In this powerful and thought-provoking interview, Dr. Julie Radico draws from her deep experience as a therapist, coach, and author to reflect on what it truly means to live a life you love. With wisdom, humor, and clarity, she shares how connection, community, and lifelong learning fuel both her purpose and her impact. From challenging the systems that hold women back to helping others feel valid in any room they enter, Julie offers a moving reminder that confidence isn’t something you earn—it’s something you reclaim.
When you think about a life that you love, what does that look like for you?
For me, living a life I love starts with connection. Everything I do is rooted in that—whether it’s therapy, coaching, speaking, and writing. Supporting people and helping them feel as okay with themselves as possible is at the heart of it all. Writing might feel more solitary, but it becomes connective once I share it and help others access the ideas behind it.
What keeps me grounded in both my personal and professional relationships is the commitment to lifelong learning. That’s part of every practice I do, whether it’s coaching, therapy, or otherwise. I’ll dive into the most academic, dense book, and I’m excited to pull out the gems, the nuggets.
When someone comes to me and says, “Julie, I’m struggling with X,” I want to say, “I have a nugget!” Not because I have all the answers, but because I’ve learned something that might help. I’ll say, “Here’s something I’ve seen happen. Maybe it applies to you, maybe it doesn’t.” I see it as offering scaffolding, not solutions.
The fact that there’s always more to learn, more room to evolve—that’s what fulfills me. Lifelong learning also fuels my mission to help others by demystifying things. In grad school, you learn a ton of jargon and how to write in a way most people can’t understand. You read these journal articles and think, Okay, they’re saying something—but what?
Now, I see it as my purpose to translate complex information and say, “Here’s what it really means.” My mission is to break it down and make it accessible. That’s what I love.
How do you balance your ambition with personal fulfillment?
Balancing is especially hard when you work for yourself. There’s no built-in structure telling you when to stop, when to say, “I did enough today.” Some days I can say that and feel content. Other days, especially when I’m deeply passionate about something, it’s harder not to want to just keep working at it.
It really comes down to how I’m filling my cup. Sometimes, ambition and fulfillment align perfectly—what I’m working on energizes me and gives me purpose. But other times, it’s draining. Even if it’s a worthwhile or ambitious project, it might deplete me.
That’s where mindfulness comes in. Coaching, at its core, is about metacognition—thinking about our thoughts. So I try to check in with myself regularly. I’ll literally pause and ask, “How am I feeling right now? What am I telling myself about this?” That reflection helps me sort out: am I doing this because I want to, or because I think I should?
How has community helped you throughout your journey so far?
Community has played a role in every step of my personal and professional journey. I’m definitely an extrovert, but I have introverted parts too. I need to be around people, to feel connected but I also need solitude to recharge. What matters most is knowing my community is there. That I’ve built a circle of people who I trust, even if we’re not talking every day.
And when I do reach out—say, with an idea like, “Do you want to write a book together?”—they’re the kind of people who say, “Let’s try.”
The two women I co-authored You Will Get Through This with are great examples. Dr. Nicole Helverson and I go way back. We went to high school together, then unexpectedly reunited on the first day of our master’s program. We did our doctoral program together too. She’s a huge part of my life.
Charity O’Reilly, LPC is another dear friend and a phenomenal trauma therapist. We met in 2006 while working in a program for adults with severe mental illness. So when I thought about who I could ask to write the book with me, there was no doubt in my mind.
That’s what community looks like to me. Whether it’s friends, family, or colleagues, the most important thing is surrounding myself with people I trust to tell me the truth and be real with me. That honesty is what makes those relationships so powerful.
What habits do you have that allow you to reach your level of success and go about your journey?
One of my habits is staying really active in associations and in networks. At the beginning of this year one of the co-authors of my book asked me, “Do you have resolutions?” I was like, “I think I want to network more.” She was like, “How? How could you network more? You network so much already.” And I told her the real truth of it, “I like it. I like meeting other people, learning about them, and building community.”
That is one of the ways that I keep myself going. There’s always somebody I can reach out to, litmus test with, to say, “Can you listen to this idea?” and to connect with by asking “How can I support you on that?” Having connectors, supporters, and people that I can learn from in lots of different areas, helps keep me going.
The growth curve is finding a healthy balance, because even though I’m very much an extrovert, there are times when I’m thinking, “Nobody talk to me. I need to recharge for a hot minute.” I love to be in the mix, networking and meeting new people and building up the connections, the pathways.
What do you believe is the key to helping more women step into their confidence and potential?
The system was made for one type of person, especially in America, and everyone else consistently receives covert and overt messages of how they are less than.
Women get conditioned to carry these expectations of, “I have to make other people happy. I have to placate their ego. I have to be quiet and not take up space or otherwise I’m a bitch or I’m perceived as stepping out of bounds.” That is not on you. If there was one small thing that I could do to chip away at the inequity, even if it’s one woman at a time, I want them to hear, “It’s not you.”
Yes, we all bring our own stuff. This is not like a blanket way to say, “You can do no wrong, be a trash person, and destroy the world.” When people talk about the imposter phenomenon, I want them to consider, “That’s a generation bias that we’ve internalized.” And these biases hurt everyone, most people say that men experience imposter phenomenon too. Overall, however you identify, if more than 50% of the population feels like there’s something wrong with them, that’s the system. That is not you.
I would hope that women would give themselves a little bit of space to say, “This is not my fault.” When somebody’s rude to them, somebody catcalls them, somebody frowns at them in a meeting and they start getting in their heads—make some space for that. Yes, you may have contributed, none of us are perfect. However, a lot of times, this is not reflective of you as a person. This more so a product of the truth that you are being made into a representative of a gender identity and others have feelings they’ve been taught from the patriarchy and that they then project onto you.
Why, in most meetings, does research show that men talk more than women—no matter which women are in the room? It’s not because those specific women are not doing the “right things.”
Women can’t fix the system alone. Sure, they can speak up in the meeting, but instead of putting the responsibility on each individual woman, let’s try to fix the system that made it okay for somebody to talk over them in the first place or take credit for their work. Because that’s the issue. That’s what I wish people would see.
Yes, we’ve progressed as a society in some ways, but we have so far to go. We also need to prioritize people’s safety, health, and wellness while striving for such change.
If you could rewrite the rules for women, what’s one rule you’d rewrite?
I want women to take up space without feeling guilty or second-guessing themselves. I want women to be able to step into any space and feel valid in that space, to not have to be like, “Oh, is it okay that I’m here?” or “Do I have to act a certain way? Do I have to prove myself?”
I want women of all intersectional identities to be able to step into any space and feel valid, because they should. Whether you’re a 60-year-old Black woman who uses a wheelchair or an 18-year-old white woman who’s able-bodied. Your experience is valid. I want women to be able to step into any space and not feel the hyper-vigilance that most every woman has.
What’s the legacy that you’re hoping to leave?
I would love for women to take up space—and also anybody of any intersectional identity—to take up space in a way that is mutually supportive and where everybody feels okay.
I’ve had experiences where my presence was not validated. One of them was actually in a leadership position for a national organization. I served on a committee years ago and in my first or second year, I was told in one of the meetings, “You wait your turn.” I had made a suggestion of what the committee could do or what we could focus on, and I was literally told, “You wait your turn.” Not my turn to be in the speaking order for that meeting, but to wait months or years to have earned for my contributions to be seen as valid.
I had so many thoughts in my mind at that time. So you’re telling me point blank that I’m not valid in this space yet? I have to earn some sort of seniority, wait you out, or navigate around you? Later on, when I took on a leadership role on that committee the first thing I did was say, “Everyone is valid here. Every person is allowed to share any thought that you have that you feel is contributing in some type of way. You are all valid and don’t let anybody tell you that you’re not.”
If you make a community where everybody feels valid, then people show up how they want to show up, and they feel okay to do that. That’s how you find people that are going to be real with you.
I hope that I help people feel valid and nobody is going to get told “you have to wait your turn” on my watch. You are valid in whatever space you want to take up, because everybody has something to give. Everyone can contribute. And if you’re sitting in your power in such a way that you then feel threatened by other people contributing, you’re missing out on the insights and growth that comes from a diversity of voices.
I have a healthy amount of self-confidence that I am happy to be humbled. Somebody said to me, “You don’t want to be the richest person in the graveyard.” I like that on lots of levels.
I want to be somebody who makes other people feel rich during their lives—fulfilled and valid—and that they were able to do things that they wanted to do and enjoy.
Julie Radico, Psy.D. ABPP, ACC is the owner and Chief Executive Officer of Radico Psychological and Consultation Services, LLC. where she provides one-on-one coaching and therapy tele-services to professional women, to help them discover how they are more than enough. She also speaks to groups on overcoming the unhelpful thinking, demystifying mental health issues, and women in leadership. Dr. Radico is a coauthor of You Will Get Through This: A Mental Health Tool Kit―Help for Depression, Anxiety, Grief, and More.
