Excerpt
What does it really take to protect your energy when hustle has become the norm? In this episode, Anne Rajoo talks with entrepreneur, mother, and children's book creator Jules Bindi about the entrepreneur mindset that finally let her hold real work boundaries, why you have to reduce work stress at the nervous-system level before it shows up on your calendar, and how she's learning to calm her nervous system so it doesn't become her daughter's inheritance. They talk honestly about the dual burden of building a business while raising a child, about where caregiving burden quietly shows up in a home, and about the self regulation tools Jules now uses instead of putting her urgency onto everyone else. If you've ever struggled with balancing career and motherhood, or built something out of exhaustion instead of alignment, this conversation is for you.
Transcript
Anne Rajoo: Juls, I'm excited to have you on the podcast, because you speak about something that's really important to the whole concept of peaceful productivity: emotional intelligence. From the conversation we had before we started recording, I know that you, like me, went through a period where hard work and pushing and just doing a lot of things felt normal — but it got you to a point where that stopped working. Maybe you can start by bringing in the listener: who you are, everything you do, and then we can talk about how things have changed in the way you work, and about emotional intelligence too.
Juls Bindi: I love that, thank you. Since I was a child, I grew up watching my parents constantly work and hustle. My dad had so many different projects — he struggled with alcoholism and wasn't able to keep a job, so he'd get fired often, and it was very inconsistent with him.
Jules: My mom, though, was the consistent one. She was the breadwinner. I remember she'd wake up around 6 a.m., and I'd make her tea. We'd make sure she felt greeted and loved before she left, and she loved on us too. Then she'd drive from San Jose to Oakland every single day, because she wanted my sister and me to have consistency at home. So my mom was working constantly, driving close to two hours each way, with traffic.
Juls: Watching her work ethic and her love for us, and then watching my dad try different business ideas — some working, some falling apart, all the highs and lows of entrepreneurship — that became my blueprint. I started to believe the most powerful businesses are built from authenticity, not exhaustion. When something isn't working in business and you keep pushing against it, it's like swimming upstream. But when you can relax into it and flow downstream instead, it's just as effective — and a lot less draining. I didn't understand that until I had a child, and honestly, not even fully until a bit after.
Juls: My daughter is seven now. When I gave birth to her, I was in the middle of building a multi-million dollar business with my ex-husband: an e-bike company called Zugo Bike. We grew it to over ten million dollars in under three months. Literally after giving birth, I was unloading containers of e-bikes, doing fulfillment, getting out thousands of orders. I'd put my daughter in a little basket with blankets and pillows in the warehouse so I could keep working while she napped, with a freight train passing by every few hours, shaking the whole place like an old warehouse club from the 80s.
Juls: That was the level of hustle. And then the divorce came, and everything collapsed — the business, the effort, all of it. It hadn't been built with authenticity. It had been built on hustle.
Juls: But here's the thing: you can hold motherhood and ambition in the same hand. It's about what you choose to do with that ambition alongside your child. I didn't want my daughter to inherit my unhealed survival patterns from my dad — the way those patterns get passed down if we're not careful. So I hold a hard boundary now: where your feet are, your presence should be too.
Juls: When I'm with my daughter, I'm with my daughter. My phone is down, my work is done. My whole team knows that when I pick her up, I'm unavailable. I'm not perfect — I'll still sneak into the bathroom to fire off a quick Slack message sometimes. But once she's asleep, around seven-thirty or eight, I'm back on the computer, checking in with my factories, orders, customer questions, my team. There's still a real balance in that, and part of it is realizing not everything is actually an emergency.
Juls: For a long time, my nervous system ran like everything was an emergency. My urgency became everyone else's emergency. I'd tell people, 'I need this now,' without stopping to think that they had other things they needed to do too. It felt urgent to me because I believed my task list mattered more than theirs. That created a lot of chaos and disruption. And that's where emotional intelligence comes in — I didn't always have it. It wasn't something my family modeled.
Juls: Our communication style growing up was yelling. We even had something we called 'family court': we'd sit around the dinner table, someone would act as judge, and whoever was in conflict — usually my dad and me — would state their case, and the judge would decide who was right. So the version of success I want my daughter to witness includes peace, joy, and boundaries. And I can't give her that if I don't have it for myself.
Anne: Wow — there are so many points in there where I'm just like, yes, this resonates. My dad, for example, was incredibly hardworking, six or seven days a week, mostly long hours. I hardly saw him. My first real family vacation that wasn't visiting grandparents was when I was sixteen. He just didn't have time for one before that.
Anne: So I told myself I didn't want to be an entrepreneur, because if that's what it looked like, no thank you — I'd rather have my nine-to-five. But life had a different path for me. I remember being on the phone trying to reply to messages while I had little kids around, trying to be present with them, and getting frustrated with them once I'd finished typing. All of that resonates with me too.
Anne: I didn't want my kids to believe that's how work has to be. But I also knew that if I didn't build a different way of working for myself, I couldn't model anything different for them. That's a lot of what led me to what I do now: peaceful productivity. Because the old way — the hustle, the pushing, the inauthenticity — just didn't work. I'd say I'm a relatively peaceful person, but underneath, I was so stressed. Everything had to happen right now, and if it didn't, it meant something bad about me: that I was failing, that I wasn't a good entrepreneur, not a good mom, not a good person at all. Those were the stories I carried.
Anne: I want to go a little deeper into something you mentioned when we first connected — you said your daughter calls you forth, and I think you used the word 'heartbreak.' Can you unpack that? And then I'd also love for you to talk about the books you've created.
Juls: Thank you. And to build on what you were just saying — alignment feels different than hustle, and your body knows the difference.
Juls: My daughter is a really unique kid. She knows exactly what to say in the right moments, and sometimes it breaks my heart. If I'm distracted, or physically there with her but not really present, she'll say, 'Mama, do you want to talk about something?' And I'll say, 'I'm okay, baby.' And she'll say, 'I just don't feel like you're present with me right now.' And she's right — I'm not. Mom's having big feelings, going through a lot of emotions.
Juls: I believe emotional intelligence is preventative medicine for future pain. When I model that for my daughter — asking questions, staying engaged rather than correcting behavior outright — it changes things. Instead of saying 'stop picking your nails,' we ask, 'are you nervous about something?' And it works every time. Now, when my daughter Sagey wants my attention, she'll pick at her nail, and I'll say, 'hey, are you nervous about something?' and she'll open up. That's what I mean about her awareness — it sometimes breaks my heart because she's so aware, and I wonder, did I make her too aware? But I'm not going to stand in the way of that awareness, even though it's not always easy.
Anne: I think it's actually a beautiful gift to have that awareness. So many people I know really struggle with it. When my own kids get a bit frustrated talking about emotions, I remind myself I had to learn this very late in life — through therapy, coaches, books. I'm hoping they'll pick it up more naturally. But sometimes I look at them and think, what am I creating here?
Juls: The nervous system of the mother becomes the climate of the home. If we're hustling and running ourselves ragged to get things done, our kids feel that energy. So the real question becomes: how do we regulate our own nervous system without putting that regulation job onto our children?
Juls: The way I look at it — when I'm having a hard day, my daughter will sometimes try to run up and hug me, like, 'Mom, are you okay, let me give you a hug.' And I'll gently redirect: 'Mommy doesn't need a hug from you right now. Mommy gives you hugs when you're not feeling good.' I need her to know she's not here to regulate my nervous system. I'm the mother — I get to hold that for her, not the other way around.
Juls: That's the difference. There are a lot of moms stuck in victim mode, and I was one of them for years — victim to my circumstances, to my business collapsing, to my ex-husband, you name it. It took me a long time to realize that mindset wasn't healthy for anyone, especially not for my daughter watching me live it. Once I moved through that, I could really own: I'm here to support her regulation, she's not here to support mine. She'll never take on a parenting role in my life.
Juls: We're not raising our children to stay with us. We're raising them to eventually leave and build their own lives. Our job is to be their safe landing — the people they come back to when they need us — and to make sure that stays true.
Anne: I love that. Is that part of why you created your books? You have some genuinely lovely books, with some wise ways of helping kids learn emotional intelligence. Tell me about that.
Juls: Thank you. I poured so many of my own stories into these books. I truly believe emotional intelligence is one of the greatest gifts we can give our children and ourselves. When kids learn early that their feelings are safe to express, that their voice matters, and that their body belongs to them, they grow into adults who trust themselves. So many people walk around disconnected from their bodies because they were taught to suppress emotions and silence them with discomfort, burnout, or eroded self-worth.
Juls: My work with the EQ Kid Books, and the collection, is about helping families reconnect with themselves emotionally. When we create emotional safety in childhood, we change generations. That feels like the most meaningful success I could ever create.
Juls: The first book I wrote was 'My Body, My Rules,' because I wanted my daughter to understand body autonomy. We have rules for school, rules for work, rules for our house — but what are the rules for your own body? I never grew up knowing we were allowed to have those. It's simple things, like: I can say no to a kiss whenever I want to, and it's okay if that makes someone uncomfortable, as long as I'm comfortable in my own body. I didn't understand that until I was an adult, so that became the first book.
Juls: After that came 'Manifest the Best Day Ever,' about how your words shape your day, like a snowball effect. When you start a new day, it's genuinely new — you don't have to carry the past into it. Things that happened in the past matter in that they help us grow, but we don't have to keep repeating them. We can use the past as a growth mechanism and still stay grounded in the present.
Juls: Then came 'Welcome to Harmony Hills,' which deals with divorce, because when my ex-husband and I split, it was really hard on my daughter, and honestly it still is sometimes. These books support difficult conversations by making them approachable. When we read the book about missing having both parents together, I'll ask her, 'where do you feel that in your body — is it in your heart, your head, your legs, your stomach?' It helps her locate the feeling and reconnect it to her breath.
Juls: There's also 'The Breathing Rock,' 'Charlie's Quiet Corner,' about neurodivergence, and 'Dracula Finds a Home,' about anti-bullying, told through a little dog and the idea that animals have feelings too. In total I've written over 10 books. I love sharing this with the world and supporting families who don't fully understand what EQ actually is.
Juls: A lot of people don't, because schools are so focused on IQ and not EQ. And with everything AI can now do for us, EQ is only going to matter more. Our brains are essentially wired like computers, capable of being reprogrammed. Trauma can be reprogrammed. The stories you tell yourself about a painful past relationship can be rewritten. I know that because I've lived it.
Anne: I know a lot of this comes from your own journey — realizing you needed to build your own emotional intelligence to move through some genuinely hard circumstances. And it's interesting, because so much of what you're describing for kids applies directly to us as adults, and to how we work. You talked about boundaries around the body, but it's the same with boundaries around time — my time versus your time. You mentioned how your urgency became something you put onto everyone else. It works the same way in reverse: you don't have to take on everyone else's urgency either.
Anne: It's fascinating how what you've built for children maps so directly onto how we function as adults. I actually have an 'emotional corner' with my own son. On days when work isn't flowing, or a client's giving me a hard time, I'll go sit in his corner — he's got little stickers there prompting: what do I need right now to feel better? And when kids learn that, it comes back around. My daughter will sometimes tell me, 'Mommy, I think you need to take a little break.' And she's right — I do.
Anne: It really is fascinating how deeply connected these things are between how we parent and how we work. Before we wrap up, I'd love for you to speak for a couple of minutes about ADHD. I know you have the neurodivergence book, and I believe you also identify as having ADHD yourself, alongside running what sounds like five different businesses. How do you actually work with that?
Juls: My team has really gotten the flow of how I work by now. I have different channels set up in Slack for everything: an ideas channel, a personal assistant channel, a kids' book channel, a Zugo Bike channel, and even a Zugo Pet channel. Everything's organized and structured, which is essential when you have ADHD.
Juls: You don't have every superpower, so you find people who have the ones you don't, and you build a team you actually trust — one you can hand things to and let them run with. I always tell people: when you hire someone, they become the CEO of that department. I'm the CEO of the company, but they're the CEO of their piece of it, and they get to make the calls there. If they're stuck, they come to me. If I were doing this solo, I wouldn't get anything done. That's the truth.
Juls: I do have to sit down and focus, and one thing that helps is music. There's an app I love that tunes music to your personal vibrational frequency, based on your birth date, birth year, and location — it's rooted in an old practice from India. It's like tuning a guitar that's slightly out of tune, and once it's on, I can actually focus. There are small tools like that out there that genuinely support focus and productivity. Because without that, you end up spinning in circles, and eventually you just collapse.
Anne: I love that, so fascinating. I'd have more questions, but we're going to wrap up here. Tell everyone where they can find your books and connect with you — all the links will be in the show notes as well.
Juls: Please visit eqkidbooks.com — we ship internationally. We're launching another seven books at the end of June. You can follow me on Instagram at @julsbindi, and also at eqkidbooks.
Anne: Amazing — thank you so much. And like I said, the books are genuinely so cute. Well done.
Juls: Thank you.
