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In this episode, I spoke with Julie Nieman.
Michael: Hi. Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Julia Neiman. Hi, Julia.
Julia: Hi, Michael. How are you?
Michael: I am great. I'm excited to talk about business intuition and young entrepreneurship and all kinds of other interesting topics including how to tell between your feelings and emotions when it comes to intuition, which I know you've got a lot of experience.
Julia: I'm looking forward to it.
Michael: Me too. Those of you who haven't met Julia before, she used to be a clinical social worker. She has got into helping teen entrepreneurs and she is the author of a couple of books, 31 Powerful Lessons for Empowering Teens in Entrepreneurship and also Picking from the Passion Tree, which helps you decide what of the many things you might do would be good to do. She works with entrepreneurs around the world, very exciting. Julia, when we talked earlier, you said you've used your intuition a lot in your business. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Julia: I do. I kind of channel things. I just sit and quiet myself and listen and then answers come to me. Whatever I need to know comes to me that way. I told you when we talked before, I had a real advantage in life and that I grew up back in the '60s in South Florida. My backyard was basically the Seminole Indian Reservation and that was before they signed the treaty with the United States government. They basically were living an authentic life. I spent a lot of time with them in their village and learning from them and learning spirituality and how to what they call listen to the spirits. Basically, what that was is tuning in and listening to your intuition. What is your heart telling you? What is your higher self being connected to your higher self and then channeling that? That's how I got into it. Now, I try to teach my kids to do that. You know what I found is that young people are really hungry for that kind of connection with themselves.
Michael: That would make sense. It makes it much easier if they are an entrepreneur to know what to do next. There's so many possible choices or in the rest of their life too.
Julia: That's exactly right. They are just really hungry for that. I've done that when I was actually working in the foster care sector and I was working in a group home. I would take the boys. I work with teenage boys for the most part. We would go outside and I would teach some things that the Indians taught me like how to expand your consciousness. When you think about it, Indians would know when somebody was coming into their environment. They were just so in tune to nature and I was taught at a young age how to actually increase my awareness by extending … I could hear things further and further away by extending my awareness and I would become aware a few feet away and then I would become aware a few yards away and then it would just keep growing as much as I could concentrate. I could hear things in the environment further and further away.
Michael: Wow! How do you use that skill in your business?
Julia: It's just learning to expand your consciousness so like if you are sitting in a room with a client and being able to expand your consciousness further than the conversation that you are having. It brings in and kind of in an intuitive way knowing what they are thinking, knowing what they are going to say next, knowing what direction they are going, and then getting channeling answers for them that are what they are looking for or really appropriate to what they are saying on a deeper level.
Michael: That lets you to be more engaged with them. It makes it easier to connect if you were enrolling them in a program. It makes it easier to sell the program.
Julia: Absolutely, and being able to be in tune to their emotions and their feelings in a way that you couldn't otherwise. It gave me the ability to open up and reach deeper levels of myself in order to relate to them on a deeper level.
Michael: That sounds a really useful skill to teach young entrepreneurs because so many young people are tied up on their cell phone or online and it's hard to hear that information if you are always connected electronically.
Julia: That's right, it really is. The other thing that I like to work with young people on is the difference between emotions and feelings because there is really a big difference between them. Emotions come from the mental mind as your mental mind is telling you, “I feel angry. I feel happy. I feel sad,” but that's all mental. Really, what you want to do to figure out what you're really feeling is tune in to your body. What is your body telling you? What are you feeling physically? That's a real feeling.
To be able to interpret what your body is saying like if you have a stomach ache, if you are having a conversation with somebody and suddenly you have the stomach ache, if you are not in tune with your body, you are going to interpret that as some emotion. It's like, “This person is making me angry.” Maybe that's not it. Maybe you are just really sensitive to the fact that they are negative. Instead of having to get angry at them, you are tuning in to what you are really feeling and like, “Oh, okay. They're a negative person and my body is reacting to that negativity.”
Michael: Maybe you are picking up this isn't a good business to you or there are some risk I need to investigate.
Julia: That's exactly right and that's where I was going with that. Your body is telling you, you have this feeling and they're a negative person and then just like, “If I'm feeling this way about them, maybe I don't want to be connected to them at all.” This is a person to stay away from rather than go off on emotions, which totally are just your interpretation. It's like connect to the physical.
Michael: When you talked about emotions being connected to your mental mind, can you dig into that a bit more to help us understand what you mean by that?
Julia: Your body is always sending you signals, but not everybody is in tune to their body, not everybody realizes that that's what's really happening. The mental mind gets in there, interprets it and says to you, “Okay. You are really angry about this. This person is really stupid and saying things that are making you angry.” Really what's happening is that they are just being negative and you don't want to be around that or maybe you're being negative and they don't want to be around it, so they are reacting to you.
Michael: Right. It's stories you create around the sensations in your mind.
Julia: That's exactly the right way to say it. It's stories that you are creating and when really what's happening is your body is trying to tell you something. It's really important to differentiate between the two.
Michael: Right, because otherwise you get lost in the story or might be an interpretation you have from some childhood experience that occurred to you. It's not accurate intuitive information about the current situation.
Julia: That's exactly right and don't we all know people that do that.
Michael: I'm one of them. That's why I have to be careful when I'm picking up things to know is this intuition or is this a story or is this some mental mind projection.
Julia: Exactly, and what is intuition really. That's important to know too.
Michael: What is intuition to you, Julia?
Julia: Intuition to me is actually my body telling me things. If I can tune in to my body, most often when I take the time to really do that and my clients also figure that out, when I take the time to do that, they are really listening to their gut. Your intuition is your gut level talking to you and your heart. Your gut and heart are connected.
Michael: They're all right next door.
Julia: They are next door, but they are really connected in a way if you look at it. If your heart is telling you that something is not right, your gut is reflecting that. If in your heart you know something is not right, your gut is going to say, “I have a stomach ache” or give you a headache or “My body is really tense. My muscles are tensing up” or “I don't feel well suddenly. What is that about?”
Michael: It might come from your gut or it might come from your legs or arms or your neck, all kinds of body parts.
Julia: Exactly. That's exactly right.
Michael: I find it helps to even talk to the body part that's hurting. Ask my gut, “I've got a tummy ache. What are you trying to tell me, tummy?” Inside my head if I'm not alone or if I'm alone I can ask it that loud.
Julia: That's what you are doing. You are connecting to the physical. You are connecting to the physical, which is where the intuition comes from. To me, that's what I believe. I don't think it's a mental thing. A lot of people talk about intuition like it comes from your mind, but it doesn't. It comes from your body.
Michael: I think it comes to different people in different ways. I think the body doesn't lie. If you are able to hear messages from your body, that is a great way to hear your intuition, but some people hear voices or they see signs in nature. There's many different ways for intuition to come to us if we are open to it.
Julia: You are right about that. I remember I once took a job because the number three was really important to me. At that time, the bearded irises had a great significance in my life. I once took a job because I went into the waiting room and there was a picture that was in three sections of bearded irises.
Michael: Wow! You don't see that every day.
Julia: No, you don't see that every day and I said, “Okay. I have to take this job.” That was the right move. It turned out to be really positive.
Michael: That's great that you noticed something unusual. It was a message. It's easy to dismiss those things, “Oh, it's just a coincidence” or not notice them at all. If you are open to it, it can lead to amazing things happening in our life.
Julia: It can. I've always studied spirituality and one of my spiritual teachers taught me. I tuned in when I saw that picture. I tuned in to what my body, what my gut and my heart were saying about it because there are also impostors. When you get really deep in the spirituality, there are impostors and there are negative energies that try to get in the way and tell you things that aren't real. Still, to me, I always go back to my body and reflect and look at, “Okay, here is this thing that has great significance to me, but is this real or not?”
Michael: I think that's a wise thing to do. Some of the guides that people have, angels or their benevolent guides and have a high vibration of love or above. Other guides can be lower vibration and they may not have your best interest at heart. They maybe more interested in pursuing their own objectives. An example of that would be if you involve drinking alcohol or taking drugs or other things that on one level are negative for us and another level part of us enjoys them. It's easy to get a message, a nudge, “Oh, let's have another drink” or “Let's go out to that party where the people who take drugs go.” That is not so useful.
Julia: That's right. When you look at it that all comes from the physical because alcohol and a lot of drugs, even marijuana, which some people use to open up their creativity, if you over do it and you over use it, it dulls your senses. It affects your brain. Alcohol numbs your brain and if you have too much of it, it numbs your body as well. It all comes back to the physical, at least in my way of thinking.
Michael: I think that's right. One of the things I talk about in my book is that you can have a spiritual advisory board where you invite different entities and angels to give you advice, but you are the one in control of your advisory board. If someone is not helping you, you can fire them from your board. Just because they are a spiritual being doesn't mean they are infallible for you.
Julia: You are exactly right about that. You are exactly right.
Michael: Why is it so important to you that you help young people become entrepreneurs because that's not what school guidance counselors typically tell students?
Julia: Don't open that can of worms. You'll get me on my soapbox because… No, I'm going to answer your question.
Michael: Go for it.
Julia: To me, school really still training kids to prepare for jobs and jobs are unrealistic. That's an unrealistic approach these days because jobs are going away. Even Walmart is going to start using robots. They have patent to develop robots to run their stores. They are not going to be hiring people. I believe that we are seeing a full circle back to when this country was started, how it was founded by entrepreneurs. We had the people that are on the grocery store. We had the mine owners that hired miners. We had the horseshoers. We had the blacksmiths. We have people that owned the boarding houses. Everything that was done was done by an entrepreneur and they either paid each other or they exchange services. In some way, we were an entrepreneurial society and we are coming back to that full circle.
When I was a clinical social worker, I work with foster youths who had some very serious mental health issues. They had bipolar. They had depression. There were days at a time they couldn't get out of bed. They could get a job. They weren't stupid kids, but they couldn't maintain those jobs. When you look at people like that, that's true for a lot of adults too. We have all the service men coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD. They can get a job, but they can't maintain it. There are days at a time where they can't function in society. For people like that, if we didn't encourage them to start their own businesses and somehow create an income for themselves, then they would be dependent on a system for their whole life and that's demoralizing.
Michael: Yeah, it is demoralizing, much more empowering that someone creates their own enterprise and learns how to do that.
Julia: That's exactly right. I have the perfect story. This was a real experience that I have. This is what put me on this path to begin with was this client who have bipolar. He suffered depression. He had some other mental health issues. This kid when he was a young child was badly abused by family members. He was not only physically abused, but sexually abused by his mother and his grandmother, by the women in your life that you were supposed to trust. He had some serious things going on. Then, he became a drug addict. His dream was to be a professional skateboarder and he carried a skateboard. I think he slept with that skateboard under his pillow.
He is so attached to that skateboard, but because of all these issues, he was very uncoordinated. He was high most of the time on whatever drug he was taking. He fell down a lot. He broke an arm. He just was not coordinated. This kid was not ever going to be a professional skateboarder, but I didn't want to quash his dream because that's the only thing he really had. When he lost his job, he had a job at McDonald's and he got into a fight with the manager and he got fired and he came home. First, he tells me he quit his job, but really he got fired. I just realize that was like the pivotal moment in my life when I realized if I can't help this kid do something for himself, he is going to be on the system his entire life.
What did that mean for him, it meant connecting him with mental health program to do some kind of rehabilitation and get him a job that would be just a basic like, what do they call that? Low paying job for the rest of his life and that wasn't okay with me because this was a really bright, creative kid. He just had these issues. I sat him down. We look at what skills he had and it turned out he could draw. I never knew he was an artist and he brought me some of his drawings. I said, “What if you do drawings that you could customize skateboards with like they do for surfboards?”
He really like that idea. He came back the next day with 12 drawings. That's how motivated he was, 12 new drawings overnight. He said, “Okay. Who do I sell them to?” I'm like, “Okay. Oh, who manufactured your skateboard?” We turn the skateboard over and we contacted those people and this was the days before you could email things to people. The guy said, “Fax me some drawings. I'll look at them.” We fax the 12 drawings and the next day he got an order for four of the drawings.
Michael: Wow!
Julia: We didn't even know what to charge for him. We didn't think about any of this. I have no idea this was going to work and he wanted four of the drawings. We just kind of affix the price to it. I explained to the guy what I was doing and he helped me come up with a fair price and he bought four of the drawings. Two weeks later, this young man comes to me and he goes, “You know I had a dream that I was designing silk screen for t-shirts and things that had to do with skateboarding. I worked with his social worker. We got him some used silk screening equipment and he started making designs. Within a couple of weeks, his stuff was hanging in the local sporting goods store. He was 18 at that time and he is now 32 and he is still doing this.
Michael: He is supporting himself. He has created an enterprise that he is motivated and passionate about.
Julia: That's exactly right. He has days at a time where he can't do anything and it doesn't affect his income whatsoever.
Michael: What a great story.
Julia: This is why I built the business that I do right now. I train trainers because my big mission is to end youth unemployment worldwide because it's an enormous problem in every country. In this country, it's like a huge problem and a big drain on the system.
Michael: The system probably won't be able to deal with it in the future. There is just so much change.
Julia: That's exactly right. Now, they're already talking at taking away some of these benefits. If they go away, then what? We need to not only teach kids how to build a business and how to be responsible for their own economic well-being, but also we need to teach them wealth creation skills. When you get money coming in and even if it's a little bit a money, how do you make that grow? How do you protect it? What do you do with the money when you get it that's going to ensure that you have some in the future? That's not something they teach in school.
Michael: No, it isn't. Also, they don't teach you how to use your intuition in your enterprise, in your business.
Julia: That's exactly right. The way that I do that is by working with kids, teaching them how to interpret what they're feeling and not just let their emotions rule them, but look at what your body is telling you. To me, that's the way to easiest to tune in to your intuition because your body intuitively is giving you the right signals that you need.
Michael: It can't be overwritten by other people trying to convince you of what they want.
Julia: Exactly. That's exactly right.
Michael: Very powerful. This reminds me I have some friends in the unschooling movement where it's not just home schooling, the child directs their own education. If they are interested in drawing things to make t-shirts, designs, that's what they study.
Julia: Exactly.
Michael: I think there's a good connection there. I have a friend who's been doing this for, I think, three years now. Originally, he was 14 years old. Now, he is 17. He has his own business as they travel around. He is motivated to learn stuff because it's useful to him.
Julia: That's amazing. I have a Facebook page called Empowering Young Entrepreneurs and I'm constantly posting stories about teenagers who are starting businesses and how they do it. There's one young man, started a business called Man Candles and he was 14 and somebody gave him a candle for his birthday and he told his father. “I can't use this.” His father said, “Why?” “Because it's too girly.” His dad says, “Well, what could we do about that? Would you light a candle?” He goes, “Yeah.” They came up with putting candles in tin cans like he would get in soup cans and things like that that make it more masculine. They didn't use perfumy scents in it. They use more masculine colors and things that boys and men would be attracted to. I think he is 22 now. He is a multimillionaire.
Michael: Wow!
Julia: He did this, his dad said, “Okay. This is a great idea. Let's see how we can get this manufactured.” His dad supported him in getting this done and they now have a multimillion dollar business called Man Candles.
Michael: Wow! That's amazing. This can be for millions of teens and young adults.
Julia: That's exactly right. I can give you story after story after story. Another young woman, she was 14 at that time, didn't like her babysitter. They couldn't find somebody that she really liked to stay with her. She started her own business at 14 years old. It's a nanny service. I don't remember the exact name of it, but it's a nanny service and she interviewed all the nannies. She came up with a criteria and then had to start hiring people because it caught on. By the time she was 16, her revenue was 500,000 a year and she had to hire somebody to manage the business for her.
Michael: So many things here or an opportunity for young people and so much more empowering, then getting into stuck in a dead end job that probably would end anyway. I was mentioning earlier that book, The End of Jobs by Taylor Pearson. He talks about how the importance of entrepreneurship and how jobs really are. Traditional jobs are more risky because they can just end like those people working at Walmart whose jobs might go away or the people working at the Amazon warehouse where they are bringing in robots to do things.
Julia: That's right, and drones. We are not even going to need delivery people anymore because they are going to deliver using drones.
Michael: Using drones or using self pad. Computer controlled vehicles is the other route that's going.
Julia: Self-driving vehicles.
Michael: A lot of the jobs with taxis or driving trucks across the country. Those won't exist in five or ten years.
Julia: That's exactly right. I know they are looking at using robots in fast food restaurants.
Michael: I have seen some videos of that. It's quite amazing.
Julia: It's amazing and it's kind of scary when you look at it. It's very scary. We need to teach kids the mindset. To me, intuition is part of a mindset. They need to learn how to tune in. Entrepreneurs have a certain mindset that's different from an employee. Some people have that intuitively, they just know, but they need to develop that mindset and they do and others don't, but it can be learned.
Michael: I think helping young people do this is great. There's also plenty of older people who are entrepreneurs who could benefit by improving their intuition.
Julia: That's exactly right. I agree with you on that 100% and everybody can do it. That's the thing. Some people are inherently intuitive, but it's a skill that can be learned.
Michael: It is. Just like you learned it when you were younger with those Indians in Florida.
Julia: That's right, because we all have it. Intuition is part of the human experience. It's just that some of us have never learned to tune into it.
Michael: That's true. Some of us have been taught to tune it out.
Julia: There you go. That's exactly right. If it weren't for my experience with the Indians, I would not have connected with my intuition. I wouldn't be who I am today because my mother certainly, she used to say to me, “Oh, you have such a big imagination like that was a bad thing.”
Michael: How do we get creative ideas for our businesses if we don't use our imagination?
Julia: That's exactly right or tune in to your intuition. What is your body telling you? What are you passionate about? You have to tune in to what you are feeling to get passion because sometimes it's just a mind thing. It's like, “I love to do this”, but do you really? Is it something you really love to do? Is your body like saying getting excited? You are feeling that energy spark through you or is this just your mind telling you “Oh, yeah, I'm really passionate about this”?
Michael: Because so many people get into careers. I'm sure some attorneys are passionate about being an attorney, but there's also some who their parents told them “This is a good career. Go do it.”
Julia: That's exactly right. I grew up like that too and I resisted because I've always been more of a creative mind. I love to write. I really wanted to be a writer, but my whole life, I grew up with people telling me, “Oh, you have to have a job. You have to have a job. You need a job.” For the longest time, most of my life I had a job. Now, that I'm retired and I'm a senior, I went “You know what? My whole life, I didn't follow my own instincts. I didn't follow my own intuition and do what I needed to do for me to be happy and creative. Now, I am doing what I'm passionate about and I'm never been happier.”
Michael: Just imagine if the whole world was filled with people who could follow their own intuition and know what they were passionate about on being part to create things themselves instead of depending on a job or a government handout.
Julia: That's right. Wouldn't that be an amazing world to live in?
Michael: It would. I'm imagining it now.
Julia: Exactly. That's what I'm trying to help create.
Michael: I have this question I use what would it take. What would it take to create that world?
Julia: It would take creating a network of young entrepreneurs worldwide who every day could check in with each other, could be connected, could do peer to peer mentoring, could encourage each other to keep going, to keep that energy up and know that you're a part of something really big in the world. To me, that's what it would take.
Michael: I think those are great answers you are getting there.
Julia: I think it's not that difficult to do. It just takes somebody with the mindset to do it and I'm that person. That's why I'm training other trainers because I can only work with so many kids at one time. If I can train trainers around the world, I'll reach that many more kids and it will happen that much faster.
Michael: That's a great approach.
Julia: The kids today love that. They are growing up with the internet. They are connected to the world in a way that I never had. I have other advantages that these kids don't have. These kids today are not really learning socialization skills. They have a hard time having a conversation with somebody unless they are pressing buttons. To sit face to face and have a conversation with somebody is a difficulty for some of my clients. They are having to get used to that. You have to give customer service. You have to be able to talk to people. Here's where intuition really is important because you have to be able to tune in to your customers. You have to know what it is that they are looking for from you. What do they need? What will make them happy?
Entrepreneurs talk about pain points and I don't like to look it at that way. I don't think a person needs to be in pain to need a solution to something, so they have a challenge. I call it a challenge. I never let my kids say, “It's hard or there's a problem.” “No, there's not. That doesn't exist. That's your mental mind telling you something that's not right. You have a challenge, and what do you need to do to solve this challenge to get past this challenge?” My kids have to say, “Oh, this is a real challenge, but I'm up for it.” Then, we start looking for solutions.
Michael: It's great to have to take a positive approach to challenges instead of feeling stuck with a problem.
Julia: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I just had a conversation with one of my former clients. She is now 29 years old and I'm still parenting her, but she is now in nursing school, which is something she has wanted ever since she was 16 years old. She wanted to be a nurse. She has some major issues with learning. It was such a challenge to get her through it. Every time she started conversation with me, she goes, “This is so hard.” I went, “No, it's not. It's not hard. It's just a challenge, but you're up for it. You're a smart girl.”
Now, she is so excited and she called me the other day to thank me for being there for her and for making her change her mindset from this is hard to this is a challenge and I'm up for it. Now, she doesn't have as many challenges as she used to either because she built self-confidence through all of this. Every time a challenge came up, she was up for it. I would just constantly move her into that mindset and she solved one thing after another and got through one challenge after another to get into nursing school. Now, she just feels this confidence that she never would have had if I didn't insist that she change her mindset.
Michael: That's very powerful. If you're an entrepreneur, you are always going to be coming across challenges.
Julia: That's exactly right. I tried to get kids into the mindset of like a challenge is a good thing. It's a good thing because it forces you to be more creative. It forces you to go deeper inside yourself to find answers that you wouldn't necessarily look for.
Michael: Yes, so you can connect.
Julia: You know how people who are religious are always fond to saying, “God never brings you more than you can handle.” It's the same idea. It's the same thing. You never are bought more than you can handle. If you just have the right mindset, you can handle it. The more you connect to your intuition, the easier it is to find the answers that you need to solve your challenges.
Michael: I certainly find that myself, my intuition can solve any problem that comes up.
Julia: That's right. Connecting with your intuition for different people comes in different forms, but however you do it, do it and it makes your life so much easier.
Michael: It does. That requires a mindset change that life is a struggle to be let go.
Julia: That's exactly right because it's not a struggle. It is what it is.
Michael: The struggle is a mental story we create around what's happening.
Julia: Absolutely. That's absolutely right. Life, it is what it is. If you are not happy with something or you feel like you have an obstacle or something is in your way, you just go inside yourself and say, “Okay, what do I need to do?” Then, sit quietly and the answer will come to you.
Michael: It may come to you immediately. It might come in a dream. It might come some other way you get the information.
Julia: It might be signs within nature, you never know, but you have to be aware. You have to like be really in tune to listen for the answer.
Michael: How do you get in tune to listen to the answers, Julia?
Julia: I think mostly I utilize nature like I live in a really beautiful environment and I'll just go sit outside. At night, I have the owls hooting in my tree. It's just so beautiful where I live. I'll go to a river or a creek or the ocean and just open myself up to that feeling to be connected to something that's way bigger than me and then the answers come to me that way.
Michael: That helps quiet the mind as well.
Julia: Absolutely. Because if you are sitting there listening to the ocean or a river rushing, that sound and the energy from that is way bigger than your mind chatter. It's needing to like get shut down the mind chatter. There's that monkey mind that's always just chattering and going a million miles a minute. To be able to shut that off and get past it, then the answers just flow to you.
Michael: I think many of us had the experience of going on vacations to the sea or out into the mountains or wherever and being a lot more creative in work when we came back.
Julia: Exactly.
Michael: We can do this every day just by getting into nature. Taking a shower isn't really going to nature, but often entrepreneurs get new ideas in the shower.
Julia: In the shower. That's right, often I heard that. “My best ideas come from the shower with the hot water beating down on me and it's so relaxing.” That really relaxing I think is the key, whatever it takes to help you relax. It's really all about shutting down that monkey mind that is constantly filling you with all of these stories and telling you stories that really hold you back and keep you down. If you can stop listening to the stories from your monkey mind, then the answers come to you.
Michael: I think the answers are there the whole time. It's just that we don't hear them with the monkeys chattering so loudly.
Julia: I think you are exactly right. Some people also call that the lizard brain. You have your lizard brain part. I know John Assaraf who has done a lot of work in neuroscience. He refers to it as the lizard brain.
Michael: Because it's reactive part of the mind.
Julia: Uh-huh. It's the reactive part of the mind, exactly right.
Michael: I know John has a number of audio programs to that. I think it's called binaural beats where it kind of tunes out your monkey mind by playing different sounds in each ear.
Julia: He does. Also, Vishen Lakhiani from Mindvalley, he does wonderful meditation music and binaural beats. He has got things for sleeping and things for energizing and they are wonderful. They are just really wonderful and it really works.
Michael: If someone listening is having trouble connecting to their intuition, maybe one step is to try and find some meditation music that helps in that regard.
Julia: I've been using OmHarmonics a lot. That's Mindvalley's meditation program and I love it.
Michael: Wonderful.
Julia: I really love it. It really helps. I deal with insomnia sometimes and that really helps me sleep. Makes a big difference.
Michael: Relaxing and also, with insomnia, noticing what my body is trying to tell me.
Julia: You have it too?
Michael: I wouldn't say I have insomnia, but I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and I'm wide awake. I either lie in bed and meditate on my different parts of my body and different chakras or I'll get up and use that creative energy and get some things done and have a nap later. If you have your own business, often you have freedom as to how you spend your time.
Julia: That's exactly right. That's one of the best parts of being in business for yourself. You can structure your day anyway you want. I've always been a night owl and I'm just not really a morning person, so I do my best work at night. At morning, it's just the time for relaxing to me and building up to the day.
Michael: Then, you get the work done late at night when it's quiet.
Julia: Yeah, late at night or I don't schedule phone calls after 10 o'clock in the morning. I start my day and my work day around 10, but I work late hours. I have clients overseas so I'm off and on Skype like late at night.
Michael: That's one of the great things about helping young people be entrepreneurs. They can create more freedom in their life whether it's freedom of time or freedom to travel.
Julia: That's right. The other thing that I really like to do is teach them about lifestyles, how to create a lifestyle that they really want and the business that they are passionate about should support that lifestyle.
Michael: Lifestyle design I think is what some people call that.
Julia: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It doesn't mean that you have to be a millionaire. I have a friend, he is from Denmark and he is about 23 or 24. He has become a DJ and he can travel anywhere in the world and do DJ parties. He doesn't have a lot of money, but it gives him enough money to travel to the next place and that's what he wants to do. He wants to travel. That's his lifestyle. He has his backpack and he travels light and he takes the train and he takes the bus. He hitchhikes. He is just having a glorious time with his life and able to earn money wherever he goes.
Michael: Wow! Many people would love to have that lifestyle and it's possible to create it if you listen to your intuition and use your imagination and creativity.
Julia: That's right. Being abundant is not always about having a lot of money.
Michael: It might be having other things, a lot of time, a lot of friends, health, freedom.
Julia: It's exactly right. Choosing the life he wants.
Michael: There's nothing wrong with money either.
Julia: Absolutely not. I think everybody should have it. Money is essential. You have to eat. You have to buy food. If you have a car, you have to put gas on the car to get places. Money is important. I don't mean to downplay the importance of money, but money isn't everything. My feeling is when you are doing what you are passionate about and serving others, when your passion is serving other people, the money comes.
Michael: I think that's true. I think it also helps to have some to the things you talk about earlier, the understanding how to work with money and how to preserve wealth and how to invest your time and money to make more money.
Julia: That's right because that's not something that we teach kids in school and so they don't learn it and that is a big issue. I'm always excited to find new ways to introduce that to people, to my kids. Wealth creation and there are spiritual principles about money too. Money is also mindset.
Michael: What's the mindset you see there?
Julia: I think your thoughts about money like you said money is important. I grew up with a lot of limiting beliefs about money because part of my father's family had a lot of money. My mother grew up in extreme poverty. There was a big clash there. There's like cognitive dissonance between the two. My mother always have this thing about my mother's skill. She is 88 now and she hoards money. She just hoards it. She'll deny herself things that she wants or needs because she doesn't want to spend the money on it. Because she is a hoarder of money, she has a lot of money put away.
Michael: But she doesn't enjoy it.
Julia: What's the point? She is 88. Isn't it time to start spending some of this money? She just, “No.” I grew up with all these limiting beliefs. The arguments in my house, we never discuss money, but all the tension in my house was always over money. I saw how people with money acted toward people that didn't have money and I just said, “Look, if that's what money does to you, I don't really want it.” When you say the money you don't really want it, it's not coming to you.
Michael: Right. Why would it hang around?
Julia: Exactly. That's part of the mindset about money. You have to really embrace wanting money and have it for the right reasons. I had a spiritual teacher that would say to me, “You have to have a good reason to have money. What are you going to do with the money that benefits other people? If you have a really good reason for the money or genuine need for the money, the money will come to you.” He demonstrated that every day.
Michael: I think appreciating it and feeling grateful for the money that comes into your life is part of the key. That's definitely a way to do that.
Julia: I agree. Gratitude is one of the more important states of mind for money and relationship to money, being grateful for everything you have.
Michael: Being grateful for the business we have and all our clients and the people we work with. That can be a meditation where you just think through all of things in your business that you feel grateful for. Maybe you include your own intuition in that list as well.
Julia: Exactly. That would be perfect.
Michael: That's one of the ways to grow your intuition, to have a gratitude practice for, “Oh, here are all the things my intuition help me with today.”
Julia: That's a great idea. I have a gratitude list. I have a friend that taught me, she does, which she calls a 10-10 list. Every day, she writes down 10 things that she is grateful for. She starts her day out like this. 10 things that she is grateful for and then 10 things that she would like to have in her life.
Michael: I love that.
Julia: The 10-10 exercise, she does it every single day and it works for her. I have adapted that. I've adapted it rather. I have to say it's really change my life.
Michael: I can see how it would because it fills you with more gratitude and it also gives you clear focus about what you want to create.
Julia: Mm-hmm (affirmative). When I send an email, I've changed my signature to read, “In gratitude.”
Michael: Instead of sincerely yours, it says “In gratitude, Julia.”
Julia: Exactly, in gratitude.
Michael: I love that.
Julia: That's right.
Michael: This has been an amazing conversation Julia. You've just shed so many interesting things about entrepreneurship and intuition. I'm going to include your new website in the show notes, so people can read about you there. They can find you on social media too. I will include the links you give on that as well.
Julia: That would be great. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about this. I'd never talked about entrepreneurship in relationship to intuition before. I really appreciate that opportunity because intuition really is a big part of an entrepreneur mindset.
Michael: I think it is. Seeing the opportunity and being creative to solve challenges and just listening, being open to your intuition.
Julia: I agree. Even coming down to choosing your niche like who are your customers going to be, who are your clients going to be. Following your intuition is like what's right, who are you going to best connect with.
Michael: That sounds like it could be a topic of a whole other conversation.
Julia: There you go.
Michael: Thank you so much, Julia.
Julia: It's been my pleasure.
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