Career Contessa

Meet Eleanor Beaton, an internationally-recognized expert in women’s leadership and an advisor to growth-oriented women entrepreneurs. Through her experience working with female leaders at all stages of their careers, Eleanor has seen it all and, specifically, she’s seen what it takes to break free from indecisiveness. Making and sticking with your decisions can be hard so that’s exactly what we’l...

Meet  Dr. Robin Berzin a functional medicine doctor and the founder of Parsley Health. Dr. Robin founded the company in 2015 because she saw a flaw in the American medical system, which primarily focuses on prescriptions and procedures, not preventative care. About 90% of diseases are related to social determinants–your environment and your behavior. At Parsley, Dr. Robin’s team of traditionally t...

Today’s interview is with Brigid Schulte, the author of the New York Times bestselling book on time pressure, Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play when No One has the Time, and the founding director of The Good Life Initiative at the nonpartisan think tank, New America, and director of The Better Life Lab. Brigid will be sharing her advice on time management, productivity, the causes and consequence...

Today’s interview is with Erin Claire Jones, a Human Design Guide and Leadership Coach who shows leaders what they’re made of by offering them a blueprint that explains how they operate so they can perform at the top of their game. Human design can also be an incredibly beneficial tool when you’re trying to determine your next career move—either inside your company or looking outside for something...

Today’s interview is with Jessica Knoll,  the bestselling author of Luckiest Girl Alive along with other books and the courageous woman who announced to the world “I Want To Be Rich And I’m Not Sorry”  via an opinion piece in The New York Times. Jessica sits down with us to share why she thinks it’s hard for women to share their ambition to be rich, why there are conflicting messages around women...

Today’s interview is with Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy, the co-authors of No Hard Feelings: The secret power of embracing emotions at work. It’s a courageous move to bring your full self—emotions and all—to work and this episode will cover why caring less about your work can actually help you succeed, what selective vulnerability it and why you need to do it, tips for establishing boundaries...

Meet Jaime Petkanics, a people and career development professional who has spent 10+ years hiring and building best in class employee experiences at companies like JPMorgan, Tory Burch, and Brooklinen. Jaime and I will be discussing a question we get all the time at Career Contessa—how do you explain gaps on your resume. Maybe these gaps are because of a layoff or resigning so you can travel for a...

Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a clinical psychologist and founder of a mental health platform called Therapy for Black Girls, which includes a podcast of the same name. We’re going to explore how to have intimidating conversations at work. We’ve all had them and for some of us, we might still be scarred from how terrible that conversation went. We also know those intimidating conversations are pretty m...

Today’s teacher is Gaby Dunn, a beloved writer-comedian, podcast host of Bad with Money and author of a money book that goes by that same title, Bad With Money: The Imperfect Art of Getting Your Financial Sh*t Together. Gaby argues that our inability to speak honestly about money is our #1 barrier to understanding it, leading us to feel alone, ashamed and anxious, which in turns makes us feel even...

Today’s teacher is Joan Kuhl, the founder of Courage to Stay, author of Dig Your Heels In, and an advocate for corporate inclusivity. Joan’s work helps women who are thinking of jumping ship from the corporate world assess their options, build career endurance, and start having the courageous conversations they need to have to create the change they deserve.    And creating change is exactly why w...

Today’s teacher is Julie Zhuo, author of The Making of a Manager and now one of Silicon Valley’s top product design executives at Facebook. Julie started her career in tech as an intern and became a rookie manager at 25. She felt lost and unprepared to succeed in this new role. Could she be a great manager with almost no prior managerial experience? Fast-forward to today with Julie having been a l...

Today’s teacher is Alyson Garrido, a career coach who takes a strengths-based approach and partners with her clients to create and execute a career strategy. She’s also a career coach through Career Contessa’s coaching service called Hire a Mentor. I’ve been a big fan of Alyson’s coaching style for a while and today we’ll be diving into a juicy topic—how to work with people you don’t like and, imp...

Today’s teacher is Mignon Fogarty or Grammar Girl as she’s also known as on the world wide web, with her award-winning podcast, and multiple books. Mignon’s here to help us navigate communication in the workplace including language mistakes we’re probably all making, how to avoid office jargon in your communication, and should we be worried that Google is now helping to finish our sentences in our...

Today’s teachers are  Ashley Graber and Shira Myrow, pyschotherapists, meditation and mindfulness educators, founders of the Evenflow app, and the women who will be teaching us how to bring mindfulness to work—and why it matters so much for our overall fulfillment and long-term success. On this episode, Ashley and Shira will break down exactly how you can work mindfulness into your daily life with...

Today’s teacher is Dr. Sasha Heinz, a recovering perfectionist-turned-positive psychologist, who has studied under the best of the best like Angela Duckworth, Barry Schwartz, and more. Specifically, Dr. Sasha is really good at helping women get out of the perfection trap while still being able to set goals and do it all in a healthy way.   And because we’re here for that real-talk advice, be sure...

Felicia Jadczak and Rachel Murray are co-CEOs of She Geeks Out, a company providing tech and tech-adjacent women and their allies an opportunity to network and connect with each other as well as with companies who wish to hire them. They also happen to be extremely passionate (and knowledgable) on the topic of navigating power and privilege in the workplace, AKA the invisible problem. And because...

Today’s teacher is Leslie McDaniel, a professional career coach as well as certified in Myers-Briggs Indicator Type test aka the very popular personality test you’ve probably read about on the internet many times. Maybe you’ve taken the Myers-Briggs test before or maybe you’re new to this idea of personality tests, regardless of where your experience lies, we know that understanding the personalit...

Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, co-founders of theSkimm and authors of HOW TO SKIMM YOUR LIFE, started the wildly popular newsletter TheSkimm back in 2012 while they were just two roommates working from their couch. Fast-forward seven years and TheSkimm is anything but a small idea with a small team. Carly and Danielle now manage a team of 100+ people and they’re often transparent about their m...

Life coach and author, Christine Hassler,  is back on The Femails to teach us how we can stop comparing ourselves to other people, avoid jealousy traps, and defeat our inner critics. And because we’re here for that real-talk advice, be sure to stick around till after Christine’s teachable moment because we’ll be answering your listener questions starting with what to do when you’re job searching f...

We’re back in the studio for a new season, but we’re shaking things up a bit with our new Summer School series. It’s like school but for your career.   Each week starting June 4th we’ll have an expert come on the show to teach us one specific work-related skill, and then we’ll move into listener Q&A via voicemails with our new career hotline.   That’s right—you can ask the Career Contessa team...

Meet Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, Author of Brave Not Perfect, and a woman working to disrupt the perfection trap. Whether or not you identify as an official “perfectionist,” you can probably relate to wanting things to go a certain way, making an effort to avoid failure, and maybe even making the less risky career move. And that’s exactly how Reshma was living her life—in the safe l...

Meet Georgina Gooley, the co-founder of Billie and a woman disrupting the pink tax.  Shaving companies have always been centered around male narratives—focused on rugged jawlines and age-old troped of masculinity. For many women, we grew up yearning to shave our legs for the first time—taunted by the glossy legs and the message that smooth legs made us “goddess-like.” On top of this—umm interestin...

Meet Candice Morgan, Head of Inclusion and Diversity at Pinterest and a woman disrupting diversity and company cultures. Prior to working at Pinterest, Candice spent a decade honing her expertise in diversity strategy. Unknowingly, Candice was navigating the career path of a future Head of Inclusion and Diversity at Pinterest. Rather than focusing only on the recruiting and hiring process, Pintere...

Meet Lauren Smith Brody, author of The Fifth Trimester and a woman disrupting working motherhood. After enjoying an incredibly successful 16-year career in the magazine publishing world—working her way up to the #2 spot as Executive Editor for Glamour Magazine, Lauren left to write about The Fifth Trimester, the time she describes as when the working mom is born.   And while I’m not a mom, I’m inc...

Meet Kristin Wong, journalist, author of Get Money and a woman disrupting money. Today is also Equal Pay Day—a day that represents how far women have to work into 2019 to earn what men made in 2018 for the same job. We’ll dive into this more throughout the episode, but one strategy Kristin and I both see as a way to close the gender pay gap is salary transparency. What it is and how transparency c...