Want Successful Kids? Teach Them Business Skills Now

[0:00]  that's why I love at lumon day that we take the most basic quintessential example of the American dream lemonade stand and we package it with all of these opportunities to allow a child to explore different career path because they're learning about creating a business plan and a marketing plan they're learning about creating a recipe that tastes good and that customers will buy they're learning about site location to maximize foot traffic and drive Prof you know all of those things are opening kids up to learning different methods and how those learnings actually apply to different situations in the real world but you've got to give a child the opportunity to explore because I don't know about you but how effective was it

[0:47]  when we were younger and and teachers or School administrators want to say what do you want to be when you grow up well I have no idea because I only know what my parents are taught or what my parents tell me or what I see on TV or what I'm hearing from other people so you go to those more generally accepted careers that you don't really have a chance to see what else is out there in the world and figure out how your skill set can apply to those different situations all right guys welcome back to a brand new episode of the heart and hustle

[1:34]  podcast now today is an incredibly important conversation because this amazing leader who sits across this digital table with me is Nicole cassier Mason she is the CEO of Lemonade Day Nicole Welcome to the show thank you so much I'm excited to be here with you and have this fantastic conversation to bring a little bit of life in love to what is currently going on in our society life love and compassion baby but also we're going to talk about inspiring the Next Generation with the skill sets that they need to be an entrepreneur who can impact the world I want to talk a little bit about the work that you guys do at lemonade day but also the importance of an entrepreneurial mindset for kids how we can help I would say fill some of the gaps when it comes to the soft skills in the lessons that we're learning and

[2:22]  teaching these children but also some of the long-term traps that we might be seeing with the instant gratification culture that we have here around us today but before we kind of get into that in our previous conversation you described yourself as a social entrepreneur what is that well for me a social entrepreneur is one who applies the same attributes of an entrepreneur to a social cause to drive transformational change through Bottoms Up Solutions in their community in its most simplest form Bottoms Up Solutions in their Community let's double click on that what does that mean so I would say in the time in which we live where seemingly government has way more control than I think our Founders

[3:12]  quite envisioned for our country that they have been looked upon as the givers of knowledge the doers of legal and legal legal things uh but they have put rings in place and barriers in place that quite frankly I don't believe government has a place for because it's the people we know our communities and the depths of our communities the best and I believe that the way to drive change is through the voices of our communities and when I say bottoms up when we have so much top- down regulation being thrown at us from the government

[4:00]  if you're going to Corral people to collaborate and ignite around a joint goal and a joint Vision it needs to come directly from the people and it needs to be contextualized in the communities in which they come from and so I think when you're talking about social entrepreneurship and Community change if it is not born from the depths of the community and it's not guided and led by the voices of that Community it won't be bought in and to drive change it has to be bought in from all of the critical players to enact that change user informed Solutions right I think about the world of business me and my team we work heavily in the tech

[4:47]  space and one of the biggest problems that I recognized when I started my professional career in 2014 I was in healthcare it seemed like a lot of the technology patient portals communication platforms were always configured and created in a lab right and then pushed from top down and so by the time it got to the end user they were like who invented this thing and why is it so difficult to use that's what I'm hearing a little bit of in your analogy there it very very much it all things uh sound good on paper until you put it into action and I think that's at the root of a lot of our biggest disconnects is there are a lot of well-intended people that apply Frameworks that then just become black and white playbooks to be

[5:35]  implemented and not contextualized and that is the biggest issue is things have to make sense given the context of this the community in which they live and realistically I sometimes get a lot of flak for this but this is one of my key beliefs is entrepreneurs create the change that we need in our communities because it's somebody who has a different perspective who's brave enough to take a chance and create something are the people who actually make true lasting impact and I think we need a little bit more of that today than ever amen and that is one of the biggest reasons why I connect it to the Lemonade Day Mission because our founder will be the first to tell you that the attributes of a successful entrepreneur correlate to those of being a successful

[6:23]  thriving human being there was uh in our previous discussion you talked a little bit about your extensive history in the nonprofit space as well as in the affordable housing and homeless Services space as well so my question for you is why did you do the work that you did in such key areas of our communities like you know nonprofit work and affordable housing and homeless Services what was the inspiration behind that very early on in your life o biggest inspiration was I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself and I wanted to leave this world a little bit better than I found it and I know that the mission Centric work of a nonprofit is kind of at the core of driving so much of that change and Bri Bridging the gaps from

[7:13]  government business in the real world and I knew that was that was where I needed to be I had my first lemonade business when I was 9 years old Little Nikki's lemonade stand and it was not an immediate success I knew honestly I think it was the first time in my life that I realized this glowing personality of mine was only going to take me so far because if I was going to get people to come back for a second cup and make any semblance of money I had to make some changes I just had no idea where to start I wasn't taught Financial or business literacy in school I wasn't taught how to apply my academic learnings to the real world but I had the privilege of being being able to go

[8:00]  back home and vent my frustrations to my parents about how difficult the world of sales is and they had the wherewithal to sit me down and Coach me on the simple steps of goal setting creating a plan working that plan and achieving results and coupled with that they taught me the importance of spend save and share and when I say that I mean spending money on myself taking some of my profits to treat myself for my hard-earned work saving and investing in my future but then being good re being good Steward of my resources and using my money to be a part of my community solution and so that literally got

[8:49]  hardwired into me from a young age where I started to see the world different and the role that I could play in that world why are we learning some of these lessons in our our education process um I would say the biggest reason right now is our education system is set up to educate kids and prepare them for academic testing and when you have a limited amount of time in the classroom with teachers and students it's understandable why so much of their learning has to be focused on that testing standard but at the same time it handicaps them on getting creative with how they teach and a lot of it has to do with capacity and bandwidth if so much of a teacher's salary and performance is

[9:40]  geared on how their students are testing it doesn't really free their mind nor their energy and desire to think different and because they're teaching to an academic test much of that isn't being taught on how to what's the trans transability of those learnings from a classroom to the real world if those questions aren't being asked on on a test and so that's where folks Like Us come in it's interesting when you think almost that the role of nonprofits are Gap fillers in the system I think that this is so interesting to me because I'm still waiting right to apply and I joked about this in our previous conversation geometry class sixth or seventh grade

[10:27]  the Pythagorean theorem was so difficult for me to be able to comprehend and I was told you're going to have to apply this later in life 34 years old still waiting for that day it's just a really interesting perspective that I think we need to reflect on more because it seems like we're missing a huge spectrum of knowledge when I say Spectrum performing well on a test right does also not cover the ability to have a growth mindset or to overcome challenges or build tenacity in grit which are the actual skill sets being honor being truthful that you have to apply in the real world environment of business and life rather than just trying to perform incredibly well on that spelling or that history test that we have been measured on our entire career which is so

[11:14]  wild yeah I mean the thing that always gets me is that exact scenario that you just laid out is that you can have like let's say this hiring manager at a big corporation like Nike and on the table in front of them is this resume that screams hire me hire me hire me and they've got a degree from a top tier University Awards of excellence in writing or math solving you know gold medal in robotics solid GPA but yet here sits across from you this different Vis you know this young person that's kind of unep picks at his or her wrinkly shirt fixated with eyes fixated on the floor and their voice is shaking just at at

[12:03]  firsthand shake and all of those skills just cry out the need for where's your ability to shake hands and look someone in the eye and passionately sell yourself and what you're good at doing if you haven't taught them those things or they don't have parents with the wherewithal that mine did and in my opinion it's such an easy thing that's why I love at lumon day that we take the most basic quintessential example of the American dream a lemonade stand and we package it with all of these opportunities to allow a child to explore different career paths because they're learning about creating a business plan and a marketing

[12:50]  plan they're learning about creating a recipe that taste good and that customers will buy they're learning about site location to maximize foot traffic Drive profit so they're learning all these different things around whether it's creating in artistic form like marketing and branding or recipe making and their love for cutting up different fruits and lemons and concocting recipes or site location and learning about kind of uh the development of urban areas and the way in which it's designed you know all of those things are opening kids up to learning different methods and and how those learnings actually apply to different situations in the real world but you've got to give a child the opportunity to explore because I don't

[13:38]  know about you but how effective was it when we were younger and and teachers or School administrators want to say what do you want to be when you grow up well I have no idea because I only know what my parents are taught or what my parents tell me or what I see on TV or what I'm hearing from other people so you go to those more generally accept at careers that you don't really have a chance to see what else is out there in the world and figure out how your skill set can apply to those different situations we've got to give children that that kind of leeway into making those decisions through opportunities we have to allow for them to taste the world right one of my favorite say and I joke about this because I have some great leaders from higher education dean of

[14:24]  students at major universities like Ohio State and Penn and stuff like that and I always say it's so funny to me how we expect a 17 or 18yearold to go out into the world after graduating from high school to make one of the biggest or multiple biggest decisions of their life my career and all this debt that I'm going to take on but yet one month prior when they were still in high school they were having to raise their hand to go to the bathroom yeah yes seems like a little bit of a dichotomy to me it's a very big deconomy and I think that's why when I talk about social entrepreneurship it's not just the work ethic and the grit and perseverance when you talk mindset your mindset is driven by your ability to self-actualize and have confidence in yourself and what you can offer and I

[15:13]  don't know if you knew this but I was shocked to learn that not only does someone's hard wirring get set between the ages of birth and 10 but did you know that self-esteem is built in the first 7 to eight years of of a child's life I did not built and that is what I say like when if you don't give children opportunities to not only self-actualize but to learn about their skills and their aptitudes and to find what they're passionate about how can you expect them to graduate confidence knowing what they want to do if they're still figuring out what level of confidence they have and that's the biggest thing if

[16:02]  you're going to charge a child to DARE and to dream and dream big you have to equally give them the opportunity to have the self-esteem to believe that they can dream and fail and Fail Hard how can you convince someone to do that if their self-esteem is wavering it's it's such an important topic of discussion because you know the only way in which we get good is by doing and the more we do something the better better results we get and the better results we get the more we want to do it and it's like a self- actual actualizing Circle right a prophecy if you will I want to I want to touch a little bit on something that's really important to me because in our previous conversation you said that you have a serious passion for breaking the generational cycles of poverty now why this is important to me is my great-grandfather was a sharecropper in

[16:50]  Arkansas my grandfather was born in the 1930s which was discriminated against just because of the color of his skin my father was the first entrepreneur who in his family took extreme risk and put me and my family in a situation to live a completely different lifestyle we broke that cycle of poverty because of Entrepreneurship why is that something that's so important to you um so you remember my sharing with you my uh firsthand experience in this space and that was prior to joining Lemonade Day at firsthand experienced through a 12-year career in the affordable housing and homeless Services space where where I witnessed firsthand that statistic play out around the early age of children building up their confidence

[17:38]  and self-actualizing and when you witness families and children entrenched in the cycle of generational poverty coupled with the lack of sufficient social and educational supports to keep the flame burning that we know children are born with that flame that fire that raw natural potential if you don't have ways to keep that flame burning it's no wonder why so much of their Hope was lost because they couldn't see a way out of their F of their family and what they were born into and I just started to imagine a world where I could put affordable housing and homeless Services out of business now I know that's lofty I know

[18:27]  some people out there will think it is inevitable but I definitely believe it's doable if we are grabbing children at the early age and exposing them to Opportunities showing them how they can apply their learnings to the real world and give them experiences to do that to nurture that flame and to keep it going it's not just a oneandone Endeavor it has to be a flame that is fanned early and often over time so that they can see a way that's different than what they were born into and so much of what we are doing is proactive right we wait until High School to start having career exploration conversations we wait until

[19:15]  if you're lucky high school if not post High School to teach financial literacy and things like that well you're already hitting kind of a double whammy because not only is it a later in life intervention but coupled with the fact that their hard wiring is already being set you are now spending your time trying to undo eight 18 years of hard wiring and learnings and it's a heck of a lot more economic if we can be proactive than reactive the mindset of an entrepreneur is something that will carry you for the rest of your life the first book that my father ever gave me and this is going to sound a little bit late but when I was a student I did not like I did not like studying I did not like reading I did

[20:03]  not like anything when I was 22 years old my father gave me a book back there it's called um Think and Grow Rich and he said Keenan the one thing that you need to recognize if you're going to accomplish something you have to be able to see it here first and I didn't really understand the importance of that until I got older and I said you know things may change in the environment a new president may come and go but my mindset is the one thing that I can continue to lean on that will help me get through tough times why do you think the entrepreneurial mindset is so important to start cultivating in children especially at an early age a mindset is what you own no one can tell you how to do it what it means it's yours and one of the biggest

[20:52]  things when we talk about the role of government is there are a lot of people out there that are waiting for or government or law to do something or to change something but no one no one can control your mindset and to be able to have that opportunity to self-actualize without waiting for somebody telling you how to do it or where to do it when to do it is incredibly powerful because at the end of the day you just have yourself to rely on and that is an incredible thing when you know that you can rely on your own power and your own mindset to enact change now I do believe it is incumbent upon us as a society as a collective of

[21:43]  nonprofits is to offer the opportunities that allow kids to self-actualize because not all children are as fortunate to be born into the systems that you and I were born into it riddled with challenges but we at least had parents with the wherewithal to show us the way not every child has that ability so how are you going to show them that a different path can be ahead of them if they're not seeing it in their daily lives and that's where I think the education system and where groups Like Us come in through Civic engagement and after school engagement Church communities and business communities can come in and offer them the hand that maybe their families can't

[22:31]  offer because at the end of the day it's teaching a kid to fish as as tried as it may sound that is exactly what we're doing is of the words of scripture is literally teaching kids how to fish because when you teach a child that they are in control of their Destiny then that affords them the mindset to be able to navigate different systems and and to feel like they have the freedom to dream one of the worst things I heard in the affordable housing and homeless Services space that I was in was a child telling me that they don't have the ability to dream because of the challenges of their family well no one should be able to

[23:18]  take that away from you everyone has the ability to dream it's just how you dream and if you have the right mindset and the confidence to Believe it or then the sky is the limit if we can connect you to the tools and the resources to achieve those dreams do you have an inner monologue can you hear yourself narrating your thoughts a lot yes sometimes annoyingly so I uh I was having a conversation I was having a conversation a little earlier first of all I found out that some people don't have an inner monologue like it's silence up here and when they think they do there's no in between of like hey should we go do this and like the conversation that we have in our mind really important to think about so just a little pin in that but

[24:05]  what I brought that up was because you know I was having a conversation with another amazing leader name is uh Tasha Connor and we were talking about the concept of our inner voice now there's an amazing book out there that I read back in 2021 called the untethered Soul now the untethered Soul the analogy that the author gives in this book is your roommate he says one thing that we should recognizes that most of us live with a roommate in our head that little voice that you can hear often tells you you're not good enough you're not going to be successful we're going to have to overcome challenges everybody else is better than us it's that voice that gives us that self-doubt but one thing that you should also recognize is that voice if you can hear it you have the perspective of viewing it meaning that is not your voice someone at one point in time a teacher a parent an uncle a

[24:55]  coach somebody who was in a bad mood told you you that you were not good enough or you had to be hesitant or scared of something now the issue is once that voice got in our head we started spending so much time with it that we started thinking that it was us and the analogy of the roommate to create some distance here is imagine if you were sitting on a couch watching a movie with your roommate who was a real person and they started jabbering on about did we go check the emails did I go pick up those clothes did I put those that food in the dish in the whatever in the fridge did I make sure I did all those tasks you would say hey we're trying to watch him movie be quiet that inner voice is something that we have to really kind of distrust because how many times has that inner voice LED you astray told you you're not good enough had you self-doubt yourself that inner voice is a really interesting concept

[25:42]  and I think we need to establish a healthy voice for this next Generation if they're going to be as successful as they should be oh I couldn't agree more and it is that Michael uh Michael Singer yeah it is I believe so okay I I love that and and I love that you you mentioned because there is also uh if you're familiar uh with po positive intelligence are you by chance so uh sh it his name is sherad and oh his name is escaping me so if we need to redo this we can uh but he is the author of positive intelligence which talks about the voices in your head kind of being separated into

[26:28]  sabots versus Sage your sabator are those that come in when you're trying to protect yourself right it goes back to the days of uh way back when when we were all surviving and we were all Apen and you see that poisonous snake and survival brain kicks in you're like okay I'm going to remember the colors of that snake but I'm going to see this beautiful butterfly and I'm not going to remember the colors of that beautiful butterfly right it's because you go into survival mode and your brain captures what it needs to survive but then you've got this Sage voice in you that comes in with perspective wisdom how do you apply that that yes I need to survive with the ability to thrive and how you can

[27:18]  contextualize that because so much of us listen to The sabator Voice in our head and it's very conniving the that sabator voice because it guises itself as this I'm trying to protect you I'm trying to do what's best when in fact you have to lift up and above it and see it for what it's worth and what it's doing just like what you were saying and that's exactly what we are trying to help our kids navigate through is that voice but that that voice right and even having the ability to audit where that voice is coming from takes such self-awareness to recognize that that is not truly us and I do very much worry about the generation of people who were growing up I was born in 1990 right so I saw what I like to refer to as the

[28:05]  Before Time meaning before the internet before social media before all these voices of comparison now we have a generation of people who are constantly having ideas put in their head the first thing that a lot of people do when they wake up in the morning is Hop on to a social media platform that shows them images that they have no control over it seems like we've lost the sense of ultimate control over our lives and like you said it seems like now many people are looking for government or someone else to come and save them when the answer is you have to take action yourself do you ever worry about the Next Generation when we talk about these issues oh very much uh I am deathly afraid of the world of AI I believe it has done wonders to bridge the gap I think it has done wonders to

[28:56]  increase accessibility but I also equally worried uh that it is dumbing down our our youth because it is replacing some of the very steps in life that those learnings come from this is an interesting concept for me um because I do agree with you but I also disagree at the same time to think about where are we going right I mean here's a good example it seems very human of us to think about when we were all Farmers the tractor was invented now nobody's going to have a job because of this the internet came about and now we have Industries like it and other people who have created these amazing jobs in Industries I was having listening to a podcast the only reason I say I might disagree with you is I was listening to a podcast with a guy from Facebook I think he was employee number 12 he's now

[29:43]  a billionaire investor guy he has a a podcast called Allin which is really cool and he was talking about what we're going to have to do is rethink about our education system because when you have a tool like artificial intelligence that can do everything on your behalf the the way in which you think about your problems has to shift we have to be critical thinkers about how we solve problems rather than how we do the work to execute on them and so I think there's a d dichotomy thereof is it scary absolutely but we as humans have to elevate the way in which we think to be able to have more leverage over the technology but I don't know if everybody has the capability and the awareness to kind of dive through a conversation like this yeah uh I appreciate how you just said that and because it is both and I do believe it's a both and it it's the

[30:31]  it's the way of the world and let's face it Lemonade Day has a digital app called the my Lemonade Day app so we're utilizing technology to bring our curriculum to life to have better analysis of our data because let's face it uh the lack of data efficacy with printed workbooks and materials is just unreal so I'm with you it does need a balance it just can't completely supplant and so much of that comes from my experience and learnings around human connection that I know for a fact one of the single causes of homelessness is the loss of community and connection 100% I know from the search Institute that there are 40 known uh developmental

[31:20]  assets which are known as the nutrients that children need to be successful thriving human beings and so much of it at its core is around community and connection it's helping give real world experiences that can help you develop the communication the language skills and build connections directly in their environment to help them understand a world outside of their own and it has to be both because you cannot learn that level of discernment and self-awareness if you are not building those real connections and maybe we're in a phase of transformation right now I heard Joe Rogan one time on his podcast say that we are human beings who are creating

[32:09]  these digital cocoons around us right and if you think about the process of you know a caterpillar turning into a cocoon it goes into this cocoon or go turns into a butterfly it goes into this cocoon where it's isolated by itself for a couple days and then it comes out the other side it's a beautiful new being I wonder if we're seeing the opportunity right now where we as humans need to let technology do what it does but we really need to get back to the emphasis of that human to human connection that will be the antithesis for everything else the sense of community showing up as a human developing soft skills being inquisitive being curious being empathetic being compassionate I think that maybe the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction but we just can't see it because we're in the middle of the Cocoon right now I would agree completely it's especially when you

[32:59]  think about the soft skills development I mean I think you and I me talked about this before that when you've got what is it almost one out of every five corporation that you interview they're going to talk about the challenges of finding people with soft skills with problem solving skills communication skills the ability to discern and to negotiate and to Advocate and to see things that might look black and white but to see them contextualized into different areas and you don't get that anywhere else other than relationship building and Community engagement where you can bounce your words off of different sounding boards and you could

[33:46]  do simulations all day long in AI but nothing can prepare you for that Real World Experience where you're looking your customer in the eye and engaging in dialogue with them one of my favorite business entrepreneurs out there I'm not sure have you ever heard of a guy named Alex heroi no okay so Alex Heros is a rags to Rich's story I can't really say Rags but he was an incredibly smart student right he went to Vanderbilt I believe it was graduated in three years was going to go to Harvard Business School while he was going through the process of taking his GMAT and applying to business school he got asked a question on the application how will the GMAT from this University or your you know Business Degree

[34:33]  whatever it looks like um translate into you being more successful and in that moment he thought to himself and said okay am I going to spend 200 Grand on an MBA would I better spend that 200 Grand of me actually going out and starting a business myself and learning the lessons of talking to people communicating influence sales marketing operations well needless to say he took the path of starting his own business scaled it to about 40 million a year as a 27-year-old was taking home like 1.5 million a month from a gym business which was insane but now he talks about how important experience is you know in the world that we live in today often the GPA no not talking down to anybody who's gone through higher education because there is a space for that but the diploma

[35:20]  doesn't get you as much as it once did there's a new generation of people who are out here in these spaces who have incredible amounts of lived experi experience which I feel like a lot of employers are now looking for because who would you rather hire Nicole somebody who graduates who's got a degree with zero experience or someone who's doing the exact job that you're hiring for with 10 years of experience which one's more valuable the ladder the latter and most of it it stems from people centered I I mean when you're talking about driving transformational change and building a culture especially a corporate culture it it requires people centered it's that it's fostering of the rich people centered cultures and getting people out of the

[36:08]  individuality and that's one of the things with AI is so much of it can put people in a disconnected role where they're behind a computer not engaging with people and it's yeah it's the people centered aspect of it that helps me understand your ability to discern and pivot and navigate different relationships and experiences I completely agree I I do worry about some of the long-term conditioning if we will that we've seen on both the the younger employee perspective but also the older generation of leaders we all live in a world now where convenience is top priority Uber Uber Eats Postmates

[36:57]  everything you can get with a couple clicks on your phone and it's instantly to you Amazon next day delivery AKA it could be here today I want to know what you think about the prevalence of instant gratification on our younger generation and is it a negative thing when they're trying to build businesses that can last beyond the trend of Drop Shipping or XYZ again it goes back to balance it doesn't have to be one or the other as cheesy as it might sound it is a yes and it's the way of the world we live in we live in a world now where things can come to us faster than horse and buggy Praise Jesus that it does all right but it's not our soul Focus because quick wins and

[37:47]  convenience again contextualized I don't know if you've ever done gallup's Clift and strengths assessment I have not have you heard of this I have I going to share a free code with you cuz it is eye openening and context is my number one strength and this is because I see so many things in the context in which it is convenience for all intents and purposes is just that it's for me to run off to the side of the road fill up gas real quick grab a bottle of water or or to order something from Amazon that ordinarily I'd have to go shopping for in perua bazillion aisle for okay that's one thing but convenience when it comes to life lessons if we haven't learned

[38:34]  anything from our from our ancestors it is that nothing is a quick win yes there's OIC yes there's all the diet fads and all of that stuff but if we don't have enough study and data from all of that to show that quick winds are very shortlived I don't know what but the very thing to Lasting change is multiple experiences frequently over time and if you don't start young with our children when they are impressionable but not even just impressionable it is when all of their faculties are being formed it's when the power of decision making is being formed if you're not grabbing them there how can you then make a case for

[39:23]  systemic change when the only thing to change the system is time and it's not just time because it takes years to change a system but it's starting at the right time early on in a child's life in order to change their trajectory that's systemic change so you can have quick wins in one area but you can't expect a quick win with a child right like do we just go to a 9-year-old and say all right well we've taught you all of these things so now you should be able to take the high school equivalency test and and you're ready to rock and roll no because we know with a child it takes early interventions often and frequently throughout the course of their life so

[40:11]  why are we not applying that same kind of modeling and thinking to other areas I could not agree with you more um one of the benefits of my entrepreneurial journey is I've been in business consistently since 2014 so I just crossed 10 years and I'll tell you what something magical happens when you have a business I'm going to use it in this context that compounds over time now you can make uh $10 last year but if you keep that $10 you make another $10 this year you have $20 total that compounding factor of sticking with something for a long time is where greatness comes from I even uh was going through a little bit of a challenge in my life where I was talking to a mentor and I had just finished uh playing college baseball I

[40:57]  got hurt and it wasn't for me anymore and he said you know Kenan and I mentioned this in our previous conversation someday you're going to have to choose to go pro at something other than baseball and in that moment I looked at my competitive greatness from wanting to play season to season in baseball knowing that it was going to end someday but this new life that I was living in business the seasons never end until I stopped playing the game I want to know what is the the importance of mentorship at Lemonade Day how do you guys put little ones in the room with somebody who they can look up to and why is that so important the biggest thing for all of us is to see what the potential is for us to be and you have to provide that role model that figure in a child's life in its real form

[41:48]  putting an Instagram influencer in front of them and saying this is what you aspire to be is not enough because so much of that is where a child is going to assume the easiness of it or the maybe I'd say the easiest of it but also uh it's uh you can sugarcoat all of the challenges and failures in an Instagram post you have to experience that and you have to feel it and having a role model of someone that you can aspire to that is close to you it's not a famous person that you're never going to shake hands with it is a real human that has lived experience that can share with you their

[42:35]  lived experience and and empathize with you through that shared experience and in most Ideal World we want to tell every child that their Mentor is their parent that's not always the case not everyone is fortunate to have a parent in their life that is a role model which is where you're educa come in or where your corporations and their volunteers come in to be able to connect a child with a real life example of someone that looks like them that has similar experiences as they do that they can walk hand inand with and journey alongside of it's critical and now mentorship could also

[43:22]  come in the form of another youth in the sense of an older youth youth we do a lot like with high schoolers and University students where they are mentoring our kids not just corporate employees who are getting volunteer hours or not just Educators who are fortunately or unfortunately already have the mark of mentorship on their badge uh but when you're able to connect a child to somebody older and cool that they can relate to and emulate is is huge how can can you guide a child to maximizing their potential if they can't see it and that's why mentorship is important to us but also it's the transferability of skills that Mentor

[44:12]  who is journeying alongside the child isn't just teaching them but they're giving them these they're giving them different scenarios they're with them to show okay well here's how you can pivot here's how you can think different they're using realtime examples and giving realtime feedback and that's different than putting in feedback into chat gbt and saying what would you say to this you hear it differently you feel it differently with that human connection and just the real life examples do you get excited about the current state of Entrepreneurship and how it's prioritized by this younger generation when we talked about our first lemonade stands in our previous conversation that's not a conversation I have often

[44:59]  but now we've got organizations and leaders out there like you who are showing a younger generation that there's a new opportunity to build the life of their dreams what do you think about that prioritization of Entrepreneurship because it wasn't really talked about when I was a kid you often when you were an entrepreneur you were somebody who didn't have a job right exactly I mean heck even my parents who have heard me give my my lemonade story and why it's connected to my personal why even my parents don't see themselves as entrepreneurs because they started one Freight forwarding company and they did it really really well they didn't have a they didn't sell it and do all of these different stages of seed capital and stuff of that nature so it didn't follow the Elon Musk or the Warren Buffett kind

[45:46]  of path so they didn't see it but everything about them is an entrepreneur because also what a lot of people forget of is what makes a a a entrepreneur is having a raving fan and your raving fan is your customer and if you have a customer who loves what you're selling and let's face it we are all in sales whether you know it or not every single one of us is passionately convincing somebody to action well that's sales at the heart of it my parents had great customers they still didn't see themselves as entrepreneurs but what I see the biggest shift is co because Co did a lot in not only helping folks understand entrepreneurial learning

[46:37]  because kids were at home learning on a computer by themselves they didn't have the same kind of social interactions so it it it all of that bubbled up to the surface and it heightened the need for soft skills development because of covid but not just that what we're seeing now is folks understanding that you can create a business and create value and it doesn't have to be a Applebees or chili kind of uh franchise that you can create a business in your community that may exist in other communities but it doesn't exist in yours and you can add value to that and so it taught people a lot around I don't just have to work for

[47:26]  their this Cor operation that I don't have a personal connection to or I'm not passionate about it but I can move here and I can do this and the narrative has changed around entrepreneurship where folks are no longer just thinking an entrepreneurs Elon Musk or Warren Buffett but that we are all entrepreneurs in our own right and I get to Define that that's pretty cool people are more RIS I mean they're just more willing to take risk it's literally the definition of being an omnipotent being right you think something now you have the power to create it in your own world and impact everybody around you which I feel like is such an opportunity I want to get a little reflective here Nicole if you could go back to a younger version of Nicole let's say 20 years old

[48:16]  and you had five minutes of uninterrupted time where you could say hey Nicole here's some advice on how you're going to navigate the future what would you say to her m H the biggest thing I would say is to think outside of the box when it comes to what you're willing to give of yourself and your time and to think different than the traditional career paths that are often promoted or advertised or known of think about the specific skill you're good at and the specific things you love to do start there write them out don't try

[49:06]  to pigeon hole them into a specific career path but just think what do I love to do and what am I really good at and to think about the through line of that because more often than not if people really sat down and did that they wouldn't NE necessarily put themselves in a corporate position or a nonprofit position or trade labor because they would find through that through line well wait gosh I think I want to be a coach because I'm really good at be at developing people and strategizing and creating vision for a team so I'm going to be a coach like it would give you the ability to think

[49:53]  different because you can see your skill in qualities in a different way safe is always a place we can come back to you know and just because you're good at something doesn't mean you should be doing it for a living either double click on that what does that mean well I'll take me for an example this is my first time being a CEO at lemonade day I've had a 21 plus career in nonprofit but this is the first I love it in the most humble way I will say I think I'm pretty darn good at it but I don't know if I want to be a CEO of a nonprofit for the rest of my

[50:41]  life because I might want to take those things that I'm really good at that I love to do and I may want to apply them in a different way maybe I want to be a a youth soccer coach or maybe I want to find a different way to empower kids through entrepreneurship by connecting with more College athletes I I mean it just it get it opens your mind to other things and people especially our children need to realize that that's okay that I don't have to follow a linear path or a hierarchical path of just because I've been a CEO of this size nonprofit means that I then have to go to a bigger nonprofit to be a CEO there it doesn't have to be like that I

[51:31]  could just apply these skills in a different way and that's okay I'm not going back it's not embarrassing it's not seen as a failure but it's just different and I should have the power to think different and you should also have the power to change your mind yes and not be judged harshly for it and not be judged harshly for it it's a superow cuz I can't tell you very transparently I have some people who are very close to me in my life who are very good at being accountants as an example does that mean that that lights them up absolutely not and so that's an amazing piece of advice for us to kind of wind it down on so here's my the last thing I want to ask for you Nicole is we have a tradition

[52:18]  here on the podcast where our previous guest wants to ask you a blind question this is really interesting our previous guest I mentioned her Tasha she wanted to know what lessons in life had you have you had to unlearn as a leader which lessons in life have you had to unlearn as a leader o the biggest biggest one you cannot innovate and evaluate at the same time and the biggest reason I say that is because I've had managerial to Executive leadership to CEO roles in my nonprofit life that I used to think it was a blessing that

[53:07]  someone could bring me an idea and because I've been boots on the ground because I've been that administrator I've been that lower level employee that has to be the one to do the things that the higher-ups tell me to do I thought it was a blessing that I knew how to translate Vision into real life everyday implementation and that is a skill set but you can't do it at the same time because if you're evaluating at the same time as innovating you are going to handicap your ability to evaluate I mean to innovate because you're constantly going to be thinking of roadblocks and it's going to it it's going to hinder your ability to innovate because you're crippling yourself with all the

[53:55]  potential what ifs and if you have the freedom to innovate put everything out there put it on paper let the ideas flow and there be no reason or handicap to it and then separately evaluate those ideas prioritize what are the ones that are the least costly and the most likely to succeed you know you can do that process but don't let it hinder your ability to innovate I love that that's a beautiful place for us to put a nice little bow on this Nicole you are the definition of heart and hustle I appreciate you for everything that you're doing to inspire this next generation of great entrepreneurs instilling the soft skills that they need to navigate turbulent times that they're going to come across

[54:41]  in their life but also the tenacity to stick with things I can't thank you enough for joining the show for everybody who's watching and listening thank you so much for joining us thank you and thank you for being the one that brings stories like this to life because you are the on when we sit here and talk about changing The Narrative of Entrepreneurship it's because of people like you who are bringing attention to this that are changing that narrative well I could say the same back at you once again Nicole thank you so much for joining the show guys that's a w