the bossbabe podcast - From Wall Street to 8-Figures: What 3 Burnouts Taught Her About Building Sustainably

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Ever wondered why every time you reach a new revenue level, the same exhaustion shows up — just dressed differently? In this conversation, Natalie sits down with Julie Santiago — founder of We Are The Women, former Wall Street operator, and one of the rare guests who can break down what high-functioning burnout actually looks like at the 7- and 8-figure mark. Julie walks through the three burnouts that shaped her career: the Wall Street year that put tumors on her ovary at 28, the coaching practice she rebuilt in a San Francisco apartment, and the post-motherhood collapse that brought her to her knees again. The takeaway isn't grit. It isn't quitting. It's something Julie calls evolution and it's the framework most high-achieving women never get taught. This isn't about hustle, balance, or finding your why. It's a brutally honest breakdown of what high-functioning burnout actually looks like at the 7- and 8-figure mark, why the same pattern that builds your success eventually breaks you, and how to evolve past the cycle so you stop ending up in the same place at every new level. Time Stamps: 00:59 The childhood imprint that built an 8-figure business and broke it 05:45 Wall Street, tumors at 28, and the body's verdict 13:10 The 2-path trap: why pushing through OR quitting both fail 20:45 Why clunkiness is a season change, not a failure to optimize 28:40 The match-my-salary moment her therapist shut down 33:22 Safety, surrender, and a new relationship to money 38:18 The metaphor that broke her thinking about money's source 43:30 Going all-in vs. knowing when to evolve Resources + Links: Pre-Order The Freedom-Based Business Method. Follow Julie on Instagram Learn more about We Are the Women Sign Up For Our Free Weekly Newsletter & Get Insights From Natalie Every Single Week On All Things Strategy, Motherhood, Business Growth + More.  Drop Us A Review On The Podcast + Send Us A Screenshot & We’ll Send You Natalie’s 7-Figure Operating System Completely FREE (value $1,997).

Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast. This week I am so excited to have Julie Santiago on the podcast. I met Julie first through CEO Mama and just fell in love with her and her mission and everything that she stands for. She is one of the most powerhouse entrepreneurs I have ever met. She is the founder and CEO of We Are the Women, which is a wellness and leadership coaching company for ambitious women who are committed to living and leading in a sustainable way. Julie was the founder. was on Wall Street, graduated all the way up to VP, and walked away from all of it to figure out what is at the root of chronic burnout for high achieving women. And since then, she's built an empire solving that problem. This episode goes in many places, but we really try to get to the root of what causes reoccurring burnout in so many women like us that have huge ambition. And we also talk about how that shifts for a lot of us inside of motherhood. This was one of my favorite in a long time and I think you're really going to love it. Let's dive in. Julie, I want to start in childhood with you. You have such an amazing story and when I was doing some research on you,

you talked a little bit about your relationship with your dad and I saw myself so much in your story. So can you talk a little bit about your relationship with your parents and what your childhood was like? Yeah. So I come from a family that is Lebanese. So my dad's fully Lebanese. My mom is half Lebanese. And there was this interesting dynamic that happened growing up, which is I saw my dad as the businessman, as the breadwinner, as the one with the power. And while my mom had a full-time job, my dad was the one that decided everything. So my mom was a teacher, and she would hand her paychecks over to my dad every month. Like that was the dynamic of the money. So my dad controlled all the money, which meant in a way that he kind of had the power in our family.

But growing up Lebanese, my dad also gave me a great gift, which in a way kind of turned out to be a little bit of a curse, which is what I think you're talking about, which is my dad used to tell me, I never want you to rely on a man for money. I never want you to rely on a man for money, which I internalized to mean, okay, it's my job to do everything on my own. I can't rely on other people. I have to be hyper, hyper independent. And that, led to an entire life of achieving and accomplishing and being the best and doing it all alone at the expense of my body, at the expense of my relationships, et cetera. But that imprint of, I never want you to rely on a man is something that led to so much hyper-independence and individualization that I reached a certain point in my life where I was like, this doesn't actually work anymore. It was a great gift. It led to so much success. But the undercurrent of it all, created some hard dynamics that I really had to overcome. How did, just even seeing the example of your mom handing over money to your dad,

how did that make you think about the masculine and the feminine? Yeah. So, okay, so I grew up in a Lebanese home, and while my family was deeply respectful, there was always this underlying unsaid thing, which is the men have the power. And so when I saw my mom, my mom was this, my mom was a very fiercely feisty, independent woman, but having to submit in a way financially to my father, it was the story that I made up about that

was I will never be in that position. I will never hand a paycheck over to a man. I will never be in a position where I have to ask for money or fight for. for myself to be heard. And so I think that's how that happened. I relate so much because growing up, my mom stayed in really abusive relationships because of money. She didn't have the money.

And so I grew up with a similar belief of I will never rely on anyone else. And like that hyper independence, which served me for a really long time until it didn't. And then I had to really look at it and unlearning that was probably one of the hardest lessons I've had to unlearn. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about where it got you. Yeah, for sure.

Got you to Wall Street. Tell me that story. Yeah. Well, I just want to say the thing about, you know, you sharing about what you saw in your mom. I think it's so beautiful what happens as children because I don't regret an ounce of my life. I'm so grateful for that message from my father. He saw what happened to the women in his family and he was like, my daughter will not have a similar fate. Yeah. I want her to be more empowered. I want her to be more free.

And that was a great gift because it led me to incredible things. things. It led me to leave the small town in Louisiana that I grew up in. It led me to Johns Hopkins. It led me to a career on Wall Street. It led me to create the business that I have now that has generated multiple eight figures and revenue. Like the gift of my hyper-independence led to so much outer success. Yeah. But I think you know, we know, we know that we can only walk that road for so long before we get to the end of it. And the same pattern that led to our success ends up becoming the same pattern that leads to our downfall if we don't know how to manage those traits in ourselves. So I'm with you on that. It has been the hardest thing to unlearn in my life.

It's been the hardest. What was your career on Wall Street like? Yeah. Okay. So when I was a junior you're in college, these folks came to Johns Hopkins to do a recruiting event. And they were like, you can work on Wall Street. And I was like, what, what's that about? And so I interviewed, you know, I can drop my resume. And they were like, great, come up to New York and interview. So I walk into the, onto the trading floor in New York City. And there's hundreds of people, like one big open room, no screens. I mean, no, no desk, no walls, all just one table, lots of screens. Everybody had two phones. in their ears, like yelling and screaming.

And as kind of an adrenaline junkie and an achievement addict, I was like, sign me up. I'm in. I'm in. This looks intense. This looks crazy. This looks fun. You mean I could get paid to do this? This kind of feels like a carnival ride.

And it was, it was. I mean, I can say more about it, but it is, it was a journey that. pushed me to my edges. I really developed some bad habits and very addictive habits in order to survive because a job like that for a woman like me was so out of alignment with who I was that I was having to manage all of the symptoms. I was having to ignore my body and then created a whole bunch of ways to just push through that involved over drinking, over eating,

disordered relationships with food, overworking, like you fill in the blink. And a lot of that came down to the fact that my system knew that it had to have more energy to survive than was natural. So I just kept trying to create false energy to keep going. And I kept borrowing that energy from the future that ultimately burned me right into the ground.

What did it look like up to burnout for you? Like, do you remember that point? Oh, yeah, definitely. What was that looking like? One of the things that's so interesting is this level of over-responsibility, I think, that we get in before burnout. It's like everything feels so important. Everything feels like it's a fire.

And it feels like it's fully our responsibility to put out the fire. And, you know, I think about, like, my young, you know, 20-something-year-old self, I believe that to be true. Like, it felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders. They took a lot of responsibility, over responsibility, over functioning, all these qualities of, you know, this high achiever DNA that we have. My body was wired, but I was so tired. So that wired but tired, it felt like I was always seeking the next dopamine hit, the next high. You know, at the time, this was like early 2000s.

So iPhones weren't even really a thing. So like I would be on my Blackberry in the cab at 3.30 in the morning on the way to work. And then at 9 p.m. at night, drinking half a bottle of wine and trying to live a normal life as a 20-something and then waking up the next day and doing it all over again. And there were just these points of thinking this cannot be what the rest of my adult life is going to look like. It felt hopeless. But I felt like I had checked all the boxes of success. So I felt like I couldn't really question it or change it because everything was so good on paper. So what led you to start thinking about changing it?

Because that's a big career to leave. Yeah, for sure. I think that this is what happened to me. This is what I see happen to so many women. Because women, like us, that high achieve our DNA, we usually have to have our backs against the wall with our hair on fire before we do anything. And like, that's a beautiful quality. Like my level of resilience and grit is up there.

But what it means is I can usually push to the point of I can push past my limits. Yeah. And so for me, it was my body because what happens usually is that we ignore ourselves for so long and it's the body that starts getting loud. So for me, in a very short span, I developed a tumor both on my forehead and on an ovary, both were benign, but I developed these tumors. I threw out my back. I had herniated discs as a 28-year-old. And it was thing after thing. I got the flu. I was having these unexplained digestive issues. It didn't matter what I did. And for the first time in Wall Street history, they required everybody to take a two-week vacation. You had to take two consecutive weeks off. Now, this wasn't like a kind, generous thing they did.

They did it because they didn't want people insider trading. And so they were like, everybody needs to take two weeks off. So if you're insider trading or if you're doing anything with the markets, we'll find out. And so it's like, okay, I'm going to take my first vacation in like five, six years and it really was my first vacation. I didn't even take days off. It was just this on all the time. 10, 12 hours a day flying down and back the coast from San Francisco to L.A. on all the time. So I took a vacation within a week. All the symptoms went away. No digestive issues, no unexplained, you know, heart palpitations. It was like my body started to recalibrate the night before I was going back to work. They started again. And I was like, oh,

Wait, maybe my health doesn't have to do with my health and it has to do with all these other things. It was the first time that I ever connected mind, body, spirit. You know, I mean, this was over 15 years ago at this point. I didn't have that language of holistic health and living and wellness. I didn't understand how all the things connected. And so that was the first time that I questioned what I was doing. And that, like just that one thought of like, oh, maybe my job's making me sick. was enough for me to start questioning a lot of other things.

What do I want? What does, how is my life supposed to look now? What if I didn't do this, what would it be? And then I started reading, I started following the threads, like following these sparkly breadcrumbs, you know, of maybe, you know, reading an article here or there, and then, and there's more. But, you know, it ultimately, it meandered me out of the job.

Like, I ultimately found, I was super interested in holistic health. I signed up for a holistic health coaching certification. A few weeks into that, I was like, oh my gosh, I think I'm a coach. This was 2010. Coaching wasn't as common as it is now. Not even close.

Uh-uh. And I remember one of, this is very, this is hilarious memory because my boss on Wall Street at the time had a friend, I had a wife. He was married and his wife had a friend who was a life coach. And I remember sitting on the Wall Street trading floor and him telling me about his wife's friend who was a life coach and I rolled my eyes. I was like, oh, people need coaches to tell them how to live. their lives. And it's the irony of like, sure enough, you know, one year later, two years later,

I was like, oh, maybe this is what I was supposed to be doing. And so, and then, you know, it took me a little while to ultimately walk away from it, but I did towards this thing that felt more aligned for me. And I mean, you've built a wildly successful business, but I know it hasn't been this. Okay, I quit Wall Street. I start my business and then all is good. You've talked about repeating the same patterns over and over in your business. And I really want to get into this. So I really relate in a sense of I feel like for such a long time and I'm still not immune to it, I would go into like really hyperachievement, overachievement, over extending and then the complete opposite end collapse. And then I'd repeat, repeat, repeat and never learn my lesson.

Yeah. And you've talked a lot about this. So can you give me some of that context in your then business career? For sure. So I think. The thing that you just described is so beautiful. And I talk about that back and forth is path one and path two. So we kind of learn that there's two paths. The first path is to stay, to grind, to push, to force, to muscle through, to struggle. That's path one. And we know if we do that, we'll eventually burn up.

We know it. We know it's not sustainable. But it's like it feels like I have to do that until some imaginary thing happens until the next launch, until I have enough money in the savings, until I have. have this many Instagram followers. Like, that's path one. Like, I'm going to push and force until I get the outcome that I think I want at the expense of whatever.

Path two is I'm going to quit. I'm going to stop. I'm going to collapse. I'm going to reject all of this. I'm going to walk away. And that actually feels really good for a time. It does. You've done that.

I've done that. Like, there are seasons when that might be the right move, but it's never the long-term solve. Because like you're saying then before you know it, you sort of recover, you get your energy back, and then you're right back on path one. It's like the circular thing that we're doing. And it feels like a dog chasing its tail all the time. I'm on path one. That doesn't work.

I'm on path two. Now I'm bored. And my achiever and an ambitious part of me, like wants to create, wants to give, wants to express, wants to share. And so this idea of path one, path two keeps us really locked in. But if we can zoom out, there's a path. three. Like we don't know that there's this third path, that there's this sacred path. And it's actually taken me many years, and I would say up until, you know, I kind of burned out three times, right? I burned out on my, and my Wall Street job. I quit the job thinking the job was the problem.

And then recreated the same thing in my tiny apartment in San Francisco trying to build a coaching practice. This time without a paycheck, without stability, and having no idea what I was doing, right? And I found myself back on path one. in the early days of entrepreneurship. And then I feel like I found my group, I found my rhythm, I found out how to do this in a way that aligned with me spiritually and that aligned with my values

and all of that happened. And then I had a child and the pandemic happened. And it brought me to my knees again around this path one, path two thing. So this idea of path three is really just this emergence of my own understanding just in these past few years. What is path three?

And path three, is a different way. It's a more sacred way. It's a more soulful way. It doesn't require us to abandon our ambition and it doesn't require us to collapse in the exhaustion of that ambition. But it's this path where we learn how to be, and you asked about the masculine and the feminine earlier, how we learn how to be in both of those, how we learn how to be, we learn how to rest, we learn how to trust, We learn how to surrender these feminine principles. And then we also know how to create structure and systems and how to work when we need to work. But we don't flip from one to the other on repeat.

It's this really beautiful, sacred path of both and. And I think a lot of that, a lot of what's required in that is trusting ourselves, trusting life, trusting the being just as much as we trust the doing. And that's a whole journey in and of itself to get to that place where we don't feel like we have to burn it all down or burn out. Like we don't have to burn out or opt out that we can actually allow for like this sacred emergence of a sacred third in a different way, you know? I think it's such a relevant conversation because, you know, I think the last couple of years

especially we've seen this huge like conversation around all you, the boss babe, girl boss or are you the trad wife? For sure. And I feel like, I mean, I've tried both. I've never been full trad wife, but I've been full 10 out of 10, you know, working in my business, on my business, scaling, growing all the things. And I've also been not working at home with my babies, you know, doing all the, as much resting as you can, you know, being more in the being. And neither of those path one, path two, have felt great to me because I am ambitious and I feel like When I go fully down the path of I'm out, I'm not doing the business thing. My ambition is like, well, what about me?

For sure. But then when I go down the path of just like going for it really hard, the core self in me is like, I'm exhausted. This doesn't feel good. But finding that path three is quite tricky. It is. Well, and I think the thing that I want to say about this, like the women who are called to walk path three, I believe that we're all here right now. on earth at this time for a reason. And not everybody's called to walk path three.

Okay. Like, I don't think that, like, I think some women are built to be in corporate and go hard and change that system from the inside out. I work with a lot of those women. And then I think there are some women who are called to stay home and tend home and 10 garden and 10 families. And that is truly what they were put on earth for. And they're called to that.

but for women like us and for the women you work with and the women I work with, those extremes aren't, either of those extremes aren't satisfying. There has to be this, how is it both and? How can it be both and? And I think the women like us who are here to do business in a different way and are here to do life in a different way are here to show the world how to do it in a different way, that it doesn't have to be this like push, strive, you know, competition, ignore other people, or, you know, soften, gentle.

Like, it's not either or. It has to be the both. And I think that's what we're learning as a society right now, too, is how do we not be in either extreme of the toxic version of those things? How do we just own what we're here to do? I'm with you. I feel like I fantasize about, you know, scaling my business to, you know, 100 million a year. And then I'm like, screw it all. I want a homeschool and like plant a garden and like,

you know, I mean, and we do that. Like I think that's so natural and normal. But it's like I'm both of these. I'm both of these aspects of me. I want to be present. I want to be loving. I want to be nurturing. I don't want to feel like I have to force them push. I don't want to have to be responsible for everything. I'd like to be able to rely on men and other people. And also, I want to change the world. And like, I have big dreams. And so not being in like the dichotomy of the black, white, if it's either this or that, I think that's a, it's a harmful way to look at life for people like us.

I want to dig into it more because I feel like I completely agree with you. But I feel like for me right now, obviously, you know, I have a six-month-old and an almost four-year-old. And I feel like I got into a pretty good rhythm with phase three. Yeah. Path three. took me a long time. Now it's clunky again. And I feel like I'm starting all over again with it. I'm like, oh, I'm different. I'm now a mom of two. My life looks very different. My business looks very different.

It's grown up a lot. It's clunky. I don't think I have the answer. If someone was saying to me, how do you do it? I'm like, honestly, like on a hope and a prayer. I don't know. All I know is I want it all. I want to be breastfeeding on demand, but I want to be available for my business. I want to want it all, but it's clunky. Yeah. How do we do it without the clunk? Yeah. Well, I don't think we do.

Okay. We, here's the way that I hold it. Because you're in such a different season. Yeah. You're in such a new season. And this is, you know, you asked me like, tell me about this path of like burning, burning out all these times in different ways in your business. I too felt like I had nailed path three.

Okay. And then the pandemic. And then my child. And then, you know, things in my marriage. And then life happens. And it brought me to my knees. Just like in a way, you're saying, like, okay, this is bringing me to my knees in a new way. Like, I'd gotten in the rhythm, but now it's different.

Now it's clunky. Yeah. And so the way that I hold it is that life is supposed to do this when we grow. You know, I wish, I so wish that we got to a place in our lives where things were consistent and never changed. It's like, nailed it, done. You know, there's the fantasy of that. Like, I figured it out. it's never going to be hard again.

But that doesn't happen. Because we're creatures of, because we're committed to growth, because we are human beings and we are made to evolve. We are always evolving, whether that's the internal work we're doing or the fact that we've added to our family or removing or whatever the next level is, there's clunkiness as we move to the next level. And I think the problem that we get in is we think that when there's clunkiness, it means there's something wrong.

And clunkiness doesn't mean there's something wrong. It means something needs to evolve. It means there's growth here. You're growing. Your life is growing. The people around you are inevitably growing. And so sometimes we get into this like, should I quit or should I grit? Like should I grit is path one.

Should I quit is path two? And there's this, the third path is like, well, how do I evolve now? And when there's clunkiness, what it's, signals is that we're entering into a different season of our lives. And I think sometimes burnout happens because we entered into a different season in our life, but we are living as if we're still in a previous season. So it's like you can no longer live like you're a mother of one. It doesn't work anymore. And so if we think that the that the clunkiness is wrong, then we'll try to optimize for the clunkiness. And sometimes that's important, but sometimes what's really needed is evolution.

I'm a different season now. What worked for me in season two is no longer what works in season three. And so that's where in a way surrender comes in. We keep trying to like push and force to fit our lives, to fit ourselves into a previous season. If we do that for too long, we burn out. And that happens because our soul is actually asking us, our bodies, our souls, whatever you want to say is asking us to evolve. It's asking us to meet our lives in the new season if we don't let our businesses evolve, if we don't let our families evolve, our systems evolve, how we do things evolve. And I think this is why we can say, well, yeah, in that season, Path 2 was right. Or in this season, I do want to be a stay-at-home homeschooling mom. And I'm going to do that for a few years.

There's nothing wrong with that. And it's a season. But I think when we get into the all or nothing, we get stuck. And so it's really about evolution, like evolving. through the clunkiness versus thinking the clunkiness is the problem. It's so true. And you mentioned a few things in there, too. You mentioned marriage. And I'm really curious how your, if your marriage has been affected by the hyperachiever, the hyper-independent.

Yeah. I know mine has. And I know it's not often easy. I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about that. I feel like we could have an entire podcast. I know. So I met my husband in college. He was, we were 20, 21 years old.

So I have now known my husband longer in my life than I didn't know him. Like that's how old I am. I'm in my mid-40s. So, you know, when we met, I was always myself. Like, you know, he met me as an achiever. He met me as a person on Wall Street. I'm like, what do I want to say about this? Because I could talk forever about this.

But here's, at the end of the day, my husband, my partner, wants to love me really well. And when I am playing the story, I never need to rely on a man, I don't give him the opportunity to love me very well. And so it has been such a journey, especially these last, you know, five, six years since having a child, since, you know,

our marriage has evolved so much. We've healed so much. It has been such a tender journey for me to see the ways in which I armor up, I am prickly. I am defensive at times. When I am playing out the story, I can't trust you. I can't trust men.

I can't rely on you. And having been with him for so long, you know, I know what it's like to look to the past as information for the present moment. That never works. Who are we now? Who are we becoming? Like wake up every day. meet my husband in a new way. But I will say that over these last few years,

as I've really learned to walk on Path 3, to trust, to surrender, to let go, to unhook from the story of not needing to rely on people, to put my hyper-independent, overachiever, inner child in the backseat, I've watched the way in which he's risen. And in the way he is so consistent, committed to loving me well and taking care of me.

And for a really long time, there was just no space for him to do that because I was just wearing this, you know, suit. I don't need you. He's like, okay. And, you know, I think that something that motherhood did for me and something that growing my business and my life beyond my own capacity did is that as my life got bigger, I had to learn to rely on other people. And like at other people being my husband or.

friends or mentors or, you know, the divine, I think life sometimes intentionally brings us to our knees. I think when life gets really big, we're invited to do it differently because life gets so big that we can't do it alone anymore. And that's also been a great gift of the achiever. I achieved so much that I couldn't do it on my own anymore. And I'm grateful for that. I feel like that is such a path of the overachiever. It's like, oh, we'll get you this far. But then at some point, if you want to stay there sustainably, you're going to have to learn the lesson that you're not the only one that's going to keep you here.

And it's interesting. Yeah, I feel. Has the breadwinner dynamic affected your relationship at all? Yeah. It's really funny. We were with some friends a couple weeks ago. And I was telling one of my guy friends, about this pattern with my father, you know, like you never rely on anyone.

And my husband kind of piped up and he was like, you're welcome. I'm glad I could play that out in your life for you. And, you know, it has my husband. I have always like switch roles. My husband is like, you know, Stanford educated engineer. He's super smart and has kind of walked his own path. He was an engineer. And when we lived in California and then he was a firefighter.

And then now he has this beautiful business called Better Husband. and he's doing this work. And we've kind of always like flip-flopped. But there was a point when I burned out the third time after having our child and after growing the business to multiple seven figures, you know, an annual revenue, multiple seven figures where I got so tired. You know about this. And I remember there was a moment that I came to my husband and I was like, I just want

you to make the same amount of money that I make so I can do whatever I want. and he was like, okay, you know, like marching orders. He was like, I'll go do it. And we did that. We tried that for about a year. And I remember my therapist at the time was like, so you're telling me that you told your husband that in order for you to be able to live the life you want,

he has to go work? And I was like, yeah, that's exactly right. And she's like, I don't think that's how it works. Like, I don't think you get to say that you aren't living your life unless something else happens. Yeah. I even know you know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah.

So, yes, it's absolutely impacted the dynamic of the relationship. Because so long as I have the story, and this is true for anything, you know, all our mindset matters so much, our nervous systems matter so much. If I have the story that I don't need a man and can't rely on a man, I have put my husband in a box of not being able to provide for me in that way. And we found, you know, our dynamic works, I will always, like, I love my work. I love making money. I'm really good at it.

And there are things in our family life that he does so much better than me. And it's like, we're just finding the dynamic of what that means. And then me stepping back and be like, what would it be like if I really let in a man? And then watching what that does for him, be like, I want to take care of her. She's finally ready to let me take care of her. You know, like someone told me a few years ago, they said, Julie, you have this business called, We Are the Women, but you're running it like a man. And you've forgotten that it's your job to be the muse, to be the muse for the business and to be

the muse for your husband. You're using him as the muse. But what would it be like if you became his muse? And I was like, no. But as I've really stepped more into trusting and allowing, I see how when I'm in a different path, when I'm not like forcing path one all the time, there's more room for. other people to be in Path 1 and hold that for me, whether that's my team or my husband. I so relate to that. I honestly probably have had the exact same conversation verbatim

that you were talking about. And what was also really interesting for me was how much of it I made it about money. And if money was the measure of success, which to me growing up, you know, money was always the measure of freedom. If I have money, I don't rely on anyone, money equals freedom. So then money is the most valuable. And so I would, would continuously hold this resentment and have fights with him about finances. And it was only when I had my own realization that money isn't the be all and end all, Natalie. You know, money is not the signal of all success and freedom and happiness and fulfillment that I could finally see all the things he was doing. But when I was so hell bent on that being the yardstick I was measuring by,

I couldn't see anything else. Totally. And when I would push him away, way he would stop doing all the things he was doing that was enabling me to play in the arena i was which you know i am great at generating revenue but i'm also a little bit of a tornado i you know i've been with him almost a decade now and i couldn't do this without him he's like the the guy like he runs behind me like picking up all this shit and then like helping me make sure things are like he just provides all that stability that without it it might i would be chaotic But I couldn't see that. Yeah, I feel that so deeply.

There's two things that I want to say about that. One's about money and then one's about the tornado. I think when we are creators in the way that we're creators, like we are, our brains are everywhere. Like, I could literally eat a cold sausage every day for lunch and not think twice about it, right? Or walk by a dirty toilet. I mean, these are like things that like, I'm like, oh, yeah, like taking care of our home. like, oh, like my kid sucks. Like, there are certain things that when we get to be in our creative genius,

like it takes, like, it takes somebody solid. And I love that visualization of like, I get to fly and he's the tether in a way. Yeah. And not tethering me down in a bad way, but like, thank you because I would float away. I'd be off in the clouds. So thank you. Like, thank you for that. And that's, I think the sacred masculine.

And I think that's a healthy, sacred masculine that gets to. hold us and I think it not all men are that way and I think it takes a lot of of our own healing and a lot you know for me and been with my husband for a long time it took a lot of calling him forth to be able to hold that so that my feminine so that my path to or path three felt safe enough like we have to feel safe enough which connects to that conversation about money because for so many of us we equate money with safety yeah money equals security and I I know the pattern in myself. Like, I went into Wall Street when my parents were getting divorced.

My parents got divorced in my early 20s, which is when I was starting Wall Street. Everything in my family life felt like it was crumbling. So what did I do? Let me go make money. Because if that's not stable, but I have money, then I'm stable. So it's speaking to what you... Everything is fixed. Everything is fixed.

And I know in me that when certain things feel unsteady around me, there's like a grab for safety and security through money. through work. And I think many women who find themselves as overworkers, overachievers, we don't have to say work addicts, but sometimes there is an energy of that addiction to work, not being able to stop, even though it's bringing negative consequences into our life. That's the definition of addiction. A lot of that comes from this need to feel safe, to fill something inside of ourselves that doesn't feel safe. So for many of us, safety has come from strategy. Safety has come from

security through money, the false sense of security through money. But what I'm finding is that true safety can only come through surrender, which lights up every one of our nervous system buttons, which is like, I can't surrender. I can't surrender. Because you can't surrender if you don't feel safe. What are you surrendering to? Can I really trust the man to hold me, society to hold me, work to hold me, the divine to hold me, whatever that is? And so in order to really be free, we have to understand that money isn't what gives us freedom. That freedom can only be an inside job. And we have to source that security and safety from here. It'll never come from out here, ever. And we've both tried. And we know it doesn't. It doesn't work. There's no amount of money

that will make me feel safe if I don't feel safe in my body. So yeah, I think it's such a good conversation. And would you say that inner safety is the prerequisite to being able to be on path three and stay on path three? I think there has to be a level of trust. In my experience, the reason that I go to path one and path two and then swing back and forth, like you're saying that flip-slop, is that I do not trust the ground beneath me. I only trust myself. And I think that we all have many of us, if not all of us, have this wound of feeling like there's nothing or no one can hold us, whether that's from our childhood imprints, whether that's from a lack of a solid spiritual practice, whether that's from trauma, like there's so many reasons for it.

But path one and path two, quit or grit, comes from, I am only, I rely only on myself. It's the hyper sufficiency. We forget that there is whatever that is, like whatever that inner safety is. And some people can just access that inner safety themselves. Some people access that through a divine connection, that there's something inside of me, there's something around me that is holding me that no matter what happens, I'm going to be okay. And there was this realization that I had about money and where it comes from a little recently around, you know, I always felt like money came from one source. Like as a kid, it might have come from my dad. Yeah. And then I worked on Wall Street and it came from Wall Street. And okay, now I have my own business and it comes from there. Oh,

I want my husband to make the money now. So it needs to come from there. Right. And it's like all these or that comes from this thing or this thing. And then all of a sudden I realized, like, oh, I got this image. I don't know if you had these growing up. But there are these banks used to have these, like, shoots where you would put money up and they, like, got sucked up and down. Do you know what I'm talking about? They probably did not exist for the eulage.

So in some of these U.S. banks, you go through the drive-through, and there was this, like, plastic machine, and you put your money in there and you deposit it. Yes. You know what I'm talking about? I've seen this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you put the money in and there's, like, sucks up. And then it goes to the teller, and then it comes back in.

Yeah. And I had this visual, it's like, oh, my gosh, Wall Street was one of those tellers, one of those machines, like one of those spouts, if you will. My dad was, we are the women is, maybe my husband is, maybe an investment property is, maybe some insurance thing is, who knows what it is. But none of those are the source. Those are the roads that the money is coming down in, but it's all coming from something else, right? it's all coming from the same source, which is, I believe, the divine source of all that is, whatever that is for other people. But when we get hooked into, it's got to be this, it's got to be this, it's got to be this,

it's got to be this, which means it's got to be me. I've got to control it. I've got to control it to be safe versus safety's here. I trust life. I trust myself to be able to ride the waves of life. I trust that I'm going to be taking care of no matter what. I trust that money isn't stability. I'm stability, the divine stability, not my business, not the people in my life even. Like it comes here and it comes from whatever that access point is for the individual, there's freedom and not because then we're not relying on ourselves only anymore. Like not really. And I'm saying it's in here, not it's still a self-reliance, but it's not I can only do this. It's that I know that I'm capable of this. And I know there's something greater holding me through this. And I'm going to be

okay no matter what. You know, like when you got to the point where you were like, oh, it's not actually about money with Stephen. What was it about? If it wasn't about the money, what did you have to access in yourself to be able to trust that? Oh, that's a good question. I think at the root of it, for me, it was all connection. It was just connection. It was all about. It was all about connection. That's all I wanted. Yeah. Yeah.

And to myself. Yeah. To just feeling connected. Whenever I wasn't feeling connected to myself, to him, I felt like I was grasping everywhere else and like trying to pull in that control, if that makes sense. So it's like the opposite of the over-reliance on self is connection. Yeah. And whether that's connection to your partner or connection to the divine or connection to

your team, when we feel like we're on the boat by ourselves and we have. kicked everybody else off. That's when the grabbing happens. That's when the over-reliance happens. That's when the focus on money happens. That's when we think if we just get to this thing, then we'll be okay happens versus I actually just want to be connected. Oh, over here I was in fear. Yeah. But the vulnerability of saying I just want connection, I'm going to open my heart because it's so safe over here for a wound. But it's really all about fear. Whereas what you're saying is that path of surrender and of trust is actually about being willing to be vulnerable enough to lean in towards connection away from self-reliance into connection. Yeah, I really think that's it. And what I

have noticed is I will more so grasp towards the external things when I'm in a situation where I'm like one foot in, one foot out. Oh, I could lose everything tomorrow. Oh, my marriage could fall apart. Oh, you know, paint any scenario. Cool, let me then just go into full like protective mode, whereas I do think it takes that regulation to be both feet into something and trusting of something. For the longest time, you know, I built a business that on paper, you know, look phenomenal. No one would look at that and think, oh, it could crumble tomorrow in my head. I was like, you know, I could have had whatever in the bank and still be working as if there's nothing there. And I think, that came from just my my childhood and what I believed and my nervous system and all of that

patterning. Yeah. I had such a similar imprint. Like I had this story of like feast or famine growing up. And so I continued to track that no matter how stable the business was or how stable the income that I was making from the business was inside of myself, it felt like at any point it could get taken away. And I think this idea of path three is, okay, I'm going to take the lid off of my life. Like, I'm going to go all in. And I am willing to fall on my face. I am willing to have this not work out. I am willing to lose all the money, to lose all the followers, to lose all of the things that somebody

tells me means success to be true to myself now. And I think that's, you know, when I left the Wall Street job, that was part of it. I went to bed at night and it was like, this is not really me. Leaving the job was the right answer. But being in the discomfort of the evolution of we are the women has been different. The right path wasn't to leave, but the right path wasn't to leave, but the right path was, oh, I'm out of alignment now. How do I bring myself into alignment? Hey, listen, hands up, surrender. If I'm done with We Are the Women, if my path here is over, cool, like we can close the doors.

I know I will create something else. I will do good work in the world I'll be provided for no matter what. But how do we go all in? Like one of the things that I'm committed to doing and I did this in my marriage, I've did this with my fertility journey, I've done this with the business, is I'm committed to walking all the way to the end of this road and know that I have done everything in my power, externally and internally. And if it still doesn't work out, I know I will have done my part. And then knowing when to be like, I've done my part now, you know? And this wants to evolve or this wants to be complete.

This is a chapter closing, a season closing, or there's an evolution here. Or, wow, I just changed all these patterns on my inside and I'll feel like it's Feaster famine all the time anymore. I can be here because my nervous system isn't doing this anymore. So I think going to the end of the road, which is why entrepreneurship is like the fire for our personal development. Yeah. I love this so much. I could talk to you all day. I feel like we need a part two of this. For any woman listening who is starting to feel that, oh yeah, that path three, I'm really interested. Where can she find you, work with you and start to explore that a bit with you because you're incredible. Love you. Thank you for inviting me here. So you can find me at

we are thewomen.com. So that's available. We have an amazing, all of my body of work is over there. And then sometimes I take on private clients. So if that's something anybody's interested in, you can just email me, which is Julie, we are the women. With just subject line private client. Exactly. Okay. Amazing. Julie, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I love you. Love you.