Julie Schoen - a word changes everything
Speaking with Julie Schoen opened my eyes on how the same gift - writing, in this case - shows up in very unique ways in two people.
Oftentimes I found myself jealous of other writers, poets, journalists and just about anyone who writes. I used to believe that if they too had the same gift then somehow I had less of it. Or if not less, that maybe they were certainly better than me - ahem hello imposter syndrome & low self-esteem.
Up until recently I never actually acknowledged the beauty of difference!
Talking to Julie I realized not only how COOL is her own expression of the love of words, but also how awesome it is that she gets to share it with us. We both love words and storytelling, however her passion took her to explore and focus on the energy of words combined with the energy of numbers (please insert the head exploding emoji right here right now!). Whereas it’s something that fascinates me - or else I would’ve never contacted her - it’s also that thing I would never spend my time on because my genius has other priorities, however it can definitely benefit from Julie’s genius!
Tanya Gervasi: What was your favorite book as a child?
Julie Shoen: I have two, is that ok? This is from fifth grade, but I can go further back. So I was super into soccer and I had a really hard time sleeping at night, had many nightmares so I would read this soccer book by Mia Hamm “Go For The Goal”. It would take my mind off just all these crazy other things and I probably have read it like 100 times. It was all about mental mindset and winning. Then my other one was “Matilda” by Roald Dahl because I loved that she could use her mind to move things and I remember setting pencils on the table and trying to make them move with my thoughts.
I loved Matilda!! I haven’t read the book but I adored the movie. Julie you were into mindset and mental focus from such a young age….
I was very competitive, I have two older sisters and two little brothers so I’m right in the middle. I always wanted to keep up, and do my best. I remember, also, very vividly having thoughts about God. When I was super super little, I remember sitting at the table one day and thinking “it’s ok when we die because I know we come back and it’s gonna be awesome”. I was probably 5 years old, we were having fried chicken and I’d just tell everyone not to worry because we’re all going to be good. I have interesting big thoughts from when I was little that have always been with me.
Do you still have them? I mean did you manage to carry them with you to adulthood?
Yeah. I think there was a good chunk of sophomore year of High School, until I met my now husband, when I got really depressed, it lasted maybe 5 years overall. I got very anxious and very much wanting people-please everyone around me. Looking back I feel I missed that part of my life because I wasn’t present at all. I cared about all these wrong things, mainly about my appearance. I just cared so much about what people thought I looked like, what I looked like, and it became this obsessive thing. It was awful. I was like, why nobody liked me in high school? Looking back I know, because I was a horrible bitch. I understand.
I had an interesting high school experience as well. It’s funny because today I look at the women who trigger me or trigger certain thoughts as opportunity rather than threat. So looking back to high school years through this perspective I was probably the girl who triggered the shit out of other girls. I was modelling and there were billboards of me throughout Italy, like suddenly I was super popular without trying to be popular nor wanting it. I think I was not aware of the power that I had and so perceived this experience from the point of view of a victim: they don’t like me, I’m bullied, there has to be something wrong with me, blah blah blah. And now I feel like taking this power back and acknowledging the fact that I had opportunities, I had the looks and everything that were maybe exactly what those girls desired for themselves but would not go for it so they bullied me.
I never thought of it that way but probably I was that girl too, because I was also modelling. I had a couple good girlfriends but then it was mostly guys I would hang out with. You are totally blowing my mind because I feel you are speaking of me. I like that you say this is a power that we hold so it’s not about me being “an awful person” which is the conclusion I jumped to.
Do you remember any dreams you had as a child about your adult self?
I wanted to be famous when I was little. I remember thinking however I can be famous I want that: actress, professional athlete. And then as I was getting older I wanted to be a teacher. I had all these amazing teachers in my life and I thought it was so cool people still talk about their teachers when they’re adults. It would be so cool if someone would talk about me years from now. Then all my high school teachers talked me out of this dream, “you’re smart, you're gonna want money so don’t go do that.” So I started looking for jobs I could make a lot of money from like public relations or lawyer stuff. In college though I decided I do want to be a teacher, I taught middle school for a few years and I loved it. Then I got pregnant with my son and I could not leave him, like it was not an option to be dropping him at daycare. That is when I started doing my own job.
Now as a writer looking back, writing has always been my biggest gift. I never connected those dots when I was young, like I should do that thing that is really easy for me and one everyone says I’m really good at. I don’t even remember learning to write or read. I could just always do it, I was reading chapter books when I was like 3. I could write a gazillion pages when I was in first grade. I was just very much gifted in that world and so now I’m like I should’ve known, I should’ve hinted into this or someone maybe have guided me and seen that this is a good avenue. But here I am now.
Have you worked jobs not related to writing?
I didn’t do any jobs related to writing until after I got pregnant with my son. I was 22 and it was then that I started realizing I needed something I could do that was easy for me, that could potentially provide money because my husband is self-employed too. Actually it was my husband who saw that I’m a great writer, he was always buying me books on how to get published and all that because “you just write constantly”. So he helped me to start a publishing company, which is the first thing we did and I had all these avatars, pen names I wrote under and I published 75-80 books in 16 months. It was one a week, almost. I was just writing writing writing while I had my newborn son. I felt like all of these years of not having an avenue to write and suddenly I have a reason….
The gates have opened! That is wild!
That was my first and then I sold my company. After I started writing for GAIA - which is that very alien, yoga… do you know GAIA? - I worked at their office in Colorado for like a year because I thought I wanted a corporate job. I did the writing for all the descriptions of their shows. But corporate America is not for me, even GAIA which is hardly corporate America - they had amethysts in every corner, we had gong baths’ staff meetings… - it was a nicer form of the same thing.
From then to now….
I got my MA in writing too during that time, which looking back I didn’t need but I just wanted everything to do with writing. The competitive nature of me came out. Then I started freelance writing and that took off! I started making 6-figures as a freelance writer and was getting all these 5 star reviews on this freelance site to the point that they thought I was cheating the system so they shut down my account. They told me I was getting too many 5 star reviews and having too many projects coming in and they didn’t know what was happening. … uhm I’m good! - that’s what’s happening. So I decided to get my clients off their site and bring them over to my stuff.
Then what happened is that I got really burnt out!
I was giving so much and as a freelancer everyone tells you what to do. I just felt I was spinning my wheels for all of these other people and not really getting to do what I really wanted to do anymore. At that point my husband was making enough money so I just decided I was done with it. I decided I was going to be a stay at home mom and focus on raising all my kids. Then it was a couple years ago that I had some kind of download, I had started studying numerology and I’ve been into numbers and what makes up words and the energy of words for a very very long time. I just realized that there was this connection between the energy that people have and their brand and the energy of how we communicate, the words that we say. So as I started to work with freelance clients I would do their numerology and play with the words that I was using and writing for them. I started to see that when they would align the results were just amazing. This kind of reignited my passion for writing again.
Interesting how when one loves to write and is a writer, it doesn’t mean he/she can write anything and everything. It’s as if the gift of writing in order to nourish us must be lived in a very specific way. The numerology you calculated for IN HER GENIUS is so so so spot on! For me it was a confirmation that this is my thing, this business is right for me.
That’s why I love it! Of all the things I can help people do, my hope is that I really just boost confidence in knowing that you are fulfilling your purpose, you are on the right path, you are doing what you are called to do. So when it gets time to do the writing well then that becomes easy because a confident person always knows what to say, a confident person isn’t second guessing themselves, so if you can have that confidence when you sit down to write an email or do a website copy or whatever you will not be short in words and you will have this steady grounded energy.
For me numerology too has helped step into this role of knowing who I am and what I’m bringing to the table, and kind of the role the universe wants me in doing this work. So now I’m not asking people second opinions about what I’m doing, I’m not trying to get approval, I trust what comes to me and I let that out in the world. It’s such a nice release because it’s not you constantly trying to mess with all the words you know “am I saying this right?” Well of course I’m saying this right because this is what I’m supposed to do!
I’d like to know more about the energy of words and when do you become aware of them. Also, I’d love to know your thoughts regarding someone who writes with perfect grammatical syntax and someone who’s writing is less perfect but very emotional. Because I think some writers get more of a block because of the fear of not having a good enough form - I have certainly been and still am at times one of them.
I feel I have always been aware of the energy of words but not realizing that that’s what it was. Whenever someone would say something to me or write something to me I remember always thinking “ I think there’s a better word that you could’ve used there”. Or I wouldn’t have gotten so mad if he/she would’ve said that thing in this other way, so there was always this piece of communication that always fascinated me. Or when I was reading a book I would always find another word that could’ve been used in that place and I would always wonder why the author picked that word - why did they use luggage instead of suitcase, why ground instead of floor. What was the purpose behind this? So I would play trying to put a new word in and you would see it like wow especially in poetry: if you change one word it changes the entire feeling and emotion behind it. I was always fascinated by how one word could completely change everything.
Then I would start looking at the letters in the words and this is before I realized numerology was a thing. But I was starting to look at the letters in the words and notice certain patterns in the letters like there’s this many E’s or there’s a pattern like a consonant and an E a consonant and an E.. so I wanted to find words with the same patterns. But it wasn’t until I read an article a decade ago about Gisele Bundchen where she said she’s really into numerology that I bought a book about it on amazon because if Gisele was doing it I should be doing it.
I read the book and started doing the numerology for everyone that I knew because it was so much fun and so spot on. I always loved astrology and different things too but this just felt easy for me, I understood it and it felt really accurate. Then I just started to study the numbers around me, like the address I live in or my apartment number or the bus that I take is this number. So you start just picking up on numbers around you, eventually realizing the numbers are trying to communicate something to you. And I thought: ok so the numbers are trying to communicate something to me, how do I overlay that with words that people are already using to try to communicate to me. It feels like unlocking this whole code of like once you break down the energy of each word, so each letter has a number assigned to it, once you start adding those numbers together for every word you realize that every single word has an energetic code. Every word that calls to me I do the numerology so I have already thousands and thousands of words sorted.
It’s so fascinating to me because I feel that when you stop to look it kind of explains what I was interested in as a kid. Like “luggage” has a very different energy than “suitcase”, “luggage” is very official and formal whereas “suitcase” is much more casual.
Also I’d like to add that “luggage” has a heaviness to it.
It does exactly!
Regarding the second part of your question I think formal writing can come naturally to certain people, some people just picked that up as they learned to write. Their can be a beautiful writing that is perfectly grammatically correct and I do think it’s coming from this honest place, but I think that’s rare. I think that many people get really tripped up by trying to make everything grammatically correct or sounding perfect when you're missing the point. When people just allow themselves to let communication just flow through them and let it be imperfect and misspell things and don’t even use punctuation or don’t even think about all of the grammar parts in it, then it comes from this space I feel more of a universal knowing and you get so much more honesty in that.
I edited this book for a woman who wrote this book about sacred plant medicine journeys for people, and her book was so beautiful and there was so much in it. I don’t know if there was a full sentence, I had to go in because her publisher was like “we can’t bring this out in the world”. But it was the most brilliant, she said it was just all downloaded to her… she wrote a number 4 every time there was “for” or u instead of “you”, there were all these short abbreviations but looking at it I felt so grateful that she didn’t stop herself from letting it come out. I’m sure if she would’ve stopped to make all these correct sentences it would’ve interrupted the flow for her. It was hundreds and hundreds of pages full of this beautiful wisdom about plants and these journeys that you have. It was cool to see something in that raw state, to help her pretty it up a little bit so that a publisher would be interested.
That’s how I write most of the time. Can I call myself a writer when I transcribe information that I picked up in the ether, I wonder. Yet my poetry especially seems to flow. And some short stories are these crazy stories I see in my head, mixed with bits of my life and the universal consciousness. They come and just like that the flow is over. I thought I was less of a writer also because I believed I had to write every day at a specific hour for a number of hours…
I can’t remember the name now but there was a poet who said that she would get a poem coming in the back of her head and she would be out in the field on her father’s farm and she would run as fast as she could to the paper, the poems would come out backwards. So she wrote from end to beginning all of her poems. If she was not fast enough to the paper the poem would just go through her. She said she felt like there are all these poems floating through the universe and that one would just happen to hit you, if you’re smart enough to just listen and have something to write it down then it’s yours otherwise it will go to someone else and someone else will write that poem. Isn’t that cool? I think I read about her story in the book BIG MAGIC by Elizabeth Gilbert.
In this book Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how you are not a genius, you have a genius. The genius is like this thing that is out in the world and it comes to you when you’re ready for it. It can leave at any point, this is why sometimes you can go go go and other times you have no idea what you are doing here. So it has nothing to do with you, it has to do with you being a vessel for the genius that lives in the world to come to you and embody you.
The Alchemist - which is my favorite book ever! - was written in 24 hours. He, Paulo Coelho, said he did not revise anything, it just came to him and he did it in under a day. The people hated it at first, the publishers said no no, but he knew this was special otherwise it wouldn’t have come to him like this. This was meant to be out in the world. It got so many rejections until a publisher said ok and the rest is history. I love it! That is how my process is, to me it’s either all comes to me and it’s super easy or I just can’t do it so I won’t that day. My genius has left the building and I’m going to make some tea.
When you read about everyone’s process you realize there is no one way. Everyone taps in their genius in a very different way. That’s what’s so cool because no one else can do the work that you’re doing because they would want to create this specific container, and to me it’s like the genius that you have wants the freedom so if you try to box it in, it’s not going to be that what it is. That’s why that’s a special gift that you have.
Thank you. I often have this feeling that if I’m doing something completely different I sort of find myself looking for this imaginary person to ask for permission to, for example can I publish this children’s book without illustrations?
Do you ever get that feeling? The feeling of looking if anyone has done that thing the way you want to do it so it’s reassuring that it’s possible…
You know I like to make people angry and do things differently. You want me to do this nope I am going to do that. The problem that I have is that once I have created this thing, there is pressure to make money with it. That is when I think I start conforming and think now I have to try to package it, now you’re telling me I have to create a funnel and I have to have a bonus and I have to upsell to people, and I have to do all these things that are like markety. That’s the problem that I get to being “what do I do with this big beautiful thing that I don’t want to change but also I’d like to make some money too”.
What solution have you found?
I’m still working on that solution. I feel part of it is don’t put the pressure on to make money from these big beautiful things right away, let them just live and grow. Just like you wouldn’t expect a baby to make money right away, you kind of need to think of your new things like that. Don’t put the pressure right away such as “this has to be a bestseller” or “this has to make me $ 10.000 a month”, so that kind of gives it space to grow and mature. You get to see it evolve until it’s that stronger thing that you can now get out into the world without the fear that it will cave under the pressure. The other thing is that you gotta trust your gut too! If you have an instinct that this isn’t the right way to sell something, you have to learn to trust knowing that you know what to do with this.
There are always people who are the anomaly that do something so why not let that be you?
Why not be that one person who did not do that but then became really successful? I think we’re so focused on the people that are successful and how they are successful right now that we forget to look at their story before they were successful and to realize that they did a lot of things that people probably told them they were really dumb for doing. But now that they’re successful everyone claps claps claps. Maybe I’m at that point when people are telling me that’s not the right way to do it, well give it some time and maybe you’ll see what I’m doing. But it’s hard, the money part is hard.
I like the comparison you used with children, when they are born we immediately start to weigh them down with expectations. What you just said blows my mind because before I even allow my creation or my piece of writing to live on its own and see where it wants to go as a sort of living energy… I tell it “I created you so you must make me money now, and in this specific way” instead of just accepting the fact that it used me as a channel to be born. Therefore it’s mine but also not too much my own.
I feel this way even with my kids. I feel very blessed that they chose me to be their mom but also feel very much that they are on their own independent mission here on the planet. They know what they’re doing and they came in with a plan. The other day my kids were playing with bricks on the floor and a friend came over and said oh they will architects, and in my mind I was like that would be so sweet, it would be so cool it they were so successful and omg it’s just kids playing with blocks why do we put all this weight on them like sign them up for architect school. It’s exactly the same with our creations, people will be like oh this is a great business you’ve gotta set this up you’ve gotta sell this you’ve gotta get this out… well maybe, but I think everything needs to have a little time to breathe if you can allow it. Just like the child that as it grows you start to see what their real talents are, what their gifts are, you need to do that with your creation to some extent too. See how this is going to evolve and grow and I don’t want to box it into a tiny container.
How powerful this creative energy is. Whether it’s kids or a project… it asks to be treated in the same way: with open curiosity and care.
Tell me about your project?
I’m trying to be a parent for my creations and at the end of the day I think I want my work to help people become more confident. I feel that on the planet right now we need so many confident people who are doing the work that they are supposed to do and not second guessing themselves, not asking other people if this is the right thing. That’s going to change the frequency of the planet and so if I can be a little nudge in the right direction like affirming people, saying yes this is the right business, this is the energy it has totally lining up with who you are and what you’re doing and these are a few tools you can use. If that can give people the confidence of “Yes I am launching my website and I am sending an email and I don’t need a huge team helping me do this I can just do it”. I think that’s going to make the world a very beautiful place because the more people are doing what they came here to do and are feeling energized by what they are doing I think that’s going to be very powerful for the planet.
I love how you empower people and especially the young entrepreneurs to insource instead of outsource.
I think the pendulum has swung so far business wise to where everybody outsources everything and is trying to create the systems so that they don’t have to do the work and it’s gotten to a point where we are not having real interactions with real people anymore and that’s what we're hungry for. We want to interact, we want to communicate, so if you sort of can start to bring back the other way being like “I want to work with a small business, I want to work with someone who’s doing the work”. And if I fall in love with a brand I hope that the person doing this is the one who wrote the website because they know better than any professional copywriter what it is that they’re meant to do. A grammatical error so what? Put it out there! People can feel that energy if it’s in the right place and you’ll find people who will do business with you. I want to encourage people to just push go and go.
What book are you currently reading?
I am reading The Genius Myth right now by author Michael Meade. I just think it’s so cool the alignment of the universe that you’re working on all of this genius and I look at my life and I’m using these words so much in my daily vocab, we like magnetized to each other. So this book is beautiful, it’s all about how people are currently believing that they are not enough when truly you are a genius. You have all of these special gifts that the world wants to diminish, but if you can remember who you are, realize that you have as much potential as anybody else on the planet and know that the people who are succeeding are no different than you… And you have all of the same tools at your disposal that you can use.
And what do you do to recharge?
Partly I am trying to find ways to live my life that I don’t have to recharge. I really believe that life isn’t meant to drain us. I have a very strong opinion about this, that life is meant to energize us, that we are here and everything around us is meant to be a beautiful unfolding and participation in the planet. So I think that there is this myth that everything is draining: parenting is draining, relationships are draining, work is draining. It’s just so disempowering. I’m trying to flip that and to say what if parenting is supposed to give me energy instead of taking my energy, what if being in a marriage is going to give me energy instead of taking energy. That to me is just a perspective change but it made a big difference. I’m not telling myself that victim story of “oh I need to take a break from this” instead it’s like “no I need more of this, this is where I get my energy from”.
This came to me when the whole world was starting to shut down in 2020 and everyone was beginning to worry about spending so much time with their family and not knowing how to recharge from them. I remember being upset because I thought, why should I have to recharge from being with the people that I love? Shouldn’t that make us feel better? That now became a big purpose in my life.
I do kundalini yoga and that helps me have internal resources, allows me to have what I need in order to show up in a big way and handle everything. I also practice meditation, 2 or 3 times a day for 5 to 10 minutes and my kids will do it with me a lot of times. I take cold showers, which is huge because they just instantly give you energy if you’re feeling stressed out or angry. I don’t drink too much caffeine either and I try to keep my energy high and stable.
I’m curious, what are three of your favorite words?
Victory. Abundance. Love.
