We recently connected with Nikki Taylor and have shared our conversation below.

Nikki, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a time you helped a customer really get an amazing result through their work with you.

In March of 2023, I led a particularly difficult all-woman hike up to Strawberry Peak in the Angeles National Forest. At the end of the hike, one woman came up to tell me that she would not have imagined in her lifetime that she would have been able to summit such a challenging peak, especially in snowy conditions. She explained that her upbringing and cultural expectations had taught her that women were expected to take few risks, that they were weak, and were not capable in the outdoors. As a mother and a wife, she had spent her entire life fulfilling the needs of her husband and children. She rarely did anything for herself, until she discovered hiking. Unlike the majority of her day-to-day activities, hiking was something she could do by herself, for herself. It was love at first step! So she started hiking with friends but always picked easy hikes, opting to keep it safe so that she would not make her family worry. But there was always an itch that she could do more. When she heard that I was going to lead a hike up to one of the peaks on the Six Pack of Peaks Challenge — a well-known self-paced hiking and trail running challenge up six iconic Southern California mountains — she signed up for the hike even though she knew it to be risky. This made her family extremely worried, and yet she persisted, managing to convince her family to allow her to go. She felt confident that the list of requirements given for the hike would be sufficient to keep her safe.

She admitted that the hike was one of the most challenging things she had ever done and had not expected to finish. She said that there were many moments of doubt, but she was so grateful for my constant encouragement and guidance. I could see how deeply touched she was because she was almost in tears and I could feel the decades of repression and doubt in her voice. She could not believe that a woman of her age with her background could achieve anything like this. She told me that she felt something in her she never felt before, confidence. But she was confident, and she was was brave, and she was capable.

She was ALIVE.

I remember her laughing as she said, “After having done this, I feel like I can do anything.”

Nikki, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I wasn’t supposed to be in the outdoor industry. I, like many of my fellow women growing up in the Philippines, was supposed to be a doctor. I went to medical school for a few years and then got pushed into modeling by my mother who was afraid I was becoming a tomboy (This is what I got for being active). Modeling exposed me to the entertainment world, and I met men and women from all over the world who presented me with new ideas and perspectives. Here were people that were respected by their peers, and I knew I wanted to be one of them. So I quit medical school, quit modeling, and came to the US for film school in Colorado, of all places :) I was 8,000 miles from everything I knew and everyone that I loved. And, for the first time in my life, I had a career of my own. Three short, beautiful years and hundreds of wonderfully bizarre short films, I graduated Magna Cum Laude and began my new career.

After a short stint with local filmmakers and doing odd jobs in Colorado, I took the next big step and moved to L.A. Working initially for small, independent production companies, I eventually got into the major studios of Paramount and Disney. I coordinated hundreds of people and dealt with budgets in the tens of millions. My bosses were important and powerful women who had sacrificed everything to get to their position, and I knew that it would take the same for me. But the funny thing is, when I looked at the people at the top, they were miserable. They’d spend long hours in the office, have strained relationships, and generally had no lives outside of their jobs. I struggled with the thought that I had left the Philippines to escape losing my freedom only to end up in the exact same spot.

I had taken up hiking and backpacking during COVID and really took advantage of the time to build up my following and brand. I became certified in Wilderness First Aid and started offering my own courses and guided trips with a focus on women. I wanted to create an environment that was safe for women to express themselves and not worry about their appearance or behavior. If nothing else, I wanted the outdoors to be a truly safe space. I spent months agonizing over my film career because I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t want to throw away all the hard work I had put into it. It was terrifying to give up what I had just spent over a decade building, but what was even more terrifying was the thought of my life passing me by as I worked on other people’s dreams. I loved the people I hiked with and it seemed that everyone around me was sharing the same feeling of awe and wonder of this planet. With encouragement from my partner, I took another major risk and left the film industry to pursue my passion of the outdoors.

For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m making an actual difference in people’s lives. I can see their pride and confidence grow with each step. There is not a peak I’ve reached that didn’t have someone break down in joyful tears at the fact that they are stronger and more capable than what they were told. The moment where a person stops believing society’s lies and starts believing in themselves is what I do this for. It’s really indescribable. Way Out Wild was started with the belief that we are all so much more than what we’ve been told. My hikes and backpacking trips intend to remove the fear and the doubts our society and cultures engrained into us as children and help realize the potential in every one of us. The person you were at the bottom of the mountain is never the same as the person at the top. In addition, the upcoming Nature Therapy program will serve to help you reconnect with our surroundings and learn to have peace amidst such constant chaos. All we have is each other and this Earth, and the only way we’re going to make it is by reminding ourselves of that fact from time to time :)

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Honestly, I believe life is full of lessons we have to unlearn. I’ve definitely had to unlearn a lot of them over the years. The most challenging one has been success and the measurement of it. But the thing is, there are no rules as to what success should look like. I’ve seen what success has looked like in the industry I used to be in and, honestly, all it made me do was want to leave. A high-stress environment deceives us into thinking every tiny action carries some great weight. We’re taught to “put out fires” that aren’t actually fires. The exploitation of workers seems to be worn as a badge of honor for creating value, but it is the people in the company that creates the value. Content shouldn’t be mass-produced, it should be mass-enjoyed, otherwise it’s all just noise.

So what did I have to unlearn?

That I did not have to live this way in order to be successful. I did not have to climb the corporate ladder at the expense of everyone else and I could be happy creating a service that helped lift people up instead of beating them down. The pandemic taught me that there isn’t a lot of support out there for us and it made me realize that I wanted to do more to help people grow, to realize their potential, to be more confident in their abilities, and to be brave in their own skin. I wanted to help people, especially women, find their own voice so that they can better advocate for themselves. The outdoors has this amazing ability to bring out the best in us and I love seeing others discover what they are capable of. I aim to redfine success as something personal, not something measured by what everyone else thinks.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When I first started guiding hikes, I did them through an all-women organization that focuses on providing a safe space for women to learn new activities and to find community with other women (their chapters in other states were wildly more successful compared to the chapter in L.A.!) When I organized my first hike, no one showed up. This really hit my confidence hard. Our L.A. chapter still had almost 2k members so I had expected at least a few people to show interest. I had spent months getting certified and hundreds of hours preparing, so it was crushing that not a soul appeared. I drove back home with a heavy heart. I had not left film yet and this was just my free time but it started making me doubt the entire field. When I arrived home my husband excitedly asked me how it went and I burst into tears.

“No one showed up. There were 15 women who signed up but none of them showed up. I drove all the way out there and waited for an hour. I stood there looking like a weirdo in front of the trailhead beaming at people just excited to see just one woman show up. But no one did.”

All my husband could do was console me in my grief. He could really tell that it hit my confidence. And it did. I began to question why I had even done all of this work if no one was even going to care.

“Post about it”, he said.

“About what? Nothing happened.”

“Post about it. Let people know. You said you wanted to run your social media differently. You wanted to be authentic in your message. So tell people. Tell people you showed up for them. You made a commitment and you stuck to it and that you hope that someday people will learn to do the same. Tell them you’re not giving up.” He said earnestly.

“People will just think I’m whiny”, I detested, “And why wouldn’t I give up. It’s obvious no one wants me to lead them on a hike”

And with so much tenderness in his voice, he pulled me out of my despair. “This was just your first hike, hun. These people don’t know who you are. They don’t know what kind of person you are. But I do. I know that you are person of integrity and a person anyone can trust to take them safely through the woods. But they don’t know that…yet.”

He was right.

They didn’t know me! So I had to show them. I continued to host more hikes, even when no one showed up. And I posted about it. I was committed to this and to the people I promised to guide.

And eventually, people did show up! We’ve grown so much that I have to have extra guides on my trips because what started out as an attendance of 0 turned out to be a regular attendance of 30.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wayoutwild_
• Linktree: https://linktr.ee/wayoutwild