“I spent twenty years advocating for people in courtrooms. Now I advocate for something just as important, their right to a connected, joyful intimate life.” – Ask Nicki
People are always a little surprised when they hear what I used to do.
For more than twenty years, I was a personal injury attorney. I specialised in some of the hardest cases people ever face, the kind that arrive after an accident, a loss, a moment that splits a life into before and after. My job was to sit with people on the worst day of their lives, earn their trust quickly, and say the difficult things out loud on their behalf.
So when I tell people I’m now a sex coach, they usually expect a dramatic story. A midlife crisis. A sudden left turn.
But it wasn’t a leap. It was a continuation.
Because when I look back, I was always doing the same job. I was helping people put words to things that felt impossible to say. I was advocating for them when they couldn’t advocate for themselves. I was sitting in the uncomfortable room, the one everyone else avoids, and staying there long enough for something to change.
The only thing that shifted was the room.
Over the years, I noticed that the conversations that lit me up were never really about the law. They were about the human underneath it: the marriage that had gone quiet, the resentment nobody named, the loneliness two people can feel while lying in the same bed. I kept thinking: someone should help people with this. And eventually I realised the someone was going to be me.
So I retrained. I qualified as an Integral Practitioner Coach through the globally accredited Integral Africa Coaching Centre. I became a member of COMENSA, an affiliate of SASHA, and an Accredited Sex Educator. I brought my whole legal career with me: the discipline, the ability to hold a hard conversation without flinching, the instinct to fight for the person in front of me.
Intimacy, it turns out, needs an advocate too.
We are taught the mechanics of sex, but never the skills to sustain desire, closeness and connection over a lifetime. So people muddle through, assume the spark was supposed to be automatic, and quietly grieve it when it fades. After enough coaching sessions, podcasts and dinner-party conversations that somehow always circled back to the topic, the same sentence kept landing in my lap: “You need to write a book.”
So I did. It’s called Sexponential, and it’s everything I’ve learned helping real couples through real problems: warm, honest, occasionally funny, and built for ordinary people who love each other and simply want to feel close again.
I didn’t leave the law because I stopped caring about advocacy. I left because I found the case I most wanted to argue: that intimacy, connection and pleasure are not luxuries. They’re part of a well-lived life. And everyone deserves someone in their corner, fighting for it.
Curious where it all leads? Sexponential is out now. And if you’re looking for a keynote speaker with an unusual story and a serious point to make, let’s talk.