ABOUT NICOLE
I believe distance can give us perspective.
For more than 24 years, I’ve built my career in healthcare, an ever-changing, high-stakes, 24/7 environment where decisions matter, the pace rarely slows, and there is almost always something that needs your attention.
It’s where I learned to lead through complexity. It’s also where I learned something more personal:
Sometimes the perspective we need most is impossible to find while we’re standing in the middle of everything demanding our attention.
What I began to notice
Throughout my career, some of my clearest moments haven’t happened behind a desk, in a meeting, or while working harder to solve a problem.
They’ve happened when I’ve stepped away from the day-to-day.
Traveling somewhere new. Walking through an unfamiliar city. Sitting over coffee without a schedule pressing in. Having enough distance from the familiar to notice what I hadn’t been able to see before.
I would return with more than memories from a trip.
I’d return with perspective.
A problem looked different. An idea surfaced. A decision became clearer. But I began to notice something else, too.
Something in me felt reignited.
The curiosity, energy, and sense of possibility that can get quieter when we’re consumed by responsibility had room to surface again. I came home not only seeing my work differently, but feeling more connected to the parts of myself that can be easy to lose sight of in the day-to-day.
Over time, I stopped thinking of that as coincidence.
That realization became Ristare.
Leadership has been my work for more than two decades.
I’ve spent more than 24 years in healthcare, growing from clinical practice into senior leadership and leading people and teams in one of the most complex environments imaginable.
My work has centered on developing leaders, building teams, navigating change, creating systems that help people succeed, and bringing structure and perspective to complicated problems.
I’ve led large multidisciplinary teams across education, quality, and research; built leadership development programs; guided organization-wide change; and supported leaders through moments when there wasn’t an obvious answer.
That experience shapes how I show up now. Not because I have your answer, but because I understand what it means to carry responsibility while trying to find one.
Coaching gave me a different way to help leaders think.
24+ Years in Healthcare Leadership
ICF Certified Professional Coach
After decades of leading and developing others, I pursued formal professional coach training to deepen the way I support leaders. Not by giving them my answers, but by creating the conditions for them to discover their own.
Today, I am an ICF Certified Professional Coach, bringing professional coaching practice together with decades of real-world leadership experience.
That distinction matters to me.
Ristare isn’t advice disguised as coaching. It’s thoughtful space, skilled conversation, curiosity, and experience intentionally designed around what you need to explore, creating enough distance from the noise to hear yourself more clearly and discover the answers that may already be within you.
Why travel?
Because changing where we are can change how we think.
Travel interrupts our patterns. It changes our pace. It asks us to pay attention. It puts us in places where our usual routines, roles, and expectations loosen their grip just a little.
That’s why place isn’t simply the backdrop for a Ristare Leadership Escape.
It’s part of the experience.
I bring the same thoughtfulness to designing where you go and how you spend your time there as I do to the coaching that surrounds it.
The goal isn’t to fill an itinerary. It’s to create the right combination of experience, openness, conversation, and space for whatever you’re there to explore.
You don’t have to know where you’re going yet.
Maybe there’s a decision you’ve been circling.
A transition you haven’t quite made sense of.
A question that keeps resurfacing.
Maybe you feel stuck. Not because something is necessarily wrong, but because sometimes we’re simply too close to where we are to see all the possibilities of where we could go.
You know you’re ready to move, but you’re not quite sure in which direction.
Or maybe there’s simply a sense that you’re ready for something different, even if you can’t name it yet.
That’s enough to begin.
We’ll start with the question.
The destination can come later.