“If AA, church and SoulCycle had a baby, I always say it would be Peoplehood,” said Julie Rice of her new business venture.
After exiting SoulCycle, the company she cofounded with Elizabeth Cutler in a former dance studio on the Upper West Side that skyrocketed to become a global phenomenon, the duo is gearing up to launch their second business together — Peoplehood.
The concept behind the new business is teaching people how to be successful in all types of relationships and work on connections through 60-minute classes that encompass breath work, music, stretching and you’ve guessed it — conversations.
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“What you get the opportunity to do when you’re there is process your own thoughts,” said Rice, who was a talent manager prior to founding SoulCycle. (Post-SoulCycle, she had a stint as WeWork’s chief brand officer working with Adam Neumann.) “You have aha moments because people hold space for you to think. You also get to be generous and listen to other people and what we come away with is building any muscle that you would need repetition with. If you come to Peoplehood once a week and you learn to listen to other people and other people listen to you, you begin to develop your empathy muscles, your listening muscles and you’ll notice that what’s happening in the room all of a sudden begins to grow outside of the room.”
Rice finds it curious that society expects people to know how to be in relationships when there is no training at school for how to be someone’s partner — in friendship, in business or romantically.
“We are never taught these skills,” she said. “The reality is that without our social and relational health, there is no mental health. Think about if there is a relationship that’s really not going right in your life, it absolutely affects the way that you feel physically and mentally. So I actually do believe the next wave in wellness will be social relational health.”
While Peoplehood has been in beta testing, it will officially launch in January, both digitally and physically with a location in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, which will offer a coffee shop, storefront and conversational room. There will, of course, also be merch including prayer candles and sweatshirts, something Rice is a big fan of (just look at SoulCycle as proof).
On offer will be three classes — Peoplehood, Couplehood, where you can bring a partner, and Peoplehood at Work, a corporate offering.
After beginning with breath work to get out of flight of fight mode and group conversations, the classes, which on average have about 16 participants, break out into one-on-one conversations.
“I might ask you a question like ‘How are you doing really?’ and I give you three minutes to answer and I just hold space for you and the only thing I can do when you stop talking is ask you, ‘Is there more?’ and it’s funny because people say ‘that’s all we’re doing in this first session?’” Rice explained. “And people come back from that breakout and say ‘I didn’t realize it was so hard. I wanted to tell them this, I wanted to say that happened to me, too, last week.’
“What’s really interesting is when you don’t interject your thoughts into somebody else’s thinking process, they really have the time to let their own thinking unfold. It’s like peeling layers of an onion,” she continued.
Each class will have a guide who is not a trained therapist, but whom Rice describes as a connector. “They’re people that in some walk of life have learned to hold space for other people. We have a great guide who’s a children’s dance teacher. She’s also a pastor’s daughter. We have fitness instructors who are guides. We have meditation teachers. We have people that have held space in lots of different ways and we put them through a really thorough training.”
As for whether these guides will amass a cult following like SoulCycle instructors, Rice believes the answer is yes.
“People want to be inspired by other people and those are the types of people that we’re training,” she said. “I can absolutely already see what’s happening at Peoplehood. You come your first night, Anthony is your guy on a Monday night and then all of a sudden you can’t see past Anthony. You want to spend that weekly hour with Anthony, you want to know what’s happening in his life, you want to know what his people problems are, you want to know what his hopes for that week are.
“I think the personalities of these guides becomes a part of people’s journeys just like any other members of the community,” she continued. “But my hope is that these guides will become like our SoulCycle instructors and they’ll become brand ambassadors and they’ll become real leaders for the community.”
As for how the corporate partnerships have performed in beta testing, Rice said they have been successful and much needed after a long period of at-home working amid the global COVID-19 pandemic.
“There just is no water cooler anymore; people don’t know the people they work with. It’s very hard to root for somebody else’s idea or collaborate on something when you have no relationship with a colleague and so we have seen real success in a very short amount of time. It’s a totally different management layer,” she explained. “We’re not teaching hard skills, we’re not helping you give feedback to somebody. We’re not taking personality tests. What we’re really doing is teaching people how to know your colleagues so you can have a more productive work atmosphere.”