Have you ever caught yourself shrinking — softening what you really think, playing smaller than you are, just to stay safe? There's a gap between how we present ourselves and what we know, deep down, to be true. This episode is about closing it.

Colin Bedell is a globally recognized astrologer and the creator of Queer Cosmos, who blends science and spirituality into something you can actually use. He writes for Cosmopolitan and Them, he's a best-selling author, and you may have seen him on the reality show Written in the Stars. He also happens to be the first boy I ever loved — my high school boyfriend, and twenty-plus years later, still one of my dearest friends.

It's Pride Month, and this one's for every leader — whether you're part of the queer community or you love someone who is. We get into why courage is really just faith, how to quiet the inner critic, why "too busy" is usually avoidance, and the five-minute practice that changes your whole day. Come laugh with us and leave 10% prouder of who you are! Happy Pride, y'all!! Let's go!

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Undersociality
• A Course in Miracles
• The Awakened Brain by Dr. Lisa Miller

LISTEN TO THE LET'S GO WITH JULIO PODCAST

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FOLLOW JULIO:

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/letsgowithjulio
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CONNECT WITH COLIN:

💼 Wedbsite: https://www.colinbedell.com/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/queercosmos/

JOIN MY NEWSLETTER:

💌 My regular newsletter — honest reflections on leadership, presence, and staying human under pressure. Join free: https://letsgowithjulio.com

ABOUT LET'S GO WITH JULIO:

Julio spent 15 years leading teams at Apple, Google, Tumblr, Airbnb, and Lyft — hired and fired along the way. Today he's a leadership coach, speaker, and host who has coached leaders at Anthropic, Adobe, Airbnb, Apple, and many of the world's leading companies, and led programs for thousands of leaders navigating identity, emotion, and transformation.

His work helps driven people find steadiness under pressure — the courage to get out of their heads and into their hearts, and to find freedom in their work, relationships, and lives through self-discovery and self-acceptance. LET'S GO WITH JULIO — the podcast, the newsletter, and the coaching — exists to help leaders lead from a steadier, braver, more human place.

CREDITS:

Theme song: "Human" by Nick Deutsch

Produced and edited by Rikki Gunton

#Pride #Confidence #Courage #QueerCosmos #ColinBedell #SelfExpression #HeartLedLeadership #LetsGoWithJulio

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the pressure to get it right, especially when the stakes are high? You're not alone — it is hard to stay yourself while it's happening — warm, calm, unarmored — when everything in you wants to brace. Our next leader on the show, Megan Cruz, models what’s possible for us.

On April 1, 2026, when NASA sent humans around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, Megan held millions of people on the live broadcast — and made each of them feel like she was sitting right there beside them. I watched her do it from my living room, and that's the moment I knew I had to bring her on — for all of us trying to figure out how to communicate well and stay grounded when it counts.

Every story you're trying to tell right now has a purpose. Are you informing? Inspiring? Connecting? The heart of communication is knowing who you're really speaking to — and why it matters to them.

Megan has spent her career — from a decade in the hardest reporting trenches to producing NASA's live broadcasts — learning how to communicate with care when everything is on the line. In this episode, we unpack a few themes every leader can use right now:

• Why preparation — not performance — is what unlocks clarity and calm
• Leadership as removing barriers and instilling faith in your team
• Communicating with care by leading with empathy and listening

This one's special. I'm grateful I got to sit down with Megan and gather as much wisdom as I could about staying steady under pressure. My hope is that you enjoy it, learn something, grow a little — and share it with someone who needs it.

Thank you, Megan Cruz, and thank you, NASA, for your time!

SOURCES:

• NASA's Artemis II Crew Launches To The Moon (Official Broadcast): https://www.youtube.com/live/Tf_UjBMIzNo
• NASA’s Artemis II Crew Comes Home (Official Broadcast): https://www.youtube.com/live/nfhDuOHMp0A
• SpaceX’s 25th Resupply Services Mission: Broadcast Begins (NASA's Kennedy Space Center): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEMWJM-sySY
• Homelessness and Addiction in New Mexico (KOAT): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gya3cNtHbM
• Megan Cruz Anchoring Clips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOHy9DId19w
• Artemis II Watch Party Held at Adler Planetarium (CBS Chicago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc_JMclUSm0

LISTEN TO THE LET'S GO WITH JULIO PODCAST

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Apple Podcasts

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FOLLOW JULIO:

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/letsgowithjulio

📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/letsgowithjulio

CONNECT WITH MEGAN:

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-cruz

📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mdccruz

JOIN MY NEWSLETTER:

💌 My regular newsletter — honest reflections on leadership, presence, and staying human under pressure. Join free: https://letsgowithjulio.com

ABOUT LET'S GO WITH JULIO:

Julio spent 15 years leading teams at Apple, Google, Tumblr, Airbnb, and Lyft — hired and fired along the way. Today he's a leadership coach, speaker, and host who has coached leaders at Anthropic, Adobe, Airbnb, Apple, and many of the world's leading companies, and led programs for thousands of leaders navigating identity, emotion, and transformation.

His work helps driven people find steadiness under pressure — the courage to get out of their heads and into their hearts, and to find freedom in their work, relationships, and lives through self-discovery and self-acceptance. LET'S GO WITH JULIO — the podcast, the newsletter, and the coaching — exists to help leaders lead from a steadier, braver, more human place.

CREDITS:

Theme song: "Human" by Nick Deutsch

Produced and edited by Rikki Gunton

#Leadership #CommunicationSkills #NASA #ArtemisII #HeartLedLeadership #LetsGoWithJulio

What if you could access the inner resilience required to navigate change in a world that's shifting faster than ever? That’s the focus of today’s episode.

I sit down with Light Watkins to help us leaders unpack:

• Why our good intentions fall apart under pressure
• The tortoise approach — why we should prioritize consistency over perfection
• The inner gym — how practices like meditation and gratitude are like strength training for your mind
• What we can learn from leaning into discomfort

Light Watkins is a meditation teacher, five-time bestselling author, and TEDx speaker whose talk has reached nearly a million people. He's taught meditation to leaders and celebrities across the globe, and his latest book, The Year You Transform, is a guide to the kind of lasting change that many of us are seeking.

My hope is that this episode invites you to rethink what it takes to actually change. It’s full of practical takeaways, mindset shifts, and experiments to get you started, so that this can be the year you transform!

Share this with your team or a friend. Subscribe to the show, write us a review, or send us some love in the comments!

CONNECT:

Follow Julio on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠

Book Julio to speak, coach, or consult at ⁠letsgowithjulio.com

CREDITS:

Theme song: "Human" by ⁠Nick Deutsch⁠

Produced + edited: ⁠Rikki Gunton⁠

There's a voice in your head that is constantly riding you, yes or no? It reminds you all the time: You're not enough. You're not far enough along. You should be working harder. This is the #1 thing I see slowing leaders down — and the thing I still struggle with too. So I made this episode for me just as much as I made it for you. Something I could come back to every time I need to ground myself and get steady around this voice. Something I could hand to a client and say, here, listen to this. It might help.

Here's what we're answering: Where does this voice come from? Why do you still listen to it? And how do you shift your relationship with it without trying to silence it (because you're already trying that and how's that working out)?

I'll walk you through the practices that changed things for me — the 30-minute noticing exercise, the "ouch" practice, and how to find the love buried underneath the criticism. These are real, practical tools that can be practiced over and over, like building a muscle. And they work.

Come back to this episode each time you need to remember: You are not the voice. You are the one who notices. You are the observer!

Let's go there, baby. Let’s talk about THAT 🙏🏽

Share this with your team or a friend. Subscribe to the show, write us a review, or send us some love in the comments!

CONNECT:

Follow Julio on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠

Book Julio to speak, coach, or consult at ⁠letsgowithjulio.com

CREDITS:

Theme song: "You Are The One" by ⁠Nick Deutsch⁠

Produced + edited: ⁠Rikki Gunton⁠

How do you earn a CEO's trust — and what do you see when you finally get in the room? That’s what we’re exploring today on the show with my former Lyft colleague Sean Berry.

Sean spent many years as an executive assistant to C-suite leaders, including the CEO of Lyft. That means he’s spent years behind the scenes — managing calendars, sitting in high-stakes meetings, reading the room so the room could keep moving. He saw leadership up close, under pressure. He knows what’s up, and he’s got a lot of wisdom to share with us about:

• Maintaining calm and building trust
• What executives are actually like behind closed doors
• The importance of triage and decoding urgency
• Preparing for high-stakes meetings
• The delicate balance between growing in your career and keeping your ego in check
• What Sean is learning now that the adrenaline has slowed down

No matter where you sit on the org chart, you’ll leave with practical takeaways about how to show up effectively when it matters most.

Share this with your team or a friend. Subscribe to the show, write us a review, or send us some love in the comments!

Find Sean at https://www.linkedin.com/in/swberry/

CONNECT:

Follow Julio on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠

Book Julio to speak, coach, or consult at ⁠letsgowithjulio.com

CREDITS:

Theme song: "You Are The One" by ⁠Nick Deutsch⁠

Produced + edited: ⁠Rikki Gunton⁠

What if trans identity can actually teach all of us what we really need right now: radical self-knowledge?

In this episode, I sit down with Chazzie Grosshandler, 19-year-old college sophomore, co-founder of The GenderCool Project, public speaker, and lifelong advocate. She came out to her family as transgender at nine years old, and was featured on the Today Show at eleven.

I first learned about GenderCool at an Out & Equal Summit, and what they shared gave me a deep respect and better understanding of the trans community, especially the courage of trans youth.

We talk about:

• What it felt like to come out to her family and then again on national television
• Why being trans is the least interesting thing about her
• The pattern of people who start out open-hearted and then harden into outrage
• GenderCool, its origins, and why representation at the highest levels matters
• Faith, intersectionality, and how stepping into yourself brings you closer to something bigger
• Chazzie’s advice for transgender youth and their parents

Chazzie’s story is an invitation to embrace who we truly are and see ourselves as more than our labels.

Find Chazzie and GenderCool:

https://gendercool.org/

https://www.instagram.com/chazziegendercool/

https://www.instagram.com/gendercool/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chazziegrosshandler/

CONNECT:

Follow Julio on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠

Book Julio to speak, coach, or consult at ⁠letsgowithjulio.com

CREDITS:

Theme song: "You Are The One" by ⁠Nick Deutsch⁠

Produced + edited: ⁠Rikki Gunton⁠

One year ago, I published Braving Big Tech — a five-part audio docu-series about getting hired and fired by Apple, Google, Tumblr, and Airbnb. It took 14 months, nearly 100 pages of writing, and 15 interviews with the people who were there — including managers that hired me, and one who fired me. 

Today, on the one-year anniversary, I’m answering the most common questions people ask me, like:

• Did you deserve to get fired?
• What did numbing actually look like? 
• What hasn’t healed yet?
• What do you say to someone whose job is killing them slowly?

This episode is honest, real and intended to help you get clear on how you’re braving big tech right now. Because let’s be real: we’re all trying to figure out how to navigate these times with a calm head and courageous heart.

Listen and learn more about Braving Big Tech:

https://bravingbigtech.com/

Listen on Apple

Listen on Spotify 

Listen on YouTube

CONNECT:

Follow Julio on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠

Book Julio to speak, coach, or consult at ⁠letsgowithjulio.com

CREDITS:

Theme song: "You Are The One" by ⁠Nick Deutsch⁠

Produced + edited: ⁠Rikki Gunton⁠

What does it look like to lead a life that's fully integrated — not split between who you are and what you do?

In this episode, I sit down with Nick Deutsch — elementary school teacher, musician, and the artist behind You Are The One, this season’s theme song.

Only 1 in 10 elementary school teachers in America are male, and Nick is one of them. He is one of our undervalued leaders raising the next generation. In this conversation, he offers wisdom from the classroom, the music room, and from a life genuinely examined.

We talk about:

• What kids are honest about that adults have learned to hide
• Why music reaches places words and logic can't
• Carl Jung, the unconscious, and why self-awareness changes everything
• The "disease to please" — and how niceness can become a cage
• Losing his mother at 26, and what grief taught him about life
• What it means to love yourself — not as a cliché, but as a real, daily practice

If you've ever "smiled on the outside while something inside was being torn apart" — this episode is for you.

MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:

⁠Nick’s Music⁠

Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves

The Loving Parent Guidebook

Listen to Braving Big Tech

CONNECT:

Follow Julio on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠

Book Julio to speak, coach, or consult at ⁠letsgowithjulio.com

CREDITS:

Theme song: "You Are The One" by ⁠Nick Deutsch⁠

Produced + edited: ⁠Rikki Gunton⁠

I’m curious: where in your life are you leading from your head… but not your heart?

Today we’re joined by Qiana Sanders — a data science leader, classically trained violinist, and proud Black trans woman from Detroit — for a conversation that’s equal parts practical and deeply human.

Qiana says “success is on the other side of service,” and she lives it. We talk about servant leadership as something you do (not something you claim), why “being a leader is a verb,” and the KPI that might matter more than any dashboard: Key Performance Heart Indicators.

You’ll hear us unpack:

• how to “engage the heart” on real teams (especially under pressure)
• how to read what people are not saying — not just what they are saying
• the lost art of one-on-ones
• why so many of us walk around with a “representative” instead of our real selves
• and what it takes to stop shrinking, stop judging, and start living out loud

The invitation for you with this episode:

Wake up and like yourself. Love yourself, actually. Then, lead from there. Thank you all for being here on this journey — let me know what this conversation brings up for you!

CONNECT:

Follow Julio on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠

Book Julio to speak, coach, or consult at ⁠letsgowithjulio.com

CREDITS:

Theme song: "You Are The One" by ⁠Nick Deutsch⁠

Produced + edited: ⁠Rikki Gunton⁠

0:00 Intro: Leading With Integrity, Grace, and Heart

3:34 What is Servant Leadership?

5:11 The Key Performance Heart Indicator

5:30 Knowing Who You Are & Living Out Loud

12:00 Being Naturally of Service

13:33 Everyone’s a Leader in Their Own Way

13:59 Unlocking the Potential of Others

15:19 Humility & Vulnerability Are Inherent in Servant Leadership

16:29 A Leader’s Job is to Engage the Heart

20:43 Having an Orchestral Mindset - What Are You Not Saying

22:18 You’ve Got to Be Excited About You

25:42 Calling People In

27:23 More on the Orchestral Mindset

30:36 Newton’s Third Law

31:10 Building Trust

32:00 Giving & Receiving Real Feedback3

7:00 The Agency to Go Higher

38:57 How to Improve Your One on Ones

44:50 Staying Grounded Through Opposition

48:44 Creating Joy For Yourself & Others

50:22 A Message For Those Transitioning

53:05 Challenging the Idea of Needing to Be Fixed

56:06 Judgment as a Mirror

01:04:24 Showing Up With Grace

01:06:42 Heart Work as an Act of Courage

We’re sitting down with my old Lyft colleague Michael Pelehach. He’s currently the COO of The Adventure Project, a nonprofit tackling extreme poverty through sustainable job creation.

Michael's career journey has in some ways been traditional — from Duke to Northwestern's MBA program to leadership roles at Target and Lyft. But he’s also been called more than once to social impact work.

How do you know when to follow the call?

Michael opens up about the pivotal experiences that shaped his path: witnessing poverty in rural Slovakia as a child, teaching English on a Fulbright grant, and the loss of his mother during the pandemic. We also explore how becoming a father has reshaped his definition of success and the legacy he wants to leave to his kids.

If you’re searching for purpose, navigating a career transition, or wondering how to be both successful and do good in the world, this conversation will leave you feeling inspired — because Michael's story proves you don't have to choose.

The Adventure Project: https://www.theadventureproject.org/

Get in Touch with Michael: [email protected]

CONNECT:

Follow Julio on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠

Book Julio to speak, coach, or consult at ⁠letsgowithjulio.com

CREDITS:

Theme song: "You Are The One" by ⁠Nick Deutsch⁠

Produced + edited: ⁠Rikki Gunton⁠

00:00 Episode Preview

00:45 Intro: Finding Purpose in Out Work

02:56 Meet Michael Pelehach 

05:02 Early Exposure to Travel and Humbling Realizations

09:10 The Pull Toward Social Impact 

18:30 The Courage to Leave Corporate

20:30 Teaching English in Bulgaria

23:00 Realizing What’s Important

28:13 Leaving Lyft for The Adventure Project

37:00 Where Can We Have the Most Impact?

40:45 Reflecting on Returning to Tech

42:48 Sustainable Development Work is Locally Led

47:11 A Broader Definition of Success

48:33 Raising Young Boys to be Compassionate

53:26 Staying Grounded While Juggling the Responsibilities of Fatherhood 

56:24 Leaving a Legacy of Putting Others First

57:22 How to Get Involved with The Adventure Project

58:24 Closing: Compassion and Empathy Are the Answer