Meet the Woman Behind the Work

Dr. Nicole Yeldell Butts knows that season not simply as a theory, but as something she has lived more than once and watched other women live in different ways. Across more than 25 years of leadership, coaching, organizational change, and culture work, she has spent much of her career alongside people and organizations navigating what happens when the familiar no longer fits and something new is asking to emerge.

That work led her to develop the SHIFT Framework, a methodology for intentional transformation grounded in a fundamental belief: change and transformation are not the same thing. Change can happen around us — sometimes by choice and sometimes without our permission. Transformation requires something more. It asks us to consciously engage with what is changing and make intentional choices about what comes next.

Over the years, Dr. Nicole has experienced her own seasons of transition and reinvention — moments that asked her to reconsider identity, direction, purpose, and what it meant to move forward in a way that still felt true to the woman she was becoming.

But one of those moments brought the pattern into sharper focus.

Four days before completing her doctorate at the University of Southern California, Dr. Nicole was unexpectedly displaced from her executive role as Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In the span of four days, she was experiencing one of the greatest professional achievements of her life while simultaneously losing a role that had become deeply connected to how she understood herself.

She was becoming Dr. Nicole at the very moment she was no longer Vice President Nicole.

Achievement and loss. Celebration and uncertainty. Becoming and letting go — all occupying the same space.

It was not her first transition, and it would not be her first experience of transformation. But this one caused her to see the in-between differently.

She knew a great deal about change. She had spent decades leading through it, advising others through it, studying it, and creating a framework for intentional transformation.

What she did not yet have was language for the particular space she was occupying.

Something had ended, but whatever was next had not fully emerged. The old identity no longer fit in quite the same way, but the new one had not completely taken shape. There was no clean before-and-after line to cross. There was simply the space between.

It was a kind of chrysalis season — not quite who she had been, not yet fully who she was becoming, and increasingly aware that the in-between itself might have something to offer.

And as she began talking about it, something else became clear.

She was not alone.

Women around her recognized themselves in the language. Some were navigating career changes. Others were questioning identities they had carried for decades. Some were moving through changes in relationships, family, health, purpose, or ambition. Others could not point to a single event at all. Their lives still worked. They were still successful. Still capable. Still accomplishing. And yet something within them was shifting.

That recognition expanded The Room Between from something deeply personal into something much larger: a space for all of us who find ourselves somewhere between the life we have known and the life that is asking to emerge.

The Room Between names that space.

The SHIFT Framework offers a way to move through it intentionally.

Together, they invite women to approach transition differently — not as a disruption to rush through or a problem to solve, but as an opportunity to pay attention to what is changing, what may need to be released, what wants to be reclaimed, and what might now be possible.

Because becoming is not always dramatic. Sometimes it begins with the quiet realization that what once fit no longer does. Sometimes it is a deliberate decision to stop living according to expectations that have outlived their usefulness. And sometimes it is simply the willingness to begin boldly becoming the woman you have not yet fully met.

That is the work of The Room Between.

It is not about arriving at some perfected version of yourself. It is about developing the consciousness and courage to make increasingly intentional choices about how you want to live, lead, love, work, and move through the world — and creating a life that allows you to move toward unapologetically thriving on your own terms.

Today, Dr. Nicole brings this work to life as a speaker, transformational coach, best-selling author, and host of The Room Between: Navigating Life's Transitions. Through speaking, coaching, community, writing, and conversation, she helps high-achieving women recognize the space between who they have been and who they are becoming — and choose, on purpose, who they step into next.

Dr. Nicole is the Founder & CEO of NLYB Solutions and the creator of the SHIFT Framework and The Room Between. She holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from the University of Southern California, where her research examined the role of executives in advancing organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion. Her career includes C-suite leadership and advisory work across corporate, nonprofit, higher education, and professional services environments.

She is the award-winning and bestselling author of two books applying the SHIFT methodology at different levels: SHIFT: A Five-Step Framework for Transforming Organizational Culture, which brings the framework to organizational and culture change, and SHIFT: A Transformational Journey from Playing Small to Unapologetically Thriving, which applies the same methodology to women's personal transformation. She is also a contributing author to The New C-Suite: Civil Leadership in Action.

Her work sits at the intersection of identity, leadership, and transformation — helping women move through change with greater consciousness, intention, and courage.