Subtitle: Turning Disability, Difference, and Disruption into Superpowers

What if the thing you were taught to treat as a weakness is really your strength?

In cyber, engineering, and high-performance tech communities, most of us quietly check at least one box: ADHD, neurodivergence, chronic pain, injury, trauma, anxiety, or another non-standard operating condition. All variables in a formula.

Tap In reframes disability and difference not as deficits to overcome, but as inputs — signals that shape how we think, adapt, and build systems. Drawing from lived experience, leadership under pressure, and the CLIMB™ framework, this talk explores how people unconsciously create compensating mechanisms to survive — and how those same mechanisms can be intentionally refined into superpowers showing clear lines to methods, levers and formulas to succeed.

This talk gives attendees permission to check the box proudly, inventory their constraints honestly, and tap into the systems they’ve already built — turning friction into leverage and difference into advantage.

Most of us in the cybersecurity and hacking community operate outside the standard mold — cognitively, physically, emotionally, or all three. Yet we are taught to hide, excuse, dismiss or work around the very conditions that shaped our strengths.

Tap In challenges that narrative.

Rather than framing disability, neurodivergence, or chronic conditions as limitations, this talk treats them as environmental conditions — like the weather. You don’t cancel life because it rains. You adapt. You bring grab an umbrella. And sometimes - and hopefully often, you even those to splash around and dance in it.

Through personal stories, systems thinking, and practical frameworks, this talk shows how professionals already build levers, buttons, and workflows to compensate — often without realizing it. By making those systems conscious and intentional, attendees learn how to stop fighting their operating conditions and start engineering around them.

This is not a talk about overcoming. It does not rank disability, minimize lived experience, or suggest that every condition becomes a ‘superpower.’ It focuses on building systems that work for the body and brain you actually have. Its about process and about owning your unique individual operating system, optimizing it and PWNing it to win.