Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler are two-time wellness founders. Their first business, SoulCycle, revolutionized the wellness, fitness, and fashion industries (they basically invented athleisure). Now, their second venture is focused on exercising a different muscle – our relational fitness. We spoke with Julie and Elizabeth about how relationships have been the key to their success, and how they’ve learned to navigate hard professional and personal conversations.
In this episode, Julie and Elizabeth share:
Why relational fitness is essential to being a better professional – and how to improve yours
When they knew it was time to exit SoulCycle
How they manage and nurture their partnership
How the brand of SoulCycle exploded
What it takes to build more than one business
On Developing our Relational Fitness
Julie: There is this one piece of the 360 wellness picture that we somehow think we all just know how to do. Like, we all just know how to be parents, or we know how to be good coworkers, or we're just gonna get married and somehow we're gonna understand how to compromise or be partners. For some reason we have not associated relational wellness with practicing, with developing our empathy muscles, our listening muscles, and society is making this harder and harder for us.
On Their Partnership
Elizabeth: I think we also really fought for our relationship. We fought for being able to stay connected and understand each other through the ups and downs of building a business, and developed an intense amount of mutual respect and caring. And I think that because so many crazy things sort of happened around each of us and together, that if we didn't come back to that, this could have easily severed. And yet here we are 16 years later, still pursuing these common goals that are about helping people really achieve something that doesn't exist in the market…it's a miracle that we've been able to do this and also something that we don't take for granted.
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