Interview with Nikki Innocent - Leaders in Conversation
Thank you, Nikki Innocent, for joining me for this last episode of our Leaders in Conversation series. Nikki and I talk about challenging the status quo, releasing expectations placed upon us, and leading your best life. [Transcript]
Nikki Innocent is a keynote speaker, humanity activist, and social entrepreneur with a focus on women’s leadership and diversity and inclusion.
She hosts the podcast Checkbox Other that explores the experience of being an "other," the dynamics of belonging and the process of embracing your authentic self. Nikki's mission is to bring people together through shared humanity and story while challenging the status quo, confronting and dismantling divisive rhetoric, and shining a light on how we can each lean into our strengths to lead our best lives.
You can reach Nikki Innocent online on her website (https://www.nikkiinnocent.com) and as @NikkiInnocent on social media.
What Are The Expectations You’Re Disrupting?
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Transcript
[Beth Wonson] Hey, it's Beth and today I'm joined by someone who I just met, have been introduced to through my friend Lindsay Pera, who you heard a couple podcasts ago. And the person I'm talking to is Nikki Innocent and I love her last name. We were just talking about that. Nikki is a trailblazing entrepreneur. She's really focused on women's leadership, diversity, and inclusion, and she hosts her own podcast called "Checkbox Other". I love that title. Nikki's done some TED talks that you can find by searching online and those are really focused on self-acceptance, self care, and breaking the rules we live by, one of my favorite topics. Nicki loves to question the status quo and push us all towards more connectivity in our lives and our work. Welcome Nikki.
[Nikki Innocent] Oh my goodness. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
[BW] I am so glad to have you. Why don't you just give us a little bit about sort of your bio, your background, how you got to where you are today.
Yes. You know, you did a wonderful job of where I am today. So I'll start from the beginnin-ish. You know, it's not going to be a full bio, it'd be a long book. I am a a biracial woman and so I grew up with a little biracial girl in Connecticut. My father is a Haitian immigrant and my mother is from long Island, New York. She is a blonde hair, blue-eyed white lady. And I should say, I could already hear her rolling her eyes at that description. I grew up in Connecticut, had two incredibly loving parents who got divorced when I was pretty young. So I lived kind of that latchkey life, which was a great experience. Such a weird thing to say. It was a great experience and I grew up pretty quickly in it, but I also say that I was an only child at the time, but at the age of 11 the universe blessed me with a wonderful sister.
And then two brothers followed suit two years after that and two years after that. And so I have the experience of being both an only child through my very, very formative years and a young stage in life and then also being a sister. So that has been a really formative aspect of who I am. I grew up as a soccer player, so had the soccer ball on my foot before I walked, I bet. Like in my crib, probably. I always like to think of it as another language that I speak. The game of soccer and just the strategy that comes with being an athlete and being a teammate. So soccer, huge part of my life. Then after I graduated from high school, I went into Bentley university. It was Bentley college when I went there, but a business school. I was very focused on being able to support myself independently.
So when I was growing up there was some loss in my life. My stepfather actually had brain cancer. It's a very difficult relationship there. And so I wanted to be able to live in my own space for myself as much as I could. And I actually went to this school with my boyfriend at the time for his visit and I was listening to it and I was like, "Excuse me, I'm going to go here and you're not going to go here. I'm going to go here." Because they had, I think it was, at the time, was like a 97% job placement rate right after school and I was like, okay, yup, that sounds good. I can take care of myself then. Played soccer in college for a while, was an orientation leader, was in the gospel choir, did all different kinds of things, never was really one for one label. Which is what Checkbox Other is all about, the fact that we live in a world that wants us to identify ourselves in a box and under one label. And I am somebody that's got a whole lot of labels that both encompass and don't truly encompass me. And then after college I went into the business world. I started initially in advertising and did that for about a year and cried for six months of that year, pretty much every night. It was not my jam. And after advertising I got a job at Bain & Company in management consulting on their global marketing strategy team, which was, oh, I think that that was a blessing. It was such a blessing. They, the people at Bain & Company became my family in Boston still to this day, so I have chills right now saying it. So many of those people are just incredibly formative to the adult that I became. And just the love and joy that those years of my life at work brought, but also just what healthy relationships look like and what healthy friendships and romantic relationships, even, by two specific couples that are together, that were together when I met them back at Bain & Company are just really great.
I think really great architects and what a good relationship looks like. Being fully yourself and loving somebody for both their strengths and their faults. I mean, come on now, who doesn't want that? So Bain & Company. Then from there I went from a team of about 65 marketers all over the world to Bain Capital, which for most people it's like those sound the same, but Bain Capital is a, an investment management company, mostly known from a private equity perspective. If you don't know what private equity is, that's okay. It's ... feel free to Google it. I'm not going to go too deep into it, but I went from a team of 65 people to a team of one there, and so that was a pretty significant change. The environment was a little bit different, but the cool part of that experience, and I was there for four years, and half of that time was post-Mitt Romney's elections. And Mitt Romney was one of the founders. And as the marketer there, that shift was a very interesting one.
So that did wonders for my ability to handle a whole bunch of situations, but also it really showed me how important it is to know your story and know your narrative, whether it's from a branding perspective as a marketer or as the human being that you are. To really be able to articulate it, know it and own it. Because if you don't, other people will take that and write your story for you and, and no one really wants that. You want the pen in your own history. So after ...
[BW] Tell me where you went from Bain & Company.
[NI] So we went Bain & Company, Bain Capital, and then I did a little stint at a biotech business development firm for a little while. And really that was my dipping the toe in the water of making a change, but I didn't know it at the time, I thought that was a huge change.
That was for about six months. It didn't work out to what I expected it to be. It was a startup. And so as I'm sure many have heard, that the expectation coming in and the reality of it day to day can be very different. So I opted to go off on my own after six months and start my own marketing consulting gigs. So I could go and work with the organizations that I was hearing about through work that people that I was working with, their side hustles through Uber and Lyft rides that I was talking to. All of the drivers, they all had such incredible entrepreneurial journeys and they were all so interested in how they could market themselves. And so I felt like the world was telling me, you got to go do something and you've got this skillset and you have this ability to be super independent and you have this ability to help people tell their stories and use their voices.
So leverage that. And so I started in the marketing consulting space and then I stumbled upon, well, I was trying to figure out ... I should say this. I was trying to figure out what my path would look like and what my business would look like and what growth looks like. Because everybody asks you when you make this kind of change, especially in my world of mostly business folks. What's your goal? What's your five year plan? How are you going to scale? And I was like, I don't know if I want to scale, what do I want this to be? Do I want to define it right now in the first two or three months of this significant career and life change? I don't know. I don't think so. And so in that moment I kind of looked inward and started to figure out, like why even two to three months in did this still feel very similar to the old jobs that I had? It wasn't in the construct of corporate, but there was something that stayed with me.
And so that's when I realized, okay, there's something under the hood. You gotta really get a little uncomfortable and get in there. And I found the women's leadership podcast with the Gaia Project for Women's Leadership. And I started listening to that and it felt like a therapy session in my ears. And I started to realize that a lot of the things that I individually felt were me going crazy, had nothing to do with "Nikki." They had to do with the systems and the structures that I had operated within to be quote unquote happy or to quote unquote succeed. And that's why happiness and success never really felt like those things to me. And so that was again, just the scratching, scratching the surface. And once I started I was like, Oh my God, I need to learn everything. And women's leadership work then turned into this whole idea was, it's not just about women, it's about anybody that isn't that mold that we're all trying to fit into.
And so that's where the diversity and inclusion work came in. I started doing some work around unconscious bias, building more networks within the Boston area. So I am based in the Boston area and I had thought that Boston was so small, my network was, I had tapped it out because everyone I knew had been in the industry I was in or went to the school I went to or knew somebody because most of the people I went to college with lived around here. And once I left kind of the corporate behind, I started doing other things, I realized that there was so much more to this city and so many more really cool people doing things that I had never imagined. So it really opened my eyes and that was a step into kind of what I like to think of as a more enlightened phase in my life and really self reflective.
But then also once I started learning those things about myself, I realized a lot of people are in this twisted pretzel of a life because we think that's how things are and we don't see other opportunities. So that led to, I need to become a coach. The marketer in me is like, how do I shout this from the rooftops and how do I make change? I don't want to just tell you about it and then have you flail. That's where kind of becoming a coach, becoming a facilitator, getting the knowledge and being able to leverage this ability that I had to really connect with people into turning it into change and transformation for people on a scale that hopefully it would be a bit of a shortcut from the circuitous journey that I took.
[BW] Yes. You know, one of the things that you, well many of the things that you talk about resonate so deeply with me and I know they will with a lot of the people who tune into this podcast. A couple of things I just want to hit on. I have met the most interesting people with the most interesting side hustles that I can imagine, taking Lyft rides. I always ask, is this, you know, do you do anything else? Is this, are you full time Lyft driver? I have met professional billiard players. I have met ex boy-band lead singers. I mean, I just can't tell you the different things that I've met that just blow me away. So I love that story because when you're curious and when you engage and when you put your phone down for five minutes, when you're in that Lyft and you just do the simple act of curiosity, it's just amazing what you can learn and hear about.
And I loved that. I also heard a theme in what you were talking about, which is totally connected to everything that we teach in Navigating Challenging Dialogue, which is the self-awareness piece. Right? I heard you say, I knew I had to look in here. I knew I had to go in to be able to get out of, and I always, I always think of the corporate constructs as the framework we'd been taught to live in. Right? It starts with school and education. I am a recovering school administrator. I left that because public school doesn't feel like, to me, like the way people authentically learn.
[NI]Yeah.
[BW] In that capsule. And I think "corporate America" frequently is that the way that people work are most effectively within that framework. So going through the self-awareness process, I love that one of your missions is to help people not have to go through the same kind of route that you did to get to this, you know, give them the shortcut. That's awesome. You talk a lot about, one of your big goals is to create a new generation of fearless leaders. And you use a term in some of the things I listened to online that's really new to me and I'd love to learn more about it. And it's the term "hybrid humans". What does that mean to you?
[NI] Oh my goodness. Well, I will tell you the origin point for it. So you were talking about self-awareness and I always as many times as I can to normalize the conversation about therapy, I do. So I have been in and out of therapy since I was young. I was always somebody asking to talk to people. Yeah. And I don't know if any of your listeners know very much about kind of the, the Haitian culture. But a lot of women that I've met and talked to, you know, there's a lot of, "Oh we don't, we don't do that." And I was always the kid that sat in the front of class with my hand up. Right? I was always, I started talking at like far too young, so I was always just very curious and wanting to figure things out. So therapy was a wonderful outlet for that.
And the reason I'm mentioning this is because the self-awareness piece comes a lot from what I've learned there. But this whole, I'm just going to tap into the school and the corporate systems that we play in, they want you to define yourself, right? They want there to be an answer, one plus one equals two and that's the bottom line. And that never really felt right when I was describing myself. One of the reasons, again that my podcast is called "Checkbox Other" is it's from the very visceral reaction that I always had to, how do you check off the box for race and ethnicity? Because when I was younger, they didn't have an option that fit me. And so I either had to check multiple or I had to check other and then write it in, or they didn't even have the option to do those things. Right?
It was a radio button instead of a checkbox, so I couldn't even do that. And so that feeling and that experience has been something that has followed me through so many aspects of my life. And I think that I have always been someone that tries to make it so other people don't feel that discomfort. Like, okay, cool. I'm in a place and I grew up in a predominantly white town. Like I was extremely, I am extremely white acting, and so I learned how to fall in line and the "hybrid human" dynamic has been around this idea as I've started my own business. Everybody asks, who are you and what are you doing? And it used to be, "what are you?" When I was younger, like my skin color is something you don't know, people speak to me in all different languages, [because] they don't know.
But now it's like, "Who are you and what are you doing?" Which is kind of a different, and I choose to take it as a very kind of full, rich, focused, solution-focused question. So the hybrid aspect is I actually am a blending of so many things and so are you. And so to say from a racial perspective, I'm black and I'm white. I am an only child and I am a sister, I am a creative and I am also able to be in the corporate space and be analytical. I am a woman, but I also have grown up in predominantly male spaces on the soccer field and in the boardroom. So there are still many aspects of who I am that I can pass in a whole bunch of places. I think passing has become a very negative term, and a lot of that tends to be because of that need to fit somewhere else. But the hybrid nature of it is I tend to really have the ability to understand where you're coming from and it's something that's very important for me to do and my ability to either go gas or electric. Right?
That's kind of where the car analogy comes in, to me. It's like I had the ability to understand where you're coming from and function on that energy and bring things together. I think both from the biracial aspect of my identity has always felt as though I'm, I'm a bridge builder, but also being an elder millennial and doing a lot more work in the generational work there. The bridge building on millennials I think fits into that too. So the hybrid nature is this idea of the lending and really being something that's accessible and someone that's accessible and allowing other people not to feel like they have to fit inside one box or category.
[BW] Hmm. I love that. And there's a couple things you brought up that I would, I'd love to dig into. One is the concept of otherness. You know, and it's such a, I'm going to try to think how I want to say this so I say it in a way that comes out with the intention that I mean it. But right now I think that the idea of feeling "other" is huge in our society, right?
[NI] Yes.
[BW] Regardless of where you fall, if you're in the majority, you're in the minority, you're in a slice of the minority or the majority, whatever. I think the "otherness" is a huge place where people are not sure what to do with their energy or their words or their intention. And so that's a huge connecting point. And then the idea of elder millennial, so I want to tell you a little story about, I was just working with a group in the tech field and everybody in the group was, they had to be between the age of 28 and 35 max.
[NI] Okay.
[BW] And so their question was, it was a coaching workshop, teaching managers how to coach, "How do we deal with millennials?"
[NI] You're like, wait, hold on, you mean, uh, you guys? [laughing]
[BW] [laughing] Are you not part of that group? And it's so interesting to me because a big part of Navigating Challenging Dialogue is breaking apart the labels and the jargon that we use to create order out of chaos, or to define things we are not comfortable with or whatever the case is. And so as we kind of dug into that, but there's a big piece in the world about defining millennials as this group of people who are all alike, with the same characteristics and the same behaviors. A group to be contended with. And based on all the research that I'm reading, I mean millennials, that category of people, are now getting to the place where they're actually supervising people who are chronologically older than them. Yeah. In many cases. And so when do we stop putting people in a bucket and start identifying people as individuals and learning about them and learning about their skills? Is there not more merit in that than trying to crack the code on millennials?
[NI] Yeah, so here's, I'll tell you at least my perspective around, I think one of the pieces that you're talking about is the labeling. The labeling of the idea of "other" you started with and then kind of going to this generational label. I think that labels are given way too much heft and way too much weight. There is importance in understanding the dynamics of a human being and understanding the ways in which they have seen the world and experience the world, the way they prefer to consume information. The experiences that they've had on generational scales that are formative events that have happened in your life, right, that have ... a lot of those experiences have a kind of rallying call around them for the generation. If you were at a certain age at that time, you had a very similar experience of either shared experience or shared confusion.
And so I think that it's important for us to, instead of trying to latch onto one label to define every human being or one label to define one human being, to really understand that we're a myriad of many, many things. And so from the other perspective, I think that the other piece is all about belonging and we're finally, I feel like "other" is becoming something that is getting pretty diluted because everybody feels "other". And really it's this idea of belonging, right? So people talking about whether they feel like they belong or not, that tends to hit some emotional chords that can make you shut down and not be able to kind of open up about where you don't feel like you belong because we all want to act like we do.
But have you ever felt like, that's why the first question that I asked my podcast is tell me about a time where you feel other, because the whole point of it isn't to say you're different. Let's talk about why you're different. It's to say your experience of difference is something that will resonate with so many people because we've all felt it in some aspect. Yeah.
[BW] An empathy point.
[NI] And so, yeah, so it's shifting the conversation from difference. And I think that we've lived in these places where there's a good and a bad, a glorification or vilification, and shifting that to, that's a nuance detail that will help inform some part of this, this human being or this experience. But there's a responsibility that we have to dig deeper and really understand that human being. Or understand the group that you're talking to. It's not just one label, then, okay, if you're a millennial, I know exactly what to do with you. So I think that that's important. The other piece about millennials specifically, I've been doing some work around millennials and I actually did a workshop recently that was all about rewriting the rules to empower millennial leaders.
And so I think there's a part of this that, millennial at this point in time is, there's a book called "The Millennial Myth" that I love. The author, her name's Crystal Kadakia, and she talks about millennials, but she really talks about it in the juxtaposition between the traditional workplace and the modern workplace. So pre-technology being a huge aspect of everything that we do and post technology really dictating most of the systems and processes that we have. And that pocket in the in between is the people that grew up with technology being a new thing. And so there were more, I think of it as like the rotary phone. We all know how to use the rotary phone, right? The elder millennials definitely do. And my sister is actually, so it's, it's '80 ... depends on where you get the pocket for millennials, but it's 1981 to 1997 and my sister is '96 and I'm '85.
So we are on a wonderful, we're on wonderful pockets of the two. And as I mentioned, my parents being divorced when I was pretty young, I ended up being in a lot of adult environments. So I ended up, I feel myself being even more pulled towards the older group. So I think there is a part of this where it's this idea of we know how to operate the rotary phone, but we also know how to find out new technology on an iPhone and that's very specific to that particular piece of technology. But in this millennial myth bucket actually talks a lot about the way that you approach problems, that there is this approaching problems and approaching the time at work and the value at work. There is a difference between time and productivity for the modern workplace rather than the traditional workplace where as nine to five doesn't mean that you've actually been productive, but for the modern dynamic. And then, you know, in the more traditional dynamic, it talks a lot about like you need to have face time, you need to earn your way, right?
You need, you need to build credibility and get seniority and it's really just, I think, this juxtaposition of how we operate both, you had mentioned, both in our school systems, right? Because you learn what you end up learning in corporate, you learn it very young. But then how that filters itself into work and our productivity as a nation that tends to, and I'm talking very specifically about Americans, I'm not sure if there are international listeners here, but in this American hustle culture of, you have every single thing you got until you burn out. And really this idea of, I will say the generation in the elder millennial generation graduating right before, and like within the year of the recession hitting this idea that we were supposed to be reaching for this job that you'd be working for for 20 to 30 years. But then we watched all of that fall away for profits and then really there was no accountability for how that all came about.
But the people that got hit with the people that were loyal and there was no reciprocity to that loyalty. And so that shifted to two years max at a job and then be looking around whether you stay or not, be aware of, be be ready cause you need to be the CEO of your own career instead of tapping in and kind of becoming part of this system and this family as an organization because you're not sure if that's going to stay. So I think that there's the generational stuff, I think it's important as a detail and as an informative filler of information. I don't necessarily think that it will fully define people. And that's, again, I don't really think you, I already talked about this whole blended thing. We got it. But I do think that it's a big part of how I see the world and how I see, I really see there'd be so much potential for us all to connect with each other. Because I really think shared humanity is the way to go. And the less we focus on how we're different and trying to polarize, you're a Democrat or Republican, right? Like you can't be in between and you can't, like there is no room in the in-between. Like the more we can take those goalposts and say, actually it's okay for you to exist as you are and dial up your strengths where, where it makes sense and work together where that happens. So ...
[BW] Well and that's, that leads me to one of the things that you talk about, which is rewriting those rules, right? The rules we live by and it's a big piece we talk about in Navigating Challenging Dialogue are what are the rules that you either picked up along the way, or that you've created for yourself that you live by, that you might not even, you might not even be 100% aware you're living by them. And how do we, and that's a lot where the unconscious bias stuff comes into play ... but what for you is a benefit of breaking down those rules that people live by?
[NI] Well I will go back to one of the, something you mentioned, and I can't remember exactly when it fell, it was probably 10 minutes ago, and we were talking about this idea that, that these rules, we live by them, but we don't know what they are, right? So not even, I'm going to not even start with breaking. I'm going to start by labeling and naming. I shouldn't be labeling, naming them, identifying what they are, and really coming to terms with the fact that we've been operating on autopilot and so much of our life that we don't even know that we're operating from a value set that might not be ours. Whether that be unconscious bias or whether that be the fact that there are a lot of people that are just operating in their careers and they're not feeling good about it, but they don't realize it's because they never gave themselves any space to think differently about what their career would be, what their life would look like. Because they're either taking the map that was given to them or they're following what they've seen on television or you know what, whatever that may be, right?
Whatever resume of life you're checking off, once you have that locked in, you can't ... you have your blinders up. And so I do think a big part of this rule stuff is you can take it on a whole bunch of different levels. So when I do a workshop, I'm very concretely about like the rules that are either in your employee handbook or that are the unspoken rules that you all know that you need to show up at this amount of time and just stay late for this. Or women can do this. Women start taking the notes in meetings and stuff like that that it's just like, why am I, why is, why does that happen? And again, we all think that once we notice it that it's something we as individuals are doing wrong. But when you have the space to have conversation, there is a lot more at play.
And a lot of times it's power and privilege structures that have nuanced, a lot of times it's in very kind of subtle nuanced ways shaped that path. And so it's the idea of, one, being aware, the therapy bottle of really you have to be aware of what's going on before you can make any changes and then really understanding, okay, your awareness, identifying behaviors that contribute to that behavior itself, and understanding where you want to, like stopping and slowing down and saying, okay, what if I had the ability to stop and say, "what do I value?" How would I act differently? Or how would I act the same? I think it's the same approach to both the individual rules we live by. If you're somebody that's a morning person and you've always thought you're a morning person, but like you're exhausted and you're chugging five cups of coffee to be a morning person, it's like, what if I just gave myself a minute to say, "Am I really a morning person?"
[BW] Yes. Is it true?
[NI] Am I ... Yeah. Am I forcing myself to be productive in the morning and burning myself, so burning myself out so hard up front that at three o'clock when my energy really would be at it highest, I have no chance.
[BW] Yep.
[NI] And so it's this idea of really just the curiosity you mentioned. I think giving a name to something helps you examine it deeper and then this will be the end piece, the release. And I think release is something that I have, I personally have had a difficult time with because the controller, the control freak that likes to keep things in places like okay but I'll let it go but I'll keep it over here just in case for later. Right? So this idea of what release can do for you and understanding like these rules. Yeah, and most of them actually have some sort of benefit whether it was for you or two generations before you, it's not bad. There's a shadow and a light to all of it, but really understanding is it serving you and if it's not serving you, can you let it go? If it's meant to come back to you in some way, I'm sure it will. But like allowing yourself the space to, to learn and grow from there.
[BW] You know, in the, it reminds me, in the Navigating Challenging Dialogue work -- cause everything comes back to that -- for me because it's the cornerstone of everything that I do and how I live my life. We have a concept called the "flawed first fact", and so many times when people show up and they want to have a conflict with someone, they want to have a tough dialogue with someone, they want to get their point of view across to someone. When we go through the six-step process, it's not too long before they realize that their whole premise they're building on is actually a flawed first fact. It's actually not even necessarily the truth. It's an unspoken expectation. It's an assumption. It's an old story they're carrying with them. And in that moment, I love it when you talk about the release, because it's almost like in the moment when the spotlight is shined on that, like, "Oh, I could let this go." You know? And then it goes back to the Byron Katie question that I love, which is, "and what would be different if you never had to tell this story again?"
[NI] Right? It just, it allows you to breathe, it allows your shoulders to go down.
[BW] Yeah.
[NI] It's this visioning exercise. My goodness.
[BW] Yeah. So I love that. I mean you and I are kind of traveling the same path in different circles and I'm thrilled to hear about that. I'm glad we met at this rest stop together. [laughter]
[BW[ That's right. I'm curious, one more thing I'm curious about were running over time, but you are so engaging. I want to keep going. You talk about butterflies retain their memory of being in the cocoon. Now I use all these metaphors of butterflies and imaginal cells and what it's like to turn to soup and all of this stuff. In my work all the time, but the part I never, held on to or even explored was do they have a memory of that time or is it just this unconscious process that they go through? And you talked about recognizing when you yourself are falling into old patterns of constriction based on those old memories. Just in a few words, just explain that to us.
[NI] Okay. Few words. All right, so this came about in my TED talk and I was trying to explain what it felt like for transformation. And a lot of times I speak in metaphor all the time and the metaphor that I tended to use as butterflies. So I am not somebody that references butterflies often other than trying to explain how this stuff just happened. But in the normal, in the normal sense of things, I'm not normally somebody that dives fully into that, but it felt ... it rang true. I'm trying to pay attention, my intuition more. So I started doing research about what metamorphosis looks like and that was one of the facts that came up and I was like, "Oh my goodness, yes, thank you very much. We're all thankful for popping that into my Google search." And so the part of the retention of memories I think is so important on so many levels.
I think there's the individual piece, but I think it's also stuff that's passed down through your lineage that I think is pretty important to acknowledge too. So acknowledging that like a lot of these memories, we rely so much on our mind and so much of it can be in your body and is in your body is what I've learned. I've operated a lot in my life up here, up in my mind and ignore the body and the soul. And so I'm trying to tap into those. And one of the things that happens for me when I start to fall into, and I've actually again, putting a name to it when I become this pretzel of myself or start to, I call her "Corporate Nikki". "Corporate. Nikki "is amazing. She can write the best email, she can turn out all the things. Right? She could stand in front of a room and handle it.
Right? Do you need slides? I've got slides. If you need me to design things, I got you. Right? But "Corporate Nikki" also has this feeling of "shoulders up". My throat actually starts to close. I feel hard. I feel like I've got armor on. And the aspect of the butterfly that actually starts to happen if I let it continue, is that the cocoon starts to actually block my ability to see things in the way that I am choosing to see them. My bias is coming hard, but it's this whole idea of contraction and expansion. And I am not able to expand when I am in "Corporate Nikki" mode. When I am in this old, the old patterns, the old memories, and a lot of it's very either very trauma driven because there's, there's some abuse in the past and there's there stuff along those lines. There's a lot of loss and there's a lot of kind of heartbreak that goes there. But like there's also this childlike piece that if you don't resolve it, you become that three-year-old having a temper tantrum when you don't mean to. And so I think that it is really important to pay attention at those points in time to your body and how your body handles it. Because those clues are normally 17 steps ahead of when you've already gone too far. I don't know how to pull back.
[BW] Mm-hmm. 100%. Wow. Thank you for that.
[NI] Of course.
[BW] So as you can tell, dear listeners, there's a lot to Nikki and she's got a lot to put out into the world and I just want to invite you as your identifying like: How am I unfolding? What do I want to become more aware of? How do I want to test those constricting pass thoughts or things I picked up along the way? Connect with her. Now how can people find you? What's the best way for them to connect with you?
[NI] Wow. My favorite way to connect is via social media. I am like the millennial in me. It's like Hey, at @NikkiInnocent all the way.
[BW] Yeah, that's how I connected with you.
[NI] Yes, so all of my social media handles, it's super easy. It will be in, I'm assuming the show notes, or a title, something, Nikki Innocent. Just like the word. The opposite of guilty is my last name. And Nikki: N I two K's and an I. And I am available on all social media that way. My website is NikkiInnocent.com. We've got so much good information there. Super proud of it, designed it myself, which is pretty cool. And I just, I do a lot of events. I'm doing some virtual programming. So if you, if people want the ability to kind of dive a little deeper in this stuff, I'm trying to make it as accessible as possible. And again, we talked about this before we hopped on, but I find the podcasting space to give you room to breathe and I think the virtual learning space does the same. So you can go at your own pace and you can really get the most out of it.
But yeah, social media, my podcast, feel free to go and have a listen. It's my child. I get like all verklempt about it. But yeah, there's, there's so many ways and there are ways, you could Google my name. There's some weird stuff that comes up sometimes, but hopefully the Google has found all of my corporates, not my corporate stuff, my entrepreneurial stuff now. So I really hope that, I hope this was helpful. I, as I told you, I'm a talker and I ask a lot of questions. We didn't get to ask questions that we'll have to do that another time. But, um, my goodness, it's been such a treat.
[BW] Great. Well, I'm thrilled to be connected with you and as everybody knows, I am just trying to spread this information out in the world and I am so grateful to be now connected with you. So thank you Nikki. And, I look forward to talking with you again.