Meet Dr. Julia Garcia

Hi. I’m Dr. Julia Garcia.

Most people call me Dr. J.

I have been doing this since I was a teenager.

“This” has looked like a lot of different things over the years. Driving around in a car with an oil leak to hand out printed flyers and burned DVD’s of my programming to different schools. Prevention programs in high schools where the school to guidance counselor ratio was hundreds to one. A youth movement that somehow reached a quarter million people before I had language for what we were building. An award-winning technology platform for teen girls and their mental health. A crisis helpline I built from scratch during a pandemic, training people who had never done anything like it to respond to real crises on a live line, deployed across 62 countries.

ARTIST ACADEMIC POET PSYCHOLOGIST

MY JOURNEY HAS TAKEN A LOT OF TURNS.

In between it all: I was a scholar college athlete. I spent five years in prevention and Title IX work. I dropped out of graduate school three times and went back three times. I earned a PhD in Psychology, was the first woman in my bloodline to do so. I built a racial equity platform in four days during civil unrest. I helped make history and performed at the first-ever TEDx at a women’s correctional facility. I’ve worked inside school gyms with no sound systems and in corporate settings with companies like Salesforce, Toyota, Verizon Go Wireless, and Typeform, who made a documentary about the work and brought me on as their summit keynote.

Now.

I deliver keynotes around the country. I recently released the book, The Five Habits of Hope, published by HarperCollins. I am currently building an AI tool called MiniChats that does not answer for you but challenges you to answer for yourself. I speak at healthcare conferences, technology summits, association events, government agencies, and universities across the country.

The framework I teach was not developed in isolation or in a lab. It was built while being in the room with the people where hope was hardest to find, and it was built by someone who had to find it for herself first.

I do not do perfection. I deliver passion. Every time.

No self-help could have saved a story like mine. But a practice could. And did. And does. Every day.