founder /
Nicole Lambrou
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Photo credit - MARS
Nicole Lambrou
Photo credit - MARS
Nicole Lambrou holds a PhD in Clinical and School Psychology with an emphasis in Industrial Organizational Psychology. She founded Three Tenets in 2005, and practices at the epicenter of leadership and organization development and executive coaching, inviting a shift from conventional partnerships to fresh ways of relating within the communities she serves.
Over time, her work has expanded to include collaborations with individuals and organizations interested in focusing on how we thrive together as human beings, bridging the worlds of art, music, and science, and within the nonprofit, for-profit and public sectors.
Nicole has lived on the edges of — and within — various social, economic, and cultural groups and is committed to supporting the well-being of our world through the illumination of what is essential.
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A supporter and beneficiary of the public school system, Nicole attended one of the largest school districts in the United States, where she had the opportunity to study music, took up violin, competed in NYSSMA, learned sign language and about the Holocaust in summer enrichment courses, volunteered at the Special Olympics, and followed her love of art through senior year. Throughout high school she tutored students at the elementary school she’d attended, including Roma children who entered school without ever having been exposed to a Western education. She also earned Advanced Placement credits in her junior and senior years before being admitted to the State University of New York at Binghamton, a public research institution in upstate New York.
At University, she decided to study child and adult development as a way to understand the individual and collective effects of trauma that she witnessed and understood in her own family and in the world around her. She holds a BA in Psychology from Binghamton University, an MA with distinction in Clinical-School Psychology, and a PhD in Clinical and School Psychology with an emphasis in Industrial Organizational Psychology from Hofstra University.
As a graduate student, Nicole served as an adjunct faculty member, teaching Human Sexuality to undergraduates, and sexual education to high school students with developmental and learning disabilities. Through her internships she worked with an inpatient population at Pilgrim Psychiatric Center in Brentwood, NY and an outpatient population at the Albert Ellis Institute of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy in New York, NY. She also worked in several research labs in both undergraduate and graduate school, including: Logical Learning Theory; Hypnosis, Trauma, and Memory; Pediatric Psychology; Learning Disabilities; and Memory and Information Processing. While at Binghamton University, she worked at The Institute for Child Development, a clinic which supports children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders and developmental, attention, and learning disorders.
Eventually, Nicole chose to integrate her studies to form a broader application of how we understand the complexities of what influences us as human beings including the social, economic, political and organizational systems we live within, and was the first student in her Clinical Psychology program to choose a thesis topic in Industrial Organizational Psychology and have a dissertation defense committee from both departments.
After realizing the barriers of working as an employee within an institutional framework, Nicole founded Three Tenets in 2005. She has also been a part of the faculty for New Ventures West’s (NVW) Professional Coaching Course, has been certified by the International Coaching Federation as a Professional Certified Coach, and by NVW as an Integral Coach.
Nicole has served on the Board of Seeds of Awareness, was a mentor for the Women’s Leadership Fellows at The Impact Center, and is an emeritus advisory board member of Oasis for Girls where she was also the advisory board chair.
In 2011, Nicole was invited to be a Resident Artist at the Red Poppy Art House (RPAH) in San Francisco when it was a collaborating partner of the de Young Museum’s Innovation Award, and shortly after, began focusing more of her work on interdisciplinary projects and with people from historically excluded and marginazlied groups.
From a young age, Nicole sought out wisdom in the depths of different traditions, and learned the value of questioning staid beliefs. Growing up within the Greek Orthodox culture, she also pursued advice from secular perspectives, eventually delving deep into her own therapeutic process; initially as a requirement in graduate school and later as part of an ongoing dedication to her own development and in supporting others through theirs. Nicole has experienced and studied various psychotherapeutic orientations, from cognitive behavioral to psychoanalysis, Gestalt and EMDR, and worked with psychodynamic, transpersonal and depth psychologists, as well as marriage and family therapists, a Soto Zen priest, Vedic astrologer, channeler, and within various somatic, meditative and movement based processes including rolfing, cranial sacral, and qigong.
Nicole started studying yoga and meditation in 1999, taking her first class at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y. Shortly after, she began an exploration into the wisdom of Eastern and mystical teachings when a friend gave her a copy of the book Peace is Every Step: The Path of mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and Zen Master, peace activist, and poet. She studied in the Diamond Approach / Ridhwan school for over seven years and was admitted to their teacher training. Over time, Nicole’s own Vipassana meditation and study of breath-work, neurobiology, and Somatic Experiencing led to the creation of a BGO (Breathing, Grounding, Orienting) practice, a unique way of supporting presence, grounding, and clarity.
A native English speaker, Nicole also speaks conversational Greek, elementary Spanish and Italian. She is a student of voice and violin and is a founding member of The Trio Tessera*, a women’s polyphonic vocal ensemble, and participates in the polyphonic workshop of Martha Mavroidi’s Rhodia Choir and the Kythirian Community String Orchestra. Nicole loves walking the shore at sunrise, seeing films in historic theaters and open air cinemas, reading, writing, and listening to live music. One of her greatest joys is playing and making music with others and being with loved ones. Nicole has also benefited from a dedicated meditation practice over the past two decades.
Holding dual US and Cypriot citizenship, Nicole has been living in San Francisco since 2002, and spends extended periods of time in Greece and Cyprus.
Terracotta statuette of woman with bird face - ca. 1450-1200 BCE, Cyprus
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
cyprus /
With human habitation dating back to around 11,000 BP, and when processing grains and making jewelery was their mainstay, Cyprus was originally settled by agriculturalists from the Levant, and later sought out for its natural resources and inhabited by Mycenean Greeks who mined for copper. Coveted for its prosperity and key strategic position, the island which boasts to be the birthplace of Aphrodite, the ancient and mythical goddess of love, has been conquered and colonized throughout its history. From the Phonecians, Assyrians, Egyptians, and Persians, it’s also been claimed by Alexander the Great and the Romans, became part of the Byzantine empire, was sold to an English King, the Knights of Templar and Lusignans, ceded to the Venitians and invaded and ruled by the Ottomans until the arrival of the British in 1878. Once again gaining independence in 1960, the Republic of Cyprus has present day cultural and geopolitical ties to Europe and the UK, and is a member of the EU, while Nicosia remains the last divided capital in the world.
Approximately 150,000 Greek Cypriots from the North and 25,000 Turkish Cypriots from the Southern part of the island became refugees in 1974 after the Greek Military coup, Turkish invasion and division of the island. To this day, the almost 50 year political conflict persists, and the island remains separated by a 180km (112mi) United Nations demilitarized buffer zone also known as the Green Line, with military posts on either side. Some 27,000 landmines have been cleared from this strip of land that ranges in width from less than 20m (66ft) to more than 7km (4.3mi), to support activities such as organic and sustainable farming. Since 2003, a number of crossing points have opened up which allows those with a passport to cross the border.