221: Becoming a Great Conversationalist with Celeste Headlee

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

How to be Awesome at Your Job

Sharpening, Self-improvement, Meaning, Winning, Development, Money, Interview, Writing, Health & Fitness, Speaking, Mental Health, Success, Wins, Fun, Skills, Business, Careers, Training, Education, Collaboration, Decisions, Career, Selfhelp, Mockaitis, Thinking

4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Journalist Celeste Headlee breaks down the steps towards being a better conversationalist.

— YOU’LL LEARN —

1) The top ways to have better conversations

2) The myths you believe about good listening

3) An eye-opening way to find out your bad habits as a conversationalist

Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep221 for clickable versions of the links below.

— ABOUT CELESTE —

Celeste Headlee, Public Broadcast Radio Show Host, and Author of Heard Mentality and We Need To Talk. Celeste Headlee is the host of “On Second Thought” at Georgia Public Broadcasting in Atlanta and has been a host and correspondent for NPR and PRI since 2006. She has trained many journalists through NPR’s Next Generation program. Headlee also has appeared as a guest on CNN, the BBC, and other international networks, and in 2012, she anchored presidential election coverage for PBS World.

• Book: We Need to Talk

• Website: CelesteHeadlee.com

• TED Talk: "10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation"

— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW —

• Tool: Fitbit

• Tool: S+ ResMed

• Book: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

• Book: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

• Previous episode: 171: Brevity = Critical with Joe McCormack

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back. It's great to have you. We are continuing our celebration of 10 years of
0:05.1	How to Be Awesome at Your Job with the second year highlighted episode. That is number 221,
0:12.1	becoming a great conversationalist with Celeste Headley. I think you're going to love it.
0:18.2	Welcome to the How to Be Awesome at Your Job podcast, the show where brilliant professionals
0:23.2	share how to sharpen the universal skills required to flourish at work.
0:27.4	Enjoy more career fun, wins, meaning, and money with your host, Pete McKaitis.
0:36.1	Celeste Headley is a public broadcast radio show host and author of Heard Mentality and We Need to Talk.
0:43.3	Celeste Headley is the host of On Second Thought at Georgia Public Broadcasting in Atlanta and has been a host and correspondent for NPR and DRI since 2006.
0:53.6	Celeste, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job
0:56.8	Podcast.
0:57.8	My pleasure.
0:58.9	Well, you've got a pretty cool background.
1:00.9	I'd love to hear a little bit of the inside scoop when it comes to presidential election
1:05.6	coverage for PBS World.
1:07.5	Well, that was when PBS World was dipping its toe. You know, PBS World focuses a lot on
1:13.2	documentaries coming, not surprisingly, from all around the world. But one of the things they've
1:18.8	discovered that is American politics is so much of interest to an international audience that they
1:24.2	wanted to actually, yeah, have a reporter right there on the ground. So that was sort of their toe in the water. And it worked out great. I mean, it's a busy
1:32.1	schedule, as you can probably imagine. And you're at a lot of conferences and conventions and
1:37.6	all those kind of things. But it's exciting. And it was an exciting election. And especially when
1:43.8	you're focusing your coverage on the kinds of
1:47.3	politics that are going to interest in international audience, to a certain extent, it was nice because
	...

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