How's Work? with Esther Perel

One is the creative guy, the other runs the business. While their bakery is thriving, their relationship is falling apart. How much of this has to do with the fact that they don't show the same love and attention to one another that they show to their macarons? Esther helps them sort our their romantic selves so they can sort out their business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

They were close friends before they started working together. But when one got a surprise promotion, the other began to question her value within the friendship, as well as the organization. To save the friendship, should she leave the job? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A young artist and her gallerist are exceptionally close. The line between professional and personal relationship often blurs, or disappears altogether. But it's a fragile intimacy, threatened by feelings of jealousy over another rising star in the gallery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

They are identical twins, inseparable since the start of life, now too in business. One brother has dreams of pursuing a career on his own, but is afraid of being left behind. While the other has never realized quite how much he leaned on his twin. Esther helps them rewrite the history of their partnership so they can move forward on a new path. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A large and scattered network of journalists meet for a virtual session with Esther. Over the past year, they've reported on the biggest stories of their careers, but they are burned out, isolated, grieving, and disconnected from the very thing that supports and energizes them all: their newsroom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From day one, they've described their relationship as “tumultuous." One is new to the workforce, the other is new to this particular workplace. One manages the other. And while they like each other on a personal level, they clash over their fundamentally different approaches to getting the job done. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Married for ten years and co-owners for seven, they bring their home dynamic to work with them. Their employees are sick of the fights and the struggles for power and control, and so are they. Meanwhile, she also worries their roles at their gym have been divided along gender lines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

They've spent their whole lives in careers that made promises it could not keep. They are fashion models, both scouted as teenagers. Now one fights to let go, the other to find a better way to stay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two lobbyists whose fight for racial equality ended up dividing them. With Esther they revisit the circumstances that lead to their decision to split up and confront the subjects at the center of it all: race, gender, sexual harassment and money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

He's a doctor, she works for the government. Her job is one thing on paper, and another thing in secret. He wants to leave his job, but doesn't know how. When their busy careers come crashing to a halt because of the pandemic, they face a new reality at home. Who gets to be the one to leave a job during uncertain times? And can they rely on their 19 year marriage for stability and support? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This season on How's Work?, iconic couples therapist Esther Perel brings a new perspective to the invisible forces that shape workplace dynamics, connections, and conflict through one-time therapy sessions with coworkers, cofounders, and colleagues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today we’re sharing an episode from Where Should We Begin? With Esther Perel. In this special series of the show, Esther connects with couples under lockdown around the world. 

Husband and wife who are co-owners of a winery and restaurant. He loves the colleague that she is at work, but he likes less the wife she is at home. As their marriage ends, they wonder if the future of their business depends on the future of their marriage.

They’ve been hairdressers for many years in a job that feels like a cross between salesperson and therapist. They vie for new clients and commissions while absorbing the anxieties, frustrations, and burdens of their regulars. How they each handle this balance is a study in contrasts.

She’s been unhappy at her job for more than 20 years and doesn't know how to leave. Her sister, a successful entrepreneur, wants to help, but this only makes her feel less-than. Family tensions and resentments, both at home and at the office, keep her frozen in place. Esther walks the sisters through an exit plan.

She owns a successful restaurant. He was her bar manager for six years. Now they’re going into business together as co-owners of a taqueria. They turn to Esther for guidance on how to transition from employer-employee to partners in a new venture. But they walk away with a deeper understanding of the ways their different cultural backgrounds and previous working relationships influence their partnership.

In this special episode — recorded in front of a live audience — Esther and Adam explore the dynamics of trust, power, and people-pleasing.

They were mates in university before co-founding a successful communications company. They still work together from different coasts, but they barely speak. One wants to move on; the other is grasping for his former friend. Neither can find the words to talk about it.

A year ago they were suddenly let go from their jobs as leaders of a creative team. Now they're starting a new company together. But to build over the scar tissue and begin again, they must first let go of the painful ending that came before.

She started a real estate company 30 years ago. Her son, who calls himself a Mama’s Boy, recently joined the business. They think their close mother-son relationship hurts the brand. With Esther’s help, they start to explore the many gender and familial biases at play...both in the office and around the family dinner table.

Friends and fellow dancers at a strip club: one brings years of experience, the other a youthful energy that turns angry at times. They’re here to talk about boundaries that are crossed, educating “civilians" about their work, family acceptance, and how they'll transition from the sex work industry into professional careers. Can sex work be a bullet point on a resume?

They flew fighter jets together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then they co-founded a successful business. Now, for the first time in their adult lives, they’re ready to part ways professionally, but they don’t know what their lives would look like without their "brother of choice." Side-by-side on Esther's couch, they talk about letting go of the fierce loyalty bonds forged in the cockpit.

In this prologue, Esther Perel introduces us to the idea of the “relational dowry.” Each of us has a relationship resume that is cultivated at home - in our families, our communities, and our romantic lives - that influences the way we interact with our colleagues at work. Here we meet a few of the people Esther will invite into her office over the course of the series: coworkers, cofounders, bosses and employees, and family members who work together.