Redraw Your Path

The First Time I Bet On Myself | Ep. 023 - Nicole Greene, Part 2

• Lynn Debilzen • Episode 23

Share episode

Join host Lynn Debilzen in Part 2 of this real and raw interview with Nicole Greene on Redraw Your Path! In this interview, Lynn learns about Nicole’s journey from defense and national security, to pastry school and chocolate entrepreneur, to startups and coach of high-performing women. Their conversation touches on:

  • How you will never feel the accumulated successes of your journey if you’re always going and proving, without slowing down
  • The connection between learned helplessness and burnout, and how sometimes it’s impossible to see your own complicity with how you’re feeling
  • The importance of celebrating every moment of awareness that you have on your journey, and your willingness to respond to those moments with gratitude

Tune in for a dynamic discussion on life and growth!

About Nicole:

As an early-stage ops consultant and innovator, I geek out on business model evolution + building systems that scale, with proven success creating and leading product and ops verticals across multiple industries, from artisan chocolates to digital health.

As a performance & lifestyle design coach for women founders and executives, I focus on sustainability not just productivity to help my clients define, pursue and achieve success on their own terms.

I am most alive when I am celebrating women realizing their personal and professional dreams or when I'm spending time on my bike with my guys -- my husband, our two boys and our pup!


Connect with Nicole:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timebydesign/
Get Nicole’s Dream Calendar Setup Guide: https://timebydesign.ck.page/dreamcalendar 

Resources mentioned:

Connect with Lynn:

  • www.redrawyourpath.com
  • www.lynndebilzen.com
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynndebilzen/
Lynn:

Hey friends, I'm Lynn Debilzen and welcome to Redraw Your Path, a podcast where I share stories of people who have made big changes in their lives and forged their own unique paths. I talk with guests about their moments of messiness, fear, and reframing on their way to where they are now. My goal is to inspire you about the shape your life could take. So let's get inspired. Hey, y'all, it's your friend Lynn, and I'm so glad you're here. This week we have part two of an amazing conversation with Nicole Greene. We talked through her 10 year career in national defense, her ventures in pastry school and her experience building a high growth artisan chocolate business. So we talked about all the things and you're not going to want to miss it. Go back to episode 22. You listen to that first and then come back here to hear what happens after Nicole's business hit the front page of the wall street journal, but all she wanted to do was burn everything to the ground. Uh, so this is part two. That was part one. As always, if you're liking the show, please rate and review that helps people find us now on with the show. Enjoy the second part of this conversation with Nicole Green. Okay, so You were ready to fire bomb. You were so out of it. You were like, I'm done with this. what came next? Tell me the next redraw.

Nicole:

So the, fortunately, the Wall Street Journal article brought in a meaningful interest in the business. I had some options at that point and I took the option that got me out. so I sold that product line and closed the rest of the business, there was other things, but the vast majority of the business was around the beer and pretzel line. So I peeled that off, shut the rest down. by the time I closed the kitchen and moved everything, all the equipment out, I was probably eight months pregnant with my now 10 year old. And, I decided to go to B school to business school. I, I'm very academic to some extent, there's part of me, still in the stacks at the U of C library, like writing papers. I wanted to understand why what had worked, worked and why, what hadn't worked, hadn't worked. I was really motivated at, cause at the time I was consulting, other artisan food businesses. and also over time, larger companies and in other industries. But I really wanted to have that foundation of theoretical knowledge again, what is that? I had just successfully built in and, sold off part of, I don't like to say sold the business because I, parts of it were a failure, parts of it were massively successful. And I like to honor both. But, I mean, there's not a chance that the experience that I got in B School was as valuable or impactful as the experience I had in real life building a company, but I needed that, right?

Lynn:

It

Nicole:

gives you

Lynn:

letters, right? Mm-Hmm.

Nicole:

Yeah, proving, right? And of course, here I am, I start B School with a 10 week old. I actually got the call that I had gotten in while I was in labor and took the call. I did that. started when my son was 10 weeks old, had the second child, my, my younger boy in the middle of the program, still graduated with my class. And with honors

Lynn:

Wow.

Nicole:

that's again, like more proving, proving, proving.

Lynn:

And tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm just naming you're your mother's daughter, right? going to law school, having kids in law school. I hope you found a study group that massaged your feet.

Nicole:

I did not.

Lynn:

Oh gosh. Darn

Nicole:

Totally a missed opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. So I did that and, I can't say I would do it again. I made some incredible friends. it was what it was. I don't, I don't want to relive or certainly denigrate, the choice of business school. I think it's the right choice for people for whom it is the right choice. For me, it was another reactive choice, right? I just didn't have the confidence and I didn't have the self knowledge. So I was like, still, I mean, at that point in my late thirties, I'm like still figuring it out. I'm like not, feeling this accumulated knowing or accumulated confidence from all my successes to date, because I was just constantly like proving there was no, there was no filling, and we talked about that. It's, it's never enough. It's never enough if it's not internal. So at that point, I'm a new mom. I loved being a new mom. I increasingly love motherhood, the less dependent my children get, if I'm being honest. but, and I know how I am about work. So I'm like, Oh, let me let my work life and my mom life dovetail. So I was really intentional about looking for a position in the baby category. And I found one, hands down best brand in baby. and That's ultimately what moved me back to Miami against my will, because when I started, having conversations with the company, the VP of marketing at the time was in Chicago. So I was like, Oh, I'll be able to stay here. They've already figured this out and it's okay to be in Chicago. No problem. Like I can co work with that woman. And unbeknownst to me, the CEO at the time was like, planning to recall or bring everybody, all the executives into the home office, which is here in Miami. And at that point, I was so in love with the opportunity that I was like, all right, Phil D, let's do it. So I, we, we relocated the family. My husband, my husband had never lived anywhere but Chicago.

Lynn:

Culture shock.

Nicole:

Totally, totally culture shock. and yeah, we moved down here. I started working at, the baby products company. initially I was hired to do biz dev and strategy. Really early on saw an opportunity to evolve the business model from what was a branded licensing company. They were bringing products from other markets and other countries into the US and it was like an incredible branding and marketing engine. And saw an opportunity with the CEO who was also a mom of young children at the time, to figure out how to do concept to commercialization product development. Neither one of us had ever done it. She was running the company, so she was busy. So I was like, I'll do it. I'll figure it out. You know, me, so ready to prove myself. and I did, we built out a powerhouse product development team across LA and Miami. We had industrial design in Los Angeles product here. I had an incredible team. We ended up putting out like 60 products in two years, totally changed the face of the company and the experience of having, Babies, it was really an incredible experience. And over the course of my four years, at that company, I totally burnt out. there's so many things that I reflect back on about my time there positively. It was the most brilliant and incredible team. I will never have that again they were so smart, so passionate, so driven. but the culture was one where you were always proving yourself. There was really no accumulated benefit of the doubt. You were always starting from ground zero and whatever project you were doing, you were proving that you could do it well enough. And on some level, That was the perfect fit for me. Oh. We're, we're supposed to prove ourselves. Like I can do that. Like I, but I ended up like proving myself right off a cliff and I really, over time in that pursuit of proving, proving, proving, I made the rest of myself so small that I eventually like that flame, everything else that I cared about and who I was. Even the parts that I didn't really know, just completely, went away. And I felt like I was a shell of a human being. I mean, I, I just was going through the motions, still proving by the way, Got the promotions, got the awards, the accolades, my team hit our metal marks and hit the goals every time. but I was really like dying inside.

Lynn:

how did you know that that is what was happening?

Nicole:

because I was literally dying inside,

Lynn:

Okay, were you having physical ailments and everything.

Nicole:

a hundred percent. I think the things that really stand out to me the most were I was not emotionally available for my kids, which is so hard to admit, but also so important to admit I love those guys so much. And I love being their mom. one of my core values has always been, or not core values, but like the point of working hard, I would have told you, was for your lived priorities and your actual priorities to be the same. And when I looked up, I was like, holy crap, like my lived priorities, like what I am doing on a day to day basis is so freaking far from what I would tell you is most important to me that it's not even recognizable. I was not recognizable to the me I wanted to be. Not even close. So it was that, and then, I had started to pull away from my relationships, my relationships or my approach became very transactional, I was so obsessed with efficiency, and, I would, I said things like, efficiency is my love language, and I said, I'm a machine, like, this is how I was talking about myself. And it was like, if something was unpredictable, oh, God forbid, I should stand there and talk to someone because I can't control how much time that conversation is going to take. again, that's a way that I made myself so small. I withdrew from anything I couldn't control. I was so underwater. From a situation that I created, right? This desperation to prove myself meant that every second of the day, I had to be extracting the most possible value from, so I was totally obsessed with that doing, and I lost myself. There's no coexistence between living and doing at that level, right? You can't. So that's how it felt. And then to, you asked about physical stuff, and this is true for, Every woman I coach, the body, not only, but does the body keep the score, which if you haven't read that book, I, my copy is so dog eared, it's disintegrating. It's so true. but the body will also yell at you if you ignore the whispers. And in my case, like my whole GI system was like, nope, we're out, I'm done. But I have clients who have developed fibroids, who've gone into adrenal failure. Chronic migraines, like whatever it is, our, we are so good at working our bodies close to death as women, right? It's body denial, body denial that. And for me, it was like a total dissociation. I just wasn't even acknowledging that my body could have needs

Lynn:

Yeah,

Nicole:

just so preoccupied with doing the work,

Lynn:

yeah. And it's just, it sounds like just an annoyance at that point. the fact that your GI system was trying to tell you something, it's just go away. It's an annoyance. And, and I'm hearing a lot of truths, too, that are somewhat, I wouldn't say contradictory, but it sounds like you had to hold a lot of things to be true at that time, The truth was, you know how to work hard. You're putting one foot in front of the other. You are doing the work and you are like proving yourself and really succeeding at that based on measuring one form of success. And then I also heard the truth of, you said I created this for myself. So there's some sort of I don't know if it's guilt or knowing of oh, I've been doing this to myself. What is wrong with me? Like, why is this happening? And then there's also the realization of my actions and my goals are not Aligning. And so holding all of that at one time is a lot.

Nicole:

it was. So I was only holding two of those things. So I knew about the non alignment. Because it was literally undeniable. I was a shell of a person. I mean, my parents, we would like, I was completely just empty. We would go out to dinner. My parents were like worried, which is weird because usually they're like, Oh, she's rushing me. She wants me working really hard. That's good. But even they were like, Oh, maybe too much. so the alignment was undeniable. The, what, what happens is in burnout, there's this experience of learned helplessness. is you lose the ability or the knowing that you can change it. So at that time I was not aware of my complicity in the way that I am now. I remember I like very clearly one night I was in tears at my kitchen counter. Like I, Felt so stuck and I said, I can't even, I don't even have time to look for a job or to update my resume. How could I ever look for a job? Like, how am I going to get myself out of this? It was, I knew I had to for my own survival and I had no idea how to do that. I, I was like, so stuck in that experience of helplessness that I was, Paralyzed by it. And, you, again, it's this, I always, the example for me of learned helplessness or the, the illustration of it is, you're mopping, mopping, mopping, mopping, desperately mopping to avoid drowning, instead of walking over to the faucet and turning it off.

Lynn:

Mm, yeah,

Nicole:

you don't even have awareness of your ability or your agency to turn the faucet off because you're so desperately mopping, right? Where do we get into survival mode and we're like trying to stay alive. We're on the hamster wheel or we're paddling desperately for our lives and it overrides. This agency, right? The learned helplessness and the agency are incompatible, which is why, when I work with clients who are in burnout, I work to cultivate that agency first. Because when you realize that you have the ability to choose, even if it's claiming A 10 minute pocket in your day for yourself, that seeds the knowing. It's oh, it's turns back on that part of your brain. It's wait a minute, I'm not helpless. I just did something for 10 minutes. And then that is a stepping stone back to the reality in which you can choose, make bigger choices for yourself. That, that part of it wasn't there. I was in the learn helplessness. What, ultimately what happened was I didn't have to resolve that for myself in the moment. I was offered an opportunity to co found a health technology company at the beginning stages of COVID. And when I took it, and I knew enough at that point to know that I needed to create the boundaries in that role that I hadn't been able to create in the prior role. And I. Remember this one night where it was like 7. 30, 7 o'clock, whatever. I had finished whatever I was doing for work. And I'm like, again, the default behavior to just go on to the next work task. And I heard my family, playing a board game downstairs. And I realized this was, we talked about earlier, that moment of awareness. I realized that I was making a choice to keep working.

Lynn:

Mm.

Nicole:

And that triggered two things. One, I knew at that point that I was complicit in the burnout

Lynn:

Mm hmm.

Nicole:

making a series of choices to keep working.

Lynn:

Mm hmm. Even in the new job where you had the opportunity to recreate those boundaries.

Nicole:

Correct. I had done it to a certain extent, but it's 7 30. What the hell am I doing starting something new? Like my kids are downstairs, right? And so then once I had the awareness of what I was choosing, I had the ability to choose differently. And I closed my computer And that was the start of my journey back to myself.

Lynn:

So beautiful. That moment where you closed your computer, went to play the board game. I'm curious what board game it was that summoned you. Do you remember the game?

Nicole:

I don't. I would guess it was Sorry back then. But this was early COVID and we're all about board games in my family. so it could have been life. Sorry. now, we play a ton of Rummy Cube. but you know, whatever, whatever it was, it was my kiddos.

Lynn:

Yeah. And they were having fun and, and you wanted to be there. You went and played that board game, but you also said that was the beginning of finding yourself, so tell me how you redrew your path from there, or what knowings came out of that moment?

Nicole:

Yeah. So the first thing I did was I got a therapist for the first time in my life.

Lynn:

my gosh, good for you!

Nicole:

I had lunch with my mom last week. God bless her. She's amazing. She said, We really should have sent you to therapy.

Lynn:

Maybe once, at least one or two sessions.

Nicole:

I was like, that's amazing awareness. I'll take it. You know what I mean? That's, that's really their version because they, they haven't done the work and that shows up in their lives. And that's not none of my business, but I love that she was like, Oh, we probably should have started that a little sooner. I'm like, thanks mom. Yeah. I started working with a therapist, the first thing, and I, I am such a believer in this, duality and again, head-led. My therapist, I remember in our first conversation asked me where I probably, you know, the feeling wheel that like the mature feeling has I don't know, 62 wedges of different emotions, right? I probably at that point had awareness of three, like I was Emotionally detached, unaware, dissociated. I was not feeling anything. I was so in my head and so out of my body and so out of my heart to keep going at the level that I was going at. and I remember she was like, where do you feel that in your body? And I was like, what the fuck are you even asking me? what does that mean? What is she talking about? What do you, what do you, what do you mean, where do I feel it? what kind of ridiculous question is that? I had no idea. And I think she got, she got it. So what she had me do at first was to focus on building awareness around pride.

Lynn:

Mm,

Nicole:

where I felt proud of how I was showing up. Because at that point, I was really steeped in shame, right? That's the, that's inextricably linked from the feeling of not being good enough is you're ashamed.

Lynn:

Mm hmm,

Nicole:

We're all walking around with a ton of shame, whether we're present in it or aware of it or, or actively motivated by it or not. If you believe you're not good enough, you are carrying around a ton of shame attached to that feeling. They are the same. Okay. So my therapist in that same conversation said, what's the opposite of shame? Obviously I had no idea, but she said pride. I was like, oh, pride. Got it. I started to work on cultivating pride. And as I started to do that, the shame got crowded out, right? And that was like, I understood. And again, once my brain clicks in, I'm good. I'm off and running that I could retrain my brain. That's when I really understood neuroplasticity and the ability to make choices that become new neural pathways, new defaults, right? And that is Oh my God, so powerful. I was like, wow, it was life changing. So that was really like very early on in my journey. And I'm really grateful to, to the woman that I work with, who approached it in a way that was accessible for me. Because like I said earlier, we could have stayed stuck in that feeling conversation forever. I wasn't going to get anywhere. I just bad, bad, glad, like that. We're back to the basics, but she really found a way to help me help myself, that was head led first. now I can talk about emotions all day long and, I'm like gifting Atlas of the Heart for, I don't know if you know, Brene's book, I try to gift that to literally everyone. I'm like, this thing is amazing and it helps you have words for the nuances of different things that you're feeling. But anyway, so I started to do. to do that work on myself and really to do the trauma recovery, because partly it was like, okay, I've got to recover from this burnout and show up in my life in a better way or none of that judgment. I show up in my life in a more embodied way. And I've got 30 years of unresolved trauma to recover from. I have to deal with that too. So it was a little bit like a, A start, stop with that and just like progress, progress. so while I'm doing that, I am co founding this health technology company and two years in, a couple of things happened. I realized that there was a clash between my job and the work that I was, and. That was an interesting thing that I didn't fully understand until later. But what, but so in the moment, what happened was I realized that there was a clash between my job and my work. I knew the work was the thing. I was finally ready. I had made enough progress and had enough awareness that I was ready to take a big bet on myself. And I knew that I, it's like, if I don't come back to life now or like fully step into myself now, it's never going to happen. And part of it was like, I saw this profound transformation, not just with myself, but in my children, my younger son in particular, is like a mirror. of me. Not in the sense that he's not his own person, but in a sense that my older son is on the spectrum. And so things filter through him in his own way. And with my younger son, it's like more, I feel anxiety and think anyone can die at any moment. And he internalizes the anxiety. That anyone can die at any moment. There's really no kind of filtering in which things get different. And so by extension, or conversely, when I started showing up in my life in a more embodied, confident, present, empowered, positive, emotional way. He did. His posture changed, Lynn. I'm not kidding. I, he, he was showing up as a completely different person. And the way that I was showing up for him was having such a profound impact on how he could show up for himself. That I was like, Oh, A billion percent, this is what I'm here to do. there could not possibly be anything more important than me staying on the path that gets him on this path,

Lynn:

Yeah.

Nicole:

It's like breaking the generational cycle.

Lynn:

Yeah. Is that what you meant by the realization that your job was different from your work?

Nicole:

No,

Lynn:

Okay.

Nicole:

I'll get, I'll get back to you. Okay. in the immediate moment, it was my job and my work are clashing. I had a sense of that, which I'll circle back to in a second. And the reason I was able to choose the work, meaning the work on myself was I saw how impactful the work was being. And it was one thing for it to be totally transformative for my own life. That was amazing enough, but to see the impact that it was having on the kids was like, okay, this is where I need to be. The clash was different. as I was doing the work, the, Fragility of my self identity was very real. I was rediscovering myself and developing an identity outside of work, outside of my work self. Because I had, first of all, always prioritized work because it gave me a context in which to prove, but then over the course of that burnout journey, I had made any semblance of self outside of work so freaking small that it had gone away. So now I'm rebuilding this self that exists separate from work, and I was aware of the fragility or like the newness of it, and suddenly my work identity started to collapse. Those were two separate things. The work identity started to collapse because the culture that I was in, I was like the white sheep of the, of the startup. I was outside of the culture, really from the beginning. I was the fifth founder. On a founding team of five, the other four had worked together, and done the prior version of the startup. but like you said, this is not How I Built This. So I'm not going to get into the business journey, but I was brought in for the purpose of doing what I do, which is build things really effectively and fast. And I'm good at pairing with visionary founders that, have this. Desire to have an impact and purpose in the world and but don't quite know how to actually do that and I can do it right but there were four of them in one of me and never in my entire professional life had I struggled to be impactful but because of that that cultural dynamic where it turned out I was the only one that was ready to really buckle down and and Go for it. do the work that had to be done to make the vision real. I was not able to drive culture in the way that was needed to make the business successful. so I had never in my professional struggle to be impactful and It was like, oh, I have relied on the strength of my work identity at that point for three decades. And that identity was fracturing because I wasn't able to get my job done for the first time ever. I couldn't get these people to do anything. Also, my self identity was so nascent at that stage. I was just starting to rebuild it. And I felt oh. If I let this part of my identity collapse because I'm throwing my body into a wall over and over again trying to get my co founders to go, I'm going to collapse.

Lynn:

Yeah.

Nicole:

It was like, I chose, I was like, I felt that tension. Like I'm going to, this is going to be another burnout experience and one that I may not be able to survive in the same way, is that, I know that's dramatic, but that's what it felt like to me at the time was like, I, I felt like I was going to lose myself.

Lynn:

Yeah. Well, and can I ask a question there, Nicole, is going back to the work you were doing with your therapist and her teaching you how to feel pride. Were you feeling any sense of pride in terms of I'm proud. I realized that this is the path that was going on. I realized. burnout before it got to a point.

Nicole:

Yes, I celebrate the crap out of every moment of awareness to this day. It's such an important part of it. And yes, I was like, Oh my God, I know what I need. I care about what I need. Like it was, I was aware that this was a completely new thing. And for me to walk away from something and, and not having succeeded at it. because I always like, as we talked about, I had that pattern of being super successful and impactful and impressive and then jetting to the next thing, but I never considered leaving before I had proven.

Lynn:

Mm hmm.

Nicole:

know, this was literally the first time where I went out not at the top. and yes, I felt so proud of the work that I was doing and how it was reflected in the kids. I I knew, cause I had a conversation. One of the things that brought me back to life is I used to do sunrise bike rides with my best friend a couple days a week. And I mean, she really, really. I can't even say enough about how impactful that those conversations were, but, people always felt like I was betting on myself, like willing to take these risks and go to health tech, go to pastry school, go to, they didn't, nobody understood what was really going on there and neither did I at the time. That was the first time I really bet on myself. That was the first time that I made a decision for myself to protect myself, to serve myself, to honor myself. That was it. And yes, I was very proud of my, my therapist was like, Oh, like a little dramatic, but okay. but great. once it clicks, I'm like, I know what I need to do. And I did it and then reported back. I have a tendency to like. be really decisive and then catch people up later. but I knew, and it was a hundred percent the right decision. And so that like really the best and first thing I ever really did for myself.

Lynn:

Yeah. Was leaving your job and, and can I assume were you leaving your job without a plan at that time? Mm

Nicole:

not only that, I mean, it's absurd. It's like insane because I'm also the single income earner in our family. we, we have a pretty expensive kid, two, and because life is expensive, but you know, one of my boys has extensive therapy, and it was a huge insane risk on some level. I didn't know what I was, what I knew was I've been giving myself 18 months, I'm not going to worry about income for 18 months. All I'm going to worry about is that I get to the end of this and I know myself and I am healed. That I have integrated the trauma, that I am showing up in my whole life as my whole self, that I love that self, that it is me. And I knew that if I could do that, I could do whatever was ahead of me. Because it's not part of it is, once I got through, like I had the realization, I'm still the high performer, high achiever, hard worker that I've always been, That's just as much a part of me. It's just like, where am I pointing that now? And what are the trade offs that I'm making consciously versus what am I sacrificing in a default capacity? So I just had that knowing, like I'm going to show up for myself and whatever. Whatever I do at the end of that 18 months will be my path, will be. And sure enough, here we are, you know,

Lynn:

the 18 months, right? Mm-Hmm?

Nicole:

yeah, yeah. and that was hard. That, it's hard to do the work. there's a moment in the journey that I don't think gets talked about enough. which is where the scaffolding of your old operating system at a certain point collapses. I picture it like a Jenga tower, right? You're taking blocks out, you're examining them, you're like, oh, that's why I did that thing. That didn't make any sense at the time, but okay, now I get it. Now I get it. I'm discovering, right? And then at a certain point, there's not enough there that you can believe in it anymore, right? Because your operating system is a system of beliefs. That, enable you to show up in your life in a certain way. At a certain point, the scaffolding of that operating system collapses. And the new operating system isn't fully online yet. And you're like a ball of nerves. That's how it felt to me. I, I felt so vulnerable and I didn't know what I was supposed to be. I could feel that I was not the same person anymore, but I didn't quite exactly know who I was all the way yet. And that transition point was really, it was very, intense. Those words are, don't mean anything. What, what can I say that will bring it to life? I felt like, it's almost, it's, it's messed up that it feels better to be certain of a belief system that's wrong for you than it feels to be in charge of your own belief system.

Lynn:

Yes. Yes. Or at the precipice

Nicole:

Like, oh, that religion. Yeah. It's like you, you, you have abandoned this religion, this set of beliefs, it no longer serves, but okay, what do I believe in? Like what,

Lynn:

Yeah.

Nicole:

the present, exactly.

Lynn:

Yeah, it's that certainness and that almost like that sense of control, like I have this one down, right? Like I know because it's The default. There's no questions about what I believe over here. But once that's gone, or once you start to inspect everything and start to go underneath through all the layers, it's oh, but now I can't, it's that awareness

Nicole:

Yes.

Lynn:

brings choice and awareness, brings that power to change it.

Nicole:

The default to no longer, you can't do it anymore.

Lynn:

Yeah, and, and some people choose to, and, that probably doesn't work out that well, right? But, you can stay in that space, or you can choose to do the work and build block by block a new operating system. I love, I love that term. so through that 18 months, was it really hard to not go back to that default? I'm picturing myself and. I have a hard time saying no to like joining this board or being in this community group or like being active. even if it's not like doing work, right? I know you love startups and working with startups. if it were me, I would be like, There's this event here and this event here. Did you have a hard time not slipping into that?

Nicole:

Yes. I made the worst decision of all the decisions during that phase, which is I was very nervous. what was it? Maybe four months in, I felt. yeah, nervous of not having clarity yet. of not having income. I mean, even though I had told myself like, okay, 18 months, don't, don't let yourself think about it. It's obviously scary. or feels absurd, like absurdly risky or indulgent in a way that I wasn't comfortable with. And I ended up, getting pulled into another startup. And I, at the time felt My role was going to be very bounded. I consciously was like, okay, this is going to be a 10 hour a week commitment because of the way my role was designed and it turned out not to be and I let that happen. I, again, I was like, oh, I don't want to disappoint. It was whatever the, the rationale was about anything other than me and what I was supposed to be doing at the time. But again, I, I had the awareness, maybe took a little longer than I wish it had, but I just got myself out of it. And I said, I, I can't do this. I'm out. and that's when the real, There was that phase where I really wasn't making as much progress and that's where I feel the loss because that time was so sacred and I squandered some of it on going back to my old default patterns. But to some extent that's how the new patterns get entrenched. and then once I got out of that, it was like, okay, let's go. And I went all the way in and. did like deeper work and got to the space where I was fully, vulnerable and processing, and I explored different modalities of healing, meditation, yoga. There's still work that I'm doing. I mean, the new frontier for me is my autobiographical memory. sucks. It hasn't come back online yet. I don't remember much of my childhood before I was 13, like in terms of real details and that's important to me. so I'm working on that and continuing the journey and 20 years from now I'm gonna slip to An old default, right? It's not about not slipping. It's about how quickly do you come back online? I, I work with my, my clients on something. I call it cycle time. It's a, a concept borrowed from lean manufacturing, which is like, how much time does it take to produce one unit of something? In this case, it's a unit of personal growth. So it's okay, you, you fallen back into an old pattern. it's awareness, it's acceptance, adjustment, realignment, you're back. How long does that take? And every time it gets faster and faster. and so that's, that's, and again, every time I celebrate it, big,

Lynn:

Yeah. Yeah.

Nicole:

it's such an important piece of reinforcing the behavior.

Lynn:

I love that. I love that. And I think it's, it's, critical to have the awareness of the time piece. I'm curious, Nicole, would you have any advice for folks who are considering redrawing their path or what advice would you be giving? And I, I like heard a ton of advice already, but what, what advice would you give to folks?

Nicole:

Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I'm a huge proponent of redrawing your path.

Lynn:

hmm.

Nicole:

Conceptually, philosophically, yes. I consider myself in this whole conversation a cautionary tale. because if you redraw your path within the context of the chase, within that, with that compulsion to prove, and that's the, that's the motivation, no matter what path you draw, It's never going to be your own.

Lynn:

hmm. Mm

Nicole:

It's not going to be right. If it's motivated by proving, or reacting to, or defaulting to, it's not, it's not the right move, or maybe you'll stumble into something that feels right, but the right thing is to find yourself and find that value within yourself. So I think it's so important to do that work, and it's, again, it's, it's hard work to do, but so valuable, and then I think, so how do you know, I guess, is the question, right, ask yourself, what are you trying to prove? And really be honest, ask yourself what you're reacting to. Really that awareness is so valuable and so magical. if you take anything from this, really, it's that I never gave myself the time to do the work until I did.

Lynn:

Mm

Nicole:

Okay, so the default is to the rush, the decision, let's go and it's this, a new title or more money, whatever. If you pursue that path, the success will never be fulfilling because there isn't enough that could ever fill that void. so giving yourself the time to do the work and to understand what's motivating because I think if I had taken the time at those different intervals that we talked about where I rushed. I could have developed the awareness much earlier and avoided the redraws that ended up not serving me.

Lynn:

Mm hmm. Yeah.

Nicole:

the advice is take the time. It's so hard.

Lynn:

It's hard. Yeah. I think it's hard when you're living in this, very complex life and there's so many demands placed on you, but I 100 percent agree with that. And, and recently came with my therapist to the realization that by giving myself time now, or in the last two years of my journey, it's actually me claiming the time that I wanted to be given. in my younger life when I had so desperately asked for that time. Like, I want a semester off. I want to figure it out. And it's, time is the only thing, and time is the biggest gift. you can give yourself to do the work.

Nicole:

I love that. Thank you for sharing that. It really is. Yeah.

Lynn:

yeah, we have to claim it for ourselves because no one else is going to, right? And even the people who want the best for us, they're not going to claim it for us. So

Nicole:

Yeah.

Lynn:

thank you. That's really beautiful advice. can you share where people can find you and is there anything, you want to promote or share with listeners?

Nicole:

yeah, thanks for asking. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I post there on a regular basis, daily right now. I'm gonna turn that down a little bit over the summer to spend some extra time with my boys. I, I have a newsletter called Time by Design. I also am available for coaching or workshops, around those three pillars that I mentioned, the, work life integration, habits for healthy high performance, and mindset management. all of those paths are available, in the featured section on my LinkedIn profile. And then also there, I have something called the Dream Calendar Setup Guide. it's very rare that I have a conversation that lasts as long where I don't start geeking out on calendaring because it's like completely my passion. but I it's a way to set up your dream calendar the way you would build your dream home from the outside in. So you build your exterior walls and your interior walls first, which are built around your non negotiable commitments that reflect your professional life. And your personal life. That's the only way to to get the integration is to make sure that both of those, identities are reflected in your calendar, in your priority list, in your boundaries, etc. And then appliances and furniture. It's a whole thing. Anyway, that's available there as well. and yeah, that's the best path to reach me, in all the different ways.

Lynn:

Awesome. And I'll include those links in the show notes. And I love the metaphor of the house and the appliances and everything. It's very, very cool. And, and I have your guide and I've spent some time with it and then I needed time to reflect and now I need to spend some more time with it, but I'm really excited

Nicole:

I love it. Somebody wrote to me the other day. I was like, that took me three hours, but it's amazing. I'm like, yeah, it's an undertaking. It's a, it's an undertaking, but it's so worth it.

Lynn:

Yeah, definitely, definitely. I want to thank you, Nicole, for sharing your story with listeners. I'm so excited, for people to hear your journey, and, I encourage listeners to reach out, connect with Nicole, and, yeah, thank you.

Nicole:

Thank you.

Lynn:

Thanks for listening to Redraw Your Path with me, Lynn Debilzen. If you like the episode, please rate and review. That helps more listeners find me. And don't be shy, reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn and sign up for my e-newsletter at redrawyourpath.com. I can't wait to share more inspiring stories with you. See you next week.