encounter as philosophy. And philosophy is precisely what he made of it. A Doctor of Moral Philosophy and author of five books, he now teaches at the Catholic Institute of Toulouse and lectures to students and business leaders across France and abroad. In this talk, he arrives at a simple, uncomfortable proposition: life is a struggle. Not a problem to be solved, not a phase to push through : a permanent condition to be accepted. His argument is not resignation. It is the opposite.