[Nicole Gibson] ​​​​​​​Love is the answer

Welcome to Exit the Matrix Stories of Success with your host Jane Slack-Smith, where we celebrate the incredible journeys of individuals who've transcended their limitations and achieved extraordinary success.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Exit the Matrix, a podcast dedicated to exploring life's most transformative moments. Today we are exploring, amongst other things, love. Now, love is a powerful force that bridges our connection to all we desire for ourselves and our world. Whether you are a human being love or a human doing love, our next guest is someone who epitomizes living a life directed by what she loves. And it is my immense pleasure to introduce you to a very special guest today, Nicole Gibson, to Exit the Matrix Podcast. Hello, Nicole.

Jane Slack-Smith, nice to be here.

Now, before I ask you the very first question, Nick, I have done a little bit of research and I have some really interesting information to share with the audience first about the amazing human that you are. So Nick is an award-winning social entrepreneur, systems architect, author, and philosopher. She models how to live from a place of exponential growth in all she does, including in her Love Out Loud community. Now, It's impossible to put one label on Nick. However, she prefers to be seen as an unstoppable message of love and human potential, impacting millions of people worldwide with her unconventional models of community development and transformation, which now even crosses over to technology. Nick's mission is profound but simple: to bring about a significant shift in human consciousness and actualize a civilization of love by 2030. With a steadfast belief in love's transformative power, Nick crafts unique solutions to modern entrepreneurial challenges, bridging gaps between business objectives and holistic wellbeing while cultivating a purpose-driven, resilient, and high-performing organizational culture. She empowers others, especially leaders and entrepreneurs, to leverage love in business to drive sustainable growth. Nick has had an incredible journey to this point, establishing a not-for-profit at 18 after her own experience, which I'm sure she'll share with us. Nick tackled the epidemic of mental health challenges by developing an unconventional model of community capacity building, engaging tens of thousands of young people across Australia, focusing on building emotional infrastructure as a means to curb the rising rates of isolation, suicide, and youth disengagement. After working with half a million people in a decade of entrepreneurship and creating a startup to help students and young people develop their business concepts, Nick recognized that there's an undeniable code that serves as a golden thread between all of us. She integrates these observations into the development of a transformative technology to unify the world beyond difference. She has many accolades and awards after completing significant national tour that I mentioned before with a team traveling across Australia on a visiting isolated schools at the ripe age of 20, she was a finalist for the Young Australian of the Year. She's been listed as one of Australia's top 100 influential women at 21, and shortly afterwards she won the Pride of Australia medal. Now, a couple of fun facts. She left school at 14 to be a rock star, and possibly that's still on the agenda of her goals. She was the youngest Commonwealth Commissioner in history to assist the government with challenges on mental health, and she lived in a van for 2 years while facilitating over 1,500 workshops in 300 communities across rural and remote Australia. Now, with all that said, Nick just lives her message that love can connect us all. She's a human being and a human doing and practicing love daily. But first, let me just share with you a magic moment that recently connected us. So whilst I was crossing a very busy road in inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy recently, I quickly glimpsed someone from the side of my eye that looked a little familiar. And as I got to the Alchemy Coffee Shop, it struck me. I think I know that face. So I recrossed the road, found Nick in a skate shop. Heads up, one of us has possibly shopped there before for their teenage son, and the other one was buying things for themselves. And I tapped her on the shoulder while she was trying on glasses and said, by some small chance, did I see you on stage in 2018 at the Mindvalley University in Estonia? And she enthusiastically said, yes, stuck out a hand, said, hi, I'm Nicole Gibson. She's someone who just embraces love. She was there on a very fleeting visit from her home in San Francisco. She said yes an hour later when I said, hey, would you join me on my podcast? And here we are. So welcome, Nick. You are amazing. Thank you so much for joining the community here today.

Thank you, Jan.

Look, with all that said, you know, the Exit the Matrix podcast is really about these sliding door moments, these significant challenges and changes, maybe health, maybe opportunity to seeing something that's different. Can you share with us maybe one or two or three of those kind of sliding door moments for you throughout my life?

Yeah, I mean, I'm a big believer in the butterfly effect, you know. I think, um, every breath, you know, every decision we make, um, has an infinite ripple into the quantum field. That's definitely how I kind of see the makeup of life, um, and throughout my life, you know, as all of us, there's been an infinite amount of sliding door moments, but I suppose the ones that are really most memorable, and I most likely would have shared this, this story, um, on stage from memory at Mindvalley when we first, first met, was the conversation my school principal decided to have with me at 17 years old. I think that, that was really— it was the first time I had an experience of unconditional love. And because of my life's work ever since, you know, 15 years on, Um, that's really been the message that's, that's driven and the purpose that's driven all of my crazy entrepreneurial pursuits. So, um, I think that that sliding door moment definitely was one of the most significant that changed the trajectory of my life. And, and what was going on for me at that time was I was in performing arts school, but I was battling with an eating disorder, an eating disorder called anorexia nervosa. And because of, I think, the culturescape that we live in, this kind of challenge that I was going through, um, was, was very confronting for the people around me. And I think what it, what it illuminated for me at that time is the way we relate to vulnerability, actually, culturally. Because unlike maybe someone that's going through a more invisible mental illness like depression or anxiety, you know, inner scars that you can't see. For me, this was something that was very visible, and what, what I got to experience was how people related to that. And it taught me a lot about where we're truly at, and it made me ask a depth of question that extended just beyond my own personal experience, which is if we're afraid to have these really difficult conversations you know, what, what other problems in the world aren't we solving? Because what I was experiencing day to day mostly was people's discomfort, you know, their, their kind of avoidance of having that, that conversation that I suppose was kind of the elephant in the room as I, as my health got to this point of crisis. But my school principal was this super alpha guy, you know, middle-aged Aussie dude and probably the last person you would expect actually to, to put his hand up and say, hey, I want to have a conversation with you. And, um, at the time when, when he approached me that day at school, you know, my attendance at that time was probably about 15% because my health was in such a critical state. So even the fact that I was at school that day to have that conversation was definitely a sliding door moment. Um, and I remember feeling when he tapped me on the shoulder and said, can you come to my office, every part of me wanted to run away.

Yeah.

Um, and I, I made the decision to, to follow him and have that conversation with him. And I remember thinking that I was going to get in trouble because that was kind of my mindset at the time, was, was just this shame I was carrying. And the first thing he said to me as I sat down in his office was, I'm not here to make you feel afraid. I just want you to know that you're not alone in going through what you're going through. Wow. Um, which completely interrupted my pattern and my expectation. And, um, after he said that, I actually burst into tears and I cried for about 30 minutes. And he didn't, he didn't try to stop, stop the crying. He just allowed me to cry. And even that was very transformative. Um, there was no mention of the fact I was clearly dealing with an eating disorder. There was no mention of, you know, mental illness, nothing like that. But just this reinforcement that he was willing to be with me in whatever I was going through. And after about 30 minutes of tears, he, um, he asked me a question. He said, do you know what my favorite thing to do after school is? And I shook my head, still crying. And, um, then he said, you know, I've been an educator for 30 years, and my favorite thing to do every day when I get home from school is, is to have a beer. And I was pretty confused by this for obvious reasons, thinking like, is this gonna tell me this is the answer to my problems or what?

By the way, the prescription is, yeah, just have a beer.

And no, that's, that's not where he was going with it. He got out a piece of paper from his desk and he wrote on it as if it was, um, like a contract. I won't have a beer until you hit your weight target. And he signed it, and then he got a piece of, um, sticky tape, and he put it— he put it next to his desk on his wall. And I just remember looking at that and thinking, why the fuck would you do that for me? And, um, he, he preceded that by saying, you know, I'm never going to understand what it's like to be a teenage girl going through what you're going through, but I know what it's like to be a human that's really struggling, and I know how it feels to be going through that alone, and you're not alone. Um, and that, that conversation most likely saved my life. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life. But the, the path I was on was a path of slow death, and it was that, um, belief and that love that gave me the strength to want to change.

That's incredible. And it, you know, that the generosity of strangers to not just recognize the situation but not try to fix or cure it and just give you space. I mean, you, you think about in our daily lives, you know, how much space do we give people to actually just be in their pain and feel that? Tell me, you know, that, that obviously changed the, as you said, the trajectory for you. You then went to living in a van. Like, how, how did that happen?

There was, you know, about 2 years between then and, and that time, but that, that was kind of day 1 in my recovery, right? So that, that day, it's not— it wasn't the, the magic golden bullet. It wasn't that, you know, I woke up the next day and I no longer was unwell. It was a very arduous path to recovery, and I had to go through all the stages of recovery, um, and that was a very challenging period in my life. But it, it went from, I think, his, his willingness to be with me in that made it seem less like a clinical experience and more of a human one. And there were many times that I was sitting in doctors' offices and, you know, waiting for appointments and being weighed and having my skinfolds done and getting told by doctors that I was going to die if I didn't make change and kind of being a number in the system. And it was his his love that was the reminder of like, someone believes in me when I, when I don't have the strength to believe in myself. That kind of got me through that. And as I mentioned, I was an aspiring performer, so that the art form that I was training in was, was called Meisner, and it's a derivative of method acting. And Meisner as an art form basically says that you need to be 100% yourself under the given imaginary circumstances. So it's kind of a 180 on traditional acting, which is learning a character, learning the character's mannerisms, etc. This is who would you be under these circumstances? What would the most authentic version of you do and be? And what you learn through this art form basically is that we have all of these limitations, to your point, that, that create these masks. In our lives and these identities, and actually we're none of those things. So it was a very powerful art form that actually was in many ways deeply spiritual, although it wasn't taught that way. It was definitely the catalyst of my spiritual journey because I recognized that the things I judge in someone else are actually just a reflection of me. So there was an innate sense of oneness that I started to come to through that discipline. And I loved doing that work, and I was also developing this passion for helping people have a voice and, you know, have their story be told when they were going through difficult things like mental health challenges. And, and so I wanted to kind of combine that passion with, with my talent, and that looks like, um, basically facilitation. You know, the work I was doing with Mindvalley was in a way kind of a derivative of that also. And I took the sentiment that I learned through art school and applied that in this community context, and it was radically transformative to give people these spaces where the mask was taken off and they could actually be authentic and real and tell the truth. And I think that's, you know, the biggest point worth emphasizing—when someone's really able to tell the truth, the healing power in that is astronomical, is kind of limitless. And that's what I was seeing time and time again. Um, and I, I wanted to— I wanted to validate that because I knew the impact that it had had on my life and the space with my principal to be able to be honest about what I was going through in a practical sense with my mental health journey, how transformative that was. But the intent to tour and go on the road was to not tell people what the answer was, but to actually listen and see if some of these principles could have that same transformative effect on others. And it really was this, you know, amazing organism. That tour was called Champions for Change, and it ended up getting sponsored by Sunsuper, which is now the Australian Retirement Trust. But back then it was Sunsuper. So they sponsored that tour, and it became, you this, this 2-year tour basically where we took those experiences all the way across Australia.

Now a quick word from our sponsor, Your Success Club. Your Success Club is a group of vibrant abundance seekers. If you subscribe to exitthematrix.io, we are going to drop you into the club room, which has lots of goodies, resources, and a free gift just for subscribing. Now back to the podcast. And I'm really interested. I mean, it seems to me like Miser is acting like yourself in the most authentic way.

Yeah, in the authentic way, in the most authentic, which is, you know, a lot harder. So like one of the drills, for instance, was our director would get us to stand in front of our peers in silence and not act. And if we deflected or acted, the time would start again. And, you know, it's the opposite of traditional actor training. It's stripping back. So when you're standing in front of a group of people who are watching you in silence, every defense, you know, comes to the surface. You want— and all of your patterns, you know, the intelligent ways that we defend and deflect become really obvious. And so we would sometimes have to do that for 40 minutes, 50 minutes, an hour. Until we got to this place of just, I'm comfortable being fully seen.

It's interesting you say that because we go back to the principal tapping you on the shoulder and saying, Nick, can I have a word? And you're going, the stories you're playing out, oh my God, I'm in trouble. This is in trouble. What's going to happen? What's going to happen? And when we stand in front of people as, you know, our authentic self, hopefully we actually then slip into, oh my God, they're judging me. Imposter syndrome. Who am I? I'm not enough. I'm not worthy. You know, what are they going And so that's— I imagine turning up at schools who possibly don't have a lot of external facilitated workshops, et cetera, was it presented as an acting workshop? Was it presented as a mental health workshop? How did that conversation kind of break through the teenage barriers of, here's another wellness person sponsored by a super fund? Turning out and tell me something.

It was positioned as motivational speaking. Yeah. So I think it helped that, you know, I was not even 20, I was still 19, so I wasn't, I wasn't much older than them. And there was a natural, you know, relatability in that. And the rapport, you know, was very much there. And although like there was this kind of success that was growing behind it of media and the sponsorship, so on. I was very kind of grassroots. I was extremely committed, especially at that sort of tender age. I didn't really understand the rest of it. It's like I had to really grow into my entrepreneurial success. That came later, and it was a very different journey for me as an entrepreneur, actually, because I had, I had a passion and a message, and I was, I was an artist, actually. And the businesses I've grown were kind of built from the pursuit of that. And now I very much consider myself to be an entrepreneur. Like, at the core, I feel that that's who I am in terms of divergent thinking and complex problem solving and systems architecture and risk, risk appetite. Like, I am all those things. But my first commercial company, I only started 5 years ago. So my first company was was a nonprofit and we were doing nonprofit consulting, you know, and a few other things. So, you know, I've really grown into the entrepreneur that I am today through, I think, quite an unconventional path. Whereas I notice in the startup community, especially here in Silicon Valley, people want to be a startup founder, you know, like even if they don't have an idea, they're like, I want to, I want to create a startup and that was definitely not my journey. I had to figure out how to grow a startup because there was a problem I truly wanted to solve.

It's interesting you say that because, you know, talking to a lot of people in the startup community, there is a degree of performance, right? There is this kind of, this act of fake it till you make it, you know, I've got a vision and then, you know, this often gets clouded by other personal needs and beliefs and things that they want to create and solve for themselves. So, you know, although you were a performer to start, you probably actually joined a whole community of people pretending to be something that they're not. Um, yeah, let me take you to, um, I guess the, the next stage. You mentioned, you know, you've started one company. I know that now you've got a number of things underway. Tell me, how has life changed and what are you creating now?

Yeah, so I mean, if you had told me even, you know, 4 years ago that I'd be developing a biotech company, I would have, I would have thought that you were out of your mind. But sort of as mentioned, this obsession with solving this one problem, which I define as emotional incapacity— that's really at the core of everything that I've ever created, is that problem that I believe as a species, it's not that we lack emotional awareness a lot of the time, but we lack the capacity to be present with the spectrum of the human experience. And that's why we distract and neglect and avoid and hate and go to war, you know. And I I truly believe that if we were able to, with empathy and presence, be with the full spectrum of the human experience with understanding, we would have a very different world. Um, but the pursuit to want to solve that problem in a more accessible, more scalable, quicker way eventually did lead me to, to technology and asking the question, well, what if we could develop a wearable technology that actually measures emotion and quantifies emotional patterns Could that at scale create the transformation that I was seeing, you know, in the intimate work I was doing with communities, but actually even more effectively because it's with you throughout the day when a facilitator isn't. So that technology sits as a vertical under Love Out Loud. Love Out Loud started after I published my first book, which was called Love Out Loud, and we started growing kind of commercial verticals from professional development to retreats and content and education. And then 3 years ago, I started to pursue this, this technology. So it's been a really wild journey. It's been an amazing journey. I've learned so much about emotion that not even through my anecdotal experience, I, I didn't even get close to truly understanding the, the DNA of what emotion actually is through our research and development. I think those discoveries, I really believe, are leading edge. And, um, I'm extremely excited, you know, to, to be where we are and in this space and, and in Silicon Valley, because I think, you know, the emergence of artificial intelligence needs this influence more than ever, which is a human touch. Yeah, whole other conversation. And it was interesting from a kind of transition of identity, I had a lot of people kind of give like, not necessarily negative, but they were very, um, uh, interested that I made that, that shift into technology because they saw me as a humanist, you know, and then I became a technologist. And I think there's a message in that that I want to emphasize to your listeners as it relates to The Matrix. I think part of The Matrix is overly identifying with anything. You know, you, you can be many things and your unique worldview can be extremely valuable in an area that you have never considered. You know, my deep insight into human behavior was the very thing that gave me the lens to be able to create a breakthrough technology. But if I had listened to the people around me at the time who were saying, you're not a tech founder, like, why would you pursue tech? You, you literally have spent your life doing the opposite of that, then I never would have been able to kind of reach my potential in those ways. And that's a game I love playing with myself and life is, you know, what are the most— what's the most outlandish kind of thing I could be? And do I have— could I have the audacity to actually pursue that and embody that?

Well, Nick, I can say just listening to you, you do have the audacity to actually follow those impossible threads and connect humanity. Just finally, I would love to just understand a little bit more about the 2030 goal, Love Out Loud, and the technology. The bridge there is obviously awareness. Is that what's leading us?

Yeah. So again, it's a big— that's a really big conversation. So I'll try to simplify it. I think at a first level, Building technology that for the first time in history can quantify something like emotion is a really, really important foundation across the board. And obviously in a commercial sense, we're focusing right now on our go-to-market in particular verticals like mental health, like behavioral health. We're gonna work with first responders who want insight into their kind of emotional fluctuations throughout their work because of things like PTSD and burnout. But the application beyond what our immediate focus is as a company, I believe, is truly infinite. Like, what if you could actually develop a currency through the quantification of emotion so that we could actually get closer to an authentic bartering system because we can quantify the energy input versus output and use something like blockchain and smart contracts to actually trade on that level. It could also be used as something like a self-sovereign identification system, which could act as a new world passport. Seems. Yeah. So it's, it's a, it's a foundational, I believe what we're creating is a foundational technology that will go on to, to kind of be the foundation for many other breakthrough technologies. And yeah, I mean, I could talk about this for the next 5 hours, but I believe to create a new civilization, basically we need to focus on economics, health, education, technology, and governance. And I think that these systems need to be completely reconsidered on, on every level. And I think we very excitingly are finally at a time where that's possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think, you know, the, the fact that there's tools that lead people to be their authentic selves and live with sovereignty and actually understand where they're coming from and how they fit in. And have that opportunity to engage in the world in an infrastructure that actually improves the consciousness and the physical and mental and spiritual environment of where we are is just extraordinary. So, so exciting. Now tell me, how do people reach out to you? What's the best way for them to connect with you?

Sure. I mean, most social platforms you'll find me on. So LinkedIn under Nicole Gibson, my name, and Instagram is Nic Gibson, Nic Gibson underscore. Um, or you can just go to my website and most things will be there, nicolegibson.com. We'll put it all down below.

And before you go, one fun fact, just for fun, that no one knows about you, or something interesting or super unique that no one knows about me. Um, well, maybe, maybe the audience doesn't know about it.

Yeah. Um, uh, I mean, there's, there's a lot. I'm a, I'm a part-time rapper. Music will be the pursuit after technology.

I think rock star, that goal does still stand in your future.

That's it. Hopefully.

Okay guys, well look, that's another wrap for an amazing discussion with Nicole Gibson for Exit the Matrix Stories of Success podcast. And before we go, if you like this episode, just a reminder, we'd be very grateful for a review, 5-star review. Go to Apple, go to the episode, go down the bottom, hit the review section. We'd love that. Let's hack their algorithm and exit that matrix. And for more inspiring stories, head over to exitthematrix.io, subscribe and download your free gift. And as always, we are here to share with you stories of success. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Nick. And it's been great having you here. Thank you.

Bye-bye, Finland. Thank you for listening to Exit the Matrix Stories of Success. Make sure you subscribe to future episodes at www.exitthematrix.io. Until next time, here's to your success.