Mentor Yourself: Interview With Invisible Mentor Julie Daniluk
Interviewee Name: Julie Daniluk, Nutritionist, Motivational Speaker, Writer, TV Host
Company Name: Daniluk Consulting
Website: http://www.juliedaniluk.com/, http://www.ownca.oprah.com/Shows/Healthy-Gourmet.aspx
To get the most from The Invisible Mentor Interview with Julie Daniluk, while you are reading it, answer the following questions:
- Are their similarities between the Julie Daniluk and yourself?
- In what ways can you use the information?
- In what ways would you respond differently from the interviewee?
- What are your five takeaways from the interview?
- After reading the interview, what is one concrete action you can take?
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Julie Daniluk: I’m a real foodie so I’m passionate about helping people have a connection to their food because it’s beyond food, it becomes every cell in your body, and it’s the building block that we use to recreate ourselves, and that’s why I’m so passionate about food. I’m a nutritionist, author about food, and TV host of the Healthy Gourmet for the Oprah Winfrey Network. I love food, and giving that information to the world. I define myself as a food advocate.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Julie Daniluk: I do yoga from 7 am to 8 am every day. I love to eat dinner for breakfast, which consists of lots of green and protein, and then I have two types of days. If I’m filming my TV Show we work 12 to 14 hours filming on the set, in which I’m enrolling people in the new possibility for their menu and diet and then we’re filming that. And in the off season, I’m writing articles, working on my next book, or teaching a lecture. And every day I’m preparing and connecting with my team so that I can have really good, successful events and getting my articles out on time to magazines like Chatelaine.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Julie Daniluk: I work by a committed promise action list. It’s like a to-do list, but it is driven by deadline so that you have to complete your promise to take on, and that’s been really amazing. I’ve only started to do that in the last seven months and it’s incredibly motivating to have something that you promised to do instead of that wish list that slides into the next day, the next day and the next day.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Julie Daniluk: I think I would have listened to my dad. My dad really tried to get me to take sciences in high school and I resisted. I wanted to be an actress, and that meant that I had to go back to school and learn things as an adult, so I think listen to your elders is something that I would do differently.
Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?
Julie Daniluk: One of the real incredible, transformational tools that I found this year is an education centre called Landmark, and it’s taught me a whole new way to connect with people, and my goals really become reachable. Before I used to put my goal in a big bubble out in the sky but I didn’t have a plan on how I was going to make those dreams come true. I find having a community and coaches to hold you to account to what you want in your life, has been truly incredible. This has been in the past year so that’s my discovery of the year.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Julie Daniluk:
1. One of the big threats is that there seems to be a threat to dieticians and holistic nutritionists. They are two camps if you will, and dieticians can often invalidate what holistic nutritionists offer. Dieticians follow the recommendations of a doctor, and holistic nutritionists follow the recommendations of a naturopathic doctor so the ideology can be quite different.
I do find a threat to my business is when I’ve heard dieticians say, “Oh, well Julie is a holistic nutritionist, she doesn’t have the scope of knowledge that a dietician has,” and my counteroffer is that we just have a different scope of knowledge, and our scope of knowledge goes into the 14 or 15 different alternative diets out there, whether it be macrobiotic, cooking from Japan, the healing cuisine from India – we’re all offering something unique so I’ve been able to turn that around and try to have more of an alignment with the dietician and say we’re just working alongside them on a different track so that the threat is removed.
Having open communication with anything that comes my way, so whenever someone says something, it’s to clear it up directly with whoever puts it out in the world and try to build alliances with them because I believe strongly that if you can have those sorts of people closer to you then it’s so much better for you. I don’t know if you have ever heard the saying, “Take your enemy to tea,” not that dieticians are my enemies, but more to say that people who are often upset or angry or threatened, it’s because they are nervous about losing their ground and their success, so if you build alliances with them, and support them in what they are doing, so that they can feel less intimidated, is the only path to success when it comes to this obstacle.
- Government regulations: The government is tightly regulating supplements. They want to control the types of supplements that are on the shelves and that may limit nutritionists’ access to recommend healthy supplements to augment people’s nutrition. I’m aware that we have to work with the government to ensure access to healthy supplementation.
3. The last one is balancing my health needs with the health needs of my clients. It’s always a time conversation about how I can keep all the balls juggling in the air of what needs to be done. We only get 24 hours in the day and I know that for health I need seven to eight hours of sleep, so that gives me the waking hours to balance my needs with everyone else’s needs. That has been a big threat in the past, and I’m handling it by building a team. So I now have someone who helps me with social media, someone who helps me with my events – building the alliances so I’m not feeling like I have to take it on all by myself is really great.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Julie Daniluk: I think what’s unique is that I don’t judge anyone’s diet at all. I have tremendous compassion for addictions and I understand that most people are struggling with food being an incredible comfort that’s substituting in an area of life that’s missing. I like to talk into that and get into the root of why people are eating in a dysfunctional way, why they’re wanting to eat certain foods, because if we can get to the root of that then we can shift people into a live-it versus a diet. I’m not big on diets, because diets mean that there is a beginning and an end, and once it ends you’re going back to indulging in lots of pizza and poutine. So I love building a lifelong choice where we build in opportunities for treats and we give people lots of juicy delicious foods so that they are feeling that support and empowered to make healthier choices gradually.
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?
Julie Daniluk: My major challenge in life and how I resolved it would have to be my own addiction to sugar. I faced the fact that I would run from one treat to the next over and over again and the only thing that broke me from that is I had to get in touch with what emotions I was eating down. I had a fantastic therapist who helped me to face my own food addiction.
Once I started to address my feelings in the moment, like I would have those sad feelings and those overwhelming feeling would come up, and I would find a way to express myself verbally instead of diving into another binge. That was truly my ultimate path to healing, and now I feel completely empowered. I can still have a treat, I can still have fun with my friends, but I can also wake up in the morning and have energy and vitality. And I can have it all and I think a lot of people think it’s one or the other – on the diet or binging. Eating in the moment gives them that 10-second satisfaction.
I feel like the connection came when I could express myself to my loved ones so that I didn’t have to hide out anymore. That was a huge challenge to get over because it was ruining my life. I mean every other thought was about food and now I still have a huge amount of my day taken up with food, but it’s in a very positive context. I feel that I have transformed the conversation from negative to positive.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Julie Daniluk: My big break was landing the job of nutritionist on The Right Fit on the Women’s Television Network over 10 years ago. My friend Anna Rosenberg, an incredible macrobiotic cooking instructor let me know about the audition and I’m forever grateful to her because she said, “There is this opportunity out there, I don’t think it’s right for me but I think you should audition.” I put a demo together in 24 hours and mailed it off to the Women’s Network. When I got the call, I was ecstatic, and realized that life was about to switch into the fast lane and it did – two TV shows later it’s a wonderful, wonderful, life.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Julie Daniluk: One of my biggest failures is being a self-published author. I tried to publish my book, Meals That Heal Inflammation as a self-published work and I tried to do everything exactly the way I would want it to be for other people. I put in hundreds of colour photographs and made it extra-oversized formatting. To afford to print it we bought an expensive printer and binder, and we installed the equipment in our home and became publishers. If we sent this book to a printer it would end up costing us $60 a book so we did it in-house and broke even on every book. We were printing them for free and we had to make a call. It’s better to make $1 or $2 a book and have it published by someone else and have the stress removed from our lives, than to try to do it all.
I ended up getting a wonderful literary agent, Rick Broadhead and he brought me to Random House and secured a contract, and now my book has been republished, so the book has been in existence for six years but how it’s going to contribute to my greatest success is that it’s going to be available in every Chapters-Indigo across the country and that broad reach and scope is so much more important than trying to have a higher amount of income per book and trying to keep all the publishing in-house. I see this as the biggest failure because it’s been a financial hit. I’m not going to make any money off this book because I’m $40,000 in debt over creating an in-house publishing house, but what it is doing is setting me up for great success moving forward. There is a silver lining in every financial downfall.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Julie Daniluk: The toughest decision was cutting my safety net. I had a day job for 16 years, and when I went independent, I decided just last year to cut my safety net and my safety net was The Big Carrot which is a health food store that I’ve been a co-operative owner of for 16 years. I had a transition phase where I had the opportunity to check out what like is like without the safety net and I have to say I have blown the ceiling off my career in letting go of my safety net. By leaping into the empty void and saying, “I’m going to find the work. I’m going to run every day as if it’s the most important day of my life.”
I used to arrive at my old workplace and just bide my time. I punched the clock and every hour I was looking forward to going home. And now, every hour that I’m awake I’m already at home, so I have to make it a vibrant choice of exactly what I want to do and it has completely changed my life. I’m so grateful that I made that tough choice because to remove the safety net meant that for the first time in my life I don’t have health benefits, a consistent pay cheque necessarily, but I was able to take on a new job recently that’s giving me those benefits so I think it’s all going to work out.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Julie Daniluk:
- My mom took me off refined foods at age seven. She found out through the work of Dr. Feingold who wrote a book called Your Hyperactive Child (Why Your Child Is Hyperactive
). In the book he describes how children with allergies to refined sugars – or mostly he talked about how colours and additives in food – can create real problems in the brain where a child acts out, or can’t learn, or speak properly, or write properly, and that was happening for me. When she put me on a 100 percent natural diet, my grades went from Ds to As overnight. My whole world opened up and I started to be a happy person. I never slept, and I had severe insomnia and a tired childhood until I was taken off refined foods. You can imagine how that would shape your life. - I almost died in Asia from food poisoning. I lost all control of my limbs and digestive functions. I was basically a shivering, feverish mess laying in a bungalow in Asia because I let it go too long. I became so dehydrated that every time I sipped water I threw up. I was so dehydrated that my fever shot up to 108 degrees. What that did, is give me the awareness – when I got home I had to go on a serious antibiotics, it destroyed my digestive tract – that I had to use food as a healing tool to get back to my place of vitality, and I worked for five years to regain my vitality. I documented that and it became my book Meals that Heal Inflammation: Embrace Healthy Living and Eliminate Pain, One Meal at a Time. So you can imagine how that event ended up having a very positive outcome.
- The third event is that I married an amazingly loving husband. I’ll say that’s a really active choice. I would say that my husband when I initially looked at him wouldn’t seem a perfect fit. He had a lot of financial problems, and he wasn’t as emotionally available – he’s laughing at me right now. He was a diamond in the rough, but in my heart I knew that he was the right person to be with and I really trusted and believed in him. He has transformed himself over the last eight years of knowing him into an extremely financially responsible, beautiful and incredibly emotionally available person and he’s the greatest rock in my life, and the greatest success in my life.
). In the book he describes how children with allergies to refined sugars – or mostly he talked about how colours and additives in food – can create real problems in the brain where a child acts out, or can’t learn, or speak properly, or write properly, and that was happening for me. When she put me on a 100 percent natural diet, my grades went from Ds to As overnight. My whole world opened up and I started to be a happy person. I never slept, and I had severe insomnia and a tired childhood until I was taken off refined foods. You can imagine how that would shape your life.
. So you can imagine how that event ended up having a very positive outcome.Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Julie Daniluk: I hope that Meals That Heal Inflammation is a legacy. This project is a five year project and I feel that I’ve given birth to an actual baby because I put everything, my heart and soul into it. It’s been a really big thing to birth, and I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment. I really hope that people love it.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Julie Daniluk: Mentors showed me what was possible, and what I could move into as a reality. When you look at your mentors and see how they have their lives together, and one of my greatest mentors is Martin Robertson. He ended up adopting me as his goddaughter. He was such a special man and he died from cancer a couple of years ago. He produced the Rolling Stones and worked with some of the biggest rock legends in the world including Sting, Paul McCartney, Elton John and all these legendary figures.
What he was able to influence me with is a fearlessness in life to feel your fear and jump into relatedness with powerful people. I think that’s the single most important thing that he helped me to understand is that if you want to be powerful, you hang out with powerful people. If you want to be creative, hang out with creative people. You surround yourself, immerse yourself in the life that you want and it will start to rub off on you. That’s something incredible that he gave me personally.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Julie Daniluk: Fall forward fast. Work out how to fearlessly communicate with powerful people.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Julie Daniluk: Fall forward fast and work to have fearless communication. Practice on your friends and loved ones saying what’s in your heart because as you communicate authentically people are incredibly attracted to that. If you look at Oprah, she is very authentic, and she is able to tap into exactly what is to be said because she has her own fears out of the way and she is very clear with the person she is speaking with. I try to live by that example and I also try to find my own way.
As an invisible mentor, I want to give so much. I think my number one trait that I want to bestow is that understanding of Karma, and the fact that as you give, in the act of giving is your gift. You don’t need anything past the gift of the giving because that act of being selfless is what brings joy.
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