PODCAST · business
The Consigliera Papers Podcast
by Stephanie Peirolo
Writing about work from an executive coach and former executive; how to be a better boss, dealing with Big Feelings at work, and more. speirolo.substack.com
Episodes
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What I didn’t know about getting older
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...
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Roll Your Own
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...
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Grief Porn
“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...
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Community
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...
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Controlling
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...
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The Positive Link
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…
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The Shame Spiral
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…
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Youth, interrupted
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…
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On stealing other people’s lives
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...
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Revel revel
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...
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Thin Skin
“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…
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Persuasion
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…
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Fever
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...
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Hell, High Water, and the Day Job
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...
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The other loves
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…
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Take Your Time
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...
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The Charismatic Grift
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…
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Pick a Side
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...
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Flocking
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...
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AI: The Plagiarism Engine
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...
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The Enchanted Forest and the Bully Lie
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…
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Toot your own horn
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...
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When is an hour not an hour?
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…
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Render Unto Caesar
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...
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Who taught us our names for anger?
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…
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Age is a number, not a personality
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…
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Authoritarian vs. Feminist
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...
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Unmetabolized Grief
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...
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What if we make it through
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...
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The Golden Substack
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…
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Dirty Grief
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…
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Pay Attention to the Foundation
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…
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Do you need to take or share power?
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...
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Take it again, from the top
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…
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The Liminal Space
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...
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Consolidation
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…
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Are you a consumer or a citizen?
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...
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Money Stories
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…
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My mad is better than your mad
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...
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Death and Industry
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…
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Gutter Ball
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...
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The Dress
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...
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The Outrage Factory
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...
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The Guide The Gate The Grievance
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...
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Explain your sandwich
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...
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Metabolize
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...
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The silent unsung test of grief
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…
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The rest of the story
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…
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Young
“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…
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What I really really want
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...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Writing about work from an executive coach and former executive; how to be a better boss, dealing with Big Feelings at work, and more.
speirolo.substack.com
HOSTED BY
Stephanie Peirolo
CATEGORIES
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How many episodes does The Consigliera Papers Podcast have?
The Consigliera Papers Podcast currently has 137 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Consigliera Papers Podcast about?
Writing about work from an executive coach and former executive; how to be a better boss, dealing with Big Feelings at work, and more. speirolo.substack.com
How often does The Consigliera Papers Podcast release new episodes?
The Consigliera Papers Podcast publishes regularly with 137 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to The Consigliera Papers Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Consigliera Papers Podcast?
The Consigliera Papers Podcast is created and hosted by Stephanie Peirolo.
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