NICOLE SILVER on Shake the Cosmos
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How do you find your calling in life? What tools can help you in your journey to self-discovery?
Entrepreneur, business consultant, and educator Nicole Silver of Vekita Full Potential talks about the importance of investing time in yourself and shares her strategies for personal development. In the episode, Nicole leads an activity to focus in on what careers and life choices bring you energy.
Nicole Serena Silver has always had a knack for finding holes in systems. She looks at a situation, takes everything into consideration, and creates a whole approach to a solution. Her own struggles with finding her passion and calling motivated her to help others. She knew a solution was needed to address the biggest question we all face, "What do I want to do with my life?" It had to be a solution that was congruent with all the intricate parts of what makes us who we are, the lifestyle we want to create, and how our choices impact relationships in our lives.
For the past decade, Nicole has been submerged in research and development of curriculum that uncovers the intricate parts of who we are and how to pair our innate gifts with career and life choices. Nicole founded GROWmyfuture.org, which trains high school educators to deliver a curriculum that empowers youth to design their lives with tools that foster self discovery. After many years of adults asking if she had any resources available to help them discover their career and life path, she decided to write Vekita Full Potential.
Nicole is a multidisciplinary strategist, with an accomplished track record in roles involving trust-based relationships, leading entrepreneurial vision into implementation, and advancing individuals success with career goals. Nicole is a successful entrepreneur, business consultant, and educator. She has led workshops for fortune 500 companies, taught internationally and has been hired to advise numerous startups.
Also, did you know that you can get yourself a copy of the Shake The Cosmos Journal as part of the personal development course? Check it out here.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
ABHISHEK: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the next episode of Shake the Cosmos. My guest here today is Nicole. Nicole is a successful entrepreneur, business consultant, and educator. She has led workshops for Fortune 500 companies, talked internationally, and has been hired to advise numerous startups. Nicole graduated with honors from UC Berkeley with a degree focused on social studies of entrepreneurship.
In 2013, she founded growmyfuture.org as a way to connect and support youths to live their full potential. Her goal is to impact the lives of thousands, if not millions, and make GROW My Future a globally recognized organization.
She’s also the author of Full Potential, a professional guidebook to help adults get clear on their career and life choices. The guidebook can be ordered at ignitingfp.com. That’s like F is Full, Potential P dot com.
So let’s jump into it.
If you could have any superpower, Nicole, what would it be?
NICOLE: I’d have to say teleporting. I love traveling, and there’s been so many times where I want to be one place or another place, instantaneously. There would be so many different places I could go and visit, and just skip all the traffic. That’s always nice. So I’d say teleporting.
ABHISHEK: Teleporting, great. Where would you go? Let’s just say, today, for some reason, I had the magic wand, and you somehow got a chance to teleport, where would be the first spot?
NICOLE: Good question. Probably somewhere by a beach. Somewhere nice and warm, where I could go swimming. There’s something that is just so comforting about being at the beach. And I plan, at some point in my life, to spend part of my year by a beach. I love Tulum. That’s one place that always calls me back.
ABHISHEK: Hm. Well thank you for making the time to speak with us today. Not at the beach, so I apologize for that.
What’s something you want your viewers to know about you? What is the brand? I was learning about you. You’ve done so many different things, and amazing with this growmyfuture.org organization and this new guidebook coming out called Full Potential.
What is your story?
NICOLE: Yeah. My story is a very interesting one, that’s for sure. I feel like I’ve lived 15 lifetimes within this lifetime.
I’ve always been an entrepreneur. But my life definitely took a windy path. When I graduated from high school, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was struggling, I saw my peers struggling. I couldn’t get an appointment with my high school counselor to figure out if I wanted to change a class, let alone talk about my future and what was possible for me. And knowing I was an entrepreneur, but not really knowing it? It’s like these things within us, usually we know them but our attention isn’t on them, if that makes any sense.
It’s like they’re always there, and they’re always a part of our natural pattern. But if we don’t focus on them, if we’re not fully aware of them, then they sit in the background. Part of me always knew I was an entrepreneur. It wasn’t fully clear when I was younger. And it took a number of experiences to really pinpoint that piece for myself.
But I ended up dropping out of college to have my daughter at the age of 23. And that was a windy road, for sure. That was difficult to be a single mom, raising a child, and trying to figure out my 20’s as well.
At that time, in ‘08 or ‘09, the economy tanked, and I was doing events at the time. I had my own company producing events. And nobody wanted to hire for events. That’s the last thing when you’re, not in a depression, but when the economy isn’t doing well. It’s a more frivolous cost. You can cut that pretty easily.
I was in LA, just me and my daughter, not knowing what to do. Nobody would look at my resume because I didn’t have a degree. So I was like, “Okay. Let me make my own path.” And I put together all these different pitches and proposals, and one of them was to BET, profiling different successful African-American professionals. This is how GROW started, actually, and Full Potential, the guidebook, this was actually congruent, and the reason why everything now exists. Sort of what I’ve been working on.
BET, they loved my program, which was highlighting these different African-American professionals. And I was supposed to talk to the woman that writes checks. However, the CEO got fired, a new CEO came in, and wiped out all the staff, including the woman that was gonna write the check, or green-light it, I should say.
So I sat with that idea, and I was like, “This is so needed. We’re not adequately answering the question of, who are you and what do you want to do with your life?” Which was the biggest question anyone could ever ask themselves. So I decided to play with it for a while. I sat with it, trying to figure out, what is it that I want to be doing with this? Knowing that it had to exist and come into the world. And eventually it evolved into a nonprofit, which is growmyfuture.org. And it was definitely a trial by error. I knew that showing these kids the potential of different peoples’ paths is great, but they didn’t see it. “That’s amazing, oh they could do that. But I’ll never be able to do that.”
I wanted to show them, this is who you are. This is your blueprint. This is the value that you have to offer the world. And for them to find that on their own, and make self-directed choices about their futures, which engages them that much more in their life.
So that’s why we created a curriculum, which educators are delivering in their classrooms to their students. We can scale this out to be a national program. That’s the nonprofit, but after running the nonprofit for such a long period of time, I had so many adults come to me and say, “Hey, do you have something for me, too?”
And I realized enough people, actually about a year ago, I think there was a week where about five people within the week asked the same thing. Like, “Hey, do you have this available for me?” And I decided, you know what? It’s time. It’s time for me to make this available. And I’ve read and researched everything that is out there. There’s great books, like True North Leadership is one of my favorites, or Designing Your Life is a good one, What Color Is Your Parachute?
But I felt like all of them have a lot of reading. And it’s not about reading, it’s about action. Also, all of them have fragmented pieces of information. You tie them all together, and it can be good. But they also miss pieces. None of them talk about company culture. And company culture can be just as important as what job it is that you choose.
It’s a very cohesive way, and a more fluid way of going about looking at what you want to be doing. And it’s more active, and people can participate in designing their own future. And not read about other people, and how they got to do things. Really have it be their own personal experience.
ABHISHEK: Thank you. I think it’s great to hear your story. It gives us so much context for this book that you have coming out, Full Potential. And to hear how you did it, trial and error, and pulling up your sleeves.
And it sounds like you’re passionate about helping people who are going through change, whether it’s a career change or a life change. And you just get joy out of it. But at the same time, noticing how GROW My Future, there’s educators and teenagers that are their audience, but then this Full Potential is really focused on adults.
So what is that like, to make that transition for yourself?
NICOLE: It was so much fun. I really loved it. I love writing for adults. You can take it so many levels deeper. You can talk about things like work-life balance. I’ve really, really enjoyed it.
With adults, I had to take into consideration different aspects, of course, of what that looks like and what that might mean. Especially, one of the things with adults typically is transitioning careers. And that’s hard, that’s super difficult. I actually interviewed a ton of different HR professionals, and people who had successfully gone through career transitions to get the best tips and tricks for adults going through that.
Taking into consideration the different stages that different adults might be at and providing information. Because, really, it’s about them. It’s not about me, and my opinion, and all of my work. It’s about, how do I serve them in the best possible way? What are they looking for, and what are they in need of? Not, what is it that I think they should do? It’s really getting a good sense from individuals of where they’re at. And I interview people to see where they’re at, too, because I don’t want it to just come from my own perspective of what I think.
We did that with the nonprofit, too. We tested it on lots of students before we actually put it out there for scalability, to train educators. And then we tested it with educators in terms of how the training platform was working for them. We designed it with educators, for educators. So, same with the guidebook.
ABHISHEK: So this guidebook, it seems like a combination of your own experience, but then also this data and interviews that you’ve got, based on the HR professionals that you interviewed as well. And there’s tips and tricks in there, as you say.
Can you give an example of one of your favorites, for the audience? That would be cool.
NICOLE: Absolutely, yeah. I’d be happy to. One of the things that I teach, I actually have lectured and done workshops in big corporations around this, is networking. I think that, more than anything, is when we’re wanting to achieve something, it’s all about people. So networking is a really important tip and trick.
It also depends on where you’re at. How the guidebook is designed, is that there are the activities in the front part of the book, which is all action activity-based. And then the final sections are the tips and tricks, and there’s an array of different ones, and people can go and spend more time in certain areas in which they feel like they want more knowledge. And then the last portion is divided into different portions depending on who the audience is, if it’s their first job. If they’re college students, for example, and then going out into the work world for their first job. If it’s people transitioning careers, if it’s what I call the olden Years, potentially retiring, or potentially looking for work in the Golden Years, too.
So those are more optional, to go to where it is that we feel we gravitate towards more.
ABHISHEK: What’s a mistake that a lot of people make, when they’re transitioning careers, for this audience that you’re speaking to?
NICOLE: I think it’s just hard. I think it’s really hard. I think that the biggest mistake with transitioning careers that can happen, because it is difficult, is you have to have perseverance. A big part of that is not having any aggravation come into interviews, or frustration, and to approach it with a fresh mind, a more adventurous mind. Playing with, what if I tell my story this way? What if I do the interview this way? Or have it be something like, let me get to know the interviewer. Let me try to understand more. What is this interviewer’s story? Or how does this company operate?
Making it an inquisitive adventure versus it being, okay, another interview, I’m so sick of this, this is my tenth, or maybe even hundredth interview. That’s what I would say.
ABHISHEK: Thank you. As I look through the pre-order website, I notice that one of the chapters is called Your Life at 100 Years Old. Would you mind shedding a little bit more light on what is the purpose of that type of chapter? Without, of course, giving away your secret sauce.
NICOLE: No, that’s okay! The secret sauce is there to be given out. I’m not trying to hold onto it. It’s okay. We can spread it wide, because really it’s about helping other people.
So, 100-year-old, yeah. I once wrote, and I don’t even remember where or why I did this, but I wrote about, what would my life look like if I was 100 years old and looking back at it? And it gave me the ability to imagine, and to see my life in different areas, and to really visualize it, to bring it all together. What is it that I want to leave behind? What is it that I wanted to create? What is the type of life that I wanted to live?
That’s at the very end of all these different activities, as well, to really bring it all together and go, “Okay. This is what I really want.” It’s like being able to work backwards, almost. Knowing what it is that you wanted to create. What is most important to you? It really is solidifying the most important pieces that you want to be doing with your life.
ABHISHEK: That’s fascinating, thinking of life as a 100-year-old, and what’s important. That’s something I’ve thought about, as well, at the same time as you’ve written about this.
Do you feel comfortable sharing what is your own? What is the story that you want people to remember when you’re 100 years old? You want to talk a little bit about that?
NICOLE: Sure. I went into as much detail in terms of where I would be living and the view that I would have, that I would have a garden that I would be working on, that I would be close to the city but still in a peaceful area in nature. I would have created a lot. But it wasn’t about being known for my creation, but having my creation have a large impact in the world.
That I would have loved, and loved deeply. And that would be with my partner, with my daughter, with everybody that I encounter. And that I really would have created a juicy life, full of travel, and experiences, and community, and hosting people. I love hosting events and bringing different experiences to people, as well. So I definitely envision that being a part of my life, and it has been, and it will continue to be.
But hopefully even more so, where I don’t have to be so focused. I’ve been on the grind for many, many years and it’s just been nonstop, and I haven’t had time to do as much as I would like to, socially, or creatively, or in other areas of my life.
ABHISHEK: Thank you so much. I’m just digesting that. That is personal, and thank you for sharing that.
NICOLE: Of course.
ABHISHEK: As I think about one particular thing you just mentioned, you dropped “community”. I talk a little bit about community in Shake the Cosmos’ earlier podcasts and how people should identify their community.
I would love to hear from you, what is your definition of community? And when you think about your own community, what does that encompass?
NICOLE: I think that that actually evolves through time. I would say community can change, and you have a certain consistency of people that have been around for large periods of time. But there’s also those that, as you evolve yourself, and as you start getting into different types of interests, and things of that nature, that can shift.
It really depends on what stage of your life you might be in. I just read an article that my friend wrote about when she became a mom, that she was looking for that type of community. And she thought automatically she’d fall into it, and that didn’t happen right away, but it’s happening now.
But life changes, things happen, and so the community evolves. It depends on your interests too. You could find that all of a sudden you love, I don’t know, boating. And then you develop a community of different people that love the same thing. It could be many different things.
So I would say that evolves, and it changes, and it depends on what your needs are. I also feel like there is something to what I call ‘leveling up’ in our own frequency. And as we evolve as humans, it depends on who is around you, and if you level up your frequency that you’ve got to join others that have also leveled up, too.
I always like to surround myself with people who are wiser or inspirational. In fact, one of the pieces within the guidebook is the people in your life. And you look at things such as, does this person energize me? Do I feel neutral after our interaction? Or do I feel completed?
ABHISHEK: Hm. Yeah, it sounds like it’s a very conscious approach to community. And the framework you’ve laid out here, around people in your life, and just understanding who that is.
And leveling up. I’m intrigued by this leveling up concept. There’s this thing about your peers, or your power, or your income, maybe, around us… Average out to be the people around you. There are some of these concepts kicking around.
But if you were to categorize, what is leveling up for you? Can you elaborate a little bit more?
NICOLE: Yeah. That’s a good question. I think I’m also trying to figure out exactly what that means too. Because it’s a new concept that I’m playing with, that part of our purpose in this world is to level up.
Leveling up can be different for different people. I think those are just the different lessons that we have to learn throughout our life, in different ways. And leveling up could be making it financially, it could be uplifting yourself through difficult situations, or getting past different patterns that tend to be frequent within your life. It could be leveling up your own spiritual path. It could be many different things.
Leveling up, it depends on what it is. What’s important, what is specific, for that individual?
ABHISHEK: Hm.
NICOLE: It’s elevating yourself to the next level, whatever that might be, whatever that goal is. Whether that is the emotional sides, psychology, for lack of better words. It can come out in many ways.
ABHISHEK: Yeah, totally. And I see a connection to many things as well. I appreciate you sharing the framework, how you think about leveling up.
It also reminds me of… I was just with a friend who drew a Buddhist circle thing for me, and it had all these different types of spokes. Like finance, work, self-love, how stretched out you can be in different ways. In some ways your new concept of leveling up sounds almost like balancing some of that. But also being conscious.
NICOLE: I would say it’s not so much about balance. It’s about lessons. It’s about evolution. That’s how I would define it, lessons and evolution.
For example, a lesson might be something that’s been a pattern for you, or maybe within your family as well. I’ll get vulnerable here, one of the patterns in my family is that my mom and dad got divorced when I was young, and my dad hasn’t been around. And I went into being a parent as a single mom. So one of the patterns is not having a man be a part of… There’s definitely a piece about having the man energy be a part of our worlds. And that’s something that I’m working on, and that I feel confident that, hopefully, I’ll be able to level up.
Which, you show that example, and it then portrays to my daughter, and my daughter sees it, and it can break the pattern. Not just from the past, but for the future. So that’s one way that you could level up, and it might be really hard. Some people deal with drug abuse, or alcohol abuse, that could be leveling up, is getting through those kinds of patterns.
So, lessons and, what did I say?
ABHISHEK: Lessons and evolution.
NICOLE: Evolution, right. Yeah. I think that that well defines what I think leveling up is.
ABHISHEK: One thought that comes to my mind now is there’s all this stuff about finding purpose and leveling up. And doing these things that just give people purpose, but then people have full-time jobs. People have work to do, nine to five.
So how does someone bring their work, and all this awesomeness that they get outside of work, into work? And make a difference?
NICOLE: Yeah, sure, there’s many different ways to do that. One of the things that you do within the guidebook is, once you define what it is that you want to be doing, you can look at, “Okay, is this something that I want to do as a hobby? Is this something that I want to integrate within work?” So there’s lots of choices. Everything within the guidebook is a choice that you make for yourself.
That’s one particular choice that you can make for yourself. You could also look at, “Do I want to see if I can transition my current position into something that better fits who I am, and what it is that I want to be doing?” You can pose different initiatives, or suggest different ways that you may want to be going about your career.
Or if you want to transition careers. You could do things like stay in your full-time nine to five job while volunteering and getting experience in the new career that you want to be transitioning into.
There’s lots of different ways that you can go about doing this. It really depends. It’s so individualized. And that’s what I love about the guidebook, is that it is based on you, and the choices that you want to make for yourself.
ABHISHEK: Thanks, and I think in the guidebook you talk about one being this work-life integration piece. And I guess I’ve heard of work-life balance before, and work-life integration is a fairly new concept. So what does that entail?
NICOLE: It’s, again, many different things. Work-life integration is the sister of work-life balance, actually it’s pretty much the same, right? It’s just work-life balance is kind of played out, and I like the integration piece versus just balancing. Because it feels like a balance could get tipped over very easily, whereas integration is something that is much more solid.
Looking at things like, where are you spending your time? Where do you want to spend your time? What is important in terms of money? Looking at all these different pieces, how do you want to feel within your life, too? Looking at the emotions that you want to invoke more.
For example, I want to feel healthier, or I want to feel more productive. And then giving actual actions with how to be able to do those things.
It’s an important piece. You can’t talk about work without talking about life as well. It all goes hand in hand, one always influences the other, both ways.
ABHISHEK: I want to pick up on something you said about action, and making sure there’s an action. And trying to understand, ideas come a dime a dozen. And thinking about your story, you’ve actually taken ideas and executed them, a trial and error approach.
What would be your advice to somebody who has a lot of ideas and is struggling with the action piece of it?
NICOLE: Yeah, well if it’s lots of ideas, it’s always about narrowing it down, and what you want to work on the most. I definitely struggled with this. I remember when I was starting my nonprofit, just the nonprofit alone, I had all these ideas with what I could do within the nonprofit. And I was very lucky to have somebody that was mentoring me, who had started the biggest nonprofit organization in India.
And he was getting his MBA at Haas, and he went home on vacation, I think it was winter break, and he came back, and I was like, “You’re not gonna be happy.” During a three week period I had started all these different things. His whole thing was having me narrow it down and really focus on specific initiatives, but I just went all out. I’m one of those people, I see so many different things, I want to do them all. Why can’t I do them all? Why can’t I see it all? I know how this can play out.
But it is really important to narrow in on what it is that you want to focus on. I’ve learned through the years, that’s for sure. Some lessons have been a little harder, but you stress yourself out and you’re not able to get as much done. So it’s really about figuring out what is most important to concentrate on.
And that doesn’t mean that the other things can’t be done. It’s just you have to have a timeline for yourself, and you have to narrow in and make choices. And then, “How do you narrow in and make choices?” is another question to be had, which the guidebook also goes into, how do you make these choices?
I always like the tactic of looking at different choices side by side. If I could do this, or this, which one would I rather do? You have to eliminate one. And then after you do that, you do that with another pairing, until you get it down to exactly what it is that you’re interested in, knowing that you can always go back.
But also, to commit to something for a period of time. I think that that is a mistake that can happen, right when you’re about to have that breakthrough, is when maybe you give up and let things go.
I did a survival program when I was 14, out in the middle of nowhere. Three weeks, in nowhere. One of the things that we had to do was we had to create coal from rubbing two sticks together. And the moment that you feel like your arm is gonna break off, and you just can’t do it anymore, that’s when you get the coal.
Always know when to push yourself, and also know when not to. Again, in the tips and tricks in the guidebook, we point to how to know when to keep going, and how to know when to move on to something else. It’s a delicate balance, though. It’s not necessarily an easy, straightforward answer. It takes a lot of reflection to understand the difference between the two.
ABHISHEK: Thank you. Diving a little bit deeper into some of the choices, as well. You said it comes down to how to make those choices. And thank you for sharing your example.
What about people who are just trying to be creative? How do you spark creativity in the choices, so it doesn’t feel so logical or planned?
NICOLE: Well, one of the things that you could do, in the guidebook that is an activity, is to imagine what it would be to live a day in the life of whatever job. So you spend the day in creativity and thinking about it. You start by journaling. What would life look like? What would this mean? Go throughout the day, thinking about all the different ways in which life would change, if you were to have this career. You talk to people about the career, you ask people if anybody’s ever encountered anybody with that type of career. And then at the end of the day you do a final reflection. Then you just let it be, because you have to let it just settle, and not do anything. Then you can experiment and do that with another job after you’ve done that.
So there’s definitely ways to approach it in a creative way.
ABHISHEK: All right. Let’s talk about one other thing. It’s everywhere, in all these books: Passion. Sometimes it can be tricky, like people don’t know what they’re passionate about. Sometimes people know. What is your perspective on it? What is your take on it? I know that’s one of the things you talk about in the guidebook, as well.
NICOLE: Yeah, absolutely. Passion is interesting. Of course some of us are born, we know what it is that we’re passionate about, and what we love doing. But unfortunately, a lot of us, it’s a trial by error. Actually, there’s a lot of misconceptions around passion, and what passion is, and how to find passion. There’s all these slogans: Find your passion, live your passion.
But actually, there’s been studies done recently about passion being something where you have to try it first, and you get good at it. And once you’re good at it, then you become passionate about it. Which is kind of the opposite of what we think. We think that we’re gonna fall into passion and automatically love doing something. But actually, it’s very possible that you first get really good at it, you get past that hump of like, “Oh my gosh, I’m not sure if I can do this. I’m not doing this so well.” And then you get good, and you’re like, “Oh, I finally did this, and I love this, and I’m really good at it.”
For example, maybe you’re like, “Gosh, I’ve always wanted to try out salsa dancing.” And you go salsa dancing for the first time, and you’re like, “Whoa! This is something that I don’t think I’m really good at, and I’m not sure if I should try it again.” But then you decide to go to salsa dancing lessons and you get really good, and you’re on fire, and you love it, and you go out salsa dancing every night. That’s just one example of how you might be able to find passion.
ABHISHEK: Thank you. We’ll just do a quick shout out to your organization, GROW My Future. I know you’re executive director of growmyfuture.org, you’re the founder of the organization as well. So how can listeners support this nonprofit?
NICOLE: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a couple of ways. I think the two biggest ways that you can support GROW My Future is one, if you know educators that would be interested in delivering our curriculum within their high schools, or principals at different high schools, let them know about our organization. Let them know what we’re doing. It’s so important. We’ve seen students go from D’s and F’s to A’s and B’s. One student took his certification to the courthouse and was like, “I’m not drifting. I know what I want to be doing.”
But even outside of some of the students that we’re working with that might be going down a bad path, and it kind of redirects them, because it shows them their value. This is applicable to anybody and everybody. One of the biggest questions we can ask ourselves is, who are we and what do we want to do? So this is equipping educators with this. If you look at the national average of high school counselors to students, in California it’s 822 to one. Nationally, it’s 429, I want to say, no it’s closer to 450 I think, to one. Recommended is one to 250, but even that is too high.
So these kids don’t even get five minutes of counseling, or on average, about five minutes of counseling of what they want to do with their futures with their high school counselors. So we’re not giving them tools, that’s where our curriculum comes in. So please spread the word to different educators around our curriculum.
And of course, donations are highly appreciated. We don’t turn educators away due to money. We definitely offer a lot of scholarships to educators. And the amount that we charge for any of our training on our curriculum is really low priced compared to what the marketing is asking. And we did that, and we offer a low priced curriculum for high quality. And we do that intentionally. So we definitely need extra support. Please consider also donating to our organization.
ABHISHEK: Thank you, growmyfuture.org. And then a final shout out to your new book coming out, Full Potential. It’s gonna be live right now and people can preorder on ignitingfp.com, that’s Full F, P Potential, dot com, and right now there’s free shipping for preorders and they’ll start being available to everybody next year.
NICOLE: Correct. Absolutely. Thank you.
ABHISHEK: Thank you.
NICOLE: Yeah, it’s been a pleasure.