Dr. Nicole Price seems, on face value, to be a true paradox of a person, and a complicated paradox at that. She is educated in, trained in, and worked in engineering. After graduating from Lincoln College Preparatory, she went on to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where she received a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering. Attaining her first internship at Marion Laboratories, she went on to work for Hallmark Cards for about five years as an engineer, and also spent about five years doing recruiting, operations, and leadership development for them. She has had a hand in manufacturing engineering, environmental engineering, engineering management, and research engineering. Of all the science and math, she said, “You’d think after 13 years of engineering, I would’ve learned that I should do something else!” 

Something else is exactly what she did. From approximately 2012 until the present time, Nicole has received a master’s degree from Park University in adult and continuing education and teaching; and she has a doctor of education degree from Capella University in leadership and accountability; and she has studied at Stanford University Graduate School of Business – leveraging diversity and inclusion for organizational excellence, intercultural/multicultural and diversity studies. In 2016, she authored a book, Spark The Heart: Engineering Empathy in Your Organization, and she started her company, Lively Paradox. 

The shift from day-to-day engineering work to being a trainer, coach, consultant, keynote speaker, author, and ultimately – a revolutionary – has been gradual, but not surprising to Nicole or those who know her. She has always loved speaking in front of people – the stage is her home – and she has always been a bit of a class clown, loving the laughs as reactions. But, the lighter side of Nicole’s life isn’t what propelled her into her role of the embracer and teacher of empathy that she is today. Around 2011, her mother was killed by a drunk driver, and Nicole was catapulted into a murder trial. Not long after that, she found out that her dad was not, indeed, her biological father. All of her training wasn’t going to help her navigate what was becoming a wave of emotions and behaviors that stemmed from trauma. “In great anger, you know that logical, reasonable, and objective points don’t matter.” The hard-fought professional woman would have also told us back then that she was entirely unempathetic, until a chance meeting.

In an airport, Nicole overheard a conversation a man was having on the phone with someone in his office. She advised he should fire them all, as they didn’t seem committed to the work. He laughed and introduced himself as Dr. Ian Roberts, the author of Radical Empathy in Leadership. That relationship changed her trajectory. 

The time had come to process her own emotions and trauma, while capitalizing on the things she already did best – working with people to help streamline companies and work teams. But, now she came at it from a different perspective. She became and is still evolving as a radical empathy revolutionary. What does that exactly mean? “Empathy can and should be taught to even the most dyed-in-the-wool cynics corporate boardrooms have to offer.” Her company boasts, “Through transformational leadership development workshops, Lively Paradox helps to unlock the skills leaders need to spark high performance on teams – every day.” And, through a slew of engagements as a coach, speaker, motivator, facilitator, and leader, Nicole has spent the last eight years preaching the gospel of empathy to any business leader who will listen. She says, “I know that 20 percent of the people believe in empathy already, and there are 70 percent who are never going to believe it. But I want to work with the ten percent who are woefully indifferent. I want to teach them that the outcomes are incredibly different if they actually care.” 

A deeper dive into the structure of empathy reveals this about Nicole: She believes that empathy is the ability to understand people. That’s it. It’s not about empathy being good all of the time. It is simply understanding what motivates people to act like they do. She wants us to understand that empathy is understanding how people feel. We may not like the way they feel, or the manipulation they engage in, but we need empathy to understand where they are coming from. “People’s emotions never die, they come out in terms of anger directed towards other people, like road rage. I’m teaching people how to recognize and use empathy to make their relationships in business better.”

When asked about comparing empathy and compassion, Nicole suggests, “I think empathy is the recognition of how people feel. Compassion is doing something about it. If we recognize that people are hungry, we are empathetic. If we work in a food bank, we are acting compassionately.” 

“Since November 6th, I’ve received a lot of calls from PR firms, and people are leaning into trying to understand, rather than shrinking away from the emotions and how they affect business.” As her Lively Paradox website (livelyparadox.com) says, “We engineer leadership in organizations. It is possible your people know what to do and simply need to be reminded to do what they know.” 

Adam Hamilton, senior pastor at The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection says of Nicole in the foreword in her book, “Our world is in desperate need of an ‘empathy revolution.’ It is the lack of empathy that demoralizes a workplace, destroys relationships, and polarizes a nation. Empathy is an essential quality for any effective leader. I can think of no one better to champion that revolution than Dr. Nicole Price.”

As we like to do, we found the definition of a revolutionary: ​​pertaining to a sudden, complete, or marked change: radically new or innovative; outside or beyond established procedure, principles, etc. Nicole seems to be bringing empathy to the business world by filling the void, wearing the combat boots, and wading in with her weapons – being a revolutionary by speaking the truth with humor and style and providing immediate tools for change. 

Featured in the March 22, 2025 issue of The Independent
By: Anne Potter Russ