Rai Cornell 0:02
Welcome to Season Two of the SOAR podcast, the place for creative entrepreneurs who want to build healthier, happier, more profitable, self employed businesses. I’m your host Rai Hyde Cornell, business mentor at Chiron consulting and CEO and senior copywriter at Cornell content marketing, get ready to soar.

Welcome to the SOAR podcast and today we have Nicole Lewis-Keeber. Nicole, tell our listeners all about you and what you do and what your business is.

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 0:47
Well, thank you for having me first of all, I’m happy to be here. Yeah, so I actually started my career as a therapist, I have a master’s degree in social work. I’m a licensed clinical social worker. And I had about 18 years in the field, you name it, I have done everything from EAP work to couples counseling, mental health, substance abuse, there’s really not a community I haven’t had some hand in except for children. I’ve never worked with kids specifically. And my business currently is, it’s more of a coaching business. And it’s really interesting, this journey going from therapist to coach, because a lot of my therapist friends back in the day when I first left kind of had a raised eyebrows saying what are you doing coaching? Because they weren’t exactly sure what it was about, you know, I think we know a little bit more now. And I just really love what I do. But when I left, after 18 years of being in the field, I was really burnt out because you know, I help people with this intersection of childhood trauma and entrepreneurship and business ownership and self care.

And my industry, we were not taught to care for ourselves, you burnout was very high when you’re in a service based profession. And so I was really burnt out, I needed to figure out how I could still work with people in more of a motivational way. And maybe less of a pathological because we kind of pathologize, you know, normal ways of being as humans under a lot of stress, right? Literally, yeah, there’s so much stigma around that. And so I found the world of coaching and began my journey here, to having a business where I started doing money mindset coaching for business owners, entrepreneurs. And what I was beginning to see really early on in my business is that my clients did not have a mindset issue. They have tried everything, they’ve read the books, they learn mindset tricks. But what evolved is that they were actually having a, you know, their childhood trauma responses were playing out in their money. And so that really sent me on a journey of doing research and exploring the intersection of childhood trauma, what it is, normalizing it, and helping people liberate themselves from it, because it was implanting itself in their businesses and structures of their businesses, how they run them, how they engage with their clients, and most importantly, how they treat themselves with their business.

So it’s always kind of hard to say this is exactly what I do, because it’s coaching, it’s education, it’s training. It’s research. And it’s been a pretty interesting journey. And this last part of it has been getting trained with Dr. Brene Brown, to facilitate her dare to lead processes because her work and my work are very aligned. And as someone who was very much a thought leader in shame and vulnerability as she was, I was very much a thought leader in you know, the intersection of trauma outside of mental health. You know people would tell me, Don’t use the trauma word, you’re gonna scare people. And if we have to call a thing a thing, we don’t drop our baggage, so to speak, at the door, we start a business that’s inaccurate. So we have to help people understand all the factors that are at play to help them have not only a financially successful business, but also an emotionally sustainable one as well.

Rai Cornell 4:16
Yeah, it’s so interesting to me that this seems like an increasingly common trajectory where mental health professionals which I have a mental health background, other guests on the podcast, Shulamit Ber Levtov, Anny McNally and now you, we all had a very similar experience where we went into the mental health world, we wanted to help people, we wanted to help them move forward. And we felt like this mental health world is just so, I love the word that you use pathological. It’s just so steeped in negativity and stigma and there’s like this wet blanket over the entire industry. And all of us, without knowing each other, we all went on similar paths to go, screw that, I want to actually help people, I’m going to break these chains of the bureaucracy of the mental health world, go out on my own, and help people be more forward thinking help them get into more of a solution focused mentality. And that’s not to discount what they went through in the past. But it’s not dwelling and it’s not ruminating, and it’s okay, this happened. Let’s heal from that. And let’s take steps forward.

And so this idea that, and I love that you call it little T trauma or small t trauma. This idea that trauma is pervasive, especially in the entrepreneurial world, is something that I see every day with the freelancers that I work with. And the self employed business owners that I work with, oftentimes we get into this line of work, because of that, either big T or little T trauma. And I mean, my book that came out earlier this year, corporate dropouts, every single chapter in that story has an instance of either little T or big T trauma. And everyone then went on to say, I don’t want to be beholden to someone else. I don’t want to be under someone else’s thumb. I want to live my life on my terms. And so in your work, in your research, how have you seen, Can you give us some examples of how trauma in either form little t, big T shows up in business? Because I think for the, you know, on paper that kind of like objective listeners gonna go? No, those are two wildly different things we can’t possibly overlap or, you know, keep your baggage at home, like don’t bring that shit to work? No, we’re humans, those things are going to lead together. So what has been your experience with that?

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 6:53
Right, I was thinking, as you were talking that, I think part of the problem that we you know, we had in the mental health field is that we were never solving the right problem. And I find that in business as well. You know, we were trying to help people with the symptoms. But there was very rarely any conversation about all of these adaptations where they were traumatic patients, right, it’s depression due to trauma, you know, substance abuse due to trauma, anxiety due to trauma, and that we were trying to solve the wrong problem, because we were not naming what it was. Right? We were kind of avoiding it, skirting it for whatever reason. And I think that I find this in the in the business world as well, because what I have seen is that a childhood experience that is traumatic to us can change everything, right? And so let’s back up a little bit and just define that small T big T really quickly, for anyone who isn’t quite familiar with that term. You know, we as a culture, we tend to only assign a very, very small slice of what trauma is, and allow people to call it that right. And we call those big T, they’re usually, you know, violence, child abuse, PTSD, catastrophic illness, accident, you these these bigger, kind of explosive events that are life threatening

Rai Cornell 8:15
Life threatening. Yeah, exactly.

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 8:17
But if I took my microphone and went out on the street and asked people what trauma is, that is invariably what people will tell you, right. But there’s also I think, a more pervasive cumulative and impactful trauma that we deal with. So calling it little T is really not, it’s probably not as accurate as it could be. The smaller T traumas, they are cumulative in nature, they are things that most people would not look at as trauma, but our nervous system doesn’t really give a crap, what you call it, the nervous system knows what it knows, right? And so these were experiences where we felt unsafe, unseen, unheard, left out, lost connection with people. And that can be anything from being bullied, you know, having a learning difference like I did growing up in school. Every day, I felt disconnected. And I internalized my inability to learn a system that can teach me as my problem, right? That changes you. It changes what you feel is available to you, losing a friend group, you know, the tweens are hurt. Having a parent who’s chronically ill, moving around a lot, all of these things can be small T trauma, and they are cumulative in nature. And they add up to change what we see as possible for ourselves. And there’s adaptations that we then have become a part of our DNA basically.

And so I always say that big T trauma explodes little T trauma erodes, but they’re both powerful enough to move a mountain, one can explode it all of a sudden, and the other one can erode it over time but they are very, very powerful. So to think that we have these experiences that first of all, we have not even identified as trauma because we have been kind of stigmatized and shamed into seeing it that way, has run unchecked. And so we have to modify our lives in order for us to get ahead. So we have these experiences where, as children, we say, I never want to feel this way, again, I will show you that I can be the person you think I can’t be. I never will let anyone tell me what to do ever, ever again. So I will always be in control. We make these internal vows, we have these experiences when we’re younger. And those vows them become a business plan, an entrepreneurial journey. And you know, every day I see the like the birth story of these businesses, and entrepreneurial journeys and desires for leadership are, in essence, a desire to go back and fix and change that experience that they had.

Rai Cornell 10:51
Yes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with an experience that you had in life or an accumulation of experiences you had in life, leading you to make a big decision, and to basically composite into being your entrepreneurial business plan. But what is wrong with that is when we fail to recognize and heal the initial wounds that caused us to go down these pathways, because it’s like, you know, I liken it to when you go to a doctor, and you say, Hey, I’ve got some back pain, and he goes, Okay, here’s some Percocet. While the Percocet is just going to numb the pain, it’s just going to mask the symptom. It’s not actually healing the problem, what really you should be doing is not sitting at your desk all day, or eating less inflammatory foods, or doing some yoga or whatever it might be, maybe you need back surgery, who knows what it is. But the Percocet is just the BandAid, it’s the cover up of the problem. And so when you’re talking about how these little T traumas and big T traumas can spark our path into entrepreneurship, that can actually be a blessing, it can be the first step in healing, but we have to do that work to go back and actually heal the wounds and just plowing forward, like, you know, a bull out of the gate, and being like, Oh, I’m never going back there, I’m never going to look at it again. It’s just gonna let those wounds erode. I love that analogy that you said, you know, big T trauma, explosive little T erodes, it’s just gonna let it erode you further and further.

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 12:28
It’ll come out sideways, like, eventually it catches up with us. And you’re absolutely right. You know, like I said earlier, we’re solving the wrong problem. So we can get clear about what the real challenges are, what the real opportunity is, then we can give ourselves the relief that we were actually looking for with the business because I do believe that you can heal through your business and it can be an arena for that if you know what it is, you’re trying to give that younger version of yourself. And let’s face it, you know, all the skill sets that we get from having these challenging journeys, they create amazing skill sets for entrepreneurship, they really do, you know, we, you know, like to be in charge and have a high tolerance for discomfort and out of the box thinker. So, you know, it can be a blessing and it can be a curse. And so my desire is for people really to understand, you know, what was the motivation, what’s my real why to start my business, as I call it, so that we can give you the relief so that more money, more success, more employees, bigger company, keep hitting these benchmarks and you don’t feel better, you don’t feel safer, you don’t feel more seen that we can actually get you the relief and the emotional sustainability that you’re looking for through your business. So you can have that right, if you know what it is you can have it

Rai Cornell 13:45
Exactly. I mean, it’s like if someone finds their path to entrepreneurship, and I literally envision this as a path in the forest, like a dusty dirt path, and they’re dragging all of these stone blocks behind them, that are the trauma that inspired them to break through that wall and get to this path. But now they’re lugging them along. And if you actually face those traumas, heal them and let go of that energy, you release that energy that you have been spending in the past dragging these things with you. Then as soon as those ropes are cut, think about how much farther you can go, how much faster you can go, how much easier and more enjoyable that journey is.

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 14:31
And sometimes people in their journey and sometimes they recognize you know, I started this business to stick it to my dad and now that I don’t need that anymore I recognize that this business wasn’t for me and I don’t want it and so there’s liberation in that as well. You know, in this process, you can pick it up and put it over here on the career journey that you choose. You know the relationships that you find yourself in you know, this is not So it’s in all spaces, which is why I think it’s important for us to bring more conversation to this intersection of, we have a lot of, like Brene says we have a lot of leaders working out their shit on their people. Yeah, right, because they’re not trauma conscious, they are not aware of their own wounds and their own shame.

And so they’re working out their stuff and all the people around them. And I see this happening in businesses. And I see this happening a lot with entrepreneurs that I work with, who it disrupts the relationship that they have with their staff, but also, more importantly, people that they contract with, because they will sabotage the employees or the sort of contractors that they bring in. And then say, well see I can’t hire anybody, I can’t trust anybody, because of that, your project didn’t work out. But really, what they’ve been doing is sabotaging that person. So they can’t do their job the whole time, not on purpose. Because relying on someone to have a part of their business feels very unsafe to them, because they have unchecked trauma in their business as well. So it, the tendrils are very long when it comes to how trauma can show up in your business.

Rai Cornell 16:09
Yes, and that really speaks to, an idea that popped into my head earlier was, you know, you’re listing out all of these great qualities of entrepreneurs and others that popped in my head were resilience and self reliance. And I think that self reliance is so connected to trauma, that we think something happened to me in the past, I can’t trust someone, I can’t rely on someone, I only have myself to rely on. And that’s a great thing. Because you’re not giving up. You’re saying I have myself to count on, I only have myself and I’m going to make this work, I’m going to make this happen, I’m going to do it on my own. I don’t care how hard it is or how long it takes. And then we get to the point where we go, okay, I want to build an agency or I just want some help. I just need a bookkeeper, I just need a VA, I just need one subcontractor who can help me out with this stuff. But there’s an element of trust in bringing someone into your business, this business that was literally created as your own protective bubble.

And to your point, it’s not a conscious decision that we’re sabotaging this person, but it’s a self protective mechanism. That I mean, when you look at it in that way, of course, you would want to have reasons to get this person out of your business and to go back to it just being you because what if they betray you? What if they dropped the ball? What if they don’t come through for you? Yeah. And you know, it’s so much easier to just do it alone, even though that’s really hard, as opposed to counting on someone else.

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 17:48
Exactly. We have to help you increase your window of tolerance for relying on someone else to do something. And that can be really hard. And, you know, I always say that, you know, relying on someone is the behavior of trust. And if there’s a trust fracture, or a trust trauma in your background, which I think is one of the biggest things that people have trauma struggle with. It can be really hard. And so sometimes I think, you know, some conventional advice is you hire employees, you shouldn’t be doing this yourself, you know, you’re the CEO, or you know, let other people take over these tasks. And I think sometimes people are advised to bring on employees, or contractors in a way that is too much too soon. But if we know that trust is one of the challenges that comes up for you because of your trauma, then we’re going to look at it from a trauma informed standpoint, and say, We need to increase your window of tolerance for this.

So we’re going to figure out what is the least difficult person to bring on and starting with delegation, and seeing how that trust builds out. But when we tell people just go do all the things just like when I was doing money mindset coaching around money trauma, telling people to double and triple their rates without helping them increase that window of tolerance for that change in their income or that change in their prices, it’ll backfire. It really will. And so I think that this is why this is so important. In my research with the entrepreneurs and business owners and I’ve talked to for the past five years, one of the categories so to speak, that this trauma shows up in a lot is trust. And there’s so many ways that it does, but trust is one of them for sure.

Rai Cornell 19:31
Yeah. So I’m gonna get more into that. We’re gonna take a quick commercial break to drop some resources for our listeners, and we’ll be right back.

Hey, this is Rai. Ready to build a business that supports a life you love, a life you’ve always dreamed of. It’s time to stop passively dealing with what’s right in front of you, and start deliberately designing your own future. That’s exactly what we do in private business mentoring. You and I work together to create a completely customed to you business model that gives you everything you want and need while protecting you from stress and burnout. Ready to get started, go to chironconsulting.us/mentoring to learn more. There, you can also book a free call with me so we can start getting to know each other and see if mentoring is right for you. Plus, I love working with early stage entrepreneurs. That’s why my mentoring packages are priced so low, I want you to soar. So don’t worry about having to shell out thousands of dollars, not here. Just go to chironconsulting.us/mentoring to learn more.

And we’re back. Okay, so this is just absolutely fascinating topic to my, you know, psychology obsessed brain. And I want to make sure, because I think by now people listening to this episode, they’re probably going Check, check, that’s me, that’s me, that’s me, I recognize myself in that and that and that and that and that. So I don’t want to leave people on a cliff, I want to tell people, This is where you can get started. So what would be some of the initial maybe like thought exercises or journaling exercises or just what do you recommend? How do people even get started, because even though we’re talking about little T trauma, it seems like this is huge, this feels massive, and it feels scary. And so no wonder we all just want to shut the door on the monster in the closet and lock it in there and then just, you know, plow forward working on our computers. Where do we even begin?

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 21:34
Well, a healthy dose of self compassion goes a long way. Because full transparency, I was a therapist, in a therapists office, still minimizing my own trauma, because I didn’t get matched up to other people. So no compared to suffering here. And having some self compassion is a really great place to start and to begin to notice, you know what is coming up for you and stay open to this idea, because this is already operating in your life without your awareness, or maybe you’re aware of it, you just didn’t know what it was. And so this is actually a really cool opportunity for you to begin to learn a little bit more about yourself and to give yourself some of the things that you actually need and want to help you have a business that feels like more emotionally sustainable, as opposed to big and scary. And so one of the things I love to ask people to do first is, I was talking about the relationship that you have with your business, because you are not your business, that’s the very first thing to know. So kind of assess where you’re out there say, Do I feel like I am my business, you are not your business, this is something that you are relating to, and it’s something that you are creating outside of yourself.

And because of that we are very proud to replicate those roles in relationship patterns, from our path into our business. And so I always ask people to think of if you were to think of your business as a person outside of you, what does it feel like? Does it feel demanding? Does it feel like you critical like too much? And if so, where have you felt that way before in your life? Is there a particular person that stands out for you or an experience, it could have been a friend you had in high school, that was a bully, it could have been your teacher, it could have been your father, mom, caregiver, and dig a little bit deeper into the current relationship that you have created with your business. This is something that I did myself in my business two years in I had created, I realized I had created a very, for lack of a better word abusive relationship with my business, because for all intents and purposes, its energy was my mom, who was very critical of me. And so I was then using my business to replicate this pattern of this person, this business has all of the energy, all of the power and I don’t. And when I was able to see that I began to change the relationship with it. But I had no idea that it had defaulted into this old pattern in this new kind of scary big thing, right?

And so I always ask people to consider the relationship you have now with your business? Who might it be? And then think about the relationship that you’d like to have? How do you want to be supported? How do you want to feel about it? Is there anyone that you’ve met in your life that made you feel that way? And begin to change the relationship and the dynamic that you have, so that those patterns are feeling supported? And cared for with your business, which is what we’re wanting, right? We’re wanting it to support us, can be within your reach. And this is something I do a lot in my practice and I have a book called Love your business that you can read a little bit more about that. Yeah, but it is one of the very first things that I take people to because they don’t recognize that their business is something outside of them and so they’re internalizing everything. And that really impacts their boundaries, their money, all of it, right? Yeah. It’s not your baby, I don’t want my business to be a baby, I want it to be a fully formed partner in, you know, to get this stuff done. So I think that’s where I like people to start. Which is kind of whimsical to think about the relationship that you could have, and who your business entity or person could be in a supportive and loving relationship.

Rai Cornell 25:27
I love this idea. And it’s so funny, because I do a lot of personification with my clients on both sides of my businesses within the content marketing side. Anytime I’m working with a new client on copy, I ask them to tell me like, if your business were a person, if your subscription box, were a person, what would they be like? Are they quiet? Are the outgoing? Are they stoic? Are they adventurous? You know tell me about them. And then on the Chiron side, when we do money mindset work, I ask people to envision money as a person, and what is your relationship with money. And yet, I’ve never looked at my own businesses as people. I’ve never personified my own businesses. And it’s interesting, because as you were saying this and, you know, I’m most reluctant to share my own personal thought process here. But I think it might actually be helpful for someone listening, is, I was thinking about this as you’re talking. And I realized, if I were to think of Cornell, my content marketing agency, as a person, I really can’t liken it to another person in my life. But I can liken it to the exact same relationship that I had with school, where I was like, I’m going to plow through these courses, I’m going to do my absolute best,

I’m going to get the As nothing else is acceptable. I’m going to pile on my plate. I mean, I graduated high school when I was 16. I got my bachelor’s degree in three years. And then I went on to get two more master’s degrees in like record time. I mean, that’s what I did. I piled it on. And now I’m in this place in my businesses where I really want to spend more time on the Chiron side, I want to build more workshops, and I want to work with more clients. And I’m like, But Cornell is demanding so much of my time and energy. And I’m realizing now, wait actually that’s something that I’m doing. I piled on the course load I piled on the homework assignments, nobody said I had to finish school that quickly. Nobody. Nobody is saying I have to take on this many projects in the Cornell side. Nobody, I’m doing that to myself. And so even just in this brief, you know, conversation we’re having in this podcast episode. That’s a huge epiphany for me. And I’m wondering, in your experience with your clients going through this mental exercise, is that common for them to have that sort of Epiphany from this personification exercise and then go, Holy shit, okay, now a whole world of possibilities just opened up because I really am in control.

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 27:54
Yeah, it’s true. And same thing happened with me when I first recognized all this, I won’t go into the story, because it’s too long. It’s in the book. But it’s a long story. But what I recognized myself was, you know, every morning I woke up feeling like I was a failure, like I had not done enough, like, my clients were fine, but I wasn’t doing enough for them. I wasn’t bringing in enough revenue, all this stuff. And the thought was, they’re not happy. And then I realized that that’s an invisible day, there is no day, this is my business, I have the power to create it and set it up in the way that works for me, I can have what it is that I need here. So if I’m feeling overwhelmed, if I’m feeling beat up by it, there’s no one else here but me, I set it up to do that. So if I can make it this way, I can dismantle it, and I can change the energy of it. And you know, with that exercise, I do tell people I’m like, it may be a person, it may be an energy like you talked about – school. And what is so beautiful and I love this process so much is that when people change the relationship entity of their business, this personification, which I love that you do, to something that feels better.

And to them, sometimes it’s a dog, sometimes it’s their aunt, sometimes, like for me, it was the Muppet of Christmas present, you know, the Christmas present spirit on The Muppet Movie, when you go through the process, you really kind of look at all the characteristics how you want to feel. And the persona comes to you. And it can be an energy, a color or a tree, whatever. So it kind of starts out as a message that can be connected to a person or experience but it turns into something a little bit more beautiful. And this personification process is so useful because we are wired for connection, right? And we’re also Wired for Story like we our brains want to know who the good guys are, who the bad guys are. In the absence of data as Brene Brown says we will fill that in right Yeah. And so that’s why this process I think works so well, because of the way that we are geared towards learning and expressing ourselves in the world. So it’s a little Woo. Or a little like, I went through this with an IT group, and they’re like, I don’t know if I really feel like I can love my business, I feel like I could like it, or we could be friends. But after we did it, and I could show them, you know how this is actually a legitimate process to take people through. It’s not just very deal. They loved it, and they really got it.

Rai Cornell 30:29
Yeah, and I don’t think it’s woowoo at all. In fact, it resonates as very, not clinical. The problem that I have with the mental health world is that it’s so clinical, that it’s sterile. It’s devoid of human connection. But what you’ve done is you’ve taken all of that clinical research, you’ve married the human component to it. And now all of a sudden, we have this holistic kind of exercise, and the personification of it. Ultimately, what we want are all the human things. We want freedom, we want vitality, we want health, we want abundance, we want comfort, we want love, we want companionship, we want all of those things, I have never spoken to anybody who wants something like, I want more, I’m trying to go back in my psychological research brain and pick out something just like totally clinical, I want some double blind case studies of you know, customers who are extremely happy with our product and you know, got great risk. Fuck no, like, people want happiness, they want fulfillment, they want the human things. And so what you’re doing is really bringing back that human component to business.

And it’s funny, because at the beginning of our episode, I was thinking, oh, you know, I need to ask her about the term that you use business therapist, what is a business therapist? And yet now, I don’t even have to ask you, because I understand completely from this conversation, what you’re talking about. Now, the last thing I want to ask no, there are two more things I want to ask you. One is my fear and this is like my protective anti mental health world side coming out. My fear is that, in dredging up all of this, we can get easily caught in this, like, back channel of dredging up the past and reprocessing and re analyzing all of the traumas. And when you take into consideration little T traumas, especially for female entrepreneurs, there are mega fuck loads of little T traumas in our histories. And how do we not get sucked into that past? And how do we give it the attention it deserves while still moving forward?

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 32:55
Yeah, that’s a really good question. And I get asked that a lot, because people are reluctant or afraid. And, you know, when you’re combining this with business, you know, the stakes are high. And you know, what I always like to tell them is like, yeah, the stakes are high. And this is happening to you anyway, right? It’s coming out sideways, I always say kind of bleeds out. It’s impacting the decisions that we make. The burnout that we experience in our businesses, our nervous system is still doing this work, whether we are aware of it or not. And so there is no choice of not doing the thing, it is doing the thing in a way that can provide relief and support and change and adaptation, to build that resilience and to begin to heal and release, you know, some of these things. And the good news is that most of our patterns are pretty similar. And we don’t have to dig through everything. In fact, we can dig through, you know, something that you know, happened in the past six months in your business, and you’re like, ah, such a pattern, I see this happening, or why did this happen? We can work on that one, and you’re probably going to get some insight as to where it began, we don’t have to deal with every single episode or experience of it. Because the beauty of that too, is that it’ll trickle down into you know, all those experiences.

So it is difficult, it can be scary, which is why I think that you have to go slow. You need to have trained support to help you with it. It is okay to dip your toe in and then come back out. You know, I never put timelines on people that I work with in my do no harm program. You know, we’ve got to go at the pace that we go out and because we all have different types of trauma, maybe we’re neurodivergent and you know, growing up and you didn’t find a way to fit in, like we all have our different stuff. And so it’s not a one size fits all necessarily. But I’ve also found that when people can see that you know, this is to the benefit of their business, and it actually motivates them a little bit more. And that if they want to become more trauma conscious, so they’re doing no harm to themselves, but also to their business, and also the people that working with because the people that we work with also have trauma, because if you’re working with human beings, trauma is in the equation, that there’s a motivating factor, I think for that, that helps people stay in it, right, and that they know that they’re not alone in it. But I don’t really recommend that people do this work with a short timeline or without any kind of support. So I routinely make referrals to therapists. I have therapists who’ve been through my do harm program that can hold space for it. I just really don’t think it’s something that if you want to do a deep dive in it that you should do alone, or, you know, it’s different for everybody.

Rai Cornell 35:50
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the good news is, you mentioned this, I firmly believe that when things happen in our lives, almost like this recurring pattern, it’s because the universe is trying to get us to learn a lesson and the universe is bonking us over the head harder and harder and harder each time like, Hey, pay attention, I need you to learn this lesson. And oftentimes, we don’t have to go through every single one of those bonks in our past, to understand the lesson, the wisdom, the information or need needing to extract from that, we just have to get it. And once we get, we’re free of it, and we can move forward and let those things go. It’s not like they’re still sitting on the shelf, tapping us on the shoulder saying, Hey, pay attention to me, pay attention me, once you get the message you’re meant to get from that. It dissipates, it loses its weight. You’re no longer dragging it behind you.

So the last thing I wanted to ask you, because you’ve mentioned Brene’s name a few times and I know our listeners who are big Brene Brown fans are just gonna totally burn me at the stake. If I don’t ask you about this. Tell me about your work with Brene Brown, what are you doing with her? And what’s this program? Tell us about it?

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 37:03
Oh Yeah, so I am a big fan of hers. You know, she’s a social worker. And I was following her path. Because again, she was out there, talking about shame and vulnerability. And people were telling her don’t use the word shame if you’re going to come talk to our people. And I have a lot of that early out in my business of people telling me not to use the T word. And so she was a real Guiding Light and mentor for me to help me decide to stick and stay, do it, call a thing a thing, we have to do this. And so an opportunity came up to train with her several years ago, and I applied, and so I was accepted. And there was I think 20% of applicants were accepted. And so I felt really blessed to be able to do this. And so I went to San Antonio and spent three and a half days with her. And we all spent time with her learning how to facilitate her dare to lead processes, which are, you know, part of her book, dare to lead and that she’s taken into all these companies and, you know, big, big industries. And it was beautiful. And she is just as you think in person as she is on the screen. she’s funny, she’s irreverent. She’s smart. She’s a beautiful speaker, a beautiful human. And since then I have been facilitating dare to lead cohorts for people who want to become deadly trained, I’m a facilitator, but they can become deadly trained with us. And I do about two a year and we have quarterly zooms with her and hopefully someday we’ll be able to do courage camp again in person in Texas. And it’s just, it’s been a really beautiful and fantastic experience to be a part of the Newberg team.

Rai Cornell 38:38
You are involved in so many incredible things between your work with Brene, your own program, your do no harm program, your book, tell our listeners where they can learn more about you, check you out and work with you if it feels right.

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 38:52
Yeah, so if you love TikTok, I’m on there as @the business therapist. You can find me on my website. I think the links will be in the show notes as well. Also Instagram Nicole.lewiskeeber, so I’m pretty out there on social media. I also have some articles I’ve written on medium so you can find me there by using their name, so I’m around.

Rai Cornell 39:14
Awesome. Thank you so much for being here Nicole, this was powerful.

Nicole Lewis-Keeber 39:18
Thank you for having me.

Rai Cornell 39:33
Hey, Rai here again. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please subscribe and rate us in your favorite podcasting platform. Want to be a guest on the show or know someone who has an amazing story of entrepreneurship? Apply on our website at chironconsulting.us/podcast.