Hi there, I’m Nataly.

Reinvention catalyst. Speaker. Best-selling author. Leadership mentor. Serial entrepreneur. Self-taught artist. Lover of all things yellow.

My life has been an ongoing education in reinvention.

When I was 13, my parents and I came to the US as refugees from the former Soviet Union. (That’s me on the left in the photo with my awesome 80s haircut!)

I didn’t speak much English and had a terrible accent, so the kids in school made fun of me. I became determined to erase my accent and found the best teacher on TV. Her name was Sam, and she was a happy American teenager on the show Who’s the Boss? (played by Alyssa Milano). I would watch the show and repeat the words Sam said while looking at a mirror so I could mimic her motions.

I did this for a year and my English got a ton better. In a few years, my accent was gone.

This was my first lesson in reinvention: You have to envision what you want and then take consistent action to get there.

My next reinvention happened in one big leap.

I was working at McKinsey & Company, the prestigious consulting firm in NYC. This was my first job out of college and it was great: I was learning a ton, working with super-smart people, and traveling.

But 18 months in, I felt a pull to roll up my sleeves and build stuff. So I took a leap and joined a start-up… which promptly imploded in the dot-com crash 6 months later.

I joined another startup, and then another, but neither succeeded. It was a rough time.

I regretted leaving my coveted McKinsey job and had $40k in college loans staring me down.

What I didn’t realize then was that while this leap ended in a big fall, it was necessary for me to eventually find my life’s calling.

But first, I had to reinvent myself and my career a few more times. Because reinvention is not an event — it’s an ongoing process.

When I was 25, I became the youngest and only female Managing Director at a venture capital firm in New York. My proudest investment was in a tiny email marketing company called Constant Contact. You might have heard of it because it eventually became a billion dollar company!

In the following decade, I started the largest online community for working moms and a publishing company that created an innovative series of books written by and for college students. I wrote a book to empower women to live more daring lives, had a daughter, and moved from NYC to Boston.

And I got my stripes in building consumer tech products at Microsoft’s innovation lab in Cambridge and as the head of consumer experience for a mobile startup that was acquired by PayPal.

I was racking up impressive titles and experience, but inside, I felt unfulfilled, and exhausted.

I came across research about gratitude and its impact on happiness and wellbeing.

I was skeptical that it would work for me, but there was only one way to know: I had to try it.

After just a few weeks of consistently practicing gratitude, I began to see a huge shift in my stress level and find more moments of daily joy.

I’d learned another reinvention lesson: You don’t have to feel confident that things will work out. You learn through action.

My experience inspired me to help other people make gratitude a habit. Together with a few awesome humans, we created Happier, which became what became the most popular gratitude sharing app in the world.

Over the next few years, the Happier app helped hundreds of thousands of people live more fulfilling lives. I was so proud of what we had built. It felt amazing to be working on something that had such a hugely positive impact on other people.

But the challenges of running a startup combined with two decades of completely ignoring my well-being and my relationship with myself finally caught up with me.

I suffered a debilitating burnout and came close to losing everything that was meaningful to me.

It was the most difficult time in my life.

I could hardly function.

I had to lay off my team. Tell the truth to my investors. The weight of responsibility was immense.

But the hardest things was not knowing the path forward.

I knew something very core had to change, but I had no idea what to do.

Over the next 2 years, I went through the most difficult, beautiful and transformative journey of reinvention.

I read mountains of scientific research in neuroscience and psychology, and dove deep into studying Yoga and other Eastern traditions. I took what I learned and turned it into practices to fuel my inner well-being, self-trust, self-compassion, and authentic sense of purpose.

For the first time in my life, I reinvented from the inside.

I didn’t just take another bold leap. I didn’t rush into another challenging opportunity. I didn’t push myself to do what I thought I should.

I did the inner work to get to know myself and to uncover my multiple dimensions beyond just being an executive and a caregiver for my family.

I told myself the truth about what was most meaningful to me and what I truly loved to do.

My inner reinvention changed my life.

I felt like I had tapped into this huge reservoir of energy and aliveness within myself.

Every aspect of my life began to flourish: my work, my creativity, my most cherished relationships.

I even began to paint! It was something I’d always felt called to do, but I refused to answer the call because I was attached to the story that doing something just for my joy was selfish and irresponsible.

I learned a powerful lesson about reinvention: It’s not about becoming a new person, but rather, about becoming more of who you’re meant to be.

In 2018, I wrote the best-selling book called Happier Now, in which I shared the Happier Method™ I’d developed, and began to speak publicly to amazing audiences all over the world.

I created and hosted workshops for teams and leaders to help them live and work with more gratitude, self-compassion, kindness, and sense of purpose.

In 2022, my next book, The Awesome Human Project, came out. I wrote it to help millions of people struggling with burnout learn emotional fitness skills so they could thrive. I also created an interactive Awesome Human Journal so readers could keep up with their emotional fitness practice.

My work has been profiled in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and has appeared in hundreds of other leading publications, including Harvard Business Review, Time, Inc., Forbes.

I continue to speak to thousands of awesome humans every year and through my REINVENT•ABILITY Accelerator and executive mentorship, I help impact makers, leaders, and entrepreneurs get unstuck and unleash their full potential for aliveness and positive impact.

If this is something you seek or want to inspire people in your organization to do, I’d love to help you do it!

MY WORK HAS BEEN FEATURED IN

We’re all more than our official bio, right? Here are some of my other “ands”…

  • I had always wanted to paint but didn’t allow myself to do it because it felt indulgent and wasn’t part of taking care of my family or fueling my career.

    Oh, how wrong I was!

    Allowing myself to express myself creatively doesn’t just fuel my joy — it has made me better in every aspect of my life, as a mom, wife, daughter, speaker, author, coach….

    Every single human being is creative and activating you to tap into your creative self is a core aspect of everything I do.

  • I came to the U.S. as a refugee when I was 13. That experience has shaped a lot of who I am and I’m grateful for it, although it was really difficult.

    By the way, my Russian name is Natasha, but I changed it to Nataly to fit in better… except I spelled it in a unique way that stands out.

    Lesson learned:

    Don’t try to be anything you’re not.

  • This is a scientifically-proven fact, just ask my husband and my daughter, my FAVORITE awesome humans!

    We have a family competition for who is the funniest and while there is often a lack of consensus, our efforts at making each other laugh are fierce.

  • I always wear yellow when I speak (OK, 95% of the time).

    I have a disproportionate amount of yellow in my closet.

    The cover of my first book, HAPPIER NOW, is yellow.

    Did I mention I love yellow?

    It brings me joy and I hope it brings you joy, too! (Science says it’s a color that fuels positive emotions, in case you’re wondering.)

NOTES TO SELF

A few things I want you to remeber

YOUR DAILY DOSE OF INSPIRATION

Gratitude isn’t soft. It’s the most courageous choice you can make 💛 . . #gratitude #gratitude🙏 #gratitudequotes #refugee #lifeinspiration