Strong Feelings. Yep, we’ve got those.
No, You Go is now Strong Feelings: a weekly podcast about work, friendship, and feminism hosted by Katel LeDu and Sara Wachter-Boettcher—the best friends you didn’t know you were missing.
Too sensitive. Emotional. Hysterical. Women’s emotions are treated as if they’re problems or weaknesses way too often—by shitty bosses and bad boyfriends, sure, but also by advice columns claiming to help women succeed at work and thinkpieces attempting to explain away the wage gap.
(Ladies, you just need to negotiate like a man!)
But feelings aren’t weak. Whether we’re admitting our deepest fears and insecurities (just be more confident!) or expressing the burning rage we feel at a world where abusive men still hold so much power (calm down, sweetie), opening up about our feelings is actually incredibly powerful.
That’s the concept behind Strong Feelings, the new name and new look for No, You Go — the podcast I started last January with my friends Katel LeDû and Jenn Lukas.
When Jenn decided to leave the show this fall, Katel and I were far from ready to quit, but we also didn’t feel quite right about sticking with the old name without her. So we decided to explore some options and see if anything felt right.
When we stumbled on “Strong Feelings,” we knew right away that we’d found our name. Because that’s exactly what we’ve been sharing with each other all fall—in angry text threads during the Kavanaugh hearings, in intense working sessions hammering out business plans, and in private Slack groups laughing about the latest actually guy in our mentions. And that’s what we’ve been sharing on the show, whether we’re opening up about burnout or talking with an expert on the intersection of racial justice and body image.
So here we are: Strong Feelings. And I’m so excited about what’s coming in 2019. The show’s format is staying similar—from talking about our goals and challenges to interviewing truly badass guests to sharing a reason to say fuck yeah at the end of every episode. But we’re going to keep working on how we tell stories from our lives, and how we share new voices and ideas with you. And we’re going to keep going deeper on what it means to be best friends and powerful women in this weird, chaotic, scary moment in history. Here’s a preview:
How to listen
If you’re already subscribed to NYG, you don’t have to do a thing. Just look for the Strong Feelings debut on January 10—and a new episode every Thursday thereafter. If not, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts:
►Apple Podcasts / ►Stitcher / ►Overcast / ►Player FM / ►PocketCasts / ►Breaker / ►acast /►Spotify
And! Sign up for our biweekly newsletter, I Love That. It’s really good.
On the agenda
There’s so much we’re gonna talk about this season, and we can’t wait to share it with you. Here’s just a few of the things we know we have strong feelings about:
Unfucking your work life
We want to talk more about the broken systems and biased norms that make so many companies totally messed up — and how to change them. Plus: navigating toxic bosses, side hustles, and career changes — all while advocating for equal pay, better family leave policies, and an end to harassment.
Trading #selfcare for true self-love
Face masks and fancy candles are great and all, but capitalism will never actually care about us. We’re gonna talk about what all of us can do to really take care of our brains and bodies — including just being kinder and more forgiving of ourselves. (Ugh. We’re still working on it.)
We’ll also be processing all our weird feels about aging in a culture that devalues older women — including at work, where we’re actually smarter than ever thankyouverymuch. Oh, and: we have got to keep talking about what we’re doing to let go of bullshit like internalized fatphobia and body-shaming.
Putting faith in friendships
I never imagined that, at 35 years old, I’d have a friend like Katel: someone I see more than once a week, and who I can tell literally anything to. And even more amazing, we can work together, too. So we’re gonna talk more about the power of partnering with badass women, how to make a creative collaboration work, and what we’re doing to build our empire (ok, just a reasonable and sustainable business that doesn’t make us lose our damn minds) together.
Facing your own bullshit
Feminism is fashionable right now — but justice won’t come from a trendy women’s-only coworking space or pithy Millennial-pink coffee mug. (Those are fine, for the record. They’re just nowhere near enough.) So we want to keep talking with activists and organizers working on issues that white women like us often distance themselves from, like sex work, racial justice, and mass incarceration.
It’s an ambitious list—but we’re gonna do our best to make good on it. And when we fuck up along the way, we’re gonna acknowledge that, too. Because we know that the only way to fix things is to talk about them. Together.
We hope you’ll join us.
