In Search of a Rainbow
How a dark period in a young girl’s life led her to create a national website empowering women.
This is the story of Nicole Smithee whose life took an unexpected turn as she sat fighting off boredom in a church pew one ordinary Sunday morning.
Hal: Let’s start by telling us where you are in your life. What are you doing now?
Nicole: I am working on building my company, Iridescent Women. It’s an online community, a digital platform for women, by women, so we could give women a place to share their experiences, their insights, to talk about things that are relevant in a woman’s life. Everything from career to finance, health and wellness, beauty and fashion, relationships, what’s happening in culture. News that’s impacting women, and what it means to really champion each other, support each other, learn from each other. I started it two years ago with a great friend and business partner, Alex Brown, and it’s been a wild ride.
Hal: Great. We’ll return to how you got the vision to do this. But first, let’s go back and talk about where you grew up, and what the highs and lows, and interesting points of your life were.
Nicole: I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, and lived in Arizona for most of my childhood.
I have one older sister, two loving parents. I have some amazing memories, and I’m so grateful for my childhood, but there were also some things that were a bit difficult for us in the home.
I’ll start with the amazing things. I learned so much from my parents. I knew my parents had my back. I loved my sister. I lived in a neighborhood where there were kids my age, and I had a sense of great friendships growing up.
The not so great part of my childhood was that for the first 10 years of my life, my dad was an alcoholic. He was a functioning alcoholic and a hard worker, but when it came to his home life, he would come home and often drink. That created a lot of challenges in our family, a lot of friction, and tension, and fighting in my parents’ marriage. There was always a lot of talk about divorce, and there was a level of different kinds of just verbal and emotional abuse that came out of that for my mom. That part was really difficult to deal with.
I’m really grateful that my father has been sober now for over 27 years, and has made some really strong choices to deal with that. I’m really grateful for the man that he’s become, but it did cause a lot of tension when we were younger. In my adolescence, I had a really hard time with the relationship with my dad, and I’m really grateful for the relationship we have now.
But those were some of those really formative things for me, I think, in terms of my personality, my passions, what my sense of purpose really looked like.
BRICK 1: EMPOWERMENT
Hal: The traumatic period of your childhood actually was a very formative time for you.
Nicole: Absolutely. When it came to my home life, we were really just trying to survive.I think my desire to help women came from watching some of the things that my mom had to deal with. She had to make the best choices she could make. I think watching my mom try to navigate being in a relationship with an alcoholic, feeling like she didn’t have enough education or finances to leave a situation that wasn’t great for her or her kids, and try to do the best she could — I saw that and went, “There’s got to be more. There’s more for my mom. There’s more for other women, there’s got to be more for me.”
I kind of felt almost like this resistance fighter growing within me, that’s like, “I want to buck the system, I want to break through, I want to do something different.” I didn’t know what that looked like, and wouldn’t even know how to give language to that, but I think that was really deeply embedded in me, and still is. I still want to always look at my life and go, “I’m not just surviving,” and I want to help people figure out, whatever their circumstances are, to go beyond just survival. To having a real deep sense of purpose and meaning, and excitement about their life.
Hal: One of the things that you told me earlier was that you felt “unseen” during that period of growing up.
Nicole: Yeah, it’s a really interesting word, but it is probably the best way to describe how I felt, specifically just in my home life. I think for me — and I do think this might be common for a lot of kids who grow up in a home with addiction — because I felt the need, as a kid, to fill in the gap. You kind of find ways to keep the peace in the home, to make sure things don’t blow up, to try to help solve the situation, which is really hard as a kid. You don’t have the right tools to do that. Sadly, it’s not something that a child should have to try to figure out — how to parent their parents.
For me, I found myself really trying to keep the peace between my mom and dad. I would try to find ways to console my mom, when she was upset about things that were happening. There wasn’t a lot of room for my emotions.
BRICK 2: THE AWAKENING OF SELF
I think the first time I felt seen was when I was 12 years old when I went to a kids’ camp. It was put on by a local church, and I didn’t really grow up in a very religious home. Culturally, I was raised with some idea of God and being Catholic, but it wasn’t something that was really very practiced in our home.
I really wanted to go to the camp, because it was a break from family. As a kid you’re like, “I get to just hang with my friends, and nobody knows what’s going on in my home life. This is perfect.” There were chapel services that they put on for the kids. Nothing spectacular about the chapel. Nothing spectacular about the music they were playing. In fact, I remember thinking, “This is so boring and weird. Why am I here? I just want to play with my friends.” But in the middle of one of those songs, for the first time in my life I felt seen. The only way I can describe it is that, for me, I became aware of, “Oh wow, there’s a God who sees me, and there’s a God who loves me.” That was revolutionary for me.
That began a journey for me having faith and really helped me start to understand, “Hey, I actually can be seen and I should be seen. I do have something to bring to the table. I do have a sense of purpose for my life.”
It awakened so much within me, and became the biggest driving force in my life, to kind of overcome some of the things I needed to overcome and to do some of the things that I’m doing today.
Hal: What a moment for a 12 year old, unbelievable. You have this awakening, this incredibly rich, spiritual experience that just descends on you. Where’d you go with that?
Nicole: Maybe it’s my personality, like when I’m in, I’m all in. Right after that, I just started getting very involved in my local church. I started reading everything I could, and studying everything I could about faith, about the Bible. Nobody told me I had to do this stuff. I just was genuinely so inspired and excited to learn more about what it means to be seen by God, and what it means to live with purpose.
It was so timely, because I was going back from that camp with this awakening, to the same reality. Isn’t that so true? We have these defining moments, but we still have our same environments that we have to walk it out in. We still go home to ourselves and our own messes. I stepped right back into the same reality. There was still fighting going on. My father had stopped drinking at that point, but he was a dry drunk; there were still a lot of issues there.
Hal: Then at some point, your family moved to California, right?
BRICK 3: GENDER EMPOWERMENT
Nicole: Yes, right after high school. I was heavily involved in dramatic arts, and I got accepted to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in LA. I loved being in front of people, I loved speaking. That’s what I thought would happen with my life. I actually acted for a couple years while I was going to school, doing TV commercial work, and that sort of thing.
Hal: Were you still involved with the church?
Nicole: Yes. I got involved in a local church there. I think what was really significant about that church, It was the first time in a church environment that I saw men and women both in leadership together, both just fully empowered, and not in competition with each other. I’d grown up in environments, where I did see women who were on church staffs, but I never saw them in any leadership position
I do think there’s some things in life that once you see it, it kind of awakens within you, “If they could do it, I could do it too.” It was the first time I saw women in these roles. I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know that was possible for me.”
Around that time, I got asked by one of the pastors, “Hey, would you want to come on staff?” I quit acting school, started working in full-time ministry when I was 19, and worked there in different roles for the next 14 years of my life. I youth pastored, associate pastored, executive pastored, and managed the staff that we had. I started speaking and traveling.
Hal: So seeing women empowered affected you.
Nicole: Yes, but outside of my local church, whenever I would be working with other local churches, or other organizations, I would walk into environments where I’d be the only woman in the room who held the position that other men held. Sometimes they would be twice my age. There were a lot of assumptions: “Hey, whose wife are you,” or, “Whose assistant are you,” or, “Whose daughter are you?” Never, “You have the same position, so let’s network, let’s talk, let’s figure out how we can work together.”
That was hard for me, and I had to learn pretty quickly to not get offended by that, but to kind of find grace to deal with it. That led to a passion to want to help other women in my field and say, “Hey, you’re not alone. Let me coach you through some things. Let me support you. There’s other women doing this too. You have every right to be in this room. You don’t have to apologize for being in this room. You have something really, really great to bring to the table.”
BRICK 4: FINDING MY VOICE
Hal: The diminishment by older men in positions of authority, spurred you forward to help women.
Nicole: Yes, I think sometimes those kind of things can bring out the best in you, if you let them. I don’t want to make that a simpler thing than it was. It wasn’t like I had one poor interaction, that I felt discriminated against and I rose to the occasion. It was a wrestle for a while, “Should I do this? Is this the place for me? When will this ever change? This is so frustrating that this still exists in 2020.” But I do think it created a resolve in me, and I had to really, really go, “No, I want to be here. I believe that I’m supposed to be here,” and figure out what I uniquely can bring to the table, that gives me a reason to be here…It kind of gave me a resolve to want to be that for other women, as I got older.
Kathleen: Like you, I have experienced those kinds of demeaning moments — people assuming that I’m the secretary, instead of an equal staff member. How were you able to transform those negative experiences?
Nicole: There was a defining moment for me. I remember having a really, really frustrating interaction at this networking event for youth pastors. I was in my early 20s when that happened. It was frustrating, the way that a man reacted to me. He was very blunt. He said, “I don’t want to hear from a woman.”
I just had to leave the room. I remember I was so angry. I was like, “I’m going to either start crying, and this guy doesn’t deserve my tears,” or, “I’m going to say something I’m going to regret.” I left the room quietly, and I went to my car, and I sat in my car. I remember sitting in the parking lot, and I just started crying. I was so frustrated.
The most frustrating part wasn’t just that I wasn’t heard, but I was trying to offer him some resources that we had created, that would have been really helpful for his students. His attitude was actually stopping him from helping other people.
It was a real challenge. It became clear to me, if I continued down this path of just being angry at people in response, then I’m going to create a different mission for my life than the one that I really want. It’s going to become about proving that I can do something as a woman, instead of just doing the work that I feel called to do. One is going to lead me down a place where it’s never going to be enough, and the other one is going to lead me down a place where at the end of my life, I can feel like I did good and I helped people.
Hal: In an earlier conversation, you talked about a conference that was another life-altering moment.
BRICK 5: THE ‘AHA’ MOMENT
Nicole: Yeah, fast forward to three years ago, I’m living in New York now. I was overseeing a nonprofit here in the city that was focused on mobilizing church planners, and also resourcing local communities in developing nations to do the work that they wanted to do. We fundraised, and then they did the work on the ground, which was awesome.
I was traveling quite a bit and speaking. I’ve been doing that for over a decade now. I was speaking at a young adults’ conference, and I’m getting ready to get up and speak. I had this unique vantage point. I was off to the side, so I could see the whole auditorium full. I was just like, “Wow, this is such an amazing moment.” I had some time to scan the audience, so I started looking and found myself stopping at young women in the crowd. I kept finding myself drawn to these particular faces. In that moment, something clicked.
It’s so funny to explain this stuff. Somebody else’s journey might be more thought out and way more like it was a six month process or whatever. It seems like for me, I have moments, and then I build off of them in my life.
But this was one of those moments, that it just clicked for me. What if I can create something that really does serve women, and just meets them where they’re at?” Which means it’s going to be digital. It’s going to be on their phones and on their laptops. Really create conversations where women feel seen by the kind of conversations that we’re having, and feel really encouraged. She needs to have practical resources and tools to do it. She needs to feel seen and heard. She needs to find her voice.
BRICK 6: TRIAL AND ERROR
Kathleen: How did you go about building the digital platform for Iridescent?
Nicole: We took some time to really build our vision, our mission, and our values, before we went to anything technical and any strategy. We just really parked for a while on, what are our values? What do we want a woman to feel when she’s interacted with us? What are the value lines that determine what kind of conversations we have, how we go about them?
But a lot has changed on the strategy side since we started. You put something out there, and then you get feedback, and then you adapt and you change. “These articles are landing for women, these are not and we thought they would be great, so let’s change that.”
Hal: Did you get any feedback that surprised you? That you thought, “Whoa, didn’t see that coming.”
Nicole: There was a contributor a while back, and she wrote a really great piece. We published it, and when our team sent a notification and some graphics to let her know, “Here’s when your article’s going to be published. Feel free to share it with everybody. We’re so grateful for your voice,” she emailed back and said, “You guys didn’t know this, because I didn’t include it in the article, but I tried to commit suicide a year ago. Instead, I started writing. This is the first piece I’m publishing….The day I got your email saying, ‘Your article’s going to be published’ is the one year anniversary of the day I tried to commit suicide. It’s the same day that I’m having a party with my friends just celebrating that I’m alive.”
Those are the kind of moments that we’re surprised by, that really resonate with us.
Kathleen: How big is the full Iridescent team and are you a non-profit or a private company?
Nicole: We are a private company, though we do a lot of partnerships with nonprofits. We have a team of about eight different people from our podcast producer, to our recurring writers, to people who are focusing more on news events, to graphic designers, and admin support…We decided to start without any investors. We stand by that choice, and we love it for us. But startups really need to know that it is a journey, and there’s highs and lows.
Kathleen: What do you think your next brick will be?
Nicole: I think the next brick for me, and I could be wrong, because life throws lots of curve balls, right? I think it would be what it would feel like for me to become a mother. I’m excited to see how that shapes me, and how that kind of changes things for me. But it’s a little bit of a nervous excitement, because it’s so much of an unknown.
Hal: Final question: Any words of wisdom?
Nicole: Oh, man. Don’t quit on the things that really matter to you. Even if they look different in different seasons or there’s iterations that aren’t exactly where you want them to be, just don’t quit on those things. Don’t quit, put in the work, don’t take yourself too seriously. Life is serious enough. Find moments to laugh. Give yourself grace and compassion along the way, but just don’t quit. There are no shortcuts, but that’s okay, because it makes you better.
You can keep up with Nicole on Iridescent Women.
“10 Bricks” is a series of interviews with people who have had interesting careers and lives, bucking the conventional wisdom of following a single, linear career path.
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Design and illustration by Martine Lindstrøm.
