Meet Hannah Cohen, founder of The Insight Coach.
Two days after standing up at a networking event and telling a room full of strangers her story, Hannah Cohen won Hidden Disability Personality of the Year 2026. It is the kind of turnaround that sounds almost too neat for real life. But nothing about Hannah’s journey has followed a neat path. Eight-plus years a widow. Six-plus years visually impaired. Twenty-plus years a solicitor. Living with ADHD. And now, the founder of The Insight Coach, helping businesses understand the disabilities they cannot see.
Hannah’s story is not one of a single dramatic turning point. It is one of several. A childhood built on kindness. A career chosen for practicality rather than passion. A husband who went out for a run one day and never came home. A genetic condition that took her sight almost overnight. And, out of all of it, a business built entirely on helping other people feel less alone in their own struggles.
A Normal Childhood, Built on Kindness
Ask Hannah where her story begins and she goes back to the beginning, quite literally, to streets full of neighbours and an ordinary, happy childhood. “I feel like it was quite normal,” she says. “Just went out, played in the streets with all my neighbours. Not that people do that these days, but I was happy. I had loving parents.”
Her parents divorced when she was twelve, but rather than describing it as a wound, Hannah remembers it almost fondly. “I found it quite fun having two different houses to go to.” What stayed with her most was her mother. “My mum especially is one of the kindest people you’ll ever know, and I think that really just was something that I took from growing up the most.”
That inheritance of kindness has become one of the two values Hannah says she has built her adult life around, the other being authenticity. “I always try and be kind, but authenticity is like my main value,” she explains, “especially through what life’s brought me. I just think if you can’t be honest and you can’t be your true self, then what’s the point? Life is so short. You’ve got to be able to be who you are and enjoy what you want.”
It is a value she believes has become rarer, not more common, in the years since she was a teenager trying to fit in. “Growing up as a teenager, you want to be like everyone else, and you don’t want to be different. And I think the older you get, you realise that actually different is brilliant.”
Law Was Never the Plan
Like a lot of people leaving school, Hannah had no burning ambition pulling her in one direction. “Everyone in my social circle was doing the same thing. Finish school, go to university. What do you do at university? I don’t know. What do you like? Nothing particularly. I didn’t have a clue.”
The decision that shaped the next two decades of her working life was not born from passion. It was born from opportunity. Her uncle ran a law firm and made her an offer. “My uncle had a law firm and said, ‘Do law, I’ll give you a job.’ So I said okay, and that’s just how it worked.” She is candid about what law meant to her from the start. “I would never say law was my passion. Well, it definitely was not my passion. Finally, I found my passion, which I’m so happy about. But yeah, law was a job, and it was a good job, but I never particularly loved it.”
For the next twenty years, Hannah moved in and out of high-street law firms, balancing the work around raising her two children, who are now in their late teens. In one of those gaps, while her children were small, she discovered an unexpected creative streak. “When my kids were very little, I didn’t work, and I thought, I wonder if there’s something I can do so that when they’re slightly older and I go back to work, I don’t have to be a solicitor anymore.” She retrained in web design, taught herself using Dreamweaver, and ran her own small business for a few years. “It was fine,” she says, “but tech grew, and I didn’t.” Eventually, she made the decision to return to law rather than keep learning a fast-moving trade. “I just sort of thought, no, I’m going to go back to law. So that’s what happened.”
The law work itself was never glamorous. She spent time in personal injury, which she describes bluntly as “not exciting,” before later moving into conveyancing after a family tragedy reshaped her priorities. “I just needed something quite nine to five,” she says of that period. “Not exciting.”
A Devastating Loss
That family tragedy was the death of Hannah’s husband, who collapsed and died suddenly while out on a run. It is, understandably, the hardest part of her story to put into words, even now. “It’s hard to even, it’s like a blurred dream,” she says. “I don’t think I was, it was in such shock for so long. I don’t know really how I dealt with it at the time.”
What carried her through, she says, was not any grand coping strategy but the people around her and the sheer necessity of showing up for her children. “Thankfully I had amazing friends and family around me, and I had to get out of bed every day for the kids, and somehow we got through it. Now I can look back on memories and just be really happy. But yeah, I actually have no idea how I managed that time.”
Returning to work became part of how she rebuilt a sense of normal life. “I needed something for me, something to fill the day that wasn’t thinking about anything about life,” she says. “I really loved going into the office. This was just not long before COVID, where I could actually just connect with people and spend time with people, chatting about nonsense, and do a bit of work.”
Then Her Sight Changed Overnight
Just as Hannah had found her feet again, a second life-altering event arrived, this time affecting her body rather than her circumstances. During the early stages of the COVID pandemic, while still working in the office, she began noticing something was wrong with one of her eyes. “I sort of mentioned to my friend, who’s my optician, I said, ‘I think there’s something wrong with my eye, I can’t see out of it properly.’ And she went, ‘I think you need to come and see me.’ I was like, really? I’m sure it’s nothing.”
That conversation was the start of what she calls a long, six-month journey of tests and hospital visits. A few months after her first eye was affected, her second eye deteriorated too. Eventually, she was diagnosed with a genetic condition that causes the optic nerves to fail, one she had never known she carried. “It’s a condition where your optic nerves basically die,” she explains. “I then found out I had this condition where it can just trigger. It’s a genetic thing, and it happened to me.”
Hannah is now registered blind, though she is quick to point out the things she can still do. “I feel lucky because I can walk around and generally do most things without help.” What she does struggle with, and wants people to understand, is recognising faces. “I always feel like I want everyone in the room to know that, because I come to these events most months and I don’t recognise anyone. So if anyone knows me or has said hi to me and I don’t recognise you, I’m very sorry. That’s the one thing I do struggle with: I don’t recognise people.”
It is also, she notes, an entirely invisible condition to anyone who doesn’t already know. Even wearing the sunflower lanyard introduced during the pandemic to signal a hidden disability did not make things obvious to people around her. “No one’s going to say, ‘Oh, you’re visually impaired, I can tell.’ You don’t know.”
Feeling Excluded at Work
Returning to her job as a solicitor after her diagnosis was, in her own word, “impossible.” The tools designed to help her, screen readers that spoke aloud what was on her monitor, made the kind of focused, fast-paced document work her role demanded almost unworkable. “The computer at work talked to me. If you read documents for work, you’ll know that you sort of scan through them, and a whole document being read in your ear, I just found impossible because I couldn’t focus. It was so boring because you couldn’t just scan for the bits that you wanted. I just thought, I can’t do this.”
Nobody around her was unkind, she is careful to stress, but the absence of small gestures created a quiet sense of being on the outside of her own workplace. “I don’t think anyone was intentionally mean in the slightest, but it was just really small things. It would have been great if people would have said, ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ Because I really felt different afterwards.”
One example stuck with her in particular: the discomfort of not being introduced to new colleagues. “I’d say to my boss, can you tell everyone who’s new that I’m visually impaired, because otherwise they might look at me and nod or wave or smile, and I won’t know, and then I feel really rude. That is something that maybe I struggle with more than I need to, worrying that people think I’m rude.”
The frustrations were not confined to the office. Hannah describes the now-familiar experience of being handed a card reader in a coffee shop or bar and having to explain herself to a stranger simply to pay for a drink. “I can’t use touchscreens unless they talk out loud, so I have to say, sorry, I’m visually impaired, I can’t read the screen. And it’s really embarrassing. It’s not that I mind saying I’m visually impaired, but every time I’m buying a drink, I’m like, why does that have to be this barrier? It’s not necessary.”
Even the platforms designed to help her are unreliable. Hannah recalls a recent morning when LinkedIn’s screen-reader function simply stopped announcing her notifications. “These things are constantly happening. A website updates, an app updates, and all of a sudden something doesn’t work. That’s unfortunately how things are with accessibility. One day something works, next day it doesn’t, and vice versa.”
Walking Away From Law
Deciding that law, and office life more broadly, was no longer the right fit was not a single dramatic decision but a slow process of asking questions and talking to people she trusted. “I wasn’t exactly sure, and I didn’t do it in one fell swoop. I was asking friends and chatting to loads of people, trying to work out what I could do and what might be good.”
The suggestion that eventually pointed her toward her new career came from the people who knew her best. “Lots of people kept saying to me, ‘You should be a resilience coach, you’re like the most resilient person I know.’ And I’m like, I don’t even know what that is.” Curious, she spoke to coaches and therapists before enrolling on a personal and business coaching course. Learning to coach others, she says, became a process of learning to understand herself. “Through the coaching process of learning to be a coach, you learn to coach yourself, and that’s when I started to understand myself better, started to put boundaries in, and really understand what I wanted out of life.”
That process of self-discovery pointed her toward the area where she had struggled the most and, she realised, where she could help others the most too. “I realised that I wanted to help people who were struggling, mostly in the workplace, because that’s where I struggled most. Also just through life’s challenges.”
The Birth of The Insight Coach
The moment it all came together was not in a boardroom but in a single workshop Hannah offered to a friend’s company. “I went into a company, right at the beginning, a friend’s company, and just said, can I do a workshop about hidden disabilities? Because I think this is where I’d like to do some work.”
She put the session together herself, delivered it, and knew immediately she had found what she had been looking for. “I just loved it, and I loved the feedback I was getting and the chats I was having with the people in the room. It was all about people understanding other people’s hidden disabilities, understanding what hidden disabilities are, and how teams can work best together, regardless of what other people are struggling with. Doing that really cemented it for me.”
Today, The Insight Coach offers one-to-one coaching for individuals and professionals navigating workplace or life challenges, alongside workshops covering hidden disabilities, resilience and neurodiversity. The scale of the need, Hannah says, is bigger than most people realise. “Twenty per cent of people in the workforce have a disability. Eighty per cent of those will have a hidden disability.”
What Businesses Get Wrong
Ask Hannah what companies most often get wrong about inclusion and her answer is strikingly simple. It is not about grand policy, but about one basic question that so rarely gets asked. “I think the main thing is just not asking what someone needs from the outset,” she says. “An employer could ask someone, what do you need to work at your best? That is a very small question, but it is so big to someone who might need a small adjustment.”
She speaks from a position that combines professional insight with personal experience. As the parent of neurodivergent children, she hopes the next generation will find it easier to speak up for themselves than she did. “I’ve got neurodivergent children, and I hope that when they’re in the workplace, they’ll be able to advocate for what they need.” For those who cannot yet do that for themselves, she believes the responsibility shifts to the people around them, to notice, to ask, and not to assume. “It’s just being curious and not assuming, because you never know what someone’s struggling with or what they’re dealing with.”
Redefining Resilience
If there is one word that follows Hannah everywhere, on LinkedIn headlines, in the mouths of friends who nudged her toward coaching, it is resilience. But her own definition of the word pushes back against the version most people carry around in their heads.
“Resilience is not something you just learn or get and then you’ve got it,” she says. “Resilience is just about working through things and trying to harness things that are helpful to you, even like self-care, getting out in nature every day, just things like that, they can really help you with your resilience. So there are lots of things you can do, but it’s not just something you get and then you’ve got it. I still have to work on it constantly.”
It is a fitting note to end on for a woman whose life has been defined less by any single triumphant comeback and more by a series of quiet, ongoing choices: to get out of bed for her children, to ask for a workplace introduction rather than suffer in silence, to turn a genetic diagnosis into the foundation of a business built on empathy. Hannah Cohen has not simply bounced back from what life has thrown at her. She has grown forward, one small, deliberate step at a time, and she is now spending her working life helping other people learn to do the same.
Hannah Cohen is the founder of The Insight Coach, offering one-to-one coaching and workplace workshops on hidden disabilities, resilience and neurodiversity. She can be found at theinsightcoach.com and across LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
With over 80 attendees, Smiley Happy People continues to be a standout networking event in Altrincham, bringing together inspiring speakers like Hannah who share their real-world insights and practical advice. A big thank you to Hannah for this engaging talk, and to all the attendees who make these events so impactful!
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