L ifestyles /C ulture
New Podcast to Feature ‘Radical Candor’
ARTS JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
IF YOU KNEW Debbie Epstein
Henry, it would come as no
surprise that she’d want to get
into the world of podcasting.

After all, the types of stories
that Henry tells on the first
season of her new podcast,
“Inspiration Loves Company,”
are the types of stories she’s
lived to tell — and lived, full
stop. Henry, who lives on the
Main Line, is a lawyer, consul-
tant and entrepreneur. Though
she was once a litigator, her
talent for creating, networking
and public speaking led her to
start a consulting firm, DEH
Consulting, Speaking, Writing.

Her podcast,
which launched on Oct. 22 and will
conclude its first season on
Dec. 16, features frank conver-
sations with other experienced
professionals, mostly women,
who cover topics like race,
office gender roles and “radical
candor,” among other planned
episodes. For the woman who
once fought alongside her
mother for the right to read
Torah from the bimah on a
Saturday morning at her bat
mitzvah, the chance to speak
directly to the challenges faced
by her peers was a natural step.

“I felt this was such an
opportunity to revisit things we
care about, and ask ourselves,
‘What’s the best way to under-
stand and embrace these
issues now?’” Henry said of
“Inspiration Loves Company.”
Henry knows that the
Debbie Epstein Henry’s new podcast is called “Inspiration Loves Company.”
“It just rocked my world,”
she said of the experience. “And
what it made me do was commit
to myself that I’m going to take
smart risks in my life and I’m
not going to wait for anything
to live the life I want.”
So when she felt it was
time to leave litigation to try
something on her own, she
didn’t hesitate.

DEH Consulting, Speaking,
Writing began after Henry sent
out a casual networking email
to a few Philadelphia attor-
neys and found a sprawling
network of lawyers interested
in work-life issues. They were
also interested in live events
where Henry would inter-
view authors, thinkers and
TED talk alums speaking to
work-life issues. DEH went
national, and thousands of
professionals attended the
events over the years — even as
Henry was busy running Bliss
Lawyers, a full-service legal
placement firm.

Heidi Freedman, a lawyer in
Cleveland, has known Henry
for 15 years. She admired
Henry’s mission to make the
legal and professional worlds
more welcoming to women,
and found the DEH events
endlessly fascinating. Listening
to the podcast now, sponsored
in part by her law firm,
Thompson Hine, she’s inspired
in the same way that she is by
Henry’s in-person speaking.

“I always tell her,” Freedman
said, “everything she touches
turns to gold.” l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
Photo by Kristen Jensen
podcast is a risk — one conver-
sational misstep can have dire
professional consequences. But
risk is what she’s preached for
years. When Henry was 26 and a
third-year student at Brooklyn
Law School, a night out with
her husband at her favorite city
diner was cut short when she
started to feel “out of sorts.”
Racing back to the apartment,
she had a grand mal seizure;
in the emergency room, Henry
was quickly diagnosed with a
brain tumor.

“And I ended up finding
this surgeon,” Henry recalled,
“and the surgeon looked at
the brain scan and said, ‘You
know, the way this lesion is
located, it’s very unusual for a
brain tumor — it looks like a
very rare parasite. But you’re
not the demographic, which
is typically found in Latin
American countries. We won’t
know unless we do surgery.’”
Five days later, she went
under the knife.

What her parents and
husband recall, on her behalf, is
the sight of the surgeon jogging
down the hall, bellowing, “It’s
a parasite!” That’s not typically
a sentence that brings relief,
but for Henry, it meant that
the surgery was the end of her
troubles: She was going to be
fine. Name: Elana Collection
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NOVEMBER 5, 2020
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