The Consigliera Papers Podcast

It’s human nature to enter a new season of life, look around, and think, oh my goodness, this is so different from what I expected. Is it like this for other people? How do I navigate this? In our hyperconnected world, we are just a few clicks away from other people who share or speak to our season of life, who invite us to huddle together and swap stories about this new/challenging/exciting time....

Consultants and coaches work with different models and methodologies, and I think most of them are valid, and provide useful perspectives. Most of the executive coaches I know are committed to helping the people and organizations they work with thrive. But there’s a particular model that seems to be gaining traction, and I can’t stand it. I call it the authoritarian. Male and female coaches do thi...

People who are grieving make decisions they wouldn’t make if they weren’t riven by loss, riddled by bereavement. I know this from personal experience. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” is how I frame decisions I made in grief that had negative consequences. We kind of know that individually, and you hear it when you’re going through grief. Don’t make any big decisions after a loss, people...

Lately I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with my father when I was in third or fourth grade. We moved so often that I keep track of my personal timeline by which house we were in. This memory takes place in the dining room of our house in Leland Street, in Maryland, so I was eight or nine years old. It would have been about 1970. I had just learned about the Bay of Pigs crisis in Cuba....

All my life, I have tried to keep the various parts of my existence in separate places. Work, motherhood, writing, community, I wanted them all to be walled off from one another. When I was younger, I didn’t even like when friends from different areas of my life met one another. I remember being at a football game in college and seeing that happen and feeling acute unease. I had to restrain myself...

One day, when my sister and I were young, she cut her knee on a piece of playground equipment. She screamed. I ran to her and looked at her leg, and for an instant there was no blood, just the white flesh angling down to the glutinous pad of her kneecap at the bottom of the wound. Then the bleeding started, our parents came running, my father scooped her up and we all went to the emergency room. I...

My house was built in the 1940s. I don’t know much about the people who lived here before me, but I have questions. The green shag carpet? The blue flowered wallpaper glued on with a mystery adhesive almost impossible to remove? The cosmetic issues I was able to see and solve soon after I moved in. But every time we get anything fixed or remodeled, more questions come up. Right now, an electrician...

Imagine you had an augmented reality device that could show power in a room. Now imagine a meeting where a person or team is trying to close a deal with a potential client. With your naked eye, you can see the slides, and everyone present, in their seats or on a video screen. Now imagine if you could hold up an AR device that highlights where the power is and how that power shifts during the meeti...

People get sloppy. We know that. How many of you have cleaned out a drawer and thought you’d keep it clean this time? You might even buy clever organizers to help, but at some point in the future it’s the same jumble of junk spilling out of those cute bamboo dividers. The running shoes bought in a haze of good intention that now gather dust, the organizing app we never open. The list of well-meani...

The word liminal means being in an “intermediate state, phase or condition,” according to my Merriam Webster app. It is from the Latin limen or threshold. It is the experience of being between one thing and the other. If I’m the one choosing to step over the threshold and move from one space into another the sensation can be exhilarating, or filled with trepidation. But if the transition is out of...

When I was younger, I thought I would keep working until I didn’t want to work anymore, a time I vaguely assumed would be in my sixties. I worked in technology and then advertising, and I saw that the only older women still working in advertising owned their own agencies or were in executive roles, so I worked my way up to an executive role. And got fired. My job performance was demonstrably exemp...

What do we lose when we are just consumers, passive vessels who spend and receive, and not citizens, not active participants in the muscular work of co-creating our reality ? I complain about social media vociferously, but it’s the owners, the algorithm generators that I despise. Some content creators are so smart it brings me joy. I was just listening to a video series done by Tressie McMillan Co...

Most of us have narratives about money. Often they’re not helpful. Articles, books and podcasts offer financial advice meant to help reduce debt, save more, invest effectively. But fewer discuss how our self-defeating or limiting narratives about money impact us at work. We think of our individual or domestic financial situations first, not about how we can build skills when we’re spending or mana...

Intellectually, we understand we are all different. When and how you work best, your talents, skills, tastes, your personality, family, privilege, culture, can all impact how you work and your expectations of your co-workers. We know this. Many of us have been “typed” by some tool used in a corporate or academic setting – ENFJ or Hedgehog or whatever. And yet. We often have that surprise, that mom...

Yesterday I wrote an obituary. It was for my Uncle Larry, who died on Thursday, a few weeks short of his 88th birthday. He’d been sick for a long time, and his death wasn’t a surprise. I spent much of the day with him, as he was dying, with my Aunt Tanya. Being with a person who is dying is a very specific experience. This is not the first time I’ve done it. The labored breathing, referred to by m...

Were you told something in your childhood or youth that left a mark? Some narrative that you still get tangled up in even now? Maybe you were told you were stupid, or ugly, or too much by people who mattered to you. Maybe it was how you were treated at school or in the community because of your race, culture, gender, or how your brain works. When I was a child, my mother would buy me presents for...

I’m looking for a wedding dress. I’m sixty-two years old and shopping with my adult daughter. As I come out of the dressing room wearing a loose, ankle length number she raises her eyebrow. “Mom, it looks like a hospital gown,” she says. She’s an RN. I look at my reflection in the mirror. She is not wrong. My search for a wedding dress seems emblematic of the cultural peculiarity of being a woman...

Outrage is the ultra-processed food of digital commerce now, extruded rather than considered, an amalgam of substances not found in nature combined in an artificial way to override our natural appetites and spur us on to consume more, to create more, to spread it like wildfire in dry grass. Bad things happened to a number of women in the last few weeks. This is not unusual. If I don’t detail the s...

Guides and Gates Culturally, we have clear ideas about who is qualified to do certain jobs. You need to be an MD or DO to practice medicine. You need to pass the bar to practice law. Few are going to argue with a standardized approach to education and skills testing to certify people who are working in areas as critical and specific as heath care or criminal defense. Or, for that matter, for elect...

Imagine a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Picture it. The bread, the peanut butter, the jelly, how and if the sandwich is sliced. Got it? My imaginary sandwich is on whole wheat bread, with chunky unsweetened peanut butter and the kind of raspberry jam I used to make in the summers with my grandmother. It is sliced diagonally to form two triangles. Your sandwich is probably different than mine....

Years ago, I dated a man who talked too much about his exes. He said these women were, without exception, crazy, demanding, mean, and still interested in him. If one of them so much as checked out his profile on LinkedIn he was convinced she wanted him back. Now I understand, like most of us who have ever been on a date, that behavior like that is a big red flag.  The common denominator in all tho...

It’s a media trope, the person persevering in the face of the loss of a loved one. Cooking show contestants say they are honoring their dead grandmother by baking her cheesecake. A grieving spouse writes a book, a bereaved parent starts a foundation. Look at them, being brave. So brave. I watched, in the desultory manner of a person who lives with someone who is interested in the Olympics, more sp...

Imagine you are part of Gen Z, between the ages of 11 and 26. Now imagine that almost every article you read about people in your generation is about puberty. No one is talking about the work you do or the art you make, or what interests and engages you because they’re obsessed with what your body did, the thing that just about every body has done, forever. It would be weird, right? Especially bec...

“It’s the first time a 59-year-old woman has ever been referred to as young.” My friend said this to me as we were discussing the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris. Who is, indeed, significantly younger than President Biden (81) and former President Trump (78). Two decades, give or take, is a big gap, which makes Harris much younger. That context changes the cultural narrative about women...

Ambition is good. Having a dream, a goal, a deeply felt sense of how you want to move through the world, spend your time and energy, and earn a living is important. I wrote a whole book about hearing and honoring those inner promptings. The book I’m still waiting to work on, navigating the labyrinth of publication rather than actually editing and finishing, which is what I thought I would be doing...