Me as a kid wondering how to make that cheese
Me, the young go-getter, preparing to pitch my tech company to investors
My Stanford MBA graduation
The day I got married to my beautiful wife
Me speaking to 500 young professionals on work-life balance
Pam, Jada, & I taking our daily walk
Hey Hard Worker,
Welcome! My name is Jullien Gordon and I’m a recovering workaholic.
Since recognizing my addiction, I’ve been making intentional choices and changes to the design of my day and life that allow me to spend more time with the people I love doing the things that I love to do outside of work.
In my 20s, I was young, smart, driven, and alone.
As the son of two divorced doctors, I always had this vision of the Cosby Family etched into my mind as my definition of success. Be good. Get good grades. Go to a good school. And get a good a job. As I got older, money became my goal and work became my route.
My first wake up call came when I was held up at gunpoint at the age of 18 for a Mercedes Benz that I bought. I was trying to show my parents that I was on a path to do better than them by getting the things that they already had faster than they got them. If they had a nice car at the age of 25, I needed to get one by 20. If they had a nice house at the age of 35, I needed to get one by 30. My push to please my parents sent my life in the wrong direction.
My second wake up call came when I almost lost my wife after just one year of marriage. One day, I left my wife on the beach in Cancun to travel back to the US for 30 hours for work. I was torn and stuck. I told myself I was working hard for my family, but at the same time I was allowing work to pull me away from my family. Not only did I lose my voice during that trip because of inadequate rest, I almost lost the love of my life.
These lessons taught me that the game of life wasn’t just about racing to check off the American Dream List faster than the next person, but that we can experience true happiness if we stay present to the millions of small moments in life just as much as we focus on the few big milestones like graduating, getting a job, getting married, getting a home, having kids, etc.
I believe we all want more happy hours….
Most people restrict their happiness to the weeknights after work or on weekends, however, we spend at least half of our waking hours slugging through work, working 40, 50, 60 hours a week in order to be happy some day off in the future…usually retirement.
As a result, we work, work, work, burning ourselves out to take care of our have-tos and hate-tos today and delay all of our want-tos and love-tos like pursuing our passions, getting married, traveling the world, or having kids until someday in the future. That doesn’t have to be how it is.
Happy hours can occur before work, during work, after work, and on weekends. A happy hour is a space and time you are intentional about. Being intentional means that you chose to spend your time in this way. You didn’t have to. You wanted to. And because it’s your choice, you are fully present in the moment.
Your life is your business, and you have to run it. That simply means exploring all of your daily choices, and taking full responsibility for them because any choice we don’t make for ourselves gets made for us by someone else like our employer and it’s impossible to be passive about life and have a passionate life at the same time. Rather than living by default, we should live by design.
When I’m not working…
When I’m not working, some of my love-tos include chilling with my wife and daughter. We love watching Scandal and Modern Family, going to open houses and off-Broadway shows, and finding new thai food and turkey burger spots. With my friends, I love hosting potlucks, playing basketball and big games of Uno, riding bikes on Sunday mornings, and playing pick-up soccer in the afternoons. When I’m alone, I love to read, garden, and build stuff around the house.
This is why I do what I do today.
I’m here to help you live your values and know your value so that you can experience more happy hours in your personal and professional life.
You can start right here right now with my free tools.
If you want to work with me directly, contact me here.
P.S. Here is my wedding video and love of my life.
#FamilyFirstFounderSecond
Vision:
More happy hours.
Mission:
To help people live their values and know their value by finding their life’s work and work-life balance.
My Values:
1. Family: Honoring those you love with your presence.
2. Work: The process of creating change in the world.
3. Enough: Recognizing your abundance & being grateful.
My Unique Ability:
Core Beliefs:
Happiness only exists in the here and now.
Change your day, change your life.
Family first. Founder second.
Abundance comes from defining enough.
Who you are should define what you do.
Success means making others successful.
We are all already entrepreneurs.
Core Practices:
Daily gratitude journal
Daily affirmation walks
Daily and weekly visioning
Monthly Potluck dinners
Professional Bio |
Jullien Gordon is the Founding Partner at New Higher, a high performance consultancy for organizations, individuals, and teams that want to increase employee performance, motivation, engagement, and retention. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as Pepsi and PricewaterhouseCoopers and business schools such as Cornell, Michigan, and the University of Maryland.
Jullien’s work began in the talent recruitment and development industry in 2007 with his work as the Associate Director of Talent Recruitment for Management Leadership for Tomorrow where he recruited diverse talent at the college and MBA level. From there, he went on to start his own high performance consultancy called New Higher. As the Founding Parter of New Higher, Jullien uses his innerviewing process to help companies understand what motivates their employees.
New Higher’s mission is to motivate, engage, and retain talent to increase presence, productivity, and profit. Jullien’s inquiry-based “innerviewing” trainings and tools help professionals fully align who they are with what they do so they can make their highest unique contribution in the world. He has been featured on MSNBC, Forbes, TED, and Black Enterprise for his work helping thousands of professionals be more present and perform higher in their lives and careers.
Jullien trained at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he focused on organizational behavior, high performance leadership, strategy, and entrepreneurship. He is also the author of four books on business, professional, and individual development. Jullien Gordon is originally from Oakland, California and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Headshots:
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