Jo James

Hello, beautiful. I’m so grateful you’re here on this planet right now, here, today. Do you know me? Have we met? It’s possible we might have met sometime before.

From my inner light to yours, namaste. Hello again.

~~~

I come from a low-income community in Kentucky where the music teachers were top-notch. They helped me develop and excel in ways that got me into MIT in 1995 and continue to bring me creative and spiritual gifts today. 

When I went off to college, I got to learn about a whole different culture, the Northeast, where people look at you like you have two heads if you say hi to them on the sidewalk. I studied neuroscience, and I wish I could have stayed for 17 more years and studied everything. When I graduated, I was on top of the world.

I held down a management consulting job during my first five years out of school, while also surviving a series of traumatic experiences that many women, unfortunately, will relate to. Through a team of coworkers in Los Angeles, I met a group of dramatic, artsy people who liked astrology. These friends reminded me that the world contains beauty when I was in the worst of my pain.

I left the consulting job in 2004 and planted myself in Venice Beach, embarking on a journey of healing and self-discovery. I acknowledged that I’d been living with PTSD. I devoted myself to the Four Agreements and attended a cool Tai Chi-based massage school. Chaotic friends fell away, and a more Zen crowd came in. Astrology remained in my conversations as a sweet way of saying, “Hey, you’re cool. I’d like to get to know you better.”

Meanwhile, I got to experience work life at a bank, a startup that tanked, and an investment firm. I developed muscle memory for technology project management lessons like defining detailed requirements and tailoring your message to your audience. I got very good at making spreadsheets.

Astrology started to inform my corporate-world work after I experienced what it was like to lead a project that kicked off on a Mercury retrograde start date. (Not good.) I began harmonizing my work with the astro-weather: affirming goals with the new moon, wrapping up loose ends with the waning moon, rethinking expectations during Mercury retrograde. 

For a while, I was asking my coworkers when their birthdays were, until someone got mad at me for stereotyping him based on his sun sign. He was right. There are 8 billion types of people in the world, not 12, and a knowledgeable astrologer wouldn’t put too much weight on the sun sign, anyway. I think the bigger lesson for me here was that the person must be placed first. Your snapshot of sky as represented in your birth chart may contain some interesting pointers, but the map is not the territory.

In 2009, my job moved from Santa Monica to Austin, as did the job of my partner, Jeremy. I got a professional project management certification in 2010 and landed a role in 2012 working with an awesome female director. Under her mentorship, I got to lead large, high-priority initiatives. This life phase helped me get the hang of facilitating groups and individuals through problem solving and decision making processes. 

Everything changed when my first child was born in 2014. Realizing I really wanted a front row seat to his first three years, I resigned from my job and devoted every fiber of my being to him. We got into some beautiful energetic spaces together and participated in all sorts of caregiver-child activities. My second child, born in 2017, was different; he got tired of being one-on-one with me pretty quickly. I returned to part-time paid work with a nonprofit in 2018 and full-time paid work with a fintech in 2019.

In 2021, as I began a new management role at Indeed, I found out my older child had significant developmental delays. We signed him up for six therapeutic appointments per week, and the question of how to allocate time between parenting and salary making became the most dynamic growth edge in my life. Despite the time management challenges, I was delighted to contribute to Indeed’s mission of helping people get jobs, something I had always done in my free time for fun anyway. 

While helping a friend with her résumé in January 2022, I noticed some typos that seemed incongruent with her level of corporate-world accomplishment. 

“Where is your natal Mercury?” I asked.

We looked up her chart. 

“Aha, Mercury in Cancer. That explains the typos, and it makes you a good emotional communicator. You can take a tense situation with a client and navigate it easily.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I am really good at that.”

“We should highlight your EQ a bit more on your résumé.”

Seeing her smile over Zoom, I realized the combination of astrology and career coaching could be more than a hobby. I began practicing with as many people as possible, refining my services. In September 2022, I left Indeed to pursue life coaching as a vocation, leaning into astrology-informed career coaching as a niche. I am delighted to be helping people expand their careers and align with their callings. I feel so grateful every day to be using my time and energy in the direction of empowerment, encouragement, and love.