Dr. Nicole Yeldell Butts

Four days before I completed my doctorate at the University of Southern California, I was unexpectedly displaced from my role as Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Family was already arriving from out of town. My husband had planned a party for about 150 friends and family who were coming to celebrate with me, and I couldn't bring myself to dampen that joy with the news. So I carried both at once: one of the most meaningful achievements of my life, and the loss of a role that had become woven into how I understood myself. I was becoming Dr. Nicole at the very moment I was no longer Vice President Nicole.

What surprised me most was neither the loss nor the achievement. It was that I had no words for the space between them. I had spent more than twenty-five years inside organizations at the exact moment they were being asked to change. I led through it, studied it, and advised other leaders through it. I knew a great deal about change. But something had ended, whatever came next hadn't yet taken shape, and I had no language for where I was standing. The old identity no longer fit the way it used to, and the new one hadn't arrived.

Looking back, I can see that I did what so many women do in that space: I went quiet. I held the news close and smiled through a celebration in my honor, because saying it out loud felt like it would take something from everyone else. The other pull, which I've watched in so many women since, is to hurry — to leap into whatever comes next so you don't have to stand in the not-knowing for one more day. Both make complete sense. Neither leaves room for what the in-between has to offer. Slowly, I began to suspect it had something to teach me, if I could stay in it long enough to listen.

Eventually, I gave that space a name: The Room Between. When I started talking about it, women kept telling me they recognized themselves in it. Some were navigating a job loss or a career change, a divorce, a diagnosis, a parent's decline, or a house that had gone quiet after the kids left. Many couldn't point to a single event at all. Their lives still worked. They were still accomplished, still relied upon, still the one holding everything together, and yet something in them had started asking a question they weren't ready to say out loud.

I created this podcast for her. The Room Between is not a waiting room you rush through until your real life resumes. I think of it as a Chrysalis Season, a time when, from the outside, it can look like nothing is happening while underneath, something important is taking shape. Most conversations about reinvention skip straight to the after-photo. I'm more interested in the middle: what it actually feels like to be there, what it asks of us, and what we would miss if we hurried through it.

On the show, I sit down with women whose stories and work illuminate that middle. The questions I bring are shaped by a belief I return to constantly: life will always bring transitions, but transformation requires intention. That belief became SHIFT, the framework at the heart of my books and coaching, grounded in a simple equation: Consciousness + Courage = Transformation. It informs how I listen. It isn't a formula every guest has to walk through.

When I'm not in the studio, I live in Los Angeles with my husband. You're likely to find me traveling, at a live show, deep in a science-fiction series, or curled up with a good novel.

The question at the center of The Room Between, how we move through the space after something ends and before the next thing has formed, is the same one I explore with organizations and the leaders inside them. To learn more about that work, my speaking and advisory practice, and both SHIFT books, visit nicolebutts.com.