Gaby Natale believes in using enthusiasm as a compass when clarity is lacking. When you’re in a fog or going through a tough time, she says enthusiasm is a great guide.  

“Enthusiasm is also a great vehicle to excellence,” Natale says. “I have interviewed pioneers and super achievers from all walks of life—from gold medalists to business tycoons to Grammy-winning artists—for decades and not once have I found someone who has reached the top of their field by doing something they absolutely hate. Enthusiasm, combined with discipline, can take us places where discipline alone could never get.”

One personal example of her using enthusiasm as fuel was the journey that took her to win three Daytime Emmy Awards back-to-back as an independent producer with a small team competing against CNN, NBC Universal and many other major networks. 

“To say we were absolutely underdogs is a complete understatement,” she says. “But it was only by turning enthusiasm into our fuel to create non-stereotypical, multidimensional content of excellence that we were able to win despite having a significantly smaller team and budget.”


(Photo by Jorge Rivas)

Redefining possibility

Natale is one of the keynote speakers at MPI’s 2023 World Education Congress (WEC) in the Mexican Caribbean, June 13-15. Her address, “Utterly Unique You: Breaking Barriers and Redefining Possibility,” will show how attendees can turn discomfort into a wake-up call for transformational leadership and personal growth. She’ll illustrate how visionaries and innovators are not extraordinary people, but instead, ordinary people who choose to see themselves and the world in extraordinary ways. 

In fact, she says there are three main commonalities that visionaries from all walks of life share.

“They see beyond the visible. What I mean by this is that they give themselves permission to see themselves not just by who they are in a particular moment, but also by who they can become if they develop their potential,” Natale says. “They don’t jump to permanent conclusions based on temporary circumstances, and they use their journey to make a positive impact: making people happy makes them happy.”

One part of human nature, though, is to resist what we don’t know. It’s been like this since the dawn of time, Natale says, but what is new now is the speed and scale of the change we are experiencing. 

“We are going through an unprecedented demographic and technological change at a global scale,” she says. “For example, just a few months ago most people had never heard of ChatGPT. Now, it is hard to keep up with the number of articles on the topic. And this is only the beginning since the amount of intelligence in the universe will double every 18 months according to tech experts. In this incredibly accelerated scenario, what will happen to leaders resisting change?”

The pioneer spirit

Natale has lived in five different countries (USA, UK, Germany, Mexico and Argentina), worked in multiple languages and had to break barriers to get where she is. She had to learn to embrace change the hard way more times than she can remember.

“Even when it feels incredibly uncomfortable at times, leaders should know there are wonderful things waiting for us on the other side of change,” she says. “The ones who pioneer and embrace change are the ones who will be in the best position to benefit from it.” 

One of the ideas she often talks about is the “pioneer spirit,” which guides people to believe in their vision even before they have results to validate it. It’s a way to open yourself up to the possibility of doing something nobody like you had done before, to challenge the status quo and introduce innovative ideas that defy herd mentality. 

“Pioneers are the DNA moral progress is made of,” Natale says. “From the civil rights movement to the suffragettes and from the LGBTQ+ movement to the amazing teenagers who are fighting for the planet, every single shift in human consciousness that has made this world a better world started in the same way: with a group of people who embraced the ‘pioneer spirit’ to push an idea whose time had come.”

Embrace uniqueness

The decision that had the biggest impact on Natale’s life was her choice to embrace an inner voice over an outer noise mindset. Regardless of outside circumstances and other people’s expectations, she says she knew she had what it takes to break barriers. 

“I credit that decision with everything that happened next: from being able to find new global opportunities after graduating in Argentina with 20 percent unemployment to starting fresh in the United States where I was able to establish myself as a triple Daytime Emmy-winning entrepreneur, bestselling author and leadership speaker for some of the most prestigious Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Estée Lauder, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble and Century 21, among others,” she says. 

When she gets invited to speak at places such as the United Nations or Georgetown University, she says she looks back at her own unlikely journey and reflects on the importance of embracing uniqueness to the point of becoming your own best advocate. 

“If you don’t believe in your own potential, who is going to believe in it?” she says. 

Even the pandemic changed her and how she views time. 

“On the professional side, the pandemic allowed me and my team to become very strategic about virtual speaking,” she says. “And since I have my own TV studio in Dallas, this was a change that has been beneficial even to this day because there are still so many Fortune 500 companies with a global workforce that have not fully returned to working from the office. So virtual and hybrid speaking is here to stay.” 

She also became more strategic about how she uses time. 

“I try to only do in person the things that really need to be in person. For example, grocery shopping is no longer an in-person experience for me,” she says. “The same happened to other routine tasks that can be done online. Every minute I liberated with this simple change is a new minute that can be used to refresh, recharge or create.”