Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

On the first day of a new job, we all cross our fingers hoping for supportive co-workers and empathetic managers, but the fact of the matter is that a positive office environment takes work– and not everyone is prepared to do it. Our guest today is Dr. Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist who has seen it all when it comes to the workplace. Dr. Michaelis coaches both individuals and teams in an e...

Before Jessi sat down with champion debater and disagreement expert Bo Seo, our team would have mostly told you that the goal of a solid relationship or colleagueship is being able to avoid disagreement. But Bo schooled us on the real opposite of bad disagreement: GOOD disagreement! Bo’s work teaches us that avoiding conflict isn’t the best path to good relationships. It’s learning to listen and b...

Three summers ago, a major retailer phoned designer Aurora James, asking for help. At the height of the protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, this retailer wanted advice on how to meet the moment. Aurora, the creative director and founder of shoe brand Brother Vellies, offered a thought that became a movement: Since Black people are almost 15% of the US population...

In an effort to get a fair deal with the AMPTP - the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike since May 2nd of this year. A month later, in early June, the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) authorized their own strike. As we post this episode, SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP have extended...

This holiday weekend, we’re bringing back last year’s conversation on negotiation with Barry Nalebuff. Barry is an entrepreneur and Professor at Yale University’s School of Management. He's the author of Split the Pie: A Radical New Way to Negotiate. In this episode, he balances fairness and power to show us all a better way to negotiate through collaboration.  Follow Barry Nalebuff on LinkedIn, a...

We’re nearing the end of Pride month for 2023, and this year visibility, equity, and safety seem more critical than ever. Olympic gold medalist and USWNT soccer star Megan Rapinoe, now Chief Equality Officer at software startup Trusaic, joins Jessi for a conversation about pay equity, the importance of standing and speaking up, and the unassailable human rights of every member of the LGBTQIA+ comm...

In the final installment of our Good Jobs series, Jessi meets with journalist Simone Stolzoff, author of the new book, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work. Simone, who goes by Simo, wants to flip the script on good jobs entirely. Instead of putting all our energy into work and shoehorning our life into the margins, he says our work lives should give us plenty of time to look for meaning...

The conversation on Good Jobs is happening all over the LinkedIn newsroom these days. In this episode of our sister show, This is Working with Daniel Roth, former President Barack Obama shares the passion for working Americans that prompted him to create the new Netflix series - Working, What We Do All Day - through his and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground production company. The show looks at how p...

In this second installment of our Good Jobs series, Jessi sits down with Zeynep Ton, founder of MIT’s Good Jobs Institute and author of the new research-driven book, The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone's Work. Zeynep argues that a good job should provide sufficient pay to give individuals agency in their personal and professional lives. She dives...

Once upon a time, many kids in the American middle class were told the same story: Go to the best college possible. Study hard, then do what you love. That is your (linear) path to a good job, and from there to meaning and success. But that path seems ill-equipped to survive our current reality of burnout, inflation, and layoffs. So what do we do now? The idea that it's time to divorce pay from me...

This week marks the start of June, and with it, Pride month in the US. To celebrate, we're sharing a very special episode featuring Hello Monday’s own Jessi Hempel as the guest. In this episode, guest host Leah Smart interviews Jessi about her memoir, The Family Outing. From the guest chair, Jessi shares what she’s learned about identity, the bonds of family, and what gifts await on the other side...

Whether or not we are individually religious, a lot of our lives are governed by our relationships to what the Christian church calls the Seven Deadly Sins - pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. As Elise Loehnen explores in her new book, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, that leads us to uphold patriarchy, and sometimes to hurt ourselv...

Happy Thursday! Here's a new podcast to check out. It's called POSSIBLE, and it's hosted by two friends of Hello Monday - Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. This episode takes on the future of work and features a cameo from our own Jessi Hempel. If you like it, we hope you'll subscribe! You can find and follow Possible wherever you listen.

Parenthood can change a work trajectory like little else. So when and how do you decide to have kids, especially if you’re going to be the person carrying that pregnancy? On today’s episode, Jessi talks to several parents about their journeys, shares some thoughts about her own, and finally gets advice on what to consider from expert Daisy Dowling, author of Workparent: The complete guide to succe...

Are you a creative person? According to Sheena Iyengar, the answer is YES - everyone is. Sheena’s work is devoted to showing that creativity is not magic. It’s a process, and it can benefit from a solid framework. But Sheena doesn’t turn to brainstorming or design thinking for this. She believes those processes need revising. And so she’s created an alternative framework for innovation. In this co...

These days a lot of people seem to be pursuing a second career right alongside the first. They’re side hustling. To learn more about how successful side hustlers are making it work, this week, we hear from Nicaila Matthews Okome. Nicaila is a social media strategist and the host of the popular entrepreneurship podcast, Side Hustle Pro. Her show features tips, advice and interviews with Black women...

A few months ago, we spun up a Hello Monday community group on LinkedIn. (You can join it here.) When we asked people to introduce themselves by sharing five things not on their LinkedIn profiles, a LOT of community members - more than half - self-identified as introverts. And that made us want to take a closer look at introversion. Enter Susan Cain, author of the longtime best-seller Quiet: The P...

Do you notice the impact of your senses on your life, or does it feel like you function on autopilot a lot? Author Gretchen Rubin has a new book out right now - Life In Five Senses - that helps us use our senses to keep us present and intentional. In this conversation with Jessi, Gretchen shares her experiences exploring and researching the senses as she worked on writing this book, and gives us a...

Timing is everything. This week on Hello Monday, we’re listening back to our conversation with Daniel Pink, the author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. When we first spoke to Dan in 2019, we talked all about making the most of your mornings, but what if you and mornings just don’t mix? Have no fear, today we’re focusing on what it takes to find your personal perfect timing to mak...

We’re independent! We make our own choices and do our own thing, and march to the beat of our own drum. Right? Turns out, not nearly as much as we thought. In today’s conversation, Jessi visits with Brian Lowery. He’s a social psychologist who runs the Leadership for Society program at the Stanford Business School. His new book is SELFLESS: The Social Construction of “You.” And he’s here to explai...

We've got another bonus episode recorded in honor of the fourth anniversary of Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel. This episode features Jessi sharing the emotional experience of writing, releasing, and receiving reviews of her debut memoir and how she was helped through this by reflecting on her early Hello Monday conversation with celebrated actress Laura Linney. Jessi shares excerpts of their award...

Are your career ambitions tied to landing one specific role or working on one specific company? Or are they guided by your core values? Jessi’s guest for this episode, NPR’s Ari Shapiro, learned the value of the latter approach early on, and this has served him throughout a career that is both wildly successful and eclectic. He’s co-hosted All Things Considered since 2015. He’s a singer with the "...

We're continuing to celebrate the fourth (!) anniversary of Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel by sharing another bonus episode featuring advice that Jessi has implemented into her own life. On today's bonus episode, Jessi shares the power of the Ten-Year Plan, featuring her conversation with Debbie Millman. Debbie is a writer, designer, educator, artist, brand consultant and host of the podcast Desig...

Sometimes, we just feel… stuck. Jessi’s having a moment like that with her writing right now. She shares her struggle and the conversation she had in hopes of addressing it, with Joanne Lipman, veteran journalist and the author of NEXT: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work. They dig into Joanne’s framework for navigating big change, and talk through some of the real life reinventions Joanne c...

To celebrate the fourth (!) anniversary of Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel, we're sharing a series of bonus episodes featuring some of the advice that Jessi has implemented into her own life. On today's bonus episode, Jessi shares some of her favorite advice from her conversation with Tiago Forte. Tiago is the author and creator of online course Building a Second Brain, which focuses on capturing,...