What if the thing that shakes your world isn’t an abstract issue or a headline, but something that happens to your kids? That was the case for brand strategist and creative advisor Nikki James Zellner. When her children’s daycare had a carbon monoxide leak that left dozens of kids and staff poisoned, she stumbled into a safety loophole that would change the course of her life.

In this episode, Nikki shares how she went from “just a mom” to a watchdog for systemic change. She explains the four “dog” archetypes of advocacy, the power of lived experience, and why the difference between visibility and impact matters more than ever. Whether you’ve ever felt too small, too unqualified, or too tired to make a difference, Nikki’s story is proof: if you’ve lived it, you’re ready.

Episode Highlights

• [03:39] The daycare carbon monoxide leak that changed everything
• [07:38] From one phone call to a statewide (and national) problem
• [16:05] Lap dogs, guard dogs, attack dogs, and watchdogs explained
• [24:42] “If you’ve lived it, you’re qualified to lead it”
• [29:31] Visibility vs. impact at the community level
• [38:50] Fighting burnout and redefining wins
• [44:45] Output vs. outcome: measuring what you can control

Lived Experience as Leadership

Nikki’s story starts with an ordinary daycare drop-off that ended with fire trucks and ambulances. Her kids survived carbon monoxide poisoning, but the near-tragedy revealed a gaping loophole in state safety law. Instead of staying silent — or suing — she chose to step up. What she discovered? Lived experience isn’t a liability, it’s a credential.

The Four Dogs of Change

Not everyone who cares creates change. Nikki breaks down four archetypes: lap dogs, guard dogs, attack dogs, and watchdogs. Most of us cycle through all four at different points, but watchdogs are the ones who ask questions, gather data, and stay at the table long enough to make an impact.

Impact Over Credit

From calling governors to handing out carbon monoxide detectors, Nikki’s focus has never been on taking credit. It’s been on creating change. Along the way, she’s built resources that ripple far beyond her own story, equipping other parents and communities to lead change where they are.

Meet Our Guest

Nikki James Zellner is a brand advisor, creative strategist, and citizen advocate who turned a near-tragedy at her children’s daycare into a movement for carbon monoxide safety. She’s the founder of The Watchdog Way and the forthcoming book of the same name (early 2026), which helps everyday people take small steps to create big change in their communities.

Meet Your Host

Tonya Kubo is a community strategist, marketing consultant, and rebel with a cause: helping people find the place where they truly belong. For nearly two decades, she’s built online spaces that feel less like comment sections and more like chosen family. She’s the fixer you call when your Facebook group has gone straight-up Lord of the Flies and the bouncer at the door of internet nonsense. As the host of Find Your Freaks, Tonya brings together unconventional thinkers and bridge-builders who know “normal” was never the point. Her favorite spaces? The ones where the freak flags fly high.

Key Quotes

• “If you’ve lived it, you’re qualified to lead it.” — Nikki James Zellner
• “We confuse visibility with impact. The watchdog makes the change, even if nobody notices.” — Nikki James Zellner
• “A win doesn’t mean setting your life on fire. A win is steady, small progress.” — Nikki James Zellner
• “Belonging isn’t about fitting in. It’s about showing up with your story and finding your people.” — Tonya Kubo

Links and Mentions

• The Watchdog Way Quiz
• Great Work by Dr. Amanda Crowell
• Nikki’s upcoming book

Support the Show

If Find Your Freaks matters to you, help us keep it ad-free by buying us a coffee (or two!). Every dollar goes to production so more weirdos can find their people.

You can purchase Find Your Freaks merchandise online through Abilities and Attitudes.

Let’s Stay Freaky

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What’s Next

Nikki reminded us that lived experience is often the spark for change, if we’re willing to act. But it also raised a deeper question: whose experiences count, and who do we listen to when the story isn’t so easy to hear? Episode 7 explores advocacy from another angle, and why sometimes the most powerful leaders are the ones who never planned to lead at all.

[Nikki James Zellner] (0:00 - 0:48)

That day I dropped them off, I did not realize that it was going to change the trajectory of the rest of my life. I think the biggest change comes from people who've personally experienced something, and it has changed the direction of their lives. It was something I hadn't felt passion for ever, and all of a sudden my whole value system shifted to justice and advocacy, when that had never been part of my value spectrum before.

For me, stories are where it starts, because it's the story that builds that momentum and that builds that energy for you. You probably have 30 things in your lived experience that you have an opportunity to change, it's just whether or not you see yourself as being somebody who can champion that change.

[Tonya Kubo] (0:49 - 1:48)

We're wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I'm Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras, because around here, what makes you weird, makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. We love to talk about community, how to build it, grow it, and sustain it, but today we are talking about what happens when you take your lived experience, draw a line in the sand, and say not on my watch. So today I have Nikki James Zellner, and she is professionally a brand advisor, a creative strategist, and the reason she's here today, the story I want you to hear about, is that she is a fierce advocate for purpose-driven change.

And so Nikki, I am just going to have you jump right in and tell us who are your freaks and why do you love them?

[Nikki James Zellner] (1:49 - 3:01)

So I have to shout out my freaks. They are on every neighborhood watch, I'm sure. They are in every town in America.

They are most likely mothers, but they don't have to be. So I would say my freaks are certainly parent activists or community activists that have lived experience in something and decided to take that lived experience and use it for fuel to create bigger change, whether that's in their own neighborhoods, whether that was in their industry, or whether that's in their communities, or the United States, or the world as a whole. These are people who didn't set out to really become activists.

They didn't set out to say I'm going to study political science and go into the government and start a non-profit organization. These are people who survived something that was likely traumatic or jolting to what they knew was the status quo, and they had to navigate systems, and they had to navigate red tape, and they had to navigate the way that people looked at them in public and say this happened to me. I'm not going to let it happen to anybody else.

Those are the people I love.

[Tonya Kubo] (3:01 - 3:38)

Oh my gosh. So what I'm hearing, it's the people who show up at the school board meeting, the city council meeting, the ones who write the letters to the editor and are just bringing a voice to what they see that they don't think everybody else is quite understanding the gravity of the situation. Yes, that is correct.

So let's talk about how you got here because, you know, I just read off your list of professional accomplishments and movement maker, change agent wasn't necessarily in there. So how did you land to be the voice for advocates, particularly citizen advocates, at this point?

[Nikki James Zellner] (3:39 - 7:34)

My husband was active duty military, and we had to, we were one of the millions of people in the United States who had to put their kids in child care in order to have a dual income household. And that day I dropped them off, I did not realize that it was going to change the trajectory of the rest of my life. So I get a text at about two in the afternoon.

My kids had been there since about seven that morning that said, there's been a gas leak, come pick up your kids. We've evacuated the building. And when I pull down that street, there's fire department, ambulances, police cars, kids are not in the daycare structure anymore.

But when you walk into where they were evacuated to, you just see hundreds of parents of about 80 kids, you know, six weeks to six years old. And what it turned out to be was a carbon monoxide leak from a furnace that was faulty. It was a switch on the furnace that malfunctioned.

And because the daycare did not have carbon monoxide detection, because they weren't required to by Virginia law, no one knew that the kids and the staff were being poisoned for over six hours until kids started passing out and people started calling 911. And so that was the day that everything changed for me. Instead of really being that freaked out parent saying this is a fluke, I instead was asking questions before the lawyer shut everybody down.

Them lawyers. I wanted to ask those young care providers, what was your experience? What was going on?

And see if I could get a common denominator of experiences. What time did this actually start? What time were the officials called?

What steps did you take to communicate with your staff and let them know that you think that there might be a problem? What symptoms were the kids experiencing? And so when you have young care providers caring for also young children, it's very compartmentalized.

It's not like they were in a big space where they all could see everything going on. It was individuals looking after 10 to 20 kids, maybe two individuals per room who were also being impaired by toxic gas. And so to me, there was certainly a couple of days there where I was in blame mode, right?

Where I was, whose fault is this? Who's to blame for this? My kids could have died, et cetera.

But then there was a point, and I have a journalism background in terms of I worked in community newspapers for close to 15, 20 years. Me too. We'll compare notes another day.

Exactly. So you kind of wear many hats. You know what to do when you get to the scene and you're the person who happens to be at the newspaper that they sent out.

So I was asking lots of questions to get data before everybody got shut down. And what I learned is that there was no detection. And so for me, that was the weird part.

What do you mean there was no detection? I have to double wrap my breast milk. I have to fingerprint three times to get in the door.

What do you mean there was no carbon monoxide detection? And I found out that it was a loophole in the Virginia State Building Code that was the reason that this daycare was allowed to exist without carbon monoxide detection while having a gas appliance that could produce it. And so I thought to myself, like, that doesn't feel right.

That doesn't seem right. This seems like a safety issue. And so I called the governor as if he had nothing else to do during the pandemic.

[Tonya Kubo] (7:35 - 7:38)

Because we journalists are not afraid to pick up a phone.

[Nikki James Zellner] (7:38 - 9:30)

No, I will pick up the phone. That is one thing you can say. And I don't start with the local team.

I mean, I just go up to the guy who's in charge of everything. And they said, well, in order to change the building code for the state, you have to change the law for the state because the building code is based off of Virginia law. And so me, who avoided politics in school, have avoided politics for the majority of my life.

I'm a peacekeeper. I like to be a peacekeeper. I was a little bit mortified.

However, every single time I remember, I would look back at pictures or I would see a story, I would get more and more fired up. And I was like, no one is changing this. This has probably been happening for 20 years.

And nobody has taken the steps to change this. I know how to brand. I know how to pick up the phone.

I know how to pitch media. I'm going to take this on. What I didn't realize is that it wasn't just a Virginia problem.

It was a United States problem. It was an international problem. And I just happened to become the poster child of a mom who had a happy ending in the sense that my kids are okay now.

They're nine and eight. They still go to public school. I still fight for carbon monoxide protection.

I still send in their school supplies a carbon monoxide alarm for every classroom at their end. I do that. That's part of my school supply list because I don't trust the school to have their back.

So I became that person who started paying more attention in the space, started understanding how budgets get spent and how people make decisions when it comes to school safety. And so I really found my people during that. I found the people that wanted to complain about everything.

And I found the people that said, this is a problem. How do we solve it? And I really saw myself in the second camp.

Oh my gosh. So there's so much there because as you know, I'm a working mom as well. My youngest went to exact, actually both of my girls went to exactly the same type of daycare that you described, daycare and preschool.

I worked at a university. So they went to a university preschool and, you know, granted in their preschool, can we shut down the preschool for everything? Right.

That's just kind of one of our things, but we were, you know, I was public information officer. So I remember controlling the flow of information. I know exactly what you mean.

When you talk about, like you can have a lot of conversations until the lawyers come in and then everything gets shut down. But one thing that I just want to ask about, because I don't know if this is a nationwide thing. I know that very much this surrounds my peer group in California is there is this fear, and it might be because I'm married to a school teacher as well, of being that mom, right?

Like nobody wants to be that mom. We don't want to be the mom that when the principal sees us coming, they want to duck and hide. We don't want to be the one that the office talks about long after we leave.

And yet everything you're telling me right now would not have happened or been possible without you being willing to be that mom.

Yes. Agreed. I'd like to say that there are four groups, right?

There are really four groups of people in my change-making journey. And I'm writing a book about my experience because the question that I got asked the most was, how did you go create that change? Right.

You don't have, I don't have a college degree. I was just a mom. I, all of my business knowledge has been accumulated because of my roles in the business world.

It did not come from a proper schooling education. It has come from real life on the streets, right? And I like to say I'm street smart, not necessarily book smart.

You know, my husband had to explain to me all of the HVAC related things when it came to carbon monoxide so that I could truly understand it in order to explain it to somebody else. And so the more people were asking me, you know, I have this thing that's important to me. What should my first step be?

I started realizing I wasn't necessarily just the carbon monoxide lady. I was becoming the, how do you create change lady when you're, when you see yourself as just this. Now, for some people, that's becoming that mom.

In our world, we like to call it the Karens, right? The ones who complain about everything. Go to every coffee store manager and say, the kid next to me isn't drinking anything.

He shouldn't be here. You know, those people. So I like to say there are four groups of people.

When it comes to a problem that you could create change around, you're either a lap dog. You're not going to create change around that problem until somebody tells you to do it. Until it affects your paycheck or until it affects, you know, your boss is telling you to do this or your parent or your neighbor is telling you to do this.

You're not going to solve that problem in any way, shape, or form. You're just going to let that problem exist. You're going to know that problem exists.

You're not going to expense any energy towards it, positive nor negative. You're just a lap dog, right? The second group is what I call the guard dogs.

Your guard dogs are the people who post things that are important to them on social media, but they never actually get up and create change. They're assigned this position. What can we do about this guy that stands at the corner pedaling for change?

But they're not actually thinking about, okay, why is the guy on the corner pedaling for change? Instead, they're more concerned with how does this make our city look, that there's a guy on the corner pedaling for change, right? They want to get rid of the guy, not get rid of the problem.

All bark, no bite, right? They are people who will talk about the problem day and night. You feel like the problem is very important to them, but when you ask them what they're actually doing about it, it's nada, big old goose egg.

They're not actually doing anything that requires more than a click of a button, right? The third group is your attack dogs. This is what we know as the Karen.

This is the person who doesn't play well in the sandbox. This is the person who films the bird watchers and starts yelling at them. They have no clue about empathy.

Everything is, this is happening to me, and I will fight people because it's happening to me. It has nothing to do with their community. It has nothing to do with the well being of anybody else involved.

It has everything to do with they're mad about something, they want other people to know that they're mad about it, right? And they don't always go about things the way in which would be most receptive to creating change. So you've got to think about those people.

Their heart might very well be in the right place. I can think about all of the directions I took during my carbon monoxide advocacy, and I can tell you now that if I would have taken the attack dog stance, I would not have gotten very far. Even though I had the story to go with it, I could not have created the change because nobody would talk to me, right?

So I had to come at it from group four. And group four for me is like, these are my freaks. These are my people.

They're the watchdogs. These are the people who see something wrong and want to understand the problem before they start throwing out all of the solutions to solve it. I could absolutely say I want a carbon monoxide alarm in this building because my kids go here.

But what I didn't understand is that this was a state problem. It was a national problem. And there were lots of nuances that I didn't understand yet because I hadn't had conversations with the right people to understand why that didn't exist.

You know, so there are systems and there are rules, and if you take the attack dog stance, you're not going to be invited to the table. And it's going to feel very much like you're constantly fighting a battle. But when you take a watchdog approach, when you can start asking questions and come at it from a place of, I'd like to understand your point of view, I'd like to understand why this doesn't exist yet according to you, according to what problems you're needing to overcome to make that happen.

That's really where change can happen. And so I would say, yes, we want you to have the fire of that mom because that's going to take time, it's going to take energy, it's going to take persistence and perseverance and grit. But I don't want you to have the attitude and the walls of that mom.

You're going to have to play in the box. And you have to do that through open communication.

Wow. I love this. So it's lap dog, guard dog, attack dog, watchdog.

Correct. Okay. Making sure that I have that accurately summarized.

Because a lot of what you say, so it reminds me of another guest we had on the show, Rachel Allen, who ended up, she is quite, I would say, notorious, she might not say that, in the federal prison system as a result of her husband becoming incarcerated.

Okay.

So similar to what you described, right, just live in life, how she lived life. And then one day, her husband is incarcerated. And there is the fact that she's isolated from most of her community as a result.

But then, you know, she had no reason to know anything about the prison system until that point. And so then as being somebody who was there to visit a loved one in the prisons, recognized a whole bunch of stuff going on. And like you mentioned, sought to figure out why, sought to, then had to educate herself on what the law says.

Right. And then, you know, fast forward a few months even, and ends up having to testify in Congress in order to effect change. Because like you said, in her case, there was an aspect of changing law, but it was really about changing practice to follow policy and policy to follow law.

Right. But loopholes in the law allow practices that aren't quite in alignment. Right.

And so one big difference between what you describe and what she described in her situation, she found herself surrounded by people who society would not pay any attention to. The other individuals in that visiting waiting room, right, are just people that society likes to bypass. And she, as a copywriter, was like, OK, well, I can tell a good story.

Yeah. So all I have to do, let me get to know these people. Right.

And I will tell their story for them. Whereas you have lived this experience and then said, you know, I would just argue I'm going to put words in your mouth and say you don't have time nor energy to tell other people's stories for them. So you have empowered people to tell their own story and to effect change that way.

Right. Was that intentional or was that just put one foot in front of the other? And here we are.

So one of the interesting things when you go to change a law, typically people will only listen to you if you're a constituent of their state or their district. Right. So when it comes to law changing and not everybody who wants to go change, wants to get involved in the law process.

Right.

Another difference, I would say, between my story and hers is that I have the feel good end of the spectrum. Right. It's kids, babies can't take care of themselves where her experience is probably more like, well, they made these choices.

And so it's, you know, this is what they get for making those choices. Now, I don't believe that, obviously. I don't think that these people should be bypassed, but there is a stereotype and a lens being used there.

I certainly think I was able to go farther because I was helping kids who couldn't help themselves. Right. And I was speaking for children.

I was speaking for children's safety and school safety is always a hot topic. My school safety isn't relative to mental health or relative to intruders or shootings, but it is absolutely still in the school safety bubble. So I would say when it came to asking others to kind of take the steps forward, one of the things I initially wanted to do was, okay, who are the people that have been impacted by this in other towns and reach out to those parents?

It was very difficult to do because a lot of those parents were involved in legal disputes with their school systems. They can't talk about it. I chose not to sue so that I could go out and speak publicly and create change.

Can you just explain that a little bit? Because I think, because I, because I've worked in a school system, right?

Yes.

In PR. Yes. I totally understand the impact of the choice you made because it's a big choice.

It's a big choice.

It is not as light as it just sounded as you pleasantly summed it up.

No, I probably forwent millions of dollars to my own personal family that I probably would have used towards paying off debt and certainly probably still taking the steps to set up CSA schools and make that difference. But when you were involved in a legal dispute, you are not allowed to give public commentary to go on the news and talk about your situation. And these disputes can take years.

You know, it's not something that goes away in two months unless you settle. And oftentimes during settlements, you're asked for a nondisclosure. You're not allowed to discuss the terms of the settlement and what happened.

And knowing that, you know, I just happened to have friends that were involved in lawsuits previously for medical reasons, and they weren't allowed to tell their stories. My whole business is built around your story and your voice. And so for me, it was a natural progression of the story is important to tell.

The story is the most important thing to tell. I have to talk about this loophole. And I have the skill sets to do it in a way that can get more traction than, say, a normal person who's never had media training or know how pitching works or knows people at the local newspaper to kind of pick up the story, right?

But what I will say is there came a point where it didn't just become about carbon monoxide for me. It became about helping other people understand that these kinds of things happen to us all the time, but do we have blinders on as to that was my knock to make a change? We're so busy going about our lives and we're so busy about doing the grocery store run and dropping our kids off at practice that we don't hear those little whispers that says, this is a change that could be made because of your lived experience.

You know, that ball going off the ball field and hitting a kid in the head and that kid having a stroke or having brain injury because there's no netting on the ball field is a change you could have gotten involved in but didn't. Now, granted, they might be the parent of the child with the brain injury and they might have a whole new amount of things on their plate that they didn't expect to have to deal with, but there's something to be said for I think the biggest change comes from people who've personally experienced something and it has changed the direction of their lives. So, whether it's getting to the point in your life where you're caring for your elderly parents and helping them navigate Medicaid or Medicare, it could be that you work in a local hospital and you're constantly answering the question, where is the lab?

Because there's not signage where it needs to be and the majority of people that walk through that hospital are elderly or limited mobility. You're making them walk all over Grants Green Earth when you could just put a sign right at the beginning where they're walking in the door. So, it doesn't have to be this big landscape of change.

It can literally be, I want to start small in the place where it happened for me and then when you get those wins you start to realize I could ripple out. I could ripple out to the city. I could ripple out to the system.

I could ripple out to the world. You know, like whatever that is for you, wherever that time and energy lives and what I found as a watchdog is that I had the skills to keep going. I may not have had the time but I made the time and the energy really fired me up.

It was something I hadn't felt passion for ever and all of a sudden my whole value system shifted to justice and advocacy when that had never been part of my value spectrum before. I had encouraged others to do it but I had never physically activated that within myself and then when I did I realized how empowering that was to feel like you could control something. Felt like you could be involved and help other people and that was a really great feeling that I don't think we experience outside of a volunteer hour or two.

You know, it's something we're not necessarily involved in. It's just part of our resume. You know, like my work puts deployment packages together for troops.

Well, you don't necessarily have a troop member who's involved. It is just something your work does so you get to say it's part of your volunteerism but what if you took those hours and actually put it towards something you had lived experience with and how much more of a difference could you make?

Yeah, so you reference lived experience quite a bit and before we started recording you you said something that I thought was really powerful which is that if you've lived it you're qualified to lead it. Yes. And having come from higher ed, right, like I know that there is a lot of pressure around but what's your degree in?

What's your education? What's your skills? What's your training?

And you know you reference that you don't have all these letters after your name.

No.

So I'm curious what did you have to unlearn in order to embrace that belief that if you've lived it you're qualified to lead it?

I think the biggest thing for me to unlearn was that there is room in the system if you actually are willing to get involved in the system. The big thing for me I think that I had the misunderstanding about is that people didn't want my involvement in the system because they wanted to keep things status quo. In reality they didn't want uneducated and by uneducated I mean people that weren't familiar with the problem or people that couldn't contribute to the dialogue of the problem.

Meaning you're a recipient of their services or you've experienced something firsthand. They didn't want Monday morning quarterbacks, people who were coming in and talking about something that needed to be changed, who didn't have any relationship with the system as a whole. So for me what I had to unlearn was I have a relationship with this.

I absolutely deserve a seat at the table. My experience is one that they might not know about. Now I've been invited to speak at the National Fire Protection Association in Las Vegas in front of 90,000 something fire marshals.

It's crazy. So for me the unlearning was there is a space for me. I need to respect the fact that there are processes that exist and that the work they do isn't meaningless and it isn't trying to keep me out.

It's trying to protect that the steps that are taken are actually taken for the right reasons and not just because somebody comes in and says it should change. Why should it change? How long have they been involved in the process?

How are they affected by the outcomes that are occurring of our current system? And I feel like that's where I really needed to unlearn something is I needed to share my perspective and understand where I fit in that and then to go in there and understand that my perspective isn't the only one. I can absolutely feel like I'm right and this needs to happen but I also have to be open to the 360 view and that my little piece of the pie is this and I was not yet aware of all of that and I needed to understand how I fit within that.

How do I navigate and when I did that is where I could see where I actually wanted to create change instead of this big space which seemed very overwhelming. The big carbon monoxide safety space. No, I want to focus here.

Daycares, schools, college campuses and I want to focus on layman conversations. I do not want to focus on safety science and the technology and the you need a degree to come in and maintain. I want to be the person responsible for change in the space of the occupants.

The people that are inside these buildings who don't know where they're protected and where they're not and I want to be responsible for making sure that they are educated and aware on where they're safe, where they're not and what to do when they experience these kinds of symptoms. That's where I can make the most impact.

And so we're back again to this is what makes a watchdog different than an attack dog, different than a guard dog and I think everybody listening already can understand where a lap dog is completely separate from the equation.

Right.

But I do feel like when a lot of people are thinking in their mind they would confuse attack dog, guard dog and watchdog. Yes, they would. And so one of the things that I was thinking about when you were describing kind of those four groups is that the attack dog and the guard dog are highly visible but the watchdog makes an impact.

Yes, there's an action behind it.

Yeah and so I was just wondering if you wouldn't mind expanding on that from the community perspective because so much of what you're talking about is really affecting change at the community level and then having that go higher or in your case having to go top down because it varies. What do you think happens when people or communities confuse that visibility with impact?

I feel like and this is also an introverted extroverted thing, right? Like if you're the person that goes and listens to all of the public meetings but you never get up and talk. You're gathering all of the data and you're using that to be an informed citizen and make decisions as a voter and so where you want to make the impact is in the ballot box for you, right?

And in the educated I'm informed I understand what's going on in my community so that I can better decide where I want to spend my volunteer hours and what's going on where and how it's going to affect my property taxes, right? What I will say to the four groups is that all of us are all four. There are certain times where we behave like one or the other or sometimes we're blending the two and so what I want people to recognize is when am I behaving like a lapdog when I should be behaving like a watchdog?

When am I behaving like an attack dog? What are the things that turn me into an attack dog where I can actually say how can I think about this and reframe this in a different way so I can go about it the watchdog way versus the attack dog way? Road rage comes to mind, right?

There's a certain point in which we behave differently than we normally would. If somebody's clicking a pin I can become a little more testy than I can, right? The same thing is true with these groups and the visibility and the impact so I would say when you're looking at the community and we'll just use the public meetings for an example the guard dog is the person who's sitting in the meeting and never speaks but they get back home and they say this is what happened at tonight's meeting.

I think you guys should do something about this. Here's the information. You're just spreading information.

You're not empowering it. You're giving access to the information but you're not taking any additional steps in any kind of way that's going to make a difference. You've gathered the info.

You're sharing the info but you're not really doing anything else beyond that, right? So I would say like in the bar of action steps taken you're pretty low on the bar of action steps taken. The attack dog is the person who goes to the meeting and they talk every single meeting.

It doesn't matter what the topic is. They are the person who's known as the bulldog of the community. They see themselves as the gatekeepers of what's going on.

They say well if nobody else is going to stand up and talk well I'm going to make sure that I use that time for public comments and you're the one that you hope the mic goes out goes out on, right? Like please let there be a technological problem and the lady not be able to speak or the man not be able to speak or the human beautiful human with the right intentions but the wrong energy the wrong energy direction and then the watchdog is the one who sat in the meeting got up to the platform and said this is my lived experience. This is the experience of my neighbor who can't be here because they're too old or they're too frail who's also having this experience.

This is the other person in the community I've talked to and shares their stories and says I would like to hold you guys all accountable because each person I named is in each person's district not just my own. So that's the difference, right? It's not that you have to get up every time.

It's that you can share kind of those impactful stories that really create change. For me stories are where it starts because it's the story that builds that momentum and that builds that energy for you and the more you can get clear on okay what's that story actually? Did the story happen to just me?

No, I was just the only one willing to talk about it because some people sued, right? But the story is happening all over the United States. It's not just my story.

So my goal is to get other people sharing like this is also happening but I wanted to create the resource for you so that when it happens to you you're not in the dark like I was. You now say here's how I can write a letter to my local government. Here's how I can provide an audit to my school where my children go and find out what the risk is in their local school.

So for me I was creating things like resources so that people could have more informed conversations and that has actually created change in communities I was not a part of in Wisconsin, in Michigan. Somebody used it in Louisiana. So for me like that's where I get the feels is when a mom says I don't know what to do and your resources helped me do that.

It's not for monetary gain. It's just so that they wouldn't feel as alone as I did and I know that when we don't feel competent in something we don't speak on something.

Yeah.

At least for a majority of us. We don't want to look or feel stupid and if there's any risk of that happening we don't do it and so what I really wanted is for you to not look or feel stupid when it came to carbon monoxide so that that principle was the one who looked uninformed not you.

Oh my gosh. So I feel like you just drew a roadmap for the person listening who as you're talking is going oh my gosh there's this thing but I don't know where to begin. You just gave them a roadmap of how to begin and what I think is most powerful is the fact that you can actually be the most informed person in the room.

Yes. Right and that you have resources to help people with that. Now I'm going to ask are those resources available on your website?

Do they have to wait for the book? How do they get access to those resources?

So the book is what we're working on now right so on nickijameselmer.com there's a tab for the book which is the Watchdog Way. It lets you take the Watchdog Way quiz to find out where you are currently with how you address problems. It lets you let's you take a little magical quiz to say am I a lap dog a guard dog an attack dog or a watchdog and then from there you can actually start to understand okay what is that thing that I need to focus on what is that one thing for me for some people it's many things and what I tell people to focus on is focus on the thing that you truly will get fired up about it causes you emotional stir I would like to say not that you want to cry every time you talk about it but it's something that's like this is something I can set a boundary around and do healthily I can do in a healthy way if it's something that you haven't worked out with your therapist yet please don't go try to attack it because you're not ready you know you're not ready to do that deep work yet where I met your friend Gwen was through heroic public speaking and we were she saw me still crying on stage talking about my kids being poisoned that's how she met me as I was doing my very first speech learning how to do a keynote on my kids getting poisoned and by the end of that training it had turned into how to create change in your community and be a watchdog it was really through that process of writing my stories down and saying this isn't about me anymore this is about other people and how they can do this and so the book is going to come out in early 2026 it's called the watchdog way how everyday people can take small steps to create big change in a world gone sideways and it's really for those people who don't see themselves as activists they don't see themselves going and starting a non-profit they might see themselves as a parent in a school line with a lot on their plate but really wants to make a difference and is wondering how do I spend my time and energy to do that in a way that is impactful in regards to something that is important to me so maybe you're a child of a wheelchair user and you want other businesses to understand that you can only go to 10 percent of the businesses in your community because your child who uses a wheelchair can't get into the rest of them maybe that's your thing maybe your thing is this is what type 2 diabetes looks like or type 1 diabetes looks like in terms of access when something happens in the school system right so you never know what it is but I guarantee you you probably have 30 things in your lived experience that you have an opportunity to change it's just whether or not you see yourself as being somebody who can champion that change my hope is that you can because there is something in there

it's whether or not you want to take that next step to do it okay so thank you for the explanation because I do think it's important for the person who is just new to the idea that this is possible yes that they have a path forward but now before we get to the end I'm going to ask you to speak to somebody else okay I'm going to ask you to speak to the person who is doing the work and they are tired right they're in it they are doing the best they can but the stamina is waning because as you know as I know some laws the wheels move so slowly and the winds are so slight and incremental yes what would you say to that person who is doing the work but still feels like

nothing is shifting so for me it was about reframing right so this incident for me happened right before covid and so during covid it felt like nothing was happening and that was when it had just happened to me so that was when I was most interested to talk about it nobody was willing to listen because because nobody's going to school so it's not a problem nobody's going to school nobody's going you know law sessions and congressional hearings weren't happening you know because everything was being pushed back but what I would say is having done that and having kept doing that is for a lot of these people doing the work a lot of times they're in the industry in which they're wanting to create the change right so they work for that non-profit or they work for those things so I would say in those instances you know really lean on the resources available for healthy workplace culture make sure you're taking care of yourself because you can't leave it it's your paycheck in my case it wasn't my paycheck it was my passion project and so as somebody living with a chronic illness I was already very in tune with my body of what do I need to listen to how do I need to set boundaries around how I'm willing to move forward what does a win look like a win doesn't mean I completely let the rest of my life catch fire while I'm working on this a win for me is I'm moving on with the remainder of my life as normal and I'm making time this little window of time to make incremental progress in this work that I'm passionate about for me the way that I could do that is these are the resources that can live I can spend a little bit of time sprinting and creating these resources that can live without me as soon as that resource is done and alive on a website I can move off of that and let Google take over right I can I can put a little bit of money if somebody says hey I want to donate to your cause what's the best way for me to do that cool a monetary donation would be great please know that I'm not a 501c3 so this isn't a tax write-off for you but I can use this directly towards ad spend to put this in neighborhoods where carbon monoxide has been a problem and make sure that these parents and families have access to resources and it was directing them to the website or I can buy carbon monoxide alarms for daycares so one of the things that I started doing was saying okay I now live in Alabama I originally lived in Virginia even though Alabama is considered a good co state in terms of they have a lot of regulations and laws around carbon monoxide not necessarily around public education so what I want to do in the state of Alabama it's not about changing the law here it's about making sure that the people who are on the front line really do understand the signs and symptoms that can happen in their environments and so I have a nice long list of all the daycares I'm starting with the daycares because their highest risk so I have a nice long list of all the daycares and then one by one I could visit one daycare a week and by the end of the year I've seen 52 daycares and have had 52 conversations with front line workers and put something in their break room and given them the resources to say this is what you need to know and help them audit their business while I'm there this is no charge this is something that I do but I had to start understanding the difference between taking credit and creating change I am not the person who takes credit for the changes happening in the co safety space I'm a part of that wheel I happen to use my story in a much more public way than some other people can but what I wanted to do is create the impact and so as people go on this journey doing the work you know facing the burnout take care of yourself because if you don't take care of yourself you can't create the change so think about these setting healthier boundaries whether that's I will do this one thing a week and outside of that one thing I don't do it if you need different themes or different seasons kind of schedule that out and say this is the season I'll focus on this next season I'll focus on that right so think about it like you would a business really you know me and you are business owners so we understand this right like I think about it like what am I doing in quarter one what am I doing in quarter two and I like to think about those small wins that lead to big change so everybody's expecting that big win that's not the way it works I happen to have a law change in year one that's a miracle that's a fluke it just happened to be we were talking about kids safety in schools all year long right the timing was right for me but what I will tell most people is it's going to be about those little wins and so I like to take it if the big goal is out here I work backwards from that big goal and say how do I need to start to establish those mile markers in that big marathon race what is mile one's marker what is mile two's marker and so mile one might be understanding what I'm trying to create change around what are the rebuttals when somebody says these are the 10 most frequently asked questions or the rebuttals that I get what are my responses to those because you're going to run into that yeah and if you fumble that ball you're going to look like somebody who is not the most informed person in the room and I want them to be on their subject I want them to be the most informed do all the informational interviews find all of the data from credible sources really spend that first three months understanding and learning about the problem so that you can go out and make a bigger change at a later time it's

not about making that big change immediately okay so that is excellent news because that's the thing right is it's focused on you know in the business world we talk about focus your goals on your output versus your outcome because you can't control the outcome right you can't control what you do right and if you do the action whatever the action is like you're mentioning going to a preschool every single week or daycare every single week as long as you do that you can trust that at the end of the year some outcome has happened yes even though you can't control that all you can control is which daycare you're going to each week yeah and that's an hour a week out of my time instead

of I'm gonna go try and see every daycare on this list in three weeks and creating this giant overwhelming feeling instead it's little by little and each time you do it you learn more and more about this is where I'm seeing more problems regarded to this regarding this thing that I'm

focused on yes yes I love this so before we let you go we've got a little quick round that we call freak flags fly and I'm eventually going to be able to say that without stuttering today is not that day though so it's five fast questions no wrong answers just whatever comes to mind are you prepared sure let's do this all right so finish this sentence you're my kind of freak if

you're my kind of freak is you nerd out on things that you care about instead of things that you

don't oh okay I like that so what's something you love that your friends simply don't get serial killer documentaries oh my gosh we recently had an interview with somebody who writes crime fiction she writes all about serial killers I love it so you guys could be besties

it's how I detox I get stress relief by watching serial killer documentaries

and I just happen to know because late at night I scroll social you're in good company there are a lot of women who that is how they decompress okay so what community would you infiltrate

just to understand it better MAGA I live in Alabama I am surrounded by very specific thoughts and feelings towards the world and I grew up traveling around the United States and have been ingrained in lots of conversations and communities I have not yet understood I don't yet understand the point of view that they're currently embracing and I would I don't know that I would enjoy that process but I would I would want to do it just to understand it a little bit more and understand outside of how the media is reporting it right what is that frame of reference and frame of mind what is that end goal that is spoken like a true journalist right it's

like like I don't want the information filtered I want to go straight to the source yes I want to ask the questions I want to hear it with my own ears and apply my own filter my own lens yes okay what tool ritual or practice helps you stay connected to your people I mean I would say

every time a carbon monoxide incident occurs it's always reported on formerly twitter also known as the x and as much as I loathe the platform it's absolutely where I can engage with journalists and make sure that they're reporting the story correctly instead of giving the public inaccurate information from the loving pios

who have not yet told them the whole story it's okay there's nothing you could say about a pio that I haven't heard personally so we get it we know the role we play on both sides okay finally before I let you go what is someone doing freakishly good work who you think deserves a bigger stage

oh so I am a big fan of Dr. Amanda Crowell she is the author of Great Work and she has a podcast called The Great Work Podcast and I used this book tremendously during finding out like what is my great work now right and so Dr. Amanda Crowell she holds a PhD she's based out of New Jersey she's a fast talker and hand talker like me I just really love how she just pushes you out of your comfort zone and says what's really important for you to ship go ship it right like go focus on it and go do it I love people that empower you to do something that you might not have thought of previously those are my favorite people yeah catalysts are such an important

aspect of our society so Nikki oh my gosh it has been a joy a joy to connect with you I just want to say thank you I'm thank you for your courage your perspective but also for lending your voice to the show so that more people can hear not just about the impact you've made but really about the impact that they can make in their own communities and for everyone listening I just want to say if you've ever been told you're not qualified not credible or not enough please hear Nikki and hear this episode and let it put on your sticky note that if you've lived it you're ready because your freak flag just might be somebody else's lifeline yeah thank you again that's it for this episode of find your freaks to help more weirdos find their way here subscribe rate and leave a review and if you're craving connection join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com what makes you weird makes you wonderful normal was never the point