MEET NICOLETTE
FOUNDER OF THE CURIOUS REBEL
I help mums of neurodivergent, anxious and emotionally intense children expand the capacity underneath everything they're holding — so life costs them less and gives them more.
I don't do calm. I do capacity. There's a difference.
I'm Nicolette. Nic, or call me Nikki if you like.
A breath and nervous system practitioner, and an advocate for women who are holding a life that needs more from them than most — and have no intention of carrying less.
Twenty-three years of holding, growing and expanding a neurodivergent family is where my story is.
Most people in this space are talking from material. I'm talking from my life.
THE THREAD
Seven years following an invisible thread. Courses, certifications, coaches, trainings. The expensive ones, the cheap ones, the ones I'm not quite willing to admit the cost of out loud.
And then I clocked it.
The thread had been leading me to the physiological base underneath everything. The layer nobody had built — and nobody was even looking at.
I didn't come at this looking for a business. I came at it with a question nobody could answer:
I'm doing every single one of these things properly, it isn't working, and why can nobody tell me why.
I started as a movement professional and kept pulling. Movement into stress resilience, into breath science, into the nervous system, and eventually into the physiology underneath all of it.
I'm a Pain Reprocessing Therapy practitioner and an Anatomy in Motion accredited practitioner, and I'm currently training in breath science.
Not because I collect certificates. Because my own tools stopped giving me anything back, and nobody could tell me why.
I'VE SAT ON THE OTHER SIDE
OF THE TABLE TOO
Sixteen years chairing governors' meetings. SEND. Safeguarding. Exclusions. Pupil premium. Grievances. Four schools, more Ofsted inspections than I can now count, and a fair few head teacher appointment panels.
I also co-built FACT and FACT+ — the communication assessment my local authority uses across Milton Keynes.
I was asked to join a small group of professionals to rewrite the first and build the second from scratch. Partly because my own child didn't present with the usual characteristics, which meant somebody had to look at it from outside the box.
So when I say I know the meetings, the forms and the appeals — I mean I've chaired them.
All of it while holding a family life where the week has never once been the week. Where the systems everybody else fits neatly into simply don't bend, so you bend instead. Where decisions get made about your child by people in rooms you're not in.
Although I made sure I was in them.
Building a business that had to hold clients properly, alongside a life that could dissolve at ten past nine on a Tuesday.
And doing it well enough that from the outside, nobody would have the first clue what it took to make it look like that.
WHY I'M WRITING ANY OF THIS DOWN
Not so you know I've been through it. Because of where it landed.
I've got the science behind how I did it now. Which means I can hand it to other women rather than watching them work it out the hard way — and honestly, that prospect is the most exciting thing I've done.
Because you rarely get to see the brightness on the other side while you're still in it, wading through treacle that's arriving faster than you can wade.
You don't need the years I took. You need the order.
That's the bit I can actually give you. So you can go and find the exciting part yourself.
A BIT MORE ABOUT NICOLETTE
I live near Milton Keynes. Home of the most roundabouts in the UK, and the Concrete Cows.
Three kids, two neurodivergent. Twenty-three years navigating ADHD and autism in my family — most of them before I had the language for what I was working with.
Cheesecake sceptic. KitKat appreciator. I read the synopsis before the film.
I work backwards from the cake.
Two Ds in GCSE science. No degree. Seven years following the thread.
What I know now would floor the exam boards.
I'm the pebble. No — the boulder. Causing the ripple.