Meet Nicholas Strand of Atlanta Midtown

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicholas Strand.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I spent nearly 20 years in large-scale live touring production, working behind the scenes on shows for artists like BLACKPINK, Sting, KISS, and Dave Matthews Band. My job was to make sure the chaos stayed invisible. Schedules collapsed, gear failed, plans changed by the hour, and none of that could ever reach the stage. The audience just saw the show. I saw everything it took to get there.
That world taught me how to lead under pressure long before I ever called myself a leader. But the real turning point in my life came from my wife, Brianna. Her words, choose your attitude, create your life, became something I had to live out in the hardest possible way after I lost her. That loss didn’t just change me. It clarified what mattered and gave me a framework I could actually stand behind: Attitude + Action = Impact.
On July 1, 2026, I took that framework off the road and turned it into a business. I founded Choose Your Attitude LLC, which now runs three connected brands. TheNickStrand.com is where I speak and coach, built around my keynote Build Your Stage: Lead Through Chaos. ChooseYourAttitude.com is a mindset and apparel brand for anyone choosing to lead their life on purpose instead of reacting to it. CreateYourLife.Today is the community that ties it together.
Today I work with founders, leaders, and high performers who are managing more pressure than anyone sees, the same way I used to manage chaos no audience ever knew existed. I’m also building a coaching track specifically for touring and live production professionals navigating what comes after the road, because I know firsthand how disorienting that transition can be.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, it hasn’t been smooth. I’d actually built a business before, as a video engineer, but this was different. I had never run something customer facing, so I didn’t fully understand what that world required. On top of that, I was launching this business during one of the hardest periods of my life. COVID had already sidewiped my entire touring career, and while I was trying to figure out this new chapter and even writing a book about it, I developed Bell’s Palsy, which affected my motion and my ability to communicate the way I needed to. It made an already difficult transition feel nearly impossible.
Then there was the reality of touring itself. Being on the road for sixty, sometimes ninety days at a time meant giving everything I had to the show, but a customer facing business runs on consistency, and consistency is hard to deliver when you disappear for two or three months at a stretch. Juggling both worlds has been one of the harder parts of this journey. It’s forced me to laser focus on messaging and on the pieces I could actually show up for, which has pushed me to build smarter systems. But it also means what I’ve built hasn’t always matched where I was personally, since I was still growing into it while building it.
Building a team has been its own challenge too. A lot of people show up ready to complete a task, but connecting them to a mission is different. I needed people who were in it for the heart of it, not just the project, and finding that has taken time. That challenge has also shown up in coaching itself. I’m working with people who share the same loss I’ve lived through, which means this isn’t theoretical for me. It’s part of why I believe every person’s path needs its own approach instead of a one size fits all playbook. Life will always hand you unique circumstances, and the job of a coach is to understand someone’s perspective well enough to help them find their own way through it, not just hand them someone else’s rulebook.
There’s also the sheer scale of what I’m trying to build. Between apparel, websites, email, and social media, running multiple brands at once is daunting, which is why building systems and batching work the way I do isn’t optional, it’s survival. And the messaging itself came from living it first. I went through the loss, wrote about it, felt it, and slowly built frameworks out of it before I ever tried to teach it or sell it, which is an entirely different skill on its own. All of that happened while I was still holding entire stadium shows together.
What keeps me going is the math. Across my touring career, shows reaching twenty to sixty thousand people a night add up to roughly twenty five million people I’ve touched indirectly. My goal now is to reach a million people directly through this work. I’ve got time to get there, and that’s part of what makes this exciting instead of overwhelming.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Choose Your Attitude is where it starts, the premium encouragement brand built through streetwear and activewear, creating a community of resilient attitude for anyone ready to stop reacting to life and start training their mindset with the same discipline they train their body.
A slightly longer alternative, if you want it to carry more of the “warrior” identity from the site:
Choose Your Attitude is where it starts, the premium encouragement brand built through streetwear and activewear. It’s not just apparel, it’s a warrior community for anyone ready to stop reacting to life and start building the resilient attitude that transforms more than just the body.
And here’s that paragraph back in the full context:
I help people lead through chaos instead of being controlled by it, and I’ve built an entire ecosystem around that idea, not just a single service. My work spans speaking, coaching, community, and content, all built around one framework: Attitude + Action = Impact. I spent nearly 20 years in large scale live touring production, working behind the scenes on shows for artists like BLACKPINK, Sting, KISS, and Dave Matthews Band. That world trained me to make chaos invisible, to keep a show running no matter what was falling apart behind the curtain. Now I teach that same skill set to people managing pressure no one else sees, whether that’s in leadership, business, or a major life transition.
What I specialize in is meeting people wherever they are in that journey. Choose Your Attitude is where it starts, the premium encouragement brand built through streetwear and activewear. It’s not just apparel, it’s a warrior community for anyone ready to stop reacting to life and start building the resilient attitude that transforms more than just the body. Create Your Life Today is the community that holds people as they start putting that mindset into action, surrounded by others doing the same work. TheNickStrand.com is where people come when they’re ready for direct impact, working with me one on one through coaching or bringing me in to speak. It’s not three separate businesses. It’s one framework, applied at every stage of someone’s growth, from understanding, to action, to impact.
I’m not teaching theory here. I lived through building shows in front of twenty to sixty thousand people a night with zero room for error, and I lived through losing my wife, Brianna, and having to rebuild everything her words gave me: choose your attitude, create your life. That combination, real world chaos management and real personal loss, is what shapes how I coach and how I built this business, not just what I say in a keynote.
I’m most proud of the reach this is building toward. Between the tours I worked, I’ve indirectly touched somewhere around twenty five million people. My goal now is to reach a million people directly, and the brand structure I’ve built, Choose Your Attitude, Create Your Life Today, and TheNickStrand.com, exists specifically to make that possible at scale, meeting people at whatever level of engagement they’re ready for.
What sets me apart is that I’m not a coach who studied leadership from the outside. I built and held together some of the biggest live productions in the world while going through some of the hardest years of my own life: career disruption from COVID, health struggles, personal loss, and the challenge of starting a customer facing business for the first time. I’m currently coaching people navigating the same kind of loss I’ve been through, which means I understand it from the inside, not just from a framework. That’s the difference. I’m not teaching people to perform resilience. I’m building a place for them to actually develop it, at whatever stage they’re in.

Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
Something that surprises people is that I’ve never had a drop of alcohol or a single drug in my life. Not once. When you spend nearly 20 years touring, you see a lot, and I had family members close to me who struggled to control it, so I made a choice early on and just stuck to it. If I never start, I never have to worry about stopping.
What’s funny is once people actually get close to me, they become genuinely protective of it. I’ll joke around with friends, act like I’m finally going to cave and have a drink, just to mess with them, and watch how fast they jump in to stop me. It’s become this running joke, but it also tells me something about the people I surround myself with. They care.
I’m not out here judging anyone for what they choose. I’ve been around it my entire career and I understand everyone’s got their own vice, their own way of coping. This has just been mine, a line I decided not to cross, and one I’ve never regretted holding.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://TheNickStrand.com
• Instagram: TheNickStrand
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thenickstrand/
• Other: https://ChooseYourAttitude.com