The Consigliera Papers Podcast

I had children in my twenties, and was a single parent of two kids by the time I was 27. Which meant I was learning how to be an adult and a parent at the same time. Which isn’t unusual, I suppose. But it did instill some habits in me that are hard to jettison. I have COVID, again, as does my partner. He got sick first, then I did. Thursday, I was feeling crummy, and I did something else I learned...

Right now, in many neighborhoods, literal or virtual, despair is rising like water on the road in a flood. Despair about politics, ongoing genocides, climate disaster. Despair is cheap. Hope is harder. When I was a kid, ankle bracelets were a fad and you often saw small, cheap gold bracelets around a young woman’s ankle. My father hated them. To him, they were tawdry, a sign of some unnamed perfid...

It’s summer. Kids are out of school, families and friends are gathering for barbeques and potlucks, weddings and graduations. If you’re an extrovert, contemplating months of people filled activities might be inviting or exciting. For introverts like me, it can be daunting. So, here’s a Summer Survival Guide for Introverts, which might also be useful for the people who work with and live with intro...

Recently, I found myself stymied by a series of tasks. But I didn’t think I needed help because I knew how to do the tasks. I just wasn’t doing them. My narrative was that the problem I needed to solve was my procrastination. I felt bad about it, which increased the negative energy around the tasks, which made them harder to approach, which made me put them off, and then I felt worse. Last week, I...

When I was a kid I was fascinated by zippers. The sharp metal teeth surrounded by supple fabric, rigorously aligned by the zipper slider with its little pull. Who thought of that? What a great idea. Basically, I have confidence in zippers. When I packed my suitcase to go to North Carolina this weekend for my cousin’s big Italian wedding I closed the suitcase with zippers. The little pulls are deco...

I’ve spent a big portion of my life in meetings. In person, on video, in conference rooms, at conferences. So many meetings. And I had a pretty good understanding of the physical and mental toll of those meetings. Facilitating big meetings or presenting – tiring. Attending, less tiring, although as an introvert being around other people is always a bit enervating. My equation was length of task +...

Wide swimmers. The plague of my pool experience. Since I swim for a while, I had time to think about it. I was more uncomfortable because it was a man, the deeply conditioned gendered experience of being a woman in proximity to physical threat from a man. While almost every wide swimmer ever in the history of wide swimmers has been an older white guy, there have been one or two women. Even though...

Have you ever been asked do unpaid work to prove you have the skills needed to get a new job? Write us a white paper, put together a strategic approach. But what happens when the work you do to get the job doesn’t get you the job and the prospective employer keeps your intellectual property?   Recently, a woman I’ll call Belle was being recruited for a marketing position at a mid-sized advertising...

Welcome to the recent flurry of new subscribers! A lot of you get here from Eugene Robinson’s substack Look What You Made Me Do , which made me think of a Eugene story, included in today’s piece. I am trying to increase my subscriber base to this all still free content, so I really appreciate any recommendations, ratings or reposts on substack or wherever you get this. I was an adult before I real...

If you get two or more people trying to make a decision together, it can get complicated. Whether you’re trying to decide what to have for dinner or how much to budget for marketing for the upcoming fiscal year, it’s hard to get a group to decide anything. Here are some reasons why making decisions as a group is hard and potential ways to deal. Get full access to Fierce Grace at speirolo.substack....

Barbara Walters considered Diane Sawyer a threat. The narrative at the time was that there could only be one female television journalist on a show, and Walters wanted it to be her, not Sawyer. They competed fiercely, with Walters even going so far as to go around ABC President Roone Arledge to try to steal a White House interview with then President Clinton from Sawyer. I do think there is a gene...

Everyone is promoting something. Their personal brand, their services, their book, their side hustle. I am too. I get it. Personal brands now mean more than accepted markers of excellence like experience, ability or education. And social media success has become the stand in metric for actual talent for those too lazy or uninterested to assess genuine merit. Why work for free? Many people don’t ha...

I haven’t done a Consigliera College in a while. For those of you who are new here – and I see you, welcome, glad you’ve joined us – the Consigliera College posts are about building skills. Things I might work on with an executive coaching client. Today’s skill is going to be building skills. How do you build a new skill or level up on an existing skill set? Step One. Identify the skill you want t...

Our culture is enamored with self-help. We love stories of the self-made. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Manifest your dreams. Rarely do these narratives acknowledge that, as individuals, we exist within systems that can support us or hold us back in ways that have become almost invisible. Most of us have, at some point in our careers, gotten bad feedback. We’ve been told about areas where w...

Same same is not always fair. Managers need to stop playing samesie samesie, and pretending their team are young children fighting over cake. And they need to carry that attitude into their culture. I’ve seen employees grouse about benefits they themselves won’t use because they, too, are playing samesie samesie. Some people will take parental leave, others will never have children. Some will avai...

One friend turns to another and says, “Let’s start an ad agency.” Or film production company, or publishing house, or podcast. Let’s make a cool consumer product or change the face of an old category. Two friends start a company. What next? I’ve been consulting and coaching for over a decade, and in that time I’ve worked with quite a few partners. Two people, friends or colleagues, decide to go in...

It seems like every fourth post I see on social media is about setting boundaries. Often the aphoristic messages are portrayed as handwritten on a white board or note pad or held up on a piece of poster board. Like, ok, we should set boundaries, got it, check. But the way it’s portrayed makes it sound like the old narratives around food and weight. Eat less, exercise more, it’s simple. If you’re n...

Years ago, when I was selling TV advertising, I came to work one day, and my key card didn’t let me into the garage. I’m leaning out of my car in the rain, frantically waving the card in front of the reader. The TV station was in Seattle, parking was a mess, which was why the company parking mattered. I had two young kids, I was a single mom, and I carried a chip the size of a washing machine on m...

This weekend, I opened up a computer file that contains old essays I wrote between 2018  and 2020. At the time I thought they were good enough to send to big publications, and I was surprised to get rejected or ignored. I read one of the essays. It was terrible. Disjointed, unclear, muddy. What I thought was good in 2018 is different than what I think is good in 2024, yes. But what surprised me is...

Last week I was looking through the ad trades and saw a mediocre headline about CMOs. I don’t subscribe to this trade, so I was scrolling past. Until I realized the picture of the CMO was a picture of me. I was a fractional CMO during the pandemic, but I wasn’t in the press in that role. I zoomed in. The haircut, the glasses, the face, were all mine. But the ears were wrong, and I don’t think I ac...

I have mixed feelings about social media and how it impacts us. That said, I have learned quite a bit in that arena. Today, I was struck by some things Emily Amick said. She’s an attorney and posts about politics and political communications on Instagram at emilyinyourphone. “When you are grieving, you have this myopic point of view. You don’t understand how anyone else is doing anything other tha...

In 1930 Alexander Calder twisted a wire or two and made a sculpture of a cow. He called it Vache , which is French for cow. Vache is also French for mean and nasty. I saw this piece, which is small enough to fit in the proverbial bread box, at an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. Calder is best known for his mobiles, which floated majestically through the exhibit. But it was the little wire cow t...

Outrage begets outrage, insult invites retaliation. I have often spoken pejoratively about middle-aged white men. But really, older white women are getting to me. And I am an older white woman. No doubt I recognize in these women behaviors which I have either done or do, or cultural expectations we should all have jettisoned long ago that many of us still carry. Social media has monetized outrage,...

I’m angry. The why isn’t that important, because the first why is a bit of a smokescreen. What I want to write about today is what happens when you look under that first why, when you triage the rage. My reaction was disproportionate to the precipitating event. That’s clue number one that something lies underneath. I was so angry. I stalked about the house, then went for a swim. Usually, the pool...

In the past year, I’ve talked with a number of prospective executive coaching clients in a one hour meet and greet, so we can see if we are a good fit. Since most of my business is from referrals, the people who get in touch usually know someone who knows me, so they have a frame of reference. Sometimes they hire me, sometimes they don’t. I don’t take it too personally when they don’t. An executiv...