MEET NICOLE
From news anchor to kindness researcher, by way of one soggy Cheerio.
Hi, I'm Nicole. Keynote speaker, author of five books, host of The Kindness Podcast, former TV journalist, hospital chaplain, coach's wife, recovering perfectionist. I help people in high-pressure, people-centered work catch the thought before it catches them.
But none of that explains how a Cheerio changed my entire life. So let me tell you the story.
MEET NICOLE
From news anchor to kindness researcher, by way of one soggy Cheerio.
Hi, I'm Nicole. Keynote speaker, author of five books, host of The Kindness Podcast, former TV journalist, hospital chaplain, coach's wife, recovering perfectionist. I help people in high-pressure, people-centered work catch the thought before it catches them.
But none of that explains how a Cheerio changed my entire life. So let me tell you the story.
WHERE IT STARTED
It started with a soggy Cheerio at a public pool.
It was 2011. I was sitting on a lounge chair, frazzled, depleted, and quietly nursing the residue of last night's rum and cokes, when my toddler offered a Cheerio to the little girl next to him. Straight from his mouth, the way toddlers do when something is just too delicious to keep to themselves.
Got to. I had been marinating in "have to" for years.
That Cheerio pulled me into a conversation with the little girl's mom, a teenager in a shiny gold bikini. She had the day off work, and she was lit up about it. She got to spend the whole day at the pool with her daughter.
Something cracked open in me that afternoon. On the way out, I did the strangest thing I'd ever done: I handed her a few twenties, enough to fill her gas tank and take her daughter to McDonald's, because I wanted her to know that I saw her, and that her perspective had just changed mine.
Then I went home and wrote about it. The column ran for ten years.
My local newspaper turned that story into a weekly column called "Kindness is Contagious."
WHERE IT STARTED
It started with a soggy Cheerio at a public pool.
It was 2011. I was sitting on a lounge chair, frazzled, depleted, and quietly nursing the residue of last night's rum and cokes, when my toddler offered a Cheerio to the little girl next to him. Straight from his mouth, the way toddlers do when something is just too delicious to keep to themselves.
That Cheerio pulled me into a conversation with the little girl's mom, a teenager in a shiny gold bikini. She had the day off work, and she was lit up about it. She got to spend the whole day at the pool with her daughter.
Got to. I had been marinating in "have to" for years.
Something cracked open in me that afternoon. On the way out, I did the strangest thing I'd ever done: I handed her a few twenties, enough to fill her gas tank and take her daughter to McDonald's, because I wanted her to know that I saw her, and that her perspective had just changed mine.
Then I went home and wrote about it. The column ran for ten years.
My local newspaper turned that story into a weekly column called "Kindness is Contagious."
WHAT CHANGED?
And then the real plot twist happened. Me.
I thought I was writing a column about other people's goodness. It turns out I was retraining my own eyes.
Once I started looking for the good, I started finding it everywhere. The lens changed, and so did the life behind it. Within a year I had quit drinking. Quit smoking. Lost thirty pounds. Fallen back in love with my husband. The atmosphere of my entire home shifted, not because anyone else changed, but because I did.
Kindness duped me. I had no idea that writing about it every week would physically change the pathways in my brain.
That's where the idea at the center of everything I teach was born: what you look for is what you see. And what you see shapes who you become.
WHAT CHANGED?
And then the real plot twist happened. Me.
I thought I was writing a column about other people's goodness. It turns out I was retraining my own eyes.
Once I started looking for the good, I started finding it everywhere. The lens changed, and so did the life behind it. Within a year I had quit drinking. Quit smoking. Lost thirty pounds. Fallen back in love with my husband. The atmosphere of my entire home shifted, not because anyone else changed, but because I did.
Kindness duped me. I had no idea that writing about it every week would physically change the pathways in my brain.
That's where the idea at the center of everything I teach was born: what you look for is what you see. And what you see shapes who you become.
KEEPING IT HONEST
I don't talk about hard things from a distance.
I was eleven years old when I was the flower girl in my mom's wedding, held in a prison chapel. I know what it's like to grow up around complicated love.
I was 37 when I gave up alcohol, after years of smiling on television by day and self-medicating by night.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer on my 40th birthday.
I've lived the whiplash life of a college basketball coach's wife, through the hirings and the firings and the moving trucks. I went to seminary, served as a small-town pastor, and spent two years as a hospital chaplain, sitting with people in trauma, grief, and crisis on the worst days of their lives.
And in one recent stretch, my husband lost his job, survived falling asleep at the wheel at 60 miles an hour, and we moved across the country to Raleigh, North Carolina with no safety net except the work I had half-paused to finish my Master of Divinity.
I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because this is why my message doesn't sound naive. I know how fast a mind can turn against you.
Two things can be true: life can be genuinely hard, and you can still choose what you feed.
KEEPING IT HONEST
I don't talk about hard things from a distance.
I was eleven years old when I was the flower girl in my mom's wedding, held in a prison chapel. I know what it's like to grow up around complicated love.
I was 37 when I gave up alcohol, after years of smiling on television by day and self-medicating by night.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer on my 40th birthday.
I've lived the whiplash life of a college basketball coach's wife, through the hirings and the firings and the moving trucks. I went to seminary, served as a small-town pastor, and spent two years as a hospital chaplain, sitting with people in trauma, grief, and crisis on the worst days of their lives.
And in one recent stretch, my husband lost his job, survived falling asleep at the wheel at 60 miles an hour, and we moved across the country to Raleigh, North Carolina with no safety net except the work I had half-paused to finish my Master of Divinity.
I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because this is why my message doesn't sound naive. I know how fast a mind can turn against you.
Two things can be true: life can be genuinely hard, and you can still choose what you feed.
THE RECEIPTS
The work, by the numbers
A weekly kindness column that ran for ten years. Five books, including The Negativity Remedy. The Kindness Podcast, named a top happiness podcast by O, The Oprah Magazine. Features by NBC Nightly News, Hallmark Channel, People, Reader's Digest, and Woman's World.
10
Years of Columns
5
BOOKS
200+
eVENTS
30,000+
PEOPLE
NBC Hallmark Channel People Reader's Digest Woman's World O, The Oprah Magazine
FEED WHAT GIVES YOU LIFE
A few of my favorite plot twists...
I won a car on The Price is Right. I dragged my family onto an episode of HGTV's House Hunters. And I won more than $70,000 in the final bonus round of Wheel of Fortune, where my winning puzzle was, no kidding, "A Positive Viewpoint."
Sometimes the universe hands you your own tagline.
Why do I chase these things? Same reason I teach what I teach. Feed what gives you life. I take my own advice.
THESE DAYS
Home is Raleigh, North Carolina.
We moved here to be near our college-aged daughter. I'm still a coach's wife, still a mom, still collecting sneakers and saying yes to strange adventures. And most weeks you'll find me in an airport, on my way to a stage, carrying the same message I stumbled into at a public pool:
Change what you look for, and you change everything.
THESE DAYS
Home is Raleigh, North Carolina.
We moved here to be near our college-aged daughter. I'm still a coach's wife, still a mom, still collecting sneakers and saying yes to strange adventures.
And most weeks you'll find me in an airport, on my way to a stage, carrying the same message I stumbled into at a public pool:
Change what you look for, and you change everything.