Nicole Johnston, TEDx & Leadership Speaker | Best-Selling Author | Executive & Leadership Coach. She is dedicated to helping corporate women overcome workplace obstacles, own their value, and step into their full authority. As the founder of innatePOWER®, she leverages over three decades of high-level corporate experience to cultivate “Mental Fitness” and authentic leadership in individuals and organizations worldwide.
Executive Background
Prior to launching her coaching practice in January 2023, Nicole built a distinguished 30-year career as a global senior Sales and Marketing executive within Fortune 50 and FMCG/CPG giants. She has successfully led multi-functional teams and managed business portfolios worth up to $1.5 billion. Her notable corporate leadership roles include:
Vice President of Sales, Food Division at Newell Brands
Head of Pet Healthcare at Boehringer Ingelheim
Vice President of Sales Strategy & Head of Ecommerce (Latin America) at Kimberly-Clark
General Manager of Club & Dollar Channels at The Hershey Company
Coaching & Speaking Philosophy
Driven by a pivotal moment that shifted her focus from building billion-dollar business structures to developing people, Nicole founded innatePOWER™. Her work addresses the critical, often unwritten dynamics of corporate environments—such as navigating power literacy, overcoming the exhaustion of invisible labor, and transitioning from merely “performing” leadership to truly embodying it.
She is a certified Organizational Development Coach through Symbiosis Coaching and holds credentials in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). As an inspirational speaker, she frequently delivers keynotes, corporate training, masterclasses, and workshops aimed at challenging organizations to build a better, more inclusive future.
Authorship & Education
Nicole is the author of the best-selling book, Taboo Topics: Things Women Should Talk About, But Don’t (released May 2025), which provides concrete language and tools for women navigating complex career advancement barriers.
A native of Iowa, she holds a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) in International Business, French, and Spanish from The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, where she also serves on the board. Additionally, she is an alumna of the Executive Leadership Institute at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Taboo Topics: Things Women Should Talk About, But Don’t
The book serves as a candid guide and professional manifesto specifically tailored for career-minded, executive-track, and director-level women. Johnston argues that women often experience professional stalls, friction, or burnout not because of a lack of capability or confidence, but due to hidden cultural, structural, and unwritten rules in the corporate world that are rarely addressed in traditional leadership manuals.
Drawing on her 30+ years of global corporate experience leading billion-dollar business portfolios (including senior roles at companies like Procter & Gamble and Hershey Foods), she brings these silent challenges into the open, offering women practical strategies to advance with clarity.
Key Themes & Topics Covered in her Book
· The Hidden Rules of Executive Presence: Unpacking the unspoken and often double standards by which women are evaluated differently than men in leadership spaces, and how to navigate them authentically.
· The Emotional Labor Tax: Managing the quiet pressure often placed on women to handle office dynamics, minimize conflicts, or take on non-promotable “office housework” tasks that drain strategic focus.
· The Perfectionism & Over-delivery Trap: Exploring why many women wait until they feel 100% qualified before taking major professional risks or speaking up, and how that can inadvertently hurt their strategic visibility.
· Silently Carried Realities: Shedding structural guilt and bringing language to personal, physical, and biological milestones (such as pregnancy, biological cycles, and menopause) that women frequently navigate in silence while maintaining demanding corporate schedules.
The Takeaway
Ultimately, Taboo Topics provides actionable boundaries, leadership strategies, and validation to help ambitious women step into senior leadership roles on their own terms without sacrificing their well-being.
TALKING POINTS: MENTAL LOAD & TABOO TOPICS
PART ONE: MENTAL LOAD
Core Message
The mental load is the invisible work of remembering, planning, anticipating, and managing, and women, especially marginalized women, carry it disproportionately at home and at work.
Key Talking Points
1. Name what it actually is
It’s not the doing. It’s the remembering to do and the managing of who does what.
You’re the one who notices the supplies are low, the deadline is coming, and the team morale is slipping. Nobody assigned you that. You just got handed it.
Sound bite: “Mental load isn’t the task. It’s being the person who can never stop tracking the tasks.”
2. It’s heavier for marginalized women
You carry the household mental load AND the workplace mental load AND the load of monitoring how you’re perceived in rooms not built for you.
Three full-time tracking systems running at once. That’s why you’re tired in a way rest doesn’t fix.
3. It’s invisible by design
The load stays invisible because it has no deliverables. No one sees the forty decisions you made before 9 am.
What’s invisible doesn’t get valued. What doesn’t get valued doesn’t get shared.
4. The cost is real
Decision fatigue. Burnout. The resentment that builds when you’re the default manager of everything.
You’re spending your best cognitive energy on logistics instead of leadership.
5. The shift
Make it visible before you try to redistribute it. You can’t hand off what no one can see.
Stop being the only one who holds the system. Document it. Name it. Let it be someone else’s turn to remember.
PART TWO: TABOO TOPICS
Core Message
The things we’re not supposed to talk about money, ambition, rage, rest, failure, mental health are exactly the things keeping us stuck when we stay silent about them.
Key Talking Points
1. Why taboos exist for us specifically
Marginalized women were taught that silence is safety. Don’t discuss your salary. Don’t admit you’re struggling. Don’t show ambition too loudly.
Sound bite: “The topics you were told to keep quiet are the ones holding the most power over you.”
2. Money
We don’t talk about pay, and that silence is exactly how pay gaps survive.
Sharing numbers feels dangerous. It’s actually protective for you and everyone behind you.
3. Ambition
Women are punished for wanting loudly. So we learn to shrink the want.
Naming your ambition out loud isn’t arrogance. It’s the first step to claiming it.
4. Rage
You were told anger isn’t allowed for you, it’s the “angry woman” stereotype waiting to be hung on you.
But anger is information. It tells you exactly where your boundaries got crossed.
5. Rest & struggle
Admitting you’re tired feels like admitting you can’t handle it. So we perform okay while running on empty.
Saying “I’m struggling” out loud is not a weakness. It’s how you stop carrying it alone.
6. The shift
The taboo loses its grip the moment it’s spoken. Privately first. One safe person is enough.
We break these silences together, or we keep paying for them alone.
Thank you Mandy Ohman, Traumadelics by Maria Loayza, Brandon Ellrich, The Secret Ingredient, Diane, and many others for tuning into my live video with Nicole Johnston! Join me for my next live video in the app.
