I met
after hearing her speak at the Insights Association Corporate Researchers Conference in September 2024. She was a keynote who talked about the importance of being a “Whole Brained Professional.”After hearing her speak, I decided I had to have her on the Career Adventurer podcast. So, I blindly reached out to her on LinkedIn.
Nikkia is a former Sr. Insights Executive at Netflix, Twitter, and Colgate-Palmolive. After nearly two decades in Corporate CPG and Tech, she decided to go down another path. She is betting on herself with an entrepreneurial venture called Birds Uncaged.
On this episode, we discussed how she ultimately decided to eschew big corporate for her new venture. We dive into the natural dissonance she felt between rising the corporate ladder and potentially doing something more creative, more freeing. Nikkia shares how journaling and creating personal vows has helped her to think and to see what makes her feel most alive.
Plus, Nikkia talks the arts. She embraces creativity. Creativity embraces her. It makes her “Whole Brained”, a critical skill in the age of AI.
Listen to the full episode. You’re sure to pick up a nugget or three for your own career adventures.
Core Themes
Take note of these themes for your own career adventures.
Stability First
I’ve always struggled to balance my need for stability against my need for adventure. My dad always preached being useful. Do something that people will always want. It’s good advice, advice that most parents likely give their kids. As a father myself, we just want them to succeed, to not end up on the street.
Nikkia talked about her own conflict balancing the choice between the stable versus the creative route. The reality is that we all need money. Careers are really just an extension of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If you don’t have stability first, it’s far more difficult and more risky to throw caution to the wind and do something perceived as more risky.
“Early in our careers, often right outta school in our twenties few of us, I think are an exception where we have this clairvoyance about what we wanna do and we stay true to it and never waiver. But a lot of us are just like, ‘We need money, right?’ We're outta our parents' homes, have a degree, and it's either a kind of scrappy hustle kind of hunger for money or it's a, I need to apply this degree and have stability.”
Journal Every Day
Journaling is powerful. Doing it consistently unlocks thoughts from deep crevasses in your mind. You write and streams of potential pour onto the page. Opportunities to reinvent. Opportunities to understand yourself. Opportunities to process feelings. If you can journal everyday, you are doing better than most of us.
Nikkia found journaling as a way to understand herself better. She writes in it consistently. She uses prompts to help her. That allows her to have a conversation and process information. The more she does it, the more the purpose evolves.
“I actually have, my journal in front of me, which I write in every morning, was a way for me to just have a relationship with myself. It was often based on question prompts. It morphed over time into gratitude.”
Most Alive?
“When have you felt most alive?” This is a question you should routinely ask yourself, especially regarding your career. It’s a question that has come up on other episodes. It’s easy to get lost in today’s to-do list tasks. It’s easy to pop the headphones in and start knocking your normal tasks out. It’s not easy to take a step back, to check in with how you feel about the tasks.
Nikkia talks about how the idea of aliveness helped her see that she loves presenting. She was a researcher by trade, but wanted to do more than just share data and facts. She wanted to tell thoughtful stories. She wanted to use multimedia to do it. Doing these things helped her feel alive. It’s a good question for everyone to ask themselves time and time again.
“That idea of aliveness, which is basically those rare moments when what you're doing and how you're expressing yourself, it's fully aligned with what you are feeling on the inside. It's almost like if in some sort of weird alternate universe the way that your cells would be operating, it's literally the same.”
You First
What do you want to do? What are you interested in? It’s so easy to put yourself on the back burner and only focus on what you think others want. We’re told “Give customers what they want.” Or, “Follow the money.” Sure, serving customers and revenue are critical backbones to any sustainable business. However, you are part of the equation too. If the work doesn’t make you proud and you have other options, why do it?
Nikkia shared how she thinks about doubling down on being herself. It has helped her go beyond being confident and gaining self-confidence. By looking deep, she is confident in her abilities. She looks to iconic creators like David Bowie, Andre 3000, Erykah Badu, in her own creative process. She makes sure to ask her younger self if it makes sense too.
“All of these people who I consider inspirations, one of the things that I learned, as I listen to their interviews, they all talk about the creative process being something that is for them at first. Don't develop the thing: the audience and the metrics and like some revenue number in mind, at the start. Do the thing and do it because the younger version of you will love it.”
What Vows Are You Making?
How often do you make critical promises to yourself? Ones that focus on who you are or want to become. They don’t have to be complicated. They just need to be thoughtful exercises that guide you in life’s journey. Promises are simply vows, right. We make promises to God, to loved ones, and to coworkers, right? Why shouldn’t we make them to ourselves?
Nikkia keeps her vows alive and in close proximity. They are operational north stars. While we spoke, she picked one up and showed it to me. The vows remind her of who she wants to be. They provide guidance for her work. They also help her identify how she wants to operate 100% of the time.
“I created this little vow…this is one of the ways in which I am trying to infuse my life as a dancer into everything I do. I vow to transform life itself into a dance, an ongoing flow of creativity, authenticity, and presence. I put that there because it's not something that I set about to do 50% of the time, it is who I am.”
Hear More About Nikkia’s Meaningful Path
We had an energetic, thoughtful conversation. It spanned life, career, inspiration, and being true to yourself.
Nikkia shares more than just these themes. She talks about being an expat. She talks about how she focuses on raising her children. She talks about how to explore inside yourself to make the external you AMAZING!
Go beyond these themes. Listen to the full episode.
Enjoy the episode! Thanks for you support!
Paul G. Fisher
Additional Resources To Check Out
Guests routinely share resources and tools they’ve found to be helpful in their own journey’s. They range from books to apps to thought leaders and more. Here’s a few additional resources discussed in this episode:
Sapiens - #1 International Bestseller. A history of human evolution and cognition.
Commanding Life - Rachel Brown’s tools to help people embrace their true power.
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