Candice Van Dertholen
Global Speaker, Holistic Practitioner
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
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Candice Van Dertholen is a Global Speaker, Retreat Facilitator, and Private Advisor to high-performing professionals, executives, and founders navigating growth, pressure, and visibility. She is the founder of The Warrior Within Healing, bringing over two decades of experience across leadership, business development, and wellness.
Her work focuses on identifying and shifting root-level patterns that directly impact decision-making, communication, and performance under pressure. She partners with leaders operating at a high level to strengthen internal clarity, stabilize momentum, and expand their capacity to lead with consistency and precision.
Candice’s approach integrates embodiment, nervous system regulation, and pattern recognition to address what traditional strategies often miss. The result is sustained performance, stronger presence, and the ability to navigate complexity without losing traction.
Candice has spoken for internal teams like McCormick & Company, Inc. and international conferences like Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading Conference in Birmingham, United Kingdom. She also volunteers as a speaker for NAMI Charlotte, bringing mental wellness support to the community.
In addition to her work, Candice is an event founder Warrior Defined, a men's mental health event in Charlotte, NC.
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Capacity to Lead: What Changes as Responsibility Grows
As responsibility grows, leadership asks more of us. More decisions. More people looking to us for direction. More complexity to navigate. More visibility. More moments where there may not be a clear answer.
Yet leadership development often focuses on expanding skills and responsibilities without examining something equally important: our capacity to hold them.
In this session, we will explore what happens internally as responsibility grows and why the patterns that helped us succeed at one level of our career may begin to work differently at the next.
Being the person who always figures it out can make delegation difficult. Being highly dependable can turn into carrying more than is ours to carry. Moving quickly can make it harder to recognize when our capacity is changing. And as more people begin depending on us, the way we respond to pressure can quietly shape our decisions, communication, and leadership.
Participants will learn how to recognize their own capacity signals, identify the patterns that influence how they respond as demands increase, and understand the relationship between capacity, self-trust, boundaries, and regulation.
Rather than waiting until capacity becomes a problem, this session invites leaders to understand it as an essential part of how they grow.
Attendees will leave with practical tools to assess what they are carrying, recognize when their internal capacity is shifting, and make more intentional decisions about where their energy and attention go as their leadership expands.
The Hidden Impact of Unprocessed Experiences
EMS professionals are trained to move quickly from one call to the next. Assess. Respond. Stabilize. Transport. Reset.
But what happens when the call ends and the experience does not?
In emergency medical services, exposure to stress is often discussed through the lens of major traumatic events. Yet the cumulative impact of the work can be much quieter. A difficult pediatric call. A patient who reminds you of someone you love. The family member whose reaction stays with you. A call that did not seem significant at the time, but somehow follows you home.
The body and brain do not automatically process an experience simply because the call is over.
For Candice Van Dertholen, this work also carries a deeply personal connection. Her late spouse lived with PTSD until the final day of his life, giving Candice firsthand experience with the lasting impact that traumatic and unprocessed experiences can have on an individual and the people who love them. That experience has shaped her commitment to helping others better understand what happens beneath the surface and why recognizing the signs earlier matters.
In this interactive session, Candice explores the hidden impact of unprocessed experiences and what happens within the nervous system during and after repeated exposure to high-intensity situations. Using accessible nervous system education, relatable examples, and practical exercises, participants will learn why certain experiences stay with us, how accumulated stress can begin showing up mentally, emotionally, and physically, and how to recognize their own signals earlier.
Participants will also explore the role of processing in resilience. Using the analogy of open tabs on a computer, the session demonstrates how experiences can continue consuming internal capacity when the system has not had an opportunity to make sense of what happened, release the emotional charge, and return toward regulation.
Rather than asking EMS professionals to eliminate stress from an inherently stressful profession, this session focuses on building greater awareness and giving providers realistic tools they can use between calls, after a shift, and in everyday life.
Previous Presentation Experience
The concepts and practices within The Hidden Impact of Unprocessed Experiences have been presented to professional and community audiences, including the 2026 NHEDA Conference in New Hampshire and NAMI Charlotte.
Beyond Imposter Syndrome: How Our Identity Shapes Our Fear of Success
This session explores the critical moment when high performers begin to disrupt their own momentum just as they approach the next level of growth. These patterns are rarely about capability. They are rooted in deeper self-protective responses tied to visibility, identity, and internal safety.
Participants will examine how self-sabotage subtly emerges during expansion, showing up as hesitation, overanalysis, and withdrawal at key inflection points. The session brings to light the underlying visibility wounds and internal narratives that make being seen at a higher level feel unsafe.
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how these patterns operate in real time and how to move through them without losing traction. The focus is on strengthening internal trust, sustaining momentum, and stepping into greater visibility and leadership with consistency and clarity.
Presentation update: This has been selected to be delivered in Birmingham, GB in September 2026 & McCormick & Co for October.
Beyond Imposter Syndrome: How Our Identity Shapes Our Fear of Success
What happens when you have worked hard to reach the next level, only to find yourself questioning whether you belong there?
We often think of imposter syndrome as a lack of confidence. Yet beneath the self-doubt can be something much deeper: an identity that has not yet caught up with who we are becoming.
For nonprofit professionals and event leaders, growth often requires greater visibility, bigger asks, stronger leadership, and the willingness to step into rooms and opportunities that once felt out of reach. Yet the very success we are working toward can bring old beliefs about worth, belonging, and who we are allowed to become to the surface.
In this thought-provoking and interactive session, Candice Van Dertholen expands upon her most highly booked speaking topic, imposter syndrome, to explore the deeper connection between past identity and fear of success.
Her work on imposter syndrome has been presented to national, international, and global audiences, including McCormick & Company, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading Conference in Birmingham, United Kingdom, the SheLeads DC Summit, Blue Star Families, and The Rosie Network.
Across industries, organizations, and cultures, one theme continues to emerge: sometimes our greatest resistance appears when we are standing at the edge of becoming someone we have never been before.
Participants will examine the past experiences that shaped their relationship with success, visibility, belonging, and achievement. They will learn how those experiences can influence present-day leadership and recognize the patterns that may be keeping them from fully stepping into what comes next.
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