Nicole Forbes spends her working life inside other people’s stories.
She is a family-law lawyer in New Hampshire, working heavily in divorce, often with complicated financial situations and high-net-worth clients. She likes negotiation, mediation and settlement because she sees divorce almost like unwinding or restructuring a partnership, with two people trying to find their way into whatever comes next.
So when I asked Nicole what she wanted for herself, something interesting happened.
She told me about work.
She wants to expand her mediation practice. She wants to remain settlement-oriented. She wants to help clients move into their next chapter.
I asked again.
What does Nicole want?
That took us somewhere else.
There was a woman who had been creative writing since childhood and still dreamed of publishing something. There was a woman imagining a small real-estate empire with her husband. There was a wife who had been with the same man since she was eighteen. There was a dog mum whose entire face changed when she started talking about Gucci.
And there was a writer who was becoming increasingly difficult to find.
Nicole has a reminder on her phone telling her to write for fifteen minutes every day. Recently, she admitted, she had started marking the reminder complete without actually doing it.
That tiny confession fascinated me.
Because earlier in the episode, Nicole had rated herself highly for how honest she is with herself. She also told me that perfectionism and second-guessing can get in the way of trusting herself.
Then, thirty minutes later, there it was.
A tiny piece of evidence. The goal still existed. The reminder still existed. The box was being ticked. The writing wasn’t happening.
And once I started looking at Nicole through that lens, I could see something else.
Her professional identity was enormous.
Lawyer Nicole knew exactly what to say. She could explain settlements, mediation, clients, negotiations, cases and professional goals. Ask about the woman underneath the profession and she had to dig a little deeper.
Then Nicole gave me one seemingly throwaway detail that changed the direction of my X-Ray.
She has “blonde moments.”
My brain immediately went to Legally Blonde.
Nicole laughed, but then told me something I couldn’t have known: growing up, her best friend’s mother used to call her Elle Woods.
Now I had my thread.
Here was an extremely accomplished, intelligent woman whose personality had far more texture than the professional identity she was presenting to the world.
She was also a divorce lawyer who had been with her husband for eighteen years.
She had spent years watching marriages unravel closely enough to notice the patterns, the tiny grievances and the moments where something seemingly insignificant represented a much bigger problem. She even described seeing pieces of herself or her own relationship in cases and using that perspective to reconsider what actually matters at home.
That is interesting. That is human and Nicole hadn’t really considered those parts of her life as material people might want to hear from her.
She was thinking about visibility primarily through the legal lens: networking, speaking engagements, articles, professional social media and thought leadership.
Then I asked her how it felt when I described Nicole Forbes as the main character of her own story.
She became uncomfortable.
She told me she doesn’t always like having a lot of attention on herself. Making herself the main character could feel like “taking up too much space.”
There it was.
The woman who advocates professionally could feel uncomfortable occupying the centre of her own story.
The woman who wants greater visibility was simultaneously monitoring how much space she was allowed to occupy.
The writer wanted to write, while the perfectionist wanted the writing to have a productive purpose and eventually be good enough to publish.
The lawyer was fully formed.
Nicole was still giving herself permission to come forward.
By the end of the Human Brand X-Ray, I asked her to introduce herself again.
This time she began with herself as a wife and a dog mum before explaining what she did professionally. We tried it again, and the pieces began coming together: Nicole Forbes, divorce lawyer, woman who has been with her husband for eighteen years, dog mum who isn’t particularly crazy about animals, and lawyer who helps high-net-worth couples navigate divorce.
She hadn’t acquired any new credentials during our conversation.
We simply had more of her available to work with.
Watch Nicole Forbe’s Human Brand X-Ray on The Fairy BOSSmother Show to find out.
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