ONE TO ONE
Root cause work.
One to one.
Not how to perform at a higher level — why you have been carrying what you're carrying, and what happens when you put it down. A circle is twelve voices; this is one, at the pace your actual situation needs rather than the pace a six-week schedule allows.
WHAT THIS IS
Some things you will say out loud exactly once, and only to one person. This is the room for those. Everyone deserves someone in their corner — to cheer them on, to offer a read they can't get from inside their own situation, and to stay honest when honest is inconvenient.
I have been on both sides of this. I learned business at a global building-products manufacturer and made it to executive level there. Then I carried all of it into a family business, where I could not see the dynamic because I was standing in it. I got out at fifty. What I know about how a person disappears into a role, I know from the inside.
Someone in your corner who will not flinch.
I will not teach you a thing I have not lived.
That includes my own body. I spent thirty years overriding it, then trained so I could ask better questions about it — and I have results from that I'm glad of. That story is on the Meet Julie page. I'm not promising you mine. Nobody honest promises anyone a result, and you should be wary of the ones who do. But everything I learned advocating for myself is in the room when we work, and you get all of it.
Then I went and got the training — an Institute for Integrative Nutrition health coach certification, and a Reiki Master's — both for myself rather than to hang out a shingle. What they changed is where I start: with the body, the calendar, the actual week you are having, rather than with a theory about who you could be.
“When I read the part about hating your job and feeling that it's toxic, it struck me. I'm in that place in my life right now.”
Veronica Rouette · on The Manifester's Playbook
TWO KINDS OF ROOMS
Personal, professional, or the place they overlap.
Most people arrive thinking they need one and discover they needed both — the role in motion is rarely separate from the person inside it. We start wherever you can name.
PERSONAL GROWTH
Coming back to your own voice
For the person whose life works on paper and doesn't feel like theirs. It starts with the body — not a plan or a protocol, just noticing what you have been overriding — because a nervous system running on empty cannot hear its own intuition.
Self-trust, and how it got dismantled
Boundaries — setting them, and surviving the reaction
The pattern underneath the people-pleasing
What your body has been telling you all along
Deciding what you actually want, out loud
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
In transition
For anyone whose working life is in motion — because the role changed, or because you did. Newly in the chair and nobody trained you for the part where you have to be a person and an authority at once. Five years in and quietly wondering whether it still fits. Leaving. Having been left. Coming back after time away to find the room rearranged.
Finding your own leadership voice instead of borrowing one
Hard conversations you've been postponing
Strengths and gaps — naming both without flinching
Boundaries at work, which are the hardest kind
Whether the role still fits, and what it means if it doesn't
Deciding to go — and what to do on the morning after
HOW IT WORKS
A conversation first.
Nothing is decided before it.
We talk for fifteen minutes before anything is agreed, so we both find out whether this is the right room for you. If it isn't, I will say so and point you somewhere better. That costs you nothing and it saves us both a season.
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Live, on video, one to one. Recorded only if you want it recorded.
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Practice in your real life, and you can reach me. This isn't a room you only enter on the hour.
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Whenever you want. The door swings both ways, and that includes out.
THE EXCHANGE
The price is on the door.
You will never have to book a call to find out a number.
Price TBD
THE EXCHANGE
What this isn’t.
You will never have to book a call to find out a number.
Not therapy. I'm an author and coach, not a licensed clinician. Coaching is a strong companion to therapy and a poor replacement for it. Plenty of people do both, and that's a good combination.
Not health coaching. I hold an IIN certification, but I trained for myself and I don't take health clients. No plans, no protocols, no diagnosis. Anything clinical belongs to your doctor or a registered dietitian.
Not reiki sessions. I'm trained to master level, but I have never sold it as a service and I'm not starting now. It goes into everything I do rather than sitting on a menu. It's also not medical treatment, and never a substitute for your doctor.
Not legal or financial advice, and not consulting on your company's problems.
Not a guarantee. I can bring three decades, two certifications and complete honesty. What happens next is work you do.
WHY JULIE
There are coaches who studied this. I lived it, and not gracefully. I learned business at a global building-products manufacturer and rose to executive there, then spent the last stretch of thirty years inside a family business — where I couldn't see the dynamic, because I was standing in it. I left at fifty with no plan, and it cost me a family.
Then I went and got trained, for myself rather than for a practice. And I spent thirty days in an ashram in southern India because a stranger told me I was too comfortable, and she was right.
There's one more thing, and it's the reason I do this at all. The first coach I ever worked with wasn't my idea. The company assigned the coaching — because I was, in the language of the time, too emotional. I was one of two women in management.
They did let me pick from a slate of candidates, which turned out to be the one part of the whole arrangement I got to decide. I chose a tiny firecracker of a woman named Stanley.
She was superb. A highly sought-after executive coach, and they paid for six months of her — I believe it ran them somewhere around fifty thousand dollars, and that was decades ago. I came out of it with two tools. Two. I still use both of them and I still teach them.
Fifty thousand dollars for two tools sounds like a terrible trade until you notice they're still working. That's the honest arithmetic of this work, and it's why I don't sell volume. You do not need twenty techniques. You need one or two that survive contact with your actual life, and then you need years.
I'll leave the reason they sent me where it is. What matters more is what that work was and wasn't. It was performance coaching — how to operate at a higher level — and it did exactly that. She didn't sand me down. She handed me tools.
What nobody asked was why I was carrying what I was carrying. That question waited another twenty years, and in the end I had to go and find it myself.
Now the part you actually wanted to know.
Because I did it late, badly, and out loud.
It's the question I start with now.
So when you tell me you can't hear yourself over everyone else's needs, I'm not working from a framework. I'm working from the parking lot. And when someone tells me they've been called too much, I know exactly which room they're standing in.
And why not Julie
You should have this half before you decide, not after.
I'm not a therapist, and I won't pretend the line is blurry
I'm not gentle in the moments where gentle would be a lie
No plans, no protocols, and no accountability where I carry it for you
I started this late — I'm short on decades of practice
What I have instead is the road, walked recently enough that I still remember every turn.
THE TWO TOOLS
One · Take a beat
There was a man who liked to knock me down a peg, always in front of the CEO. It worked every time. I got flustered — which is, of course, what too emotional meant.
She told me: the next time he does it, take a breath before you answer. Then, while you're breathing, look at him and picture a zipper running from his throat down to his belly. Unzip it. See the frightened little boy standing inside.
Now answer him.
It has never once failed.
Two · Know your own wiring
She was the first person ever to hand me a personality assessment, and the first to sit down and explain what the result actually meant.
I am an introvert. I was doing an extrovert's job.
Nobody had ever suggested that was a real thing, let alone that it explained why I came home empty every single night for years. It didn't change the job. It named the cost of the job — and once a cost has a name you can decide whether you're willing to keep paying it.
Neither of those is root cause work. Both are better than most of what gets sold as it. But look again at what the zipper really taught me: find the frightened thing underneath the behaviour, and the behaviour stops running you.
She gave me that for boardrooms. It took me another twenty years to turn it on myself.
People ask what they were. Here they are.
I'm not keeping them. They cost somebody fifty thousand dollars and they've been free ever since.
That is what became of your work. It kept going.
At the end of my career I went looking for Stanley, hoping to hire her again, and found that she had died.
So I'll say it here instead, where it might one day reach somebody who knew her. Stanley, you gave me two things. I have handed both of them to every person who has ever sat across from me, and they have handed them on from there.
FROM PEOPLE I’VE WORKED WITH
No one walks away without learning something about themselves that makes them stronger. Julie has been coaching me over the past 15 years.
Nicole Schreuder · Learning & Development Manager
Nicole is a former colleague, and a friend.
Named, and with the relationships disclosed.
Once I began cultivating my strengths, I could see more ways to use and expand my talents.
Jill Ann Arnold
Jill Ann is a friend.
She walks closely with you on your growth journey. I know several people who aspire to be just like her.
Jason Orwig · Director of Technology
She moves people from acquaintance to friend in the blink of an eye. She is honest, and that is everything.
Howard Kurtzman
Howard painted the cover of ROAR: Your Sacred Rebellion. We support each other's work, and you should know that when you read this.
IF THIS IS YOUR SEASON
Fifteen minutes, and no obligation after it.
Write to me and tell me, in whatever words you have, what's going on. It doesn't need to be tidy. Nobody arrives with a tidy version.
Prefer company for the work? The circle runs here—twelve people, six weeks, four movements.
NOT YET, BUT MAYBE LATER
Then read a while first.
About one letter a week. Something I have lived, told straight, with the part I got wrong left in. No pressure follows it.