Your Inner Critic and Self Sabotage With the Strategic Truth Teller

Tara-Nicholle Kirke is the Founder and CEO of SoulTour. SoulTour is a personal growth school where entrepreneurs and companies realize their full potential through uplifting transformation programs, curriculums, and coaching. Before founding SoulTour, Tara honed her entrepreneurial chops as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Before that, she served as MyFitnessPal’s and Under Armour’s Vice President of Marketing, growing the platform from 45 million users to 120 million users. Additionally, Tara is an author, penning The Transformational Consumer: Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair With Your Customers by Helping Them Get Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser. Her accolades have garnered her features in Forbes, the Harvard Business Review, and the New York Times.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Tara-Nicholle Kirke discusses her educational and career background
• Managing college and a demanding career as a single mother
• The importance of surrounding yourself with people who speak positivity into your life
• Turning a crisis into an opportunity to disrupt your life
• How Tara became a consultant for MyFitnessPal
• Tara discusses a client case study
• Tara explains her self mastery
• SoulTour programs for success
• Tara’s ultimate books list

In this episode…

Though life’s expectations are slowly changing, for decades, the order of life has always been to go to school, study hard, make good grades, graduate from a good college, and get a good job. But what happens when you do everything right yet a catastrophe still presents itself?

Entrepreneur and business coach Tara-Nicholle Kirke experienced a life-changing event that could have set her back, but she was able to turn her crisis into an opportunity. Since then, many successes have transpired. Through her experiences, she now helps hundreds of people realize their full potential and grow.

Join Dr. Jeremy Weisz, host of the Inspired Insider Podcast, as he sits down with the Founder and CEO of SoulTour, Tara-Nicholle Kirke. The two discuss how she overcame life challenges through the power of positivity and opportunity. Additionally, Tara shares her career transitions, a client case study, her SoulTour program, and the books that have changed her outlook on life.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Tara-Nicholle Kirke on LinkedIn
• SoulTour
• SoulTour Affirmations
• Email SoulTour: [email protected]

Special Mentions: 

• Dr. Kristin Oja on LinkedIn
• Deepa Purushothaman on LinkedIn

Books:

• The Transformational Consumer: Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair With Your Customers by Helping Them Get Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser by Tara-Nicholle Nelson
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
• The First, the Few, the Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America by Deepa Purushothaman 
• The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks
• Understanding Human Design: The New Science of Astrology: Discover Who You Really Are by Karen Curry Parker
• The Human Design Workbook: A Step by Step Guide to Understanding Your Own Chart and How It Can Transform Your Life by Karen Curry Parker
• The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz
• Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud

Related Episode(s):

• “[Top Israel Leader Series] Engineering the Autonomous Revolution With Rabbi Mois Navon of Mobileye”
• “Developing Sustainable Solutions From Beer Waste With Dan Kurzrock Co-Founder of ReGrained”
• “[One Question] The Value of Learning from Mistakes and Missed Opportunities with Dave Colina Founder of O2”

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01  

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22  

Dr. Jeremy Weisz, here, Founder of Inspired Insider, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Tara-Nicholle Kirke of SoulTour. And I’m gonna formally introduce Tara in a second. But I always like to mention other episodes people’s check out. And really the theme of this, your journey is pretty incredible and diverse, I guess you could say, you know, and it’s really about, you know, we were talking before we hit record about having you what you do being congruent with who you are. And so other past episodes, I guess I hit on some of the Health and Longevity Series that I did with Inspired Insider, I did one with Dr. Kristen Oja, of Stat Wellness and just, you know, they live some of these people live wellness. And that’s what they decide to do, and they follow what they love and make a business out of it, make a great living and help people in the same respect. So talk, check out the Dr. Kristin Oja one. And there’s just many more of different founders and episodes on there. Check it out on Inspired Insider, and this episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect their dream 100 relationships. And we do that by helping you run your podcasts. We are an easy button for your business to launch and run your podcast. And you know, Tara, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. I’ve found no better way to do that over the past decade than to profile the people and companies I most admire and profile what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about starting a podcast, you should. If you have questions, go to Rise25.com and learn more. And I’m excited: Tara-Nicholle Kirke. She’s a globally recognized author, transformational expert, and spiritual strategist. Don’t let the word spiritual fool you in this conversation, don’t check out he’s like, that’s too woowoo for me, because her journey and her background is pretty amazing. And we’re gonna find out how she got to this, this SoulTour business and she’s the Founder of SoulTour. She’s taught over 50,000 people how to stop hiding their light with her self mastery method and toolkit. She helps ambitious people reach their potential and start living their big dreams. And she does that by helping them undo self-sabotage patterns. And she wrote the book, you know, transformational business on contrast, relational business called the transformational consumer. It’s one of my favorite sub headlines. Tara and I want to do justice. It’s fuel a lifelong love affair with your customers by helping them get healthier, wealthier, and wiser. And she has been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and New York Times. And I was saying we’re gonna dig into her experience. It ranges from getting her law degree from Berkeley to working at lightspeed Venture Partners to VP of Marketing and my fitness pal, which grew from 45 million to 100 million customers in her tenure, and then it was acquired by Under Armour for $475 million. She worked at Under Armour as well. Tara, thanks for joining me.

Tara-Nicholle Kirke  3:20  

I am so delighted to be here, Jeremy. Thank you.

Jeremy Weisz  3:22  

Let’s go back to just like mapping out your journey. But why law? Why Berkeley? What What made you when you were in college in high school? What did you want to be when you grew up?

Tara-Nicholle Kirke  3:33  

Oh, I wanted to be a professor. And it’s funny that now the way we think about and talk about SoulTour is that SoulTour is a school of self mastery. So ultimately, I hear you know, from for many of my clients, I’m a coach, I’m a consultant. I’m their spiritual teacher, but I often hear people describe me as their like, teacher.

Jeremy Weisz  3:54  

The non-traditional route to professor.

Tara-Nicholle Kirke  3:56  

I hear their children. My clients, children say, oh, terrorists are teacher. That’s, that’s great. So yeah, I thought I would be professor. I have this really funny way that the law thing happened. I thought I have a master’s degree in psychology thought I was going to go get a PhD in psychology and be a psych professor. But before the summer before my master’s degree, I actually did this weird, wonderful internship at the FBI Academy in Virginia. And I met a bunch of people there who had law degrees, and we’re doing really unusual things with them. And at the time, I had had a couple little kids, I was about to be a single mom and I was like, I could either go to law school for three years, or I could do a PhD for five. So I have this, you know, a bunch of miracles happened and I got into UC Berkeley and they actually paid for me to come here and move my kids and all of that and I still live down the street from school. I graduated from UC Berkeley Law two 21 years ago, and I still live down the street.

Jeremy Weisz  5:03  

You said a couple things I want to touch on. You said FBI Academy in in single mother. Talk about the FBI Academy, what what did you learn there? Ah, um,

Tara-Nicholle Kirke  5:14  

I was reminded there versus like, learn it for the first time, I was reminded of possibility. And just like creative possibilities, there were if you if you could master the way that you thought, more than the subject matter of a discipline, law, lots of doors would open. And that’s kind of what I saw. I’ve never really been one that personally struggled a ton with imposter syndrome. I really was a was flagged early in life as like kind of a gifted child and came up like that through school. But I grew up in a small town. And there was a moment when I started to leave my town and at the FBI Academy was the first of those experiences. Where I had it was the first time I ever really felt what I think people talk about as impostor syndrome, where I was like, Oh my gosh, what if just everyone in my town thinks I’m smart? What if I go there? And I’m not really. And so there I, I started to learn that I could actually like hang with the big intellectual dogs so to speak. And that, you know, there there were many worlds and many lives that were available to you. Using your gifts and talents.

Jeremy Weisz  6:34  

Where did you grow up?

Tara-Nicholle Kirke  6:35  

I grew up in Bakersfield, California. So third generation California and but I grew up in the Central Valley in this very, actually very non California style town is very red, you know, red state, very conservative, very religious upbringing.

Jeremy Weisz  6:53  

The single mother stuck out because, you know, school life work is hard enough. Right? Now you add a child to it. I really don’t know how people do it. Yeah, to how many kids did you have at the time? And how did you

Tara-Nicholle Kirke  7:09  

like then I had to I had my I’ve got three children at this. Today, I have three children. You want a real doozy There they are 29 years old, 30 years old and five years old. Okay, the 29 year old is my biological child, the other two are adopted. So at the time, I had the 20, the now 29 year old and now 30 year old. They’re half brothers, biologically. But I was like, I don’t know, I was 16. When I started, I was 16 and six months pregnant when I started college. But that kind of just shows you the paradox. My whole life has been this, my whole journey has been a journey of bringing together seemingly paradoxical things. So like in one person, in my own being, I was this combination of like, Teen Mom marrying the guy from the wrong side of the tracks. And super excellent high school student who got all these scholarships and was able to graduate early and start college early. And I just cannot underestimate the number of people who were pivotal. I can’t pivot people now. People and just, you know, I say miracles. They happen so much that they’re not really that, you know, Miracle miraculous, I guess, in the conventional sense. But I mean, there was like a local law firm in my hometown that agreed to just pay for my college. There were people who agreed to pay for me to go to law school. There were all these like, and it’s a it’s part of what trained me early to understand that there were forces that were bigger than me that could support my success. And that it didn’t have to be a religious or spooky or weird thing for me to align with and awaken to and receive that assistance. It didn’t have to be associated with someone else’s idea of, you know, whatever, God or church or whatever, it could actually just be whatever it made it to be for me. And that has truly changed my life. And it changes my client’s lives now
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