Your New Life Blend

Is your workplace toxic? Benish Shah is an in-demand lawyer and marketing executive, used to ambitious projects with punishing timelines, and she didn't mind hard work. But in the wake of the pandemic, she  started to question not just the work, but the workplaces. Was her work making the world a better place? And were her workplaces measuring up to that same standard? Benish had noticed a pa...

When the pandemic upended our lives in March 2020, Cindy Gallop was one of the few people who did not experience personal or professional upheaval, or even inconvenience. Cindy loved spending time alone in the apartment she loved, she was a sought-after speaker and consultant who was equally in demand online - and she ran a startup that was predicated exclusively on users and customers being onlin...

A few years ago, Emily Lynn Paulson didn't think she had a problem with drinking. She'd quit cold turkey for her pregnancies, after all. But there always seemed to be a reason to drink, an opportunity, an excuse. And, soon, a constant. And her kids noticed. So she made a decision, found a sponsor and a 12-step program, and quit. Now Emily is the founder of Sober Mom Squad, a Certified Pr...

Sehreen Noor Ali did not plan to start a venture-backed company in the pediatric health care space. But her child had started missing her milestones and she had too many unanswered questions. After taking time off work and spending hours upon hours in Google rabbit holes and parent Facebook groups searching for clues and trading information, Sehreen decided to create a tool to surface this informa...

Daisy Auger-Dominguez is passionate about inclusion on a deep, personal level, drawing on her own experiences being othered and unheard work for change through empathy. As the Chief People Officer of Vice and the author of “Inclusion Revolution: The Essential Guide to Dismantling Racial Inequity in the Workplace” she takes that empathy to work every day - and wow is her work cut out for her in thi...

Christina Wallace led a hard-charging life before the pandemic. She was a multi-hyphenate's multi-hyphenate, a musician-entrepreneur-marathon-runner-speaker-author-road-warrior who was flying a hundred thousand miles a year for work. Then she quit her job, because she had a new baby and it was time for a change. She was mapping out her book proposal and multiple income streams when the pandem...

The through-line of Umbreen Bhatti's career has been helping people tackle, as she says, "big, complex, sticky challenges." As the Director of the Athena Center for Leadership at Barnard College, and in her previous work as a lawyer and Director of the Innovation Lab at KQED, Umbreen looks at these challenges from all perspectives and then zooms out and kicks the tires on the underl...

Yoga educator Chrissy Carter left her high-intensity job as a trader on Wall Street to pursue her passion for wellness. Then in March 2020 her yoga practice suddenly switched from the studio to her home which became the place for everything else, too, including her husband and baby, as boundaries completely disappeared, along with her sense of control over her life. Chrissy had always approached h...

Author Lindsey Pollak had always made a point of projecting polish and control - useful for her work as an in-demand speaker and workplace expert. In March 2020 she had a year of speaking engagements booked - until she didn't. Over a two-week period, she lost over six figures in business as clients cancelled bookings and took back deposits. As the family breadwinner, she had no choice but to...

What stories are we telling ourselves about the world? The New Quo founder Christina Blacken works with leaders to challenge the status quo through "narrative intelligence" - understanding the power of stories to change minds, break patterns, and make better, wiser decisions. In this episode, host Shoshanna Hecht speaks with Christina about the stories we tell ourselves in good times and...

Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen has always been fascinated by work and how it dominates our lives - and, since March 2020, has been fascinated by the profound shift she has observed in our relationship to work since the pandemic sent so many of us home, and sent so many others directly into harm's way. These observations were the basis of her recent article, "How the Pandemic Ende...

How do you support women in the workplace? If you're Sali Christeson, founder and CEO of Argent, you do it with sleeve-stays, flexible fabrics and, of course, pockets. Argent's suits were ubiquitous this fall in the run-up to the election with a hot-pink voting-themed collection - but almost three years ago in March 2020 when everyone stopped going to the office, she wasn't even sur...

 Welcome to Your New Life Blend, a podcast about deciding what we want our lives to look like. Even as we are expected to "return to normal,” we are all, collectively and individually, remaking what "normal" looks like - in our families, in our careers, and in a shifting, evolving culture. Join therapist and coach Shoshanna Hecht for thoughtful, illuminating conversations with guest...