Success almost BROKE Me. My Story & WHY I started this Podcast

I have always wanted more. Not more stuff, just more.... life. More experience, more of the feeling that I was actually living it on my own terms.

From a young age I KNEW my life was going to look different,I did everything young, everything on my own timeline. Backpacked the world with the man who is now my husband. Built everything we have from nothing. No safety net, no head start, just hard work and a deep desire,.

And then somewhere between building a seven figure business, raising three girls and saying yes to absolutely everything, I lost her. The woman who wanted all of that, I completely lost her.

This is episode one, My story.

The one I didn't post on Instagram while it was happening.

In this episode:

• Why I walked away from a seven figure business at the top of my game
• The funeral that cracked something open in me that I could no longer avoid
• The identity work that changed my life and why I have realised it is the piece most women are missing
• Why 40 is absolutely the beginning.

We get one precious life. One. This podcast exists because I refuse to watch women spend it settling.

Welcome to Next Level, with Nic.

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Find me on Instagram //www.instagram.com/_nicoleabbott/ 

Ready for more? https://www.nicoleabbott.co/

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Transcript

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I have always wanted more. Not more stuff, not more money for the sake of it, just this niggling feeling of more. More life, more experiences, more of that feeling like I was actually living on my terms. From a really young age, I had this fire in me, this absolute knowing that my life was going to look different, that I was going to do things differently, and that I was not going to wait for permission from anyone to just go and live it. And I did, I really did. But somewhere along the way, between building the businesses, raising our girls, saying yes to everything and running at a pace that never stopped, I lost her. I completely lost her. This is my story, and it's also the story about how I found my way back. This is Next Level with Nick. I'm Nicole Abbott, high performance health and identity coach, surfer and mum of three. This podcast is for the woman who wants to feel amazing, sustain her success, and love the life she's building. We talk all the good stuff, no fluff and no filters. Let's go. If this is your first episode, welcome. I am so genuinely stoked that you are here. Before I tell you what this show is about, I want to tell you who it's for. Because if you're the right woman, you are going to know immediately. It is for the woman who has built something real, who has worked hard, who shows up for everyone, who is capable and driven and never stops, who is privately, quietly, wondering why it doesn't feel the way it's supposed to. She looks like she has it all together, but she is barely holding on behind closed doors. Let me tell you, I know her all too well because I was her. And I have created this podcast for her because I wish at the time someone had created it for me. From as young as I can remember, I had this different way of viewing the world. Different to my parents, different to what was expected. I just could not wait to travel. I couldn't wait to just start living how I wanted to live. I did everything young, everything on my own timeline, which was very much go, go, go. At 18 and 19, I saved and saved and saved and I traveled. I actually ended up backpacking and working around the world with a man who is now my husband, Danny. We had our first daughter so young. Having a daughter that's almost 18, I look back and I cannot believe I had a baby at 22. It is wild. I recently turned 40. And honestly, even saying that out loud is so bizarre to me because I do not identify with that at all. In my mind, I am just still in my 30s. I'm the woman I've always been, just with more knowledge, awareness, and less time for anything that doesn't align. Time is just so precious. And any of you that have teenagers, I know that you get this. Life is busy in a whole different way to when we had toddlers. I'm not someone who sees 40 as midlife or over the hill as our parents' generation would say. I genuinely believe, and I see this in so many women, that once our children start to get to this age, you realize there's a whole other life ahead of us. A second chapter that is entirely ours. I personally don't play into the narrative that things are all downhill from here because I feel the healthiest I've ever felt, the fittest and the clearest on who I am, what I want, and what I will and won't accept. 40 is not the beginning of the end. For women like us, it is just the beginning, my friend. I have always been drawn to doing things differently. How can I live a more aligned, more intentional kind of way? That has always been me. That desire to do things my own way is exactly why I have always found myself on an entrepreneurial path. My husband Danny is a builder and I love design and styling. We'd spent a solid five years on the side of our extremely busy life buying, renovating, building, and selling homes. Time and time again, we found ourselves stuck when we wanted to sell these stunning, beautiful homes that we'd created. We couldn't find an agent we trusted to do these homes justice. So after spending time to I'm so glad I had absolutely no idea what I was walking into because it was a lot. I went on to study to get my real estate license while raising three very little girls. One at school, one at preschool, one attached to me, full-time. It was a juggle. But if you know me, once I set my mind to something, I am going to make it happen. And that I did. I clearly remember calling Danny during one of the practical components of that course, completely overwhelmed, on the verge of tears, saying, This is not for me. I just don't fit in with these people. However, driving home that same day, something stopped me in my tracks and I thought, kid, why wouldn't I do this? I don't have to be the same as those people. I'll just do it my way. So I decided then and there that if I was going to do this, I was going to do it completely my way. My way meant rocking up to appraisals in our Hyundai ILOad Family Surf fan. If I could pick a car that is the complete opposite to a stereotypical real estate agent's car, it would be that. The funny thing is, people loved it. It was different. I was different. I genuinely loved every second of that journey. I want to be clear about this. I loved that career. For the first five or six years, I was completely lit up by it. I loved winning a listing, the creativity of the campaign, the negotiations. Honestly, I was really good at them and I knew it. I loved that I had walked in with zero experience, zero expectations, and I figured it out as I went. I built something real from nothing. I'm so proud of that, and I always will be proud of that. Seven days a week, 10 hours a day, and not just sitting at a desk around the clock. Appraisals, viewings during the day, listings, marketing, emails at night. My phone never went off. I never let it. I literally couldn't. I had zero boundaries ever, including holidays. My health was completely deprioritized. The wild thing is that health has always been my highest value, but I was so consumed by my business that I didn't even see it happening. I remember looking at a photo of myself a few days after a beautiful friend's 40th birthday party. I genuinely did not recognize the woman in it. She was puffy, inflamed, and just had this look of disconnection. The moment I knew something had to give was the day I was sitting in the surf on a beautiful sunny day, completely unable to enjoy it. My brain, as usual, was running through my to-do list, counting the hours until I had to get back to work. I know this is a common thing amongst business owners, but this day felt so different to me. I was there in the ocean, the one place I'd always gone to feel grounded and recharged. I felt like it had just lost its effect altogether. In that moment, I knew that this business I had spent seven years building had literally sucked every ounce of joy from me. I had been subconsciously disconnecting from that business for a solid 12 months before I made any decision. This lingering feeling that I didn't want to be there anymore, but I was just so entangled in it that I couldn't see a way out, so I just kept burying it. Then one day, when I was in the thick of a huge shift in the market, completely frazzled, standing in the rain at my daughter's cross-country event, I unraveled my entire soul to a woman I barely knew because she simply asked me how I was. She must have thought I had completely lost the plot. I went home that day and randomly reached out to a breathwork practitioner on the Gold Coast, a woman named Nicola Lay. I'd been seeing her pop up on Instagram through a friend that was working with her, and every time they shared something, I just felt so drawn into it. Much to my surprise, after leaving emails with her and being told she had a nine-week wait list, she called me that same day. That phone call was the beginning of everything changing. I committed to a nine-month breathwork program with Nicola, which was quite literally life-changing for me in the most positive way. And looking back, it was the most important thing I did before making the decision to sell my business because I knew I couldn't trust a decision that big to a nervous system that was completely fried. While I was deep in that work, my beautiful mother-in-law Lynn became very unwell very suddenly. She was warm, funny, and full of life, and her passing was so devastating to our whole family. At her funerals, person after person stood up and spoke about who Lynn was, how she made people feel, how much fun she was, how she showed up for the people that she loved. Do you know what no one mentioned? Not one person mentioned her career. A few days later, I was reflecting on that beautiful service. I found myself thinking, if this were mine today, what would people say about me? I knew the answer immediately, and I did not like it. Because sure, people would say she was a good wife, she was a good mom, but besides that, all I did was work. That was the moment something cracked open that I just could not avoid. We had planned a big trip that year with our girls. Traveling, surfing, and just being present together. I had been feeling such guilt for missing out on so much time with my family. It was exactly what we needed. We headed to Sri Lanka for eight weeks. And I want to be honest, because those first couple of weeks, they were wild. My nervous system did not just switch off because I left the country. I quickly learned that is not how it works. It took time to stop stressing, stop staying busy, to remember what it felt like to just be. Slowly, something started to shift. And it's nothing that I had been anticipating or expecting. But about two to three weeks in, I felt this overwhelming sense of me. Like the woman I was had been waiting quietly underneath all of that noise. And finally, finally had some time to breathe. I came home from that trip with complete certainty. No doubt, no fear, absolute certainty. I sold the business, and let me tell you, I did not look back. In the year after selling, I studied a lot. I studied all of my passions for myself first because I needed to understand what had actually happened to my body, my nervous system, and my identity. I became a certified integrative health practitioner, high performance health and longevity coach, and an NLP practitioner. So many women find themselves doing all the health things, exercising, eating better, trying to sleep more, and they're still stuck, still exhausted, still not feeling like the version of themselves they know is in there somewhere. The reason is the identity work. It is the piece that is almost always missing. You cannot exercise, eat well, and expect to just magically step into a new version of yourself if you've not done the internal work or if you've not started to reprogram the beliefs that are keeping you exactly where you are. Your subconscious is always listening. It is always watching what you do. And if your external actions are not matching the identity that you say you want to embody, it will always pull you back to what it knows. The internal work and the external work have to happen together at the same time. That is the missing piece. That is manifestation in action. I quite literally walked the talk on this for a solid two years before I even thought about recording this podcast. For me, the anchors that prove to me that my identity had actually shifted are the way I start my days, intentionally on purpose, filling my cup before the world gets a look in. The people and the energy that surround me, that one has changed everything. Becoming so fixed in my values, so clear on what I am doing and why, that the outside opinions just don't rattle me anymore. Surfing without guilt, moving my body because I love it, not because I have to. The way I dress, the way I prioritize things, the way I show up. None of this happened overnight. All of it happened on purpose. And don't get me wrong, I do not claim to be perfect. I am so far from that. I have done so many of the hard things, pivoted, started over, sat in uncertainty, and kept going anyway. Every single one of those experiences has brought me here. I feel so pulled, so called to use all of that to motivate, inspire, and help other women to do the same. Because we get one precious life. One. So why are we settling? Why are we not living that life to our highest, our happiest, our most alive state? I'm not saying life won't have shitty times because it will. That's duality. That is part of being here. But it's not the shitty times that define us. It's how we move through them, how we recover, how we rise and evolve. I genuinely feel with everything that I have that I was put on this earth to test and try all of this. Because I know there are women out there who have worked themselves to the ground, who have been giving everything to everyone else and are finally, finally ready to choose themselves. That is not selfish. It is absolutely necessary. Find somewhere quiet. Grab a pen and answer this honestly. If someone stood up and spoke about you today, what would they say? Not what you hoped they would say. What would they actually say based on how you're showing up right now? Write that down. Then write down who you want them to say you are. The gap between those answers, that is where your work begins. That gap is exactly what this podcast is for. Thank you so much for being here for my first episode. I will see you next week. Don't just listen and move on. Grab a pen, write down your next level move, and actually do it this week. That one thing is your 1% and your 1% compounds. If this resonated or someone in your life needs to hear it, share it. Find me on Instagram at underscore NicoleAbbott or head to NicoleAbbott.co. See you next week.