The Consigliera Papers Podcast

Our cultural narratives about aging are focused on diminished mental capacity, not expanded spiritual authority. But I understand more as I get older, I have a perspective and, yes, wisdom, I didn’t realize I would achieve. I was born in 1962, and I am now 62 years old, at least for a couple more weeks. When I was young I had a vague idea of what it would be like to be in my sixties, and I am quit...

When I was in college I fell in love with a man who loved to smoke. He consumed both pot and tobacco with a craftsman’s attention to detail. I never much cared for pot, alcohol was my preference, but I did smoke cigarettes. I bought mine in packs from the gas station. At the time, I smoked Camel nons, what we used to call filterless cigarettes, the kind where you inevitably pick a fleck of tobacco...

“Talk about your dead kid. It will get people’s attention, make them relate to you, it’s a compelling story.” I’m a relatively unknown author promoting a new book from a small publisher in London. The topic of the book, spiritual tools for decision making, isn’t enough of a hook, I’m told. The PR consultant who I paid to advise me gives me some useful advice, but I don’t like this suggestion. Talk...

Since the presidential election, I have seen many exhortations to lean into community. I agree, I have tried to do that myself. But what the often anodyne exhortations fail to explain is that community is challenging. It’s hard to be with a disparate group of people trying to do a thing together while hewing to norms and standards that can be very different from what we encounter at work or in our...

I’m in recovery, and have been for a long time, and I’ve started to call it the Recovery Mindfuck. It happens in recovery and outside of it, when people use concepts and phrases meant to highlight and help, admonitions intended for instruction and illumination, to weaponized and pathologize ordinary human behaviors. “You’re so controlling.” Have you ever heard the word controlling used in a way th...

Recently, I was watching a tiktok where a young woman spoke quite passionately about a flare of controversy shooting up from the flaming heap of online cultural conversation. It wasn’t about politics, it was about how a woman chose to portray herself in a work of art. This young woman had opinions. I had a reaction, a swift flash of judgement that mirrored the passion of the woman on the small scr...

I’m not sure why we like to trace the origin of our sick and ask who gave it to us. It’s often phrased as active, the dank gift pressed upon us, or something we brought upon ourselves “she gave me the flu” or “I picked up a cold” rather than the reality of a random connection between germ and body in any open space. I picked up my three-year-old grandson from day care the other day and thought I a...

My favorite audiences for the corporate trainings I do are people in their twenties and early thirties. They want to learn, so they are usually interested and engaged. They are curious. Often they start asking me questions about difficult work situations, even if they aren’t connected specifically to the training topic. The women ask me more questions, because I am not shy about talking about my e...

I was picking up my granddaughter Ruby from her house, and my son in law mentioned reading my recent substack in which I quoted Ruby. As I am wont to do. And Ruby looked up from putting on her shoes. “Wait. You write about me?” she said. She is six. She knows I write about her because she made me open the advanced reading copy of my new book and read her the part she’s in and she was delighted. Bu...

Tomorrow is the launch of my book. And I’ve had mixed feelings about it. But as I was talking about it with my friend Juliette she stopped me. “Revel,” she said. “You’ve been working towards this for years. And now it’s happened. Revel in it.” Our culture has so many narratives about success or dreams achieved. It’s going to be wonderful. Or it’s not. I’ve seen clips on social media of very rich a...

“I should develop thicker skin.” I heard that phrase again this week and it got me thinking. I don’t think our job is to change our skin, or our personality or to file off the sensitive tender parts of our psyche. For one, it’s painful. Two, it’s often not productive, moving away from being who we truly are to some version of ourselves that is more palatable to the dominant cultural norms. Because...

I’m putting together a sales training for a client, and I’ve been thinking about the best way to teach people how to persuade others. Last weekend, I was driving my grandkids to church, and I heard the following exchange – for real, I’m not making this up. For context, my six-year-old granddaughter and I go to church together most Sundays, but her three-year-old brother was, until quite recently,...

I got sick last week, and my left tonsil turned into a lake of flaming pain. When I finally limped into the urgent care Sunday afternoon both the nurse and the doctor did that little medical flinch when they looked in my throat, both indicating “that’s quite, uh, inflamed.” Which is the professional way of saying damn, your throat is on fire. I had a fever, which is unusual for me, since I usually...

I usually write about things I know or that I’m curious about. But what’s been on my mind lately is what I don’t know. My book launches one month from today. And I am consistently surprised by everything I don’t know about publishing a book. Not the mechanics as much as the experience of it. I understand intellectually the process of publishing a book; the need for social media, the shouting from...

I remember a conversation I had with a co-worker vividly, even though I can’t remember her name or even where we were working. We were both salespeople, and we were at an event, staffing a table somewhere. It was slow, so we were talking. She was in her twenties, a few years younger than I was, and I liked her. She was personable, kind, intelligent. But she told me that she didn’t have any women f...

When I was in New Mexico I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. I didn’t know much about O’Keeffe, but I was curious. One of her paintings , The Barns, Lake George captured my attention. She painted it in 1926. It is of two massive barns, one seen from the side, the other seen from one end, as if they are lined up at a right angle. The massive hulks of the black barns fill the canvas. Off to one s...

I’m working on promoting my book, which is what I’m supposed to be doing right now instead of writing this. And I keep getting the same question. What about the God thing? Phrased one way or another, I’ve gotten this question from various professionals who are helping me market my book. The book is about discernment, a spiritual practice generally associated with Catholicism. I want to make discer...

This weekend I read a guest essay in the New York Times by Keker, Van Nest and Peters, the senior partners at the law firm Keker, Van Nest and Peters. It was a bracing exhortation for lawyers to stand up to Trump’s attacks on law firms who Trump feels did him wrong. The authors call out the pusillanimous behavior of Paul, Weiss, a law firm who “capitulated, agreeing to direct $40 million worth of...

This weekend I gathered with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while. We were waiting for the teapot to boil when one of my friends told me that her husband had been diagnosed with cancer. She then told me a story about a relative’s bad behavior. I won’t repeat it here because it’s not my story to tell, but if you’ve ever cared for someone who is very ill, you most likely have your own story of fami...

Last week, my podcast partner Eugene S. Robinson sent me a link to an article that sounded a lot like content we’ve done on The Bad Boss Brief . My first thought was that plenty of people write about bad bosses, and the idea that more than one person can come up with a similar concept in a similar time frame is not hard to swallow. Except, AI. AI scrapes everything, indiscriminately, including, I...

Our parents are the stewards of our pasts, as individuals, families and communities. They tell us who we were from the time before we can remember. Stories of our birth, our first word, how old we were when we started walking. They tell us stories about their lives, or our grandparents’, building a scaffolding of history and identity upon which we can train our own understanding. Unless they don’t...

Trumpet your accomplishments. Blow that f*****g horn. Like the walls of Jericho, knock down the barriers to your advancement, to getting paid what you are worth, to staying employed. Recently, in a comment thread on LinkedIn under a post I made, a comment showed up that disagreed with me. The writer made a good point but ended with something to the effect of “but good job promoting yourself.” It’s...

Recently I was having a philosophical conversation with my 5-year-old granddaughter about time. I was trying to explain to her why time can feel like it’s moving quickly when you’re doing something fun, and feel like it’s moving slowly when you’re experiencing something unpleasant. Considering that she is still learning how to tell time and only recently moved away from the “how many sleeps” metri...

With my new book coming out in May, I need to engage in social media more than I have up to this point. I know about marketing. I need to market the book to the best of my abilities. I have a publisher who has offered extensive and useful guidelines and assistance to show me how to use social effectively. And yet I balked. The balking is complex. I would like to say that it is solely a result of m...

A friend mentioned a recent substack in which I wrote about how grief can cause us to lash out. I was referring to specific situations in which my grief spilled out into unjustified, unskillful outbursts at people who were helping me. She nodded and said she had, in her grief, lashed out. She used that specific phrase, which I had used. As a veteran lasher-outer, I got curious about what lashing o...