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Bethenny Frankel doesn’t like to play favorites, she says, but this episode of Just B might just be her favorite. She sits down with Kelly Ripa to learn about her family, her career, her marriage, her kids, her dogs, and most of all, to talk about negotiating tactics, creating value, and striving toward your goals. Kelly and Bethenny know each other personally, but even so, Bethenny is surprised by some of the information that comes out; for example, Kelly’s grandmother graduated high school at 15 and went on to college in a time when many women didn’t bother with higher education, while Kelly never went to college, opting instead to try to get a job in production in New York. Her parents told her, “You can have a summer. But then you have to enroll in community college or work for New Jersey Transit.”
She talks about starting out as an actor, moving into the talk show hosting game, and trying to do both for awhile, but ultimately giving up on acting so she could raise her kids. “For women it is a much harder road to get to that big payday,” she says; she worked for 30 years at ABC to get where she is today. Does she feel like she was underestimated? Oh yes, and “it’s been a great benefit to me….people never see me coming.” Though she calls much of her career “a complete accident,” she does give herself some credit for turning those accidents into deliberate choices and maximizing them to the utmost. “You created value,” Bethenny says, pointing out “for the people at home” that at the negotiation table, “you have to know when you are valuable and when you’re not…..you gotta know the temperature of the room.” It certainly worked for Kelly; she even decided to step away from hosting a few times, only to be enticed back with a better deal.
But the “better deal” isn’t always about money, she points out. Kelly has often negotiated for more time off than more money; she wanted structure and a consistent schedule so she could be an active part of her children’s lives. That structure also gave her husband, Mark Consuelos, flexibility to be choosy about the projects he did and how much time he spent away from the family. “I’m a hard worker, but I don’t want to give up everything just to work all the time,” she says. “There are things that are, to me, more valuable now.” Bethenny couldn’t agree more, telling her about making sure her Real Housewives contract gave her room to appear on Shark Tank if she got the opportunity, and how she recently walked away from a seven-figure deal because it was too restrictive. “It’s not always about money.” Plus, the scripts Kelly is working on, how Mark once saved Lucy Liu from a random creep, and Kelly makes Bethenny cry; hear the entire conversation on this episode of Just B With Bethenny Frankel.
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