Jan. 20, 2026
Embracing the Leonardo Trait: Angie Dixon's Journey to Neurodivergent Creativity
Send us a text In this enlightening episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we sit down with the multi-talented Angie Dixon, an author, summit host, artist, and proud neurospicy individual. Angie shares her journey through creativity and neurodivergence, discussing her upcoming book, "The Leonardo Trait," set to release on January 27th, which explores profound creativity in a chaotic world. She delves into her unique approach to hosting an email-based summit, making it accessible for ever...
In this enlightening episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we sit down with the multi-talented Angie Dixon, an author, summit host, artist, and proud neurospicy individual. Angie shares her journey through creativity and neurodivergence, discussing her upcoming book, "The Leonardo Trait," set to release on January 27th, which explores profound creativity in a chaotic world. She delves into her unique approach to hosting an email-based summit, making it accessible for everyone, especially those who may struggle with traditional formats. Angie explains the concept of the "Leonardo Trait," a term she coined to describe the multifaceted nature of creative individuals who may feel overwhelmed by their own brilliance. We also tackle important topics such as autistic masking, burnout, and the challenges faced by multi-passionate creatives in conventional work environments. Angie's insights offer valuable advice for those navigating their own creative paths and seeking to embrace their authentic selves. Don't miss this inspiring conversation that champions the beauty of being different and the power of self-acceptance. Learn more about Angie and her work at profoundcreativity.com.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. if you believe you can achieve. Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today we're going to be talking creativity as I am joined by Angie Dixon. She is a multi passionate author, summit host, artist, and neurospicy human being. She's been doing her thing for two decades, so we're going to be talking to her about what she's up to and gonna be up to and why she does what she does. So, Angie, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to join me.
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> Angie Dixon>Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?
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> Angie Dixon>Okay. I'm, I'm neurodivergent. I have autism and adhd, which we call adhd. I'm, the author of the book the Leonardo Trait, which is coming out January 27th. This is actually the fourth edition of this book and the subtitle of this edition is Profound Creativity and a Chaotic World. It's about obviously profound creativity. I, wrote the first three editions before I realized that I was neurodivergent. So this book is really about neurodivergent creativity and unmasking and being just more of who you are. I really think that neurodivergent people will get the most out of it.
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> Angie Dixon>But anyone who's really creative and a little different and kind of marches to a different drum beat will probably enjoy the book. And I'm really excited to talk about it.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Yeah, well, let's, let's talk about. You also are a summit host, so explain to listeners what that is.
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> Angie Dixon>Okay. Well, normally a virtual summit is you have a bunch of people who get on Zoom or some YouTube or some platform and give recorded presentations.
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> Angie Dixon>For various reasons, I am not able to do that kind of a virtual summit. I'm disabled. It's hard for me to, to do the planning and, and the work for that. And I decided to host an email based summit, which is exactly what it sounds like. My speakers, instead of speaking, are going to write a presentation and those will go out by email throughout the days of the summit. Three or four a day each day. And that's also on January 27th. And I'm really excited about this because it's accessible to everyone. Not just accessible for me to do it, but also accessible for neurodivergent people who might have trouble with showing up at a specific time. They might be busy, they might just not have the spoons that day. The energy, my speakers are really excited about it. They think it's going to be really great. And I'm just really looking forward to holding that.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, you, you coined the phrase Leonardo trait.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So explain to the listeners what that is and how someone knows, will know if they have the Leonardo trait.
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> Angie Dixon>Well, the Leonardo trait is something I came up with just on the spur of the moment. One night I was talking with my best friend and her daughter about some books I've been reading about creativity. And one author had coined the term Benjamin Franklin's and she was talking about creative people, but she didn't really seem to get the kind of creativity that I have of the constantly switching projects, but coming back to them and having, you know, 37 tabs open in your brain at one time. And the other author seemed to get it a little bit more, but she recommended that, that you have a file cabinet for each project that you have. And I would need like a five story house to have a file cabinet for each project I have going on. And I was telling my friend about this and her daughter and the daughter said, well, why would you call people?
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> Angie Dixon>What do you think it is? And I said, well, you know, it's a trait. I like to think of it as being like Leonardo, who did so many different things and was accepted for doing so many different things and we celebrate him. M. And my friend said, so the Leonardo trait? And I said, yeah, that's what I call it. And she said, you know, you have to write that book now. And so I did. I started the next day. That was in 2006. And like I said, I'm, just putting out the fourth edition of the book. And really people who constantly have new ideas coming up who think that they're maybe a little too much because of their creativity, who think they're weird, who think that people are overwhelmed by them, people who spiral in and out of projects. You, you have something going on and you really into it and you're doing a lot with it and then you set it aside and you take on another project for a while and then you come back to the original one and then you go off to a third, one and you come back to the second one. Those are the people really who have the Leonardo trait. And it's just a way of expressing creativity and a real, I want to say, a plentiness of creativity, a lot of creativity.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about autistic masking. Talk about what that is and, how it shaped your life and what finally pushed you to unmask.
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> Angie Dixon>Right. You know, masking. In autism, we talk about masking, and what we mean is trying to appear to be neurotypical, because autistic people are not like neurotypical people. We don't do the same things in the same way. One thing is that, like, I said we have a lot of interests. We get really excited about our interests. We veer off and do a lot of different things. We get obsessed with something and talk about it all the time. Call that a special interest that we're just really obsessed with and want to talk about to the point that other people might think that that's a little too much. People often use the words too much or a lot about us. especially in a professional setting. You know, we tend to find people who love us for who we are. But a lot of times we also try to hide some of who we are. And I think that we do that especially. Especially when we don't know that we're autistic or when we've not accepted that who we are is not too much. We're not broken, we're brilliant, and we're perfectly enough. And for me, masking was. I was a weird kid. I mean, I had been weird or different all my life. And I tried really m hard to fit in. You know, I got a degree. I worked in an office for many years. And I just never really felt like I was being myself or like I could be myself. And as I was writing the Leonardo Trade, I start the first one, I started talking about being who we are, being more of who we are. And I started to unmask a bit. And a few years ago, I was actually diagnosed with autism. And I realized that this is not me being weird. This is not me just not being the right kind of person or not having the right kind of ambition or drive, that autism is who I am, and that my brain just functions differently. And I was talking recently to someone who said that she has an autistic friend and she thinks of it as her friend's superpower. And I said, absolutely. But it's hard at first for us to recognize that this is. This is great. Who we are is amazing. And I think it's really important to have somebody in your life or whom you've heard of or you've read a book or you've heard this podcast. And I just want to say to people that you are brilliant and enough and. And this is your superpower being who you are, there's not another one of you in the world.
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> Angie Dixon>And to me, that is so important to realize that you're special. I mean, I think everyone is special in their own way, but I like to think that autistic people don't recognize their specialness, but they are extraordinary, extraordinarily special.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about autistic burnout. What does autistic burnout look like in adults? And why is autistic burnout so misunderstood?
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> Angie Dixon>It's really easy for autistic people to burn out, partly because of the masking and partly because we're not equipped mentally or emotionally, to do the hustle lifestyle and the working constantly and trying to meet other people's expectations of us. And when we burn out, it's often after a long time of pushing way too hard, pushing our bodies and our brains way too far. And it looks like depression in a lot of people. It looks like. It can look like apathy. It can look like, you know, working for two weeks straight with no break and then going to bed for a month or, you know, a lesser or a longer period of time. And it's really. I'm in a couple of neurodivergent groups, and I'm, learning more and more about burnout from other people. My burnout story was that I did not realize how burned out I was until I became disabled and was no longer able to work. And at first it was really shocking to me to not be able to work because I had worked so much and made work such a big part of my life. And, for two or three years, I was not able to work at all. And after the first few months, I began to realize that this is actually really good. I needed some time off.
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> Angie Dixon>And after, you know, like I said, after a few years, I became able to work somewhat again. And I realized that my relationship with work had changed because I had rested my way out of what had turned out to be really severe autistic burnout. And I was suddenly, I had more energy, had more time. I was able to choose more carefully what I wanted to do with my time. And I realized that not everyone is going to have that opportunity. I like to say that becoming disabled was one of the best things that happened to me because it broke me out of my autistic workaholism and burnout. But I think that everyone who is in burnout can hopefully find a way to sort of start to back off from some of that and start. I hope that I'm Giving them permission to do that.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about why multi passionate creatives struggle with traditional productivity.
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> Angie Dixon>There's a couple reasons. The first reason is that we're not really good at working in a linear fashion. We have multiple things going on in our brains and in our lives at once. You know, like I said, I'm, I'm juggling getting a book out and getting the summit ready and I wouldn't have that any other way. But very often in traditional offices, traditional business jobs, they expect you to do one thing and finish it and then do the next thing and finish it. I mean you may be working on multiple things at once, but they want you to, kind of work on them simultaneously. And we don't do that very well. We really hyper focus on one thing and then switch over to the next thing and hyper focus on that for a while and we don't really fit into the traditional mold of productivity. And the other, I said there were a couple things. The other thing is that I think the hyper focus really, sometimes we get hyper focused on something that other people don't see the importance of. And it is important, it's important and we know where we're going with it. But quite often other people look at us and they think we're off working over here on the side on something.
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> Angie Dixon>When really what we're doing is doing something that's going to make the whole thing come together in the end in a brilliant way. But it's not obvious to them what we're doing. And actually there's a third thing is that hustle culture is just really hard on us for the reasons I mentioned earlier about burnout. So the more we hustle, the harder our lives become.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Speaking of that, give people out there that might be neurodivergent best practice tips on building a life of business that fits their brain instead of, you know, fighting against it.
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> Angie Dixon>Absolutely. one thing is if you're, if you are working for someone else is to, I think, be open about what you need and keep looking until you find something that works for you. I'm not going to say that everyone who's neurodivergent needs to work for themselves. I think you should do what you're drawn to, whether that's being a doctor or an accountant or a writer like myself. But I think that, that it's possible if you know what you need and you know what you want to do, it is very possible to work within the system and still be yourself. And I think unmasking and being your authentic self is a very big part of that. If you are working for yourself, it's very easy if you're running your own business to get caught up in this. I need to do what everyone else is doing.
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> Angie Dixon>And you know, it's just, you don't, you don't have to do what everyone is doing. You don't have to fit in. The more you don't fit in, the more you're going to succeed. When I came up with the idea for holding an email summit, which no one has ever done, it was an idea that I came up, with. And I thought, no one is going to be interested in this.
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> Angie Dixon>No one is going to want to speak at it, no one is going to want to come to it. And the response has just been off the charts. Within a day, I had 20 people asking to speak and I had 12 slots. So I expanded the summit. I think it's a leap of faith.
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> Angie Dixon>You have to believe that being yourself is going to work, and it is going to work. I think that's the biggest thing, is to just understand that being yourself is absolutely the right thing.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about your late autism diagnosis.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>How has your life changed after getting that late diagnosis? And what made you, decide to even go in and get checked or feel like, hey, I need to go get this checked out?
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> Angie Dixon>Well, my son was diagnosed at, I, ah, think 23 with, with autism. And it still took me several years to, to get a clue about that, which is funny because we basically share a brain. We are the same person. But after he was diagnosed, I had several people on, on Facebook and once I was in the hospital, asked me if I was autistic. And I said, you know, I might be, I might be. And I finally reached a point where I thought, I want to know. Some people choose not to get a diagnosis for various reasons. They can't afford it or they just don't want a diagnosis, or they're nervous about having it on their medical record for various reasons. I decided I wanted to know. And that diagnosis really changed everything for me.
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> Angie Dixon>It realigned me with, who I really am. It helped me understand what I was actually writing about in the Leonardo trait and actually changed how I see myself. I still had a tendency to see myself as different and not really understand why. Once I realized that I am autistic, it opened up so many channels. I started seeking out neurodivergent spaces and neurodivergent people. And it was the first time in my life that I really felt like I had people in a community and that people were going to understand me when I said things related to my life. That if I had a special interest or if something was more clear to me because of my neurodivergence, that there would be people who would understand that.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about this. How can someone unmask safely without wrecking their whole life?
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> Angie Dixon>Okay, that's a good one. I think, you know, it goes in steps. You, start unmasking with people you feel safe around. You start maybe sort of taking small steps at work and around the people that you care about. I don't think you should go into work and announce that you are not ever going to work in a straight line again. But I think that you can go into work and say, hey, I've noticed that I work better when I spend a block of time on this and then a block of time on that. And that, moving between them in short bursts kind of drains my energy as I move. I think that you can talk to the people around you and explain. I think I'm autistic or I know I'm autistic, and I would like to try some of these things. With working a little differently, I'd like to be a little more of who I am. I'd like to have a little freedom to experiment with trying some new ways of working, which might involve, like I said, spending more time in larger blocks, maybe having more communication be by email instead of, so many phone calls or meetings. Or perhaps having people understand that if you are meeting in person or if you are meeting on the phone, that you may need to write down what is said and then come back with more questions than you might previously have that you may need a little time to absorb what's going on. Another thing is that autistic people are very literal. We take things very literally, and we need things explained very clearly to us. Not like we're not smart, but like, we don't always pick up on social cues. And you might say it'd be great if you do a little more of X. And. And what we hear is that you think that would be great, not that you need us to do more of X and less of Y, we really need clear communication.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, to the creatives out there that might feel burned out or, overwhelmed, and they feel like they've tried everything, what's the one piece of advice you would give them?
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> Angie Dixon>I think the biggest thing you can do is to give yourself some forgiveness and some peace and understand that you may be overwhelmed, but you are going to be okay. And to try to get as much rest and as much space as you can and try to surround yourself with people who are going to help you heal from your burnout and your overwhelm.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.
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> Angie Dixon>So I have my book coming out and I have my summit coming out, both on January 27th, and you can find out more about those@profoundcreativity.com.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>That was my next question. Your website so close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about, that you would like to touch on any final thoughts you have for the listeners.
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> Angie Dixon>I just want to say that I think that all of your listeners are brilliant and special, whether they're neurodivergent or not. But if they are neurodivergent, I hope that I've said something that really encourages them to be who they are authentically.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Go out your website one more time.
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> Angie Dixon>Profoundcreativity.Com there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Please check out, profoundcreativity.com, check out Angie's Summits. Pick up the book when it comes out January 27, 2026. Follow Rate Review Share this episode to as many people as possible.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.craveball337.com and share the site and the show to as many people that you know. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Angie, thank you for all that you do. And thank you for joining me.
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> Angie Dixon>Oh, thank you so much for having me.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, visit www.craveballuh337.com until next time, keep living the dream. Dream.
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