Nick Williams's Story
Why did Nick Williams co-found Inspired Entrepreneur? Why is he so passionate about it and wants to help others?
Nick Williams - author, coach, motivational speaker and founder of Inspired Entrepreneur - reveals to Natalie Cooper the events of an unhappy childhood that prevented him celebrating his own natural talents.
It wasn’t until he suffered a near breakdown, at the age of 31, that Nick was forced to face the pain he’d been blanking out. Up until then, he describes ‘walking through life, simply existing and dreading going to work…shut off and shut down’. Looking back on the years from childhood through to his late 20s, Nick’s memories are blurred. His responses to a series of stirring questions uncover subconsciously-held details that surprise even himself.
Dormant talents that lie within you?
Perhaps when you were younger, you were never given the chance to find out what your talents were because you lacked parental role models who were able to help show you the way?
Did any of your teachers try to make you feel small? Or maybe your ‘friends’ told you not to show off - trying to make out you were a bragger instead?
As a result, as you approached adolescence and moved into adulthood, did you bury your natural talents?
Nick raises the above questions because he believes everyone has a gift, a talent, or a skill, and a calling within themselves about who they can become. He knows this because he has been on a long journey of self-discovery and hopes that by sharing his story he can help others unlock their own fears, so that they too can fulfil their potential.
‘I feel that contribution is in my DNA. I can’t contain the love and care that’s within me. What I’ve learned, care about and can contribute, I don’t want to withhold,’ says Nick. ‘I will stretch out my hand to anyone who is suffering, and act as a beacon of hope to them because of the dark places I’ve been to.’
A fear of failure
Nick was brought up in Hornchurch, Essex. ‘As a child, I grew up with very few expressions of love from my mum and sister, but lots from my dad,’ says Nick. ‘I had a difficult relationship with my mum and I clashed with her a lot. I don’t remember her ever expressing her pride of me. My sister is four years older than me, but we were never that close. So I was always seeking to be loved and needed affirmation and encouragement. When I witnessed what other families were like, I felt cheated and confused.
‘In our household, life was quite dull - there wasn’t a lot of stimulation. We had holidays down in Margate, and as a kid I was quite adventurous but mainly did activities on my own. I loved communicating, being creative, writing poetry and playing with chemistry sets. I was also into photo developing, gardening, football and music.’
Nick’s father was the manager of an insurance company and had stayed with the same firm for 49 years. However, in his spare time he was a Methodist lay preacher, and Nick admired this: ‘I loved his passion for preaching and thought I might have a calling and a destiny too. But I thought having a calling meant being a minister, and that didn’t appeal to me so I dismissed the idea.
His mother, meanwhile, was a housewife who worked until she had children and then had part-time jobs. Her attitude seemed to be that you were here to fit in, follow the rules and to do what you were told. ‘I always felt loved by my dad, but love from my mum was conditional upon whether I was well behaved, and didn’t cause problems,’ he says. ‘Looking back, my mother’s love was expressed practically, she was the youngest of eight children.’
He recalls being in a school play that his dad came to watch while his mother stayed at home. ‘I felt a real grudge against her and never forgave her,’ admits Nick. ‘I grew up feeling hollow, in that whatever my achievements, they were never of any significance to my mother. In a way, my mum was a great teacher in that she was the antithesis of everything I’m not.’
Feeling a misfit
Nick’s memory of playing football, scoring a hat-trick in the school field and being told by his mates not to ‘show off’ typifies how he felt during his school years: misunderstood, never quite fitting in, and something of a loner. ‘These were the themes of my life,’ says Nick. ‘I felt confused. Why wouldn’t I want to be good at what I was doing? Instead I felt constant rejection. It wasn’t safe to be good at anything.’
Entrepreneurial flair
When Nick was 14, he got a Saturday job in a shop. It was his escape away from the family home and his one soul saving grace where he had fun and got recognition. He explains: ‘I was selling hi-fi systems and found that I had initiative, some competence and technical mastery. The bosses trusted me too and I felt grown up for the first time. I found I was pretty good at selling. It was like going into another universe because it gave me a deep sense of serving others. I loved selling stereo equipment because I felt I was helping to enrich the lives of people who were passionate about music.’
As Nick tries to piece together memories from his teenage years, he struggles to recollect them. At the age of 15, he started to spend evenings at the local pub, where he would drink cider with older friends from his neighbourhood. This was the beginning of the drinking which was to aid him throughout his A-levels at school and into his late 20s.
Blocking out trauma
Nick was the first person from his family to go into higher education. It still remains a mystery to him how he got himself on the path to gaining a degree in business studies, which he undertook at North East London Polytechnic in Barking, living in the family home while he studied. It was something of a halfway house for Nick, not yet brave enough to step out of his comfort zone and leave the family. In a way, they were his only anchor. ‘I was afraid of moving away from my family and becoming separate from them,’ he reflects.
While studying, Nick got a part-time job in a local wine bar, but didn’t build up his social life. In his first year at university, Nick experienced several emotional trials. His dad’s sister came to live with them while she was dying of cancer. After that, he ended up moving to Brentwood with a couple of his friends. A short time after he moved in with them, one, a fellow student, died suddenly. At the same time, Nick’s parents decided to sell the family home Nick had spent all his life growing up in.
‘It was a pretty traumatic time,’ he says. ‘Following this I also had a head-on car crash and was nearly killed. I bottled it all up. I had always been told that if you have problems, you should pull yourself together and not express your pain. I was following my mum’s example of toughing things out. There wasn’t any support for me, I had no map. So I had to numb my own feelings. I was very disconnected and lonely.’
Taste of freedom
During Nick’s sandwich placement in his third year of polytechnic, he went to work for a paint manufacturer, and got to travel around the UK. ‘It was a life affirming experience,’ states Nick. He was landed with Brian Ryan, an Arthur Daley-type character who acted as Nick’s first mentor and encouraged him to take responsibility. ‘He gave me projects to do. I felt trusted in a way I hadn’t before and I was grateful for the opportunities he gave me. He treated me like an equal and opened up my eyes to other worlds I hadn’t explored before,’ says Nick.
This gave him a confidence boost. When he graduated aged 22 with a 2:1 degree, he was still working in the wine bar and ended up cruising through life for a while. Believing that no one would want to employ him, he went on to get a diploma in marketing and then spent some time working for an uncle who owned an electrical business.
It was through connections at the wine bar that he secured his first ‘proper’ job aged 23, working for Telefusion, where he was to spend three years direct selling TV and video equipment. He was given his first company car, and worked hard. The hours were long, but he was able to secure enough income to buy his first property, in Hornchurch, in 1984.
A miserable existence
At the age of 26, Nick left Telefusion to take up a new job selling office equipment to businesses for Wordplex plc. By this time his sister had moved to London. Nick sold his house and followed her to Parsons Green where they lived together for two years. ‘I was quite excited, breaking with my past. My parents had moved away but I still felt embarrassed and ashamed that I was following in the footsteps of my sister. I was still desperate for my mum’s and sister’s approval.’
During these years, Nick put pressure on himself to outperform his peers because he never acknowledged his own successes. He succumbed to what he now calls the ‘Protestant work ethic’ – work hard, make sacrifices and go against your own grain in order to become successful.
Nick moved job roles again, aged 29, when he went to work for Digital. At about the same time he also came across Alternatives, an organisation running personal growth events in Piccadilly, London, and was introduced to a completely different ‘touchy feely’ world of spiritual development. He felt he’d ‘come home’, and started to spend time with people who were more interested in friendship and connection than alcohol. He had a kind of awakening.
‘I stopped drinking and became more conscious - I was now willing to feel my emotions instead of masking them under alcohol,’ says Nick. He knew he wanted to change direction, but was in turmoil and ended up working for Digital for three more years before he summoned up the courage to quit.
He says: ‘For a while I had a foot in both camps, then I made the full transition when I quit Digital and the commercial world.’ At that time he was a highly driven, top sales performer, selling computers globally and winning numerous sales trips to exotic places. However, it dawned on him that he’d spent his whole life trying to show everyone that he wasn’t a failure.
He reveals: ‘I was desperate to feel successful. I had ticked all the right boxes. I had a massive mortgage and a fair amount of money but I never felt good enough. Life was meaningless. I was just looking to appear a success, but knew I was playing a role. It was wearing me out. I was at my most successful but most stressed. A paradox.
‘I won a trip to Antigua. I was being sent to paradise but all I could feel was hell raging inside, killing me. I was pushing and driving myself, working hard and playing hard and then I heard this voice - that I needed to blossom. The same one I had ignored 20 years earlier.’
The thought that he should quit his career and follow the dream in his heart had been going around in circles in Nick’s head for a few years, but he’d become attached to the money. Now he knew there had to be more to life than financial gain. He says: ‘Eventually it became too painful for the bud not to blossom. I then thought of being on my deathbed, looking back and wondering if I could have had more adventure, fun, even written a book rather than chase the security? I couldn’t bear the pain of a life lived in regret.’
Identity crisis - who am I?
In July 1989, aged 31 and with ‘a few grand in the bank’, Nick quit his secure, high-powered job. He had a dream of starting his own business, but first spent three months backpacking around the world. He says it was the most exciting yet painful of times. ‘I travelled around America, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Thailand, had a holiday romance and fell in love. I wanted to be far away from home. I thought to myself: ‘Yeah, I’m ok to claim my own independence, my own identity, and stand on my own two feet without a company behind me’.’
It was on his return that Nick hit rock bottom and was stopped dead in his tracks. Instead of starting his business, fear kicked in and he felt paralysed and thrown into sudden shock. His world suddenly came crashing down around him and he suffered an identity crisis. He came back to the UK with no income and felt like a failure, that life wasn’t worth living. He signed on the dole for around 10 months.
Feeling lost, unloved and scared, this was to be the turning point that would lead Nick to break free from the conditioning of his childhood. He would spend the next year until October 1990 allowing himself to feel hurt by grieving and mourning his lost childhood. It was a bleak time in his life. He would wander the local parks, crying the days away and wanting to be burnt up.
However, bit by bit Nick allowed himself to shed the protective layers he’d piled on to hide himself away from the world for nearly the first 30 years of his life. He discarded the roles his family had placed on him, that had made him feel useless.
‘I was sitting on the fence questioning whether I wanted to live or die,’ says Nick. I chose to make a commitment to life rather than to death – and start living. So in November 1990, I came off the dole and with no entrepreneurial role models from my family, started my first company. I began to put myself out into the world as a trainer and seminar promoter.’
Undergoing transformation – a new life beckoning
It was at this point that Nick began a journey to re-parent himself. He came across the author and poet, Robert Bly, and through his work exploring masculinity, Bly’s voice acted as a guide. ‘Iron Man, Men and Masculinity’ was particularly pertinent to Nick and he found himself enrolling on a series of rural workshops for men, run at Gaunts House in Dorset, that were led by two elders.
This is where he was reintroduced to poetry and undertook a lot of grief work. He says: ‘It was incredibly powerful as I had to get in touch with what was buried underneath. Robert Bly says the gateway back to a man’s heart is often through grief. It allowed me to reclaim parts of myself that I’d let go of. Like an onion that has so many layers, I had to shed various skins. Something in me had to die in order for me to change.’
He continues: ‘Robert Bly gave me faith, that it wasn’t all meaningless. That I had to go through what I’d been through so that the new me could emerge. There was a mountain in front of me to climb, and I had to establish myself in the world from a standing start.’
Nick’s sister introduced him to a book on ‘transactional analysis’ which was to become profound for Nick in terms of his own spiritual growth and personal development. He went into therapy and ended up training with Julie Hay. Julie helped him to set up his first few paid gigs, a series of seminars for an experienced American Transactional Analysis trainer to create visibility for him in the UK. ‘I wanted to ride on his coat tails because I didn’t think I was experienced enough to be able to present, train or educate others myself,’ says Nick.
He also got more deeply involved with Alternatives, and started giving talks on the subject of personal development, with little training. It was an oasis of inspiration for his parched soul. He ended up working on projects with many of the leading lights of the personal development world. He’d convinced the author James Redfield of The Celestine Prophecy to present by telelink in front of an audience of 450 people after the author stated he didn’t want to come to the UK. He also arranged, co-produced and ran two events in Hammersmith for 3,000 people, as well as over 1,000 people in Manchester for Dr Wayne Dyer and Dr Deepak Chopra. ‘I did do some amazing stuff. Intuitively I must have been doing something right because I was making some ripples and getting invitations to work around the UK. I ended up co-running and working with Alternatives for the next four years up to 1999.’
Breaking through the barriers
For the first time in our interview, Nick smiles. The corners of his mouth soften, and his eyes sparkle. ‘Looking back it wobbled me because I never realised how lonely and desperate I was. I realise I disowned my part in making things happen, discounting my own achievements. I was always telling myself I was the weakest link and everything could have happened without me - that I didn’t really pull my weight. It was a big lie I told myself.
The next breakthrough for Nick was when he realised how much he had learned from organising talks, but that he was also ‘hiding out’ again, and now it was time to really ‘show up’. He wanted to be the one giving the talks rather than organising them. He stepped back from the day-to-day running of his business, joined the board of trustees of Alternatives and devoted his energy to developing his own career in speaking, writing, educating and broadcasting.
‘I always hear my mum’s voice, saying: ‘Don’t feel good about yourself, who do you think you are?’ In life, I’ve taken on a lot of crap and bit by bit transcended through it,’ says Nick. ‘I now acknowledge I am dynamic. I now give myself permission to realise I have gifts. I am a pioneer. I have been pretty bold and audacious, innovative and creative, which has led me to develop my own signature programmes. I now feel my work is my ministry.’
Finding his voice – the door to inspiration
In 1996, Nick met his partner Helen, who he describes as a tremendous support. After they met, he sold his flat to move in with her, initially in Tottenham and now in Finchley. In 1998, Nick decided to risk his dream of writing his own book and finding his own voice. Through his work with Alternatives he knew a dozen publishers, so he sent a publishing proposal to six of these. Only one was interested, but that was all he needed. He says: ‘The day they sent me the contract I was both excited and terrified. I was like ‘oh no’, because a part of me was fearful about whether I could deliver on it. So I went into quiet meditation and my soul shouted at me ‘yes, I can’. A wave of peace flowed over me. By the act of committing to signing that contract, it immediately opened the door of inspiration and a switch inside me turned on. That door has never closed since. In that book was the best of me.’
Nick’s book, The Work We Were Born To Do, became an international bestseller and put his name on the global map. His message that work should involve joy, and that you can earn a living from doing what you love, has resonated globally. From there, Nick has carved out a name for himself as a public speaker, coach, writer, event organiser for other leaders, and a collaborator. He has so far been invited to speak in 16 countries, written six books with more on their way and is an active member of the Global Leaders Academy. He feels he has become who he dreamed he could be.
It’s only in the last few years that Nick has started to get a real sense of his own value. ‘I was only ever told what I was doing wrong, not what I was doing right. I can still feel easily judged, criticised, and that I’m not good enough, because the triggers are still there - but it’s about learning to acknowledge your own brilliance.
‘In the past I felt imprisoned by my fears, but now I have found something greater than them. Under the pain of insignificance and feeling unloved, I found that I have a gift for inspiring others to find their own sense of worth, value and significance. My greatest wound and a chronic difficulty in my life has gradually transformed into a positive cornerstone. I did always feel loved by my father, and when he died in 2005, I knew my challenge was to learn to love myself like I knew he did. I am getting there now.’
Inspired entrepreneur
We all hold the tools to overcome challenges, obstacles and move forwards in your life. Nick believes it’s about facing your fears, letting go of the past, taking risks, having courage, and being willing to go on a journey. These are all stages that Nick had to push himself through, so that he could come out of the shadows and free himself to become the inspiring entrepreneur he is today.
He says: ‘You have the courage to face your darkest feelings - you won’t die. Paradoxically, we also need to laugh about how much crap we believe about ourselves and realise how silly it all is. You don’t have to put on a mask, just trust your heart. Ups and downs are normal, they’re not character defects – there’s always going to be growth periods.’
Nick went from having a completely structured life to no structure at all. He explains that two great human needs are structure and strokes. Structure is knowing where we fit in, what we should be doing and when, and how we will be measured – this provides some certainty in our lives. It also creates belonging. In employment, structure is often provided by the organisation and we do as we are expected to.
Strokes are ‘social interaction’ – the connections we have, the attention we give and receive. Employment gives us a lot of both. He believes that without structure and strokes we can go into a kind of freefall – not knowing the what, how, when, or with whom. ‘We have many decisions to make by ourselves rather than someone else making them for us. We can miss the camaraderie, connections and conversations to start with, as well as the sense of belonging,’ he says.
It is for these reasons that, in 2006, Nick founded Inspired Entrepreneur - an online network and community to help people transition from full-time employment into self-employment doing work they love. ‘Newbie inspired entrepreneurs need a lot of support because they are either afraid of the unknown, failing, not making enough money or even feel that they won’t be up to the job – all self-doubts. Inspired-entrepreneur.com is a place where people can meet, learn, grow and succeed together in a positive environment.
‘Isolation, taking responsibility for themselves and their own lives and lack of community is a big thing,’ says Nick, ‘as well as knowing where to invest their energy and what steps to take - in other words, the ‘what do I need to do and how do I do it?’.’
Nick also loves to inspire and mentor leaders, mature business owners and entrepreneurs who still need a lot of practical support and encouragement, but want to step up, be more authentic and play an even bigger game.
‘Don’t wait until you feel ready to face resistance or wait to overcome fear, just do it. Take the first, second and third step, keep being courageous and stepping forward. It’s ok to be imperfect. We’re not superhuman,’ he advises. ‘I have learned that what seemed like a delusion, a crazy dream, has become a global business serving thousands of people. I so encourage others to believe in themselves and to follow their own dream.
‘Most of us have absolutely no idea what we are capable of until we get inspired and commit to growing bigger than our fears. We all have demons, baggage and anxieties - the trick is in controlling them.’
Nick now describes himself as a servant leader. ‘I will help anyone who wants to get out of their prison. I’ll help them to dig a tunnel so they can find a way out of it and escape to get back into the light. My friend Dr Chuck Spezzano says that real leadership is simply friends helping friends.’
He knows that many people have talents that never get expressed because of lack of encouragement and fear, so he does all he can to support people reaching their potential.
‘If all the love and gifts that are unexpressed in people got expressed, the world would be transformed,’ Nick says. ‘It takes courage to share yourself authentically with the world, but when you do, the rewards are tremendous, and everyone is richer for it. It is a very generous act. And you get to inspire yourself and others. How wonderful is that?’
‘So, what are you waiting for? Please, give us what you’ve got – we need your gifts.’
Nick Williams
Inspired Entrepreneur