Julie Hruska is a successful businesswoman and a dedicated mother to three. Her experience as a successful entrepreneur and coach offers valuable insight and actionable advice for anyone seeking clarity and action toward their goals! Julie discusses her latest project, a TV show called “The Next Level with Julie Hruska,” where she interviews successful people and gathers advice for anyone seeking it. In this episode, Julie Hruska provides practical tips and strategies to help you achieve your goals and reach new heights both professionally and personally.



https://youtu.be/xKjgZ5NRMBs

 
Brett Gilliland: I'm your host, Brett Gilliland, and today I've got Julie Hruska with me. Julie, how you doing? 
Julie Hruska: I'm awesome. Thank you so much for having me today, Brett. 
Brett Gilliland: Well, we are happy to have you. You're in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. I love that place. 
Julie Hruska: It is so pretty here. I actually grew up in the Midwest where you're at and, um, I didn't like the cold winters, so I came south. I didn't quite get far enough south to avoid winter, but it's, it's beautiful here. 
Brett Gilliland: Yes it is. We went there, uh, I guess maybe two summers ago on a family vacation. My wife, who's also named Julie and, and, uh, our four boys and so little Biltmore mansion, if everybody's not been out there, it's such an awesome place, a great part of the country.
Julie Hruska: Yeah, it, it's amazing. There's so much to do in the outdoors, and we do have the best of all worlds. And we're not too far from the beach too, which is like my favorite place. 
Brett Gilliland: That's, that's right. Well, uh, Julie, if you can, um, we'll, we'll dive into what you do for a living and all that kind of stuff, but you are a high performance, uh, strategist, uh, certified high performance coach, speaker, trainer. I know you got a TV show coming out called The Next Level. You've got some group coaching called Next Level as well. Um, but before we dive into that kind of stuff, can you just maybe give us a little lay of the land on what's made you, the woman you are today? 
Julie Hruska: Oh, wow. That's, that's such a complex question. Right. So I grew up in the Midwest, um, in a very traditional conservative Christian family. Um, I was very much raised to become a wife and mother, and so I lived out that path. I got married at 20. Um, started having kids in my early twenties. I have three beautiful kids, so they're the blessing of that part of my story.
But, um, as I went through that life, I started to realize that I was losing my identity. I was very unhappy. I was very anxious. And, um, my oldest son is severely dyslexic and so he needed to go to a special. That was quite expensive. So I looked at going back to work and I'd been out of work, um, for a while, staying at home with my kids.
So when I went back to get my master's degree, there was a program, um, out in Colorado Springs, Colorado for brain-based gender differences. Um, I was a educator at the time, so when I went out there for the first time in over a decade, People were calling my name, they were asking my opinion. I was no longer Ethan, Erin, and Sidney's mom.
I actually had a name.
Brett Gilliland: Yeah.
Julie Hruska: Which seems foreign to a lot of people who haven't been through it, but for me, I really lost a sense of self. And so in that moment, it was like an asteroid literally hit me in the head and woke me up. And the wool came off my eyes and I realized all of the things that weren't working in my life and very much that I had adopted my parents' belief of what life should be and not my own.
Brett Gilliland: Mm-hmm. 
Julie Hruska: Um, so unfortunately, um, when you have that kind of awakening experience, some people celebrate that, but for me it was terrifying. Because I realized I was in my early thirties and I had followed someone else's path. And the unraveling of that, the really stripping things down and looking at who I am and why I was created and what my purposes in the world was very challenging.
I had to face the fact that my marriage was toxic. Um, there were a lot of unhealthy patterns that were affecting my children, so I ended up getting divorced. I ended up with full custody of my oldest son, primary of my younger two. And um, then kind of had to go from there. At the time I was teaching kindergarten and um, for anybody that knows about education in this country, you really can't support a family of four on a kindergarten salary.
So that started my move into, I'm a teacher. What else can I teach? And, um, from there I actually got into teaching power yoga because of the mindset and empowerment that I found during my divorce and during the process of recreating my life. And as soon as I quit my salary job to teach yoga full-time, I realized that yoga was just one of the tools.
For being your best self. And really it was the deeper issues. It was looking at what really holds people back. It's not that you can just take the messy. Kind of chaos of a person's life and pile on these great tools, you have to start over. You have to build a foundation. And so I realized that I needed to do advanced studies.
I got my certified high performance coach training. I went beyond that, um, and did some mindfulness, some psychology, CMEs, and really, Got to the point where I could help people dive into the root causes of their challenges. 
Brett Gilliland: Hmm. Yeah, I think that's the biggest part of it, isn't it? I mean, we can do all these things, but if we don't dive into what the issue is, it's uh, we're just putting band-aids on it, right?
Julie Hruska: Right. And, and as you know, it's like that bucket. You plug one hole and then another one spouts out. So same, like I was saying, with the foundation, you have to really like demolish the old. A lot of times it takes that some people have a good foundation already and can build upon, but a lot of times you have to go in and just really excavate all of those limiting beliefs, all of the things that hold you back, and then start over and create that firm foundation with clarity, courage, energy, productivity mindset mastery. I could, this is, this is the stuff that I'm really passionate about because it does help people change their lives, both personally and professionally.
Brett Gilliland: Yep. So let's talk about that. Let's, let's dig a little deeper. So you said one of the tools was yoga is what you found. And so, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm picturing or trying to paint a picture here of this toolbox, right. And we've got Julie's toolbox over here to the side of you. And you, you open it up and, and you're gonna need a different tool for every different project that you go work on, right? So if you had to fill up your toolbox, if you will, with uh, all these tools, and you're gonna go to the hardware store now and you're gonna go buy these tools, what, what are the tools we're putting in there? What, what's, what's going in there besides the yoga? 
Julie Hruska: So yoga doesn't have to be, I used to, when I started, when I shifted from doing yoga, mindfulness, and meditation and health and wellness coaching to high performance, people were completely freaked out. They're like, are you gonna make me do yoga? I'm like, no.
Brett Gilliland: No.
Julie Hruska: You don't have to do yoga to live your best life. But health and wellness is a tool.
Brett Gilliland: Yeah.
Julie Hruska: You, you have to make sure that you have some great forms of exercise in your tool. The nutrition, the hydration, the sleep. Those are the basics that sometimes we don't think about when we're facing challenges or when we're hitting a wall in our lives. So those basics are really important, and then you get to your mindset. And examining the things that really hold people back. Those limiting beliefs, that fear of failure, the BS excuses and stories that we tell ourself that maybe started in childhood, that you're not good enough, that you're not capable, and we just repeat them and we look for other examples of how that's true.
Brett Gilliland: Yeah. 
Julie Hruska: To hold ourselves back, but oftentimes it's subconscious, so you have to get in there and you have to do the work. 
Brett Gilliland: Yeah, and I think coaching too. And, and, um, you know, you obviously have your next level coaching program, but coaching is so important with that. And, and if you think of the best athletes in the world, just, just think of sports, they all have coaches, right?
Tiger Woods had a swing coach in his prime and. Justin Thomas has a swing coach, a nutritionist, and all these people, right? And, and so Michael Phelps, I mean everybody. And, and so for you, what are you finding that the people that do hire a coach, where are you starting with them and how do you go through that process to find that That kinda what I would call the Pandora's box, that everybody's got stored inside.
Julie Hruska: Yeah, that, that's a really great question, Brett. So what I do with my clients is we really dive in 75 to 90 minute with my one-on-one clients, um, individual SE session where we look at career relationships, health and finance. And we determine where they're functioning at, their optimal levels and where they're not.
Because you have to look at yourself really clearly in the mirror. You have to have that real and raw conversation to say, you know, honestly, when I pull it all back, when I take off the mask and the facades, here's what's working in my life and here's what's not. And then we take the things that aren't working, and create a plan to optimize their lives. 
Brett Gilliland: Yep. And the planning is huge, but let's go back to that toolbox cuz um, I like to skip around and keep going on conversations where whoever's popping through my, my brain here. Um, but when you, when you look at those tools in the toolbox, so hydration, sleep, exercise, um, you know,

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