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The Year I Stopped Playing Small: A Memoir
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 22 2026
Pages: 118
Weight: 0.37
Height: 0.28 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What happens when the life you've built is successful, but no longer big enough for who you're becoming?
In The Year I Stopped Playing Small, Nicole Serena shares the deeply personal story of the year that changed everything.
What began as a season of growth became a year of reinvention. While launching new companies, building global partnerships, creating university-level courses, writing books, and bringing a patented innovation to life, Nicole found herself confronting a harder challenge: letting go of the habits, beliefs, and responsibilities that had once made her successful but were now holding her back.
This is not a story about overnight success.
It is a story about learning to slow down when your mind moves at a million miles an hour. About trusting others instead of carrying everything yourself. About saying no without guilt. About building systems instead of solving every problem. About becoming a global citizen while staying grounded in what matters most.
Through candid reflections on leadership, family, ambition, failure, resilience, and personal growth, Nicole explores what it truly means to stop playing small and start living with intention.
For entrepreneurs, leaders, creators, and anyone standing at the edge of a bigger future, this memoir is an invitation to ask a powerful question:
What would change if you stopped building your life around who you've been, and started building it around who you're becoming?
The Year I Stopped Playing Small is a story of courage, reinvention, and discovering that the greatest limits are often the ones we never realized we created ourselves.
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