Speaker. Coach. Strategist. Author.
Some people collect credentials. JJ Ferrari collects transformations — not the polished, LinkedIn-ready kind, but the real kind. The ones that cost you something. The ones that remake you.
Over a career spanning three countries and five decades, she has become one of the most compelling voices in the world on what it actually takes to change — why so few of us do it, and what happens when we finally dare.
Chicago: a child who didn't follow the flock
JJ grew up in Chicago as a short, chubby redhead in dark-framed glasses who was, by most conventional measures, a troublemaker. Teachers disliked her. Bullies came for her. Her sisters were eventually transferred to a different school — not because they'd done anything wrong, but to protect them from the reputation she'd earned by second grade.
What her teachers called disruption, JJ called curiosity. She took apart a brand-new bicycle three days after receiving it — pulling the spokes from the wheels, the bearings from the pedals, sanding off the paint — not to be defiant, but because she needed to understand how it worked, and didn't like the colour. It was the same instinct that drove everything she would later build: the compulsion to look beneath the surface, find the pattern, and make it better.
“The things that got me in trouble the most when I was young are the things that made me successful.”
Her parents, Donald and Carole Jacob, were her first and greatest teachers. Her father was a maker and a fixer, someone who could strip an engine bare, find the fault, and put it back together perfectly. Her mother was rarer: a woman who taught her daughter about money, intuition, spirituality, reading people, and the power of acting on instinct without hesitation.
“You don't have to play by the rules, but you need to know what rules everyone else is playing by if you want to influence and win the game.”
“Trust and act on your intuitions immediately and without question. If you don't, they will stop arriving in your mind.”
She was also, from a very young age, deeply aware of something she kept entirely private: that the person living in her mind and her heart was female. She carried that awareness through her childhood, her teens, and decades of extraordinary public achievement — holding it carefully, knowing its time would come.
The making of a strategist
By her twenties, JJ was dancing, acting, and modelling in Chicago — living by instinct and performance, developing the ability to read rooms and hold an audience that would define her later career. At seventeen she'd already started her first business. At university, studying biology, genetics, chemistry, and nursing, she discovered what she'd actually been searching for all along: systems and patterns.
Her professional career began in a call centre, and it almost ended there too. Two weeks in, she was on the verge of being fired. Instead of defending herself, she studied the patterns. She looked at the top performers, built her own system, and asked to test it. Within a month she was in the top three. Within six months, management had replaced the existing system with hers — increasing closings, reducing returns, and cutting employee turnover.
The clients of that call centre started asking for the trainer behind those numbers. She started running workshops. Then she was on the road. Then she was sharing stages with Brian Tracy, Jay Abraham, and Bob Proctor — and then the speakers themselves were hiring her to build training programs for their own businesses. Her first major business-coaching engagement grew her client's revenue by over five million dollars in under six months.
A career without limits
What followed over two decades was, by any measure, extraordinary. JJ became CEO of Anthony Robbins AU. She served as interim CEO and executive director of corporations across three countries. She ran 300-seat call centres for luxury clients. She was the executive performance coach for PwC, St. George Bank, and KPMG. She advised businesses in over 140 industries, coached more than 200 CEOs, consulted to over 1,800 companies, and delivered more than 1,000 keynotes across Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
At 46, she left Chicago behind entirely and moved to Australia to take on a CEO role for a training and seminar company. She arrived in a country she didn't know, took on a company she hadn't built, and made it work — because making things work in unfamiliar territory is simply what she does. In that same period she authored Selling You, a program that helped train 10,000 long-term unemployed individuals into new success.
“I believe people have untapped genius inside them. My job is to help them unlock it.”
The secret self
In 2016, JJ stood on the TEDxMelbourne stage and shared something she had kept inside for 53 years. She told the audience she was transitioning her gender — that she had known since she was very young that she was female, and had built an entire extraordinary life in a body, under a name, and in a role the world had assigned to someone else. The audience gave her a standing ovation.
That talk, Your Secret Self, became one of the most talked-about presentations from the event — not because of shock value, but because of the truth it uncovered: that almost everyone in the room was carrying something. A version of themselves they hadn't shown the world. A life they were living inside their head that they hadn't yet had the courage to live outside of it.
The transition cost her things that mattered deeply: relationships, friendships, a version of her business and professional life she had spent decades building. But what she found on the other side was not just relief. It was a fuller perception of the world — a capacity for empathy that only comes from having lived, genuinely, on multiple sides of the human experience.
“I don't look at it as a man, and I don't look at it as a woman. I look at it as a fully formed person.”
Building again
After her transition, JJ built again. She founded Dance Monkey Design and Marketing in Sydney — now a successful web design business that has produced over 250 high-converting websites, underpinned by her proprietary Nova Precision content coaching process. She founded Nova Strategic, her business consultancy. She returned to coaching, to keynoting, to the stage.
The audiences who see her now encounter someone who has genuinely been at the top of executive leadership, lived through profound personal loss and reinvention, navigated one of the most visible and misunderstood transitions a human being can make, and emerged with both her strategic mind and her warmth fully intact. She reads approximately 150 books a year, and still takes on clients in industries she has never worked in — or businesses on the verge of closing — simply to see if she can change the ending. She finds it, in her own words, amazingly fun.
What she offers the world
JJ Ferrari is not a motivational speaker. The distinction matters. Motivational speakers make you feel something for an hour. JJ gives you tools you use for the rest of your career. Her keynotes have been described by clients — McCain Foods, NASDAQ, PwC, Norton Rose Fulbright, Crown Perth, Big Brothers Big Sisters Australia — not as presentations but as turning points.
Her coaching clients are CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, and high-potential leaders who have outgrown the standard coaching playbook. She doesn't use worn-out frameworks. She uses pattern recognition and 360-degree sounding-board strategy, built from her own lived experience in boardrooms, on stage, and in the quiet, difficult work of remaking a life.
“My mission is to open closed minds to let them expand, create, envision and flourish.”
And her story — the Chicago kid who didn't follow the flock, who nearly got fired before building a better system than anyone had, who ran companies across three countries, spoke to 20,000 people at a time, carried a secret for 53 years, transitioned publicly, lost and rebuilt, and is still building — is not a backstory. It is the teaching itself.