Unconventionally: The Many First Moves of Niña Terol
Niña Terol is a startup—if you could say that about a person. She is full of grit, always a work in progress, passion-fueled, and raring to go. She sums up 20 years of accomplishments into a few choice words: communicator, connector, changemaker, and creative catalyst. In that time frame, she’s gone from journalism to government to education to innovation.
Niña is the Chief Marketing Officer of Talino Venture Labs
and the Founder of Girl, Make the First Move.
“I had gone through a lot of different sectors, a lot of different fields,” Niña begins. “And maybe the older generation might say, ‘Oh, you're such a millennial, you can’t stay long enough in one job. You like to jump.’”
To those presumptions, she answers: “I do like to jump.”
Currently, Niña is Chief Marketing Officer and entrepreneur-in-residence of startup builder Talino Venture Labs, creator of the online community Mindful Manila, and founder of newly established online community ‘Girl, Make the First Move’. To say that she has her finger in many pies is an understatement. There is no appropriate idiom yet for what she is, but she has that covered, too.
“I’ve always seen my career as a tool belt, like an arsenal of things I want to learn,” Niña explains. “At each point in my career, it was about what I wanted to learn next. What did I want to do next? What did I want to get exposed to next so that I can build that up in my arsenal? It’s been an amazing adventure and at each point, I was picking up a new skill.”
The Big Experiment
Niña is the first to admit that she is a work in progress. Like a startup, she considers herself an unfinished product, perpetually in beta mode and continuously evolving. “I mean, the version of me you first met a few years ago is so different from the version of me now,” she says.
After a major life transformation seven years ago, Niña decided to view her life as an active experiment. “I like doing a life SWOT. If I were a business entity, what are my skills? What are my weaknesses? What are my opportunities? That’s how I take stock of my skill set and I continue to do this now.”
She stresses the importance of self-reflection, observation, recommendation, and iteration. In the midst of a life crisis in 2014 , Niña confesses that she had to confront her ugliest sides and realized that she needed to do a lot of work on herself. “I had to really step back and do the life SWOT.”
The good comes with the bad, that much is known, but whenever girls come up to Niña to ask how to be like her, she would still shake her head, not wishing for anyone to go through the issues she’s had to surmount to get to where she is now. Challenges, she says matter-of-factly, are part of the daily grind. Difficulties come and some are worse than others. But how you deal with them is what matters, she advises.
Her mother’s COVID-19 diagnosis, for example, was a wakeup call and Niña’s mind went through the grim motions of imagining a life without her mom. In the end, she accepted that she was going to be devastated, but she would get through it somehow — no matter how hard it would be.
“You grow your resilience muscles with each difficulty that happens,” she observes. “When the larger adversities come, you’ll be in a better place to handle them. The challenges don’t get easier, but your muscles get stronger — and you’re able to lift your burdens in a more graceful way.”
Build And Learn
Some time ago, Niña got accepted to a master’s degree in innovation in the U.K. One of her friends, Camille Escudero, asked her: “Are you really going to move away to another country to study and read books? Be in a classroom for one or two years? Shouldn’t you just innovate? If you’re studying innovation just go ahead and innovate already!”
So, when she didn’t receive a scholarship, Niña decided to take matters into her own hands: “I knew the curriculum. I knew what I wanted to study. I decided that I was going to DIY my master’s degree.”
It is this can-do attitude, this sheer determination to create that pushed Niña from a budding career in communication to enterprise. “A part of me was yearning to be a part of the action. I wanted to build solutions,” she explains.
Since venturing into startup development, Niña discovered so many things about herself, such as an appreciation for numbers and a love for pitching to investors. Working in an environment with a never-ending exposure to new ideas, Niña leverages on her ability to adapt and grow.
“There are times where you’re afraid to do something because you don’t know how. But this is where the power of partnerships and collaborations come in.”
Surrounded by people in varying fields, Niña realized that she, as well as others, was never going to be an expert at everything. “But if you work with other people who have different or complementary skill sets, then you’ll become more confident. You learn from them and they learn from you. I’ve become so much sharper.”
Make the First Move
With not enough on her plate as is, Niña googled how women made the first moves. She was appalled that the results were mostly about dating. “Seriously, is that the only thing we can make first moves on?” she exclaims.
The premise behind her new platform ‘Girl, Make the First Move’ is to provoke, challenge, and inspire. She noticed that women had many aspirations but just as many, if not more, reasons that hold them back, from physical to cultural restraints.
“Girl, Make the First Move aims to be an online community, platform, and space, a movement where we can encourage and empower women and girls of all ages, whether you’re a seven-year-old who wants to try things or 70 and you feel like you’re not done yet and you want to do something new.”
Barely two weeks old, Niña already put things in motion — the proverbial first move — hosting her pilot Clubhouse forum last July 3. She invited speakers from different backgrounds and from different parts of the globe, all revealing their experiences of making the first move. Stories ranged from breaking free of traditional cultural norms to creating your own path where there are no role models and paving the way for other women to share their journeys.
According to Niña, first moves can manifest in so many ways but women don’t often know where to start.
“What I’ve learned from this forum is that it’s not about big moves. It can be micro moves. Sometimes, it’s about saying, ‘You know what? I’m going to say ‘no’ to more things so I can say ‘yes’ to the right things.’”
But in a decade where female empowerment seems to have come out guns blazing, do women need to be told to make the first move? For Niña, it’s more a gentle reminder. She’s not in the business, for example, of forcing people into fields that are still male-dominated, like construction or security, but she encourages women to not box themselves out of it.
“We're not looking to flip it around and say no, there should be more women,” Niña explains. “They don’t have to join these fields if they don’t want to, but they should feel like they can.”
In this big push toward equal opportunity, Niña warns against toxic feminism. “I would never advocate for hostility toward men. It’s about women in themselves taking initiative,” she says, expressing her gratitude for the male mentors and bosses who encouraged her to break her limits and shoved her to making her first moves.
“I really give credit to a lot of men who have been secure enough to not close the door…those who lifted the lid off the glass ceiling.
Girl, Make the First Move is as much about women taking initiative as it is about others being supportive about creating a space that is safe for girls and women to thrive.”
With the success of her first event, Niña has so many plans for ‘Girl, Make the First Move’. She’s planning to hold more forums, launch a podcast, and open the platform to a wider audience.
As her initiative sets out to change the lives of women and girls everywhere, I have no doubt that this new adventure will result in the next iteration of Nina Terol.
Follow Girl, Make the First Move on
Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Watch this space for news and updates on Girl, Make the First Move!
Watch the full video interview with Niña
LIVE on my @iamginaromero Facebook page.
