In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou writes, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Nicole Walters understood that precept. In 2015, she was a working at one of the top healthcare companies in the United States making six figures as a senior sales executive. While she loved what she was doing and was a successful earner for the company, she wanted more. She knew there were multitudes of stories within her that needed to be told.
Nicole Walters
Courtesy Nicole Walters
A first generation American, Walters’ parents were immigrants from Ghana. She and her family of four grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington DC. Walters slept on a couch until she was 12. She also got scholarships to attend private school and went to The Johns Hopkins University.
Her mother who worked as a secretary and her father who was a cab driver always envisioned a traditional corporate path for their daughter. “My parents saw me as both their American dream and their 401(k) plan,” says Walters. “They expected me to follow the traditional corporate route or become a doctor/lawyer. Those were my only options.” As she explains their perspective as first generation immigrants was only to move from “blue-collar into white-collar labor.”
But Walters felt unfulfilled and bankrupt of the joy and freedom she desired. Knowing deep within that she needed to be her own boss, in 2015 she quit her job in a very public way in front of thousands of people live on Periscope. She declared that she was going to work for herself. Until then she had been developing her own entrepreneur education business as a side hustle.
“It was hard for me to watch that video for some time, because it was such a challenging moment,” she says of the Periscope video. “However I look at it now and recognize that I was scared of a lot of things without really having a vision of what would happen in real life. I got the courage to quit because I had built a place for me to go.”
As Walters sees it she wasn’t quitting her job, she was hiring herself. “Even though I knew I was doing it in a public way, it was an opportunity for me to showcase exactly what it looks like to face one of the biggest fears many of us have, which is taking a huge leap into possibility and our purpose,” she says.
Since then, Walters built a multi-million-dollar personal development and business education company. Using what she learned in the corporate world, she helps people optimize their business. As the CEO and Founder of Inherit Learning Company, she specializes in business development training and strategic coaching for emerging entrepreneurs and established business owners.
In the midst of her massive career shift Walters and her husband adopted three homeless sisters who were 3, 11 and 14. Walters and her family are the subjects of new reality show She’s The Boss on USA Network.
The series centers around Walters and her family as she runs her marketing business. There’s her husband, Josh Walters, a stay-at-home lawyer, their three daughters and their Manny (man nanny)/executive assistant/beloved friend Eddie. Walters describes the show as a “hilarious comedy of errors” showing how a mom tries to balance her successful business and family.
“A lot of people are going to relate, because our family is a little bit of everyone. A beautiful cross-section of America,” says Walters. “People will really enjoy watching something relatable, positive, and super encouraging.”
One message Walters hope people take away from She’s the Boss is that they will learn to grant themselves and other families more understanding and compassion. “It’s recognizing that we’re all doing the best we can with what we have,” she says. “And if they’re able to consider that, hopefully in a time where it feels like everything is so divisive, we can all find common ground. And laugh a lot while doing it.”
Jeryl Brunner: So many people are aching to take agency of their lives in a big way like you did, but are too terrified or don’t have the resources or confidence. What would you advise?
Nicole Walters: A lot of times the fear that we feel around taking on something new isn’t really founded in experienced failure. It is founded in thoughts and perceptions around failure an d what the outcome of that would be. So we’re really caught up in what will people think. What will I think of myself? How will I recover? And the reality is we will never actually know the answer to those questions, unless we start. So I always try to tell people that there is no failure. There are only wins and great learning lessons.
Brunner: Your family seems to be the portrait for modern America. How would you describe your family?
Walters: We often joke in our household that our family is the “United Nations of families.” We’re a little bit of everything. I grew up in total poverty and now I live in the 1%. My husband is a Jewish lawyer and I am a Christian American who is the daughter of African immigrants. Our daughters are adopted, we’ve got two crazy rescue dogs and who could forget our absolutely silly man nanny, Manny. Our family is absolutely a portrait of modern America, we’re a little bit of everything and a whole lot of love.
Brunner: When did you know you had to be an entrepreneur or what was your dream when you were a child?
Walters: I absolutely believe that entrepreneurship is something that you’re born with. I definitely have it in my DNA. Whether it was delegating on the playground, to playing CEO at home with my dolls, to starting businesses, like lemonade stands and hairstyling services.
It has always been at my core to figure out how to make an extra coin serving solutions to others. Even though I was following the traditional business path that my parents anticipated for me, it was only a matter of time before I broke out and built something great. Now that I’ve landed upon my gift with my business education company Inherit Learning, I could never imagine turning back. I found my purpose and I’m building my legacy everyday.
Brunner: What do you wish you could tell your younger self?
Walters: I would tell her to grant herself some grace, so that she can understand that nothing is supposed to happen overnight. And honestly no one‘s paying attention before you’re 30 anyway. Give your dreams a shot, take some risks, break out of the box. It will all be just fine.
