The Balance Dilemma

You don’t usually expect a successful business presentation to conclude with a ride in an ambulance. And when it happens, it can be life-changing. That’s the case with guest Lori Pine, Founder and CEO of The Joy CEO.

Climbing and traversing her way up and across the proverbial corporate ladder, Lori’s career took her to VP status at global brands like Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, and Campbell’s Soup Company. Household names for sure, but when a need arose at home, she answered the call. Lori is now an executive coach for ambitious, high-performing professional women over 40 who are seeing more purpose and passion in their everyday lives, helping them to find clarity and reclaim their joy.

For many the balance dilemma begins with parenting . . . an endeavor that guest Katherine Sellery reminds us we’re never trained to do. While running her own commodities trading business in Hong Kong, with a young son, her desire to learn more led her to training. Ultimately Katherine made a full career pivot and created her own parenting communication method - The Conscious Parenting Revolution. Even better, her method, she says, works with adults and in business settings.

An expert in gender studies and the gender divide, TBD guest Susan Shapiro Barash describes how commuter-train eavesdropping led to her first book (and study), A Passion for More, about why women cheat in relationships. As she tells TBD, it’s likely more common than you think and growing.

Susan’s written work - and there are 13 nonfiction and 4 fiction books (the latter under her pen name Susannah Marren) - explores the roles of women in society, including taboo issues many are afraid to discuss. Her books explore women’s relationships, including rivalry (Tripping the Prom Queen), lying (Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets), second wives (Second Wives: The Pitfalls and Rewards of Marrying Widowers and Divorced Men ), and toxic friends (Toxic Friends).

A professor of gender studies, Susan explains what this all means for American women, wives, and society. One thing she makes clear is that “The most important and single act [to change things] would be if women earned equal pay for equal work, because until that is established, we're marginalized."

And yes, we asked whether she had cheated in a relationship. You’ll have to listen for her answer.

Although the Brookings Institution refers to the us military as “one of the most progressive institutions” women still represent only about 17% of overall service members, and far less in the top brass - single digits. 

Col. (Ret.) Mary Westmoreland is one of those women who rose to high ranks. She joins TBD to tell her story, why and when she joined the military, how she rose through the ranks while raising a family . . . and what she learned about leadership, success, whether the military is a good career for women,  and so much more . . .

From age to experience, appearance, demeanor, and more, women never seem to be quite right for career advancement. Indeed, for any woman who feels like she’s banging her head against a glass ceiling or wall, TBD guests Dr. Amy Diehl and Dr. Leanne Dzubinski explain why “it’s not all your fault.” Co-authors of Glass Walls: Shattering the Six Gender Bias Barriers Still Holding Women Back at Work, they breakdown all the small and large ways women are held back. Learn new terms like he-peating, bro-prating and equalist.

Fortunately, Drs. Diehl and Dzubinski believe the issue is fixable and provide workplace solutions in the book. One tip, don’t forget to call them - and other female PhDs and MDs - doctor.

Co Hosts Maura Carlin and Christie Derrico return to their microphones to begin the fourth (!) season of The Balance Dilemma Podcast. They catch up on summer fun, “girl math,” book recommendations, and discuss going forward. Lessons from prior guests, expected future guests, and more research are all on tap in this episode.

As if it’s not hard enough to give up sugar, our guests discuss an important oft-overlooked source . . . alcohol. With the advent and increase of “mommy wine culture” giving it up can bring social as well as dietary restrictions. Sharing their personal and professional experiences and research, guests Jen Dorf and Jean Marie discuss why alcohol is so bad for women, especially as they age. Their program “See Ya Sugar” is designed to help kick the sweet habit for good. And, sadly, it affects your morning coffee ritual as well.

Jen Graziano is an attorney, mother, funeral director, founder of jewelry line RememBar, and Host of the podcast and radio show Time to Talk. But she didn’t join The Balance Dilemma to promote her businesses. Foremost on Jen’s mind was dealing with a second marriage on the rocks. Why the family blending didn’t work? How to know when it’s failing and when to get out? And staying true to yourself and your daughter.

Jen’s pearls of wisdom come from growing up in the family business of death rituals - the funeral business. Let’s just say, it provides a full perspective on life and what really matters. And how work inspired the The RememBar Collection - fine, memorial jewelry.

As to how she does it all, Jen points to flexibility of being a family business owner and what she calls her “organized chaos.”

Put away your old-fashioned image of the staid librarian whispering “shhhh” as she stamps books taken out. Not only are they fully digital, but nowadays libraries are also vibrant centers of community and service.

In honor of National Book Day and National Library Week, TBD is joined by two librarians from the Mamaroneck Public Library - Rosemary Farrell and Jack Weiss. We talk book recommendations, reading versus listening, digital resources, and book bans.

Unlike oil and water, you’ll be surprised to hear how luxury Miami real estate and premium olive oil mix. Marie-Charlotte (know as Charlotte) Piro pivoted from a wildly successful real estate career in Miami catering to European clients to founding and running Olio Piro LLC.

In this episode, you’ll also hear her story of coming to America, making a life, and she achieves (or doesn’t) some measure of balance. And yes, she does believe you can have it all and all at the same time. “Be bold and ask for help.”

A master of pivots, sometimes by necessity, Loren Stephens, the author of All Sorrows Can Be Borne, shares her story. Early in her career she dealt with the realization that “passions don't pay bills.” After years of success in finance, fundraising, and documentary films, Loren found her way back to her first dream - writing and helping other write and publish. It’s a story that takes her cross-country to follow her then ex-husband for co-parenting and finding a way to make it all work.

Loren is a widely published essayist and fiction and non-fiction writer.  All Sorrows Can Be Borne was inspired by her (second) mother-in-law’s life story growing up in Japan during and after World War II. Loren is a two-time nominee of the prestigious Pushcart Prize. As President and Founder of the ghostwriting companies Write Wisdom and Bright Star Memoirs, Loren helps other writers pursue their dreams.

Feeling burnt out? Ever wonder how you could just bow out for a bit and get you #$%! together? Discover the power of the pause. Former Google sales executive Rachael O’Meara tells her personal pause story that inspired her book, Pause: Harnessing the Life-Changing Power of Giving Yourself a Break. Learn terms like TASER, Mental Flossing, and Digital Detox, as well as the five signs that you need a pause.

Professor Caroline Bicks discusses how her wedding ring became an issue in a job interview. She wrote about the dilemma in her NY Times Modern Love article, “Is The Husband Going to Be a Problem.”  There's a name for it in academia - the “two-body problem”  as our guest explains.

Dr. Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. She is also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English. She specializes in Shakespeare, gender studies, and the history of science. She is the author of Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World: Rethinking Female Adolescence (Cambridge University Press, 2021); Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Ashgate, 2003); co-editor of The History of British Women’s Writing, 1500-1610 (Palgrave, 2010). She also is the co-author of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas.

Episode 47  with Chelsea Conaboy - Challenging the myth of  maternal instinct

Episode 45 with Ginny Poleman

Swipe left or swipe right?  We’re talking divorce and dating.  And if you haven’t been in the scene since the 1980s, quite a lot has changed.

Imagine having one of your toughest marital conversations as part of a groundbreaking documentary. Well, guest Emily A. Hay did just that and she shares that experience and the aftermath on The Balance Dilemma.

Long committed to careers based on flexibility, Emily is the founding member of Hay There Social Media - a platform that teaches mothers to run their own social media marketing businesses. But her flexibility wasn’t enough for a fair and balanced home life with a husband and two children.

Not only did Emily use Eve Rodsky’s (TBD Ep 34) Fair Play methodology, but she and her husband are featured in the new Fair Play Documentary.  She describes how it is working and why she believes in work life integration, rather than work life balance.

This mother, writer, professor of law, and director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinics at the University of San Francisco School of Law chats with TBD about her new book, Ambitious Like a Mother: Why Prioritizing Your Career is Good for Your Kids.

Lara is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has published op-eds in the New York Times and The Washington Post and is a contributing writer for Slate with her ongoing series on criminal justice and modern family life. She is also the author of Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction.

So how the heck does she juggle it all?  Lara will share her stories on career setbacks, overcoming the stigma of a divorce, and the power of passion for your work. In her words, it’s a “messy imbalance.”

But, she says, it doesn’t work for two parents to have equally demanding high power careers at the same time. Rather, she advises what she calls a “seesaw” marriage.  And most importantly, she says to have these discussions before you decide to have children.

When they said, "You can take the girl off the farm but you can't take the farm out of the girl…” they forgot to mention, it takes a businesswoman to run the farm! Adrienne Evatt left behind the big city/corporate rat race but not the knowledge she learned from her twenty-year career. Hear how Adrienne went from urban to rural to live a healthier, happier, and sustainable life with her family, running Urban Dreamer Farm and Vineyard, a family run farm stand, and baked goods business and how she coaches others to achieve their reinvention goals with her Recipe for Life on-line coaching. Among other things, Adrienne talks about the importance of dream durability: "being so set on your goal or you dream that you're not willing to let people knock you off your course."

And, for croissant lovers, Adrienne taught herself to make those fabulous pastries, and sadly confirms what we all suspected: "Croissants have a lot of butter. They have 81 layers of butter. One croissant has almost a pound of butter."

If real life were a movie, guest Nina Sadowsky could write the script. Nina's experience has toggled from coast to coast and has spun from marriage to difficult divorce. Hear how, through it all, she has found success.

This former entertainment lawyer was the screenwriter for The Wedding Planner and her short film The First Year’s a Bitch won the best editing award at the New York Short Film Festival. A master of pivots, she is the Program Director of NYU’s Los Angeles while creating her own novel empire. Nina’s latest book Privacy released in June 2022.

Nina tells us that  “being an artist is .. . this constant cycle of: I'm a genius, I'm an idiot. I'm brilliant. I'm a moron." Her advice includes facing imposter syndrome with confidence and recognizing that “there’s what happens to you and there’s how you deal with it.”

Have you experienced a little stress over the last couple of years? . . . Yeah, us too.  Join clinical psychologist Dr. Risa Ryger, an expert in change. Risa explains her trademarked “disruptive self-ownership” and how it can help you  thrive personally and professionally. She takes us through a calming exercise and provides strategies for facing the day and world. Hear about her Four Fs and 4-4-8 breathing technique. In addition, we discuss some of the mental health challenges brought on the two years of the pandemic.

Guest Elana Milianta shares her story as a self-made wealth management consultant, retail business owner, and author, who came to this country with her family as a young émigré, seeking freedom. Elana’s life passion has been to help women build financial literacy. Her book,  A Girlfriend’s Financial Survival Guide, educates women on building financial independence as they transition through life’s stages.

How Elana amassed her knowledge didn't just come from degrees and certifications. She shares with us what she learned from her parents about hard work and financial independence, and by saving, budgeting, and building good credit.

Learn how you - at any age - can develop your own wealth and financial security on this episode of The Balance Dilemma.

And, according to Elana, don’t buy that Starbucks coffee. Invest it instead. Find out why.

This is a classic tale of, How the heck did she do that?  From working-class roots to Managing Director and Private Banker at Deutsche Bank Wealth Management, Joanne Jensen is a star in the financial world.  Joanne managed WFH and flex hours long before they were commonplace and in a field where they were virtually unheard of. Joanne shares with TBD the importance of knowing your own finances, especially in times of transition.  Hear how/why she stayed in the workforce, even when things were hard, why wealth management is a good career for women (no, really), and how to put yourself first and negotiate for more money. A little hint - know your facts and your value.

New York Times best selling author Frank Schaeffer introduces his latest book, “Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy”, a post-coronavirus “blueprint” for social changes needed to put living ahead of work. Schaeffer also explains why he - a 68 year old heterosexual male - wants to be a ‘mother’.  And it has nothing to do with gender or sexuality.  Rather, it’s about the nurturing role. 

Episode originally aired live on WVOX-AM on November 11, 2021

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. According to the latest statistics, one in every eight women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime.

T.J. Hills is one of those women. In her new book Sex, Drugs, Babies and Breast Cancer: Health Benefits of Estrogen Gene Testing, she shares her personal story. What put her (and other women) at risk and how it might have been avoided, are just some of the issues discussed. Plus, learn how a simple estrogen gene test could assess your risk. And, at the core is a story about lack of balance, priorities, and ignoring one’s own health. 

Lawyer, wife, mother, and embodiment of the American dream. Carol’s parents immigrated to the United States in search of a better life for their family. It’s an amazing story that Carol shares with us.

In her professional life, Carol not only represents clients but is committed to bringing up other women, through mentoring and advocacy. Learn how she and her family navigated the pandemic, between shutdowns, WFH, SFH (that’s school from home) and now BTO (back to office).

And for anyone looking for career advice, Carol gives it to us straight. It might not be what you want to hear . . . but it’s information you should not ignore. Starting with . . . why Carol won't put motherhood on her resume.

Episode originally aired live on WVOX-AM October 14, 2021.