THE CIRCLE
Two rooms. Both small enough to be honest in.
One is six weeks of structured work, online, moving through the four movements together. The other is in person, in the same room, with nothing to move through — just people who have stopped performing, in each other's company. You can do either. Most people eventually do both.
The ROAR circle · online · six weeks
Nobody presents. Nobody performs. There is no back row to sit in, because a circle has no back row — that is the whole point of the shape.
Every week you read, you write, you speak, and then you take one real step in your actual life. Transformation that stays on the page isn't transformation. It's homework.
A circle is not an audience.
You were never meant to perform for love. You were meant to be love.
The promise is plain, and it is the same one printed on the book: in six weeks, you'll stop performing for love and external validation — and become the narrator of your own life's story.
“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
TWO KINDS OF ROOMS
In order, because the order is the work.
Each one opens what the next one needs. You do not have to arrive believing any of it — you only have to be willing to move.
01
02
03
04
Reclaim
Radiate
Take back your voice. Notice what your body has been telling you all along, and put down the stress you have been calling fine.
Own
Stand in your truth and say it out loud. This is where you stop editing yourself for the room — and write, in your own words, the declaration of who you are.
Align
Bring your life into agreement with your values. Not as an idea. As a real step, taken in the real world, that week.
Live it in the open. The roar isn't the end of the work; it's the beginning of everything after.
How a week runs
Two hours on the calendar. The rest happens in your life.
The same four things every week, for six weeks. You always know what is being asked of you.
TOGETHER
A 90-minute live session
With Julie, on Zoom, cameras on. Recorded, so a hard week doesn't cost you the room.
SIZE
WHAT IT IS NOT
TOGETHER
A 30-minute peer call
Paired with someone else in the circle. This is where the company gets real.
ALONE
Reading and one prompt
Assigned chapters from ROAR: Your Sacred Rebellion, and one journal prompt. Not ten.
OUT LOUD
One real-life practice
One thing you actually do, in your actual week, and then report on honestly.
WHERE
Zoom. Cameras on — that is not a rule bolted on for order, it is the work
MATERIALS
A participant workbook for every week, and the book itself.
Twelve. Small enough that nobody hides.
Not therapy. A strong companion to it, and Julie says so out loud in the room.
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.