Nuance and human context, Ni’coel warns, are sacrificed on the altar of tidy TikTok taxonomies that pose as “wisdom” yet let us hide instead of grow. After years of pattern-tracking, she has traced every breakdown, or breakthrough, of intimacy, leadership, and collaboration to a three-part scaffold:

Skill — practiced competency: noticing, naming, communicating, executing.

Capacity — nervous-system range: the load-bearing substrate that can stay with pleasure, threat, ambiguity, intimacy without numbing or ejecting.

Desire — the animating appetite: willingness to pay the initiation fee of change.

This triad serves as a diagnostic dashboard for founders, spouses, and strategists alike: locate the missing leg and you know where to invest practice, regulation work, or motivational fire. Ignore it, and friction-free substitutions accrue “decision debt,” eroding the relational field where real intelligence lives.

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🔸Cohost: Chelsea Makena’s work spans leadership development, enablement, engagement, and performance. She partners with founders and tech executives to build humane, high-performance systems. As one of CHDI’s earliest collaborators, she brings a grounded people lens that elevates our conversations on human systems.