“People ask me all the time, ‘How do you do it all?’” Lauren Winter, head of operations for Vox Media’s advertising organization, told me over Zoom as we discussed why she joined BONDE, the network built for executive women whose ambitions aren’t confined to reaching the C-suite.

“My answer is always the same. It’s ‘I don’t.’ I don’t. When people put pressure on themselves to do it all, that’s where you can disappoint yourself really easily and get down on yourself.”

While the rest of her household sleeps, Winter awakes at 5am to accomplish strategic work her daily back-to-back corporate meetings never leave time to do. At Vox, she oversees account management, revenue operations, paid social, and ad operations across publishing brands including New York Magazine , Eater , and PopSugar . She closes her laptop at 6:30 when her husband wakes up their three children (aged 6, 4 and 2) and prepares to catch the 8:05 a.m. commuter train into New York’s Financial District.

“You feel guilty if you’re missing something at home, you feel pressure if there’s something you feel like you could be more on top of at work, and it’s figuring out the right balance,” Winter said. “And for me, that is adding more hours to my day by waking up at 5 a.m.”

Her solution doesn’t eliminate anxiety from having two demanding lives occupying the same 24 hours. It simply buys her more time. It’s a negotiation she discovered is common when she joined BONDE.

“If you’re ambitious, you’re navigating a lot at once in life, in your mind, and I think that BONDE puts you in a room where you don’t have to pretend like you have it all figured out,” Winter said. “I think it’s one of the very few places where you don’t have to separate, who you are at work with who you are at home.”

In building a network around trust and psychological safety, BONDE co-founders Meg Gold and Parnian created a community of people who understand the struggles and willingly share advice in making better decisions. BONDE rooms allow you to unapologetically name your ambitions while simultaneously confronting your private doubts, oftentimes encouraging you to claim a professional opportunity you’ve earned but haven’t given yourself permission to pursue.

“We want high-caliber women to show up, but we don’t want them to feel like they have to be inauthentic,” Emami told me over Zoom, as did everyone interviewed for this article. “We don’t want that. We don’t want it to feel like it’s only about your title. We don’t want it to feel like it’s only about the job that you do during the day, because every single one of us are such complex human beings.”

The Isolation Executive Women Aren’t Supposed To Name

“All of a sudden, I’m in a room with women that are like, why not? Why not right now?” Winter recounted her experience with other BONDE members. “They are regurgitating my accomplishments back to me, and when I hear it from them, I’m like, ‘oh, that sounds like someone that is doing really great.’ It has been helpful to build confidence in that, and kind of squash the side of imposter syndrome.”

Winter’s tenure in digital media is an anomaly. In an industry notorious for agency-hopping and rapid turnover, she’s spent 13 years scaling her organization through successive mergers and acquisitions, including Group Nine’s acquisition of PopSugar, which was then absorbed into Vox Media. Her longevity has come from triage between what the institution needs and where her life can make compromises.

“Leadership can get very isolating and lonely when you know things before other people do,” she said. “You have to make decisions that remove the emotion from the equation, because your job is to do what’s best for the business and the majority of people on your team.”

That informational asymmetry is one of senior management’s loneliest burdens. Inside BONDE, Winter found a peer group where she didn’t have to compartmentalize her identities between corporate leader, institutional custodian and mother of three.

“There’s this analogy that I love so much and think about all the time,” she said. “You’re juggling it all, and the balls are going to drop. You just have to know which ones are plastic and can be picked back up, and which ones are glass and can’t fall.”

For Winter, a kindergarten spring concert is a non-negotiable glass ball; a school book fair her mother-in-law can attend is plastic. Neither choice is painless, but triage requires knowing which events require her specifically and which can be managed by a support system. BONDE has given her a peer group fluent in the competing pressures of work, family and leadership, without asking her to pretend one side of the equation cancels the other.

“In my hometown, I’m one of the only, one of my only friends that works,” Winter shared. “To have this group of women that I can talk to that understand how hard that balance is, and how hard both sides of life are, and get advice from on how to manage it, I don’t know if there’s ever a right answer, but how to manage it the best possible way that you can, and hopefully help with some of the guilt of either side.”

Dismantling Self-Doubt In High-Performing Executive Women

“I always suffer from imposter syndrome so much,” Jannelle Matlock confessed to me. “I want to get to that next level, but I know I’m the one blocking myself.”

She joined BONDE suspecting she wasn’t alone in her private struggles. “I wanted to see how those people are actually getting to where they’re at. I wanted those real conversations, to understand the struggles that they’re dealing with, and how they overcame them, and are still overcoming them.”

Already a member of VIA, an operations network for venture professionals , she wanted to know how leaders across radically different sectors navigate ambition, insecurity, motherhood, promotion, relationships, and executive authority. “From an outside perspective, they’re just crushing it, they’re on an amazing trajectory, and it looks like they’ve had it so easy, with no hiccups there.”

Owning your accomplishments requires overcoming internal friction. Matlock, now investment operations director at Palo Alto-based venture firm Eclipse, entered the firm eight years ago as its office manager and executive assistant after beginning her career in sales.

Her trajectory inside venture capital didn’t follow the typical associate-to-partner pipeline, which weighed on her confidence. But as her operational scope expanded into firm strategy and portfolio support, Matlock reached an inflection point. She recognized she was capable of leading investment operations , but standing up to command a formal director-level promotion felt daunting.

“I hadn’t done it internally in my team, where I had to make the ask,” she said of how others recognized her abilities and helped her rise within the organization. “It was more, kind of, handed to me, which was great, but I knew I needed to do it on my own.”

Inside the BONDE network, members helped her frame her metrics to articulate her operational impact, which pushed her through her own mental hesitation. They challenged her doubts, making her accept a seat at the table was hers because she’d earned it. “They really helped me walk through the process, just to make sure I was putting my best foot forward, and I was really overly prepared for the promotion.”

Her responsibilities now span internal strategy and systems alongside deal sourcing, pipeline management and portfolio support. “It comes back to the realness of the people in there,” she said. “The authenticity of the leaders, being able to just share more than just their accomplishments, but also all aspects of their life.”

Matlock has since paid it forward, connecting BONDE members to opportunities with Eclipse portfolio companies.

“I love my work, I love what I do, but I am so much more than my role. I think everything in my life that I deal with plays a part of that. It’s all connected.”

When Executive Women Outgrow Someone Else’s Playbook

“Growing up, eldest daughter, I’m very sensitive to other people’s expectations, and I allow that to dictate my path,” Alexandra Cole shared with me. “So I went to an Ivy League school, and upon graduation, I didn’t really pause to think, what do I want to do? What excites me? Instead, I just looked at, okay, what is the top job to get out of college? And it was either finance or consulting, so I went the consulting route.”

It was the correct answer in the way we’re groomed early to recognize career correctness: law, medicine, engineering, consulting or finance. Land at a prestigious organization and earn your parents’ pride as they tell everyone what you’re now doing. Cole, trained to succeed within this system, accepted an offer from Bain & Company.

Then a college friend returned from abroad with a loose idea for a company, and something in Cole’s body rejected the system.

“Something just got turned on inside of me in response to that idea,” she said. “And yet, I have never been more certain in my body that this was what I needed to do. So I said yes.”

She left Bain at 23 to co-found Purpose Generation, a strategy and communications firm helping legacy companies understand changing consumer and talent expectations. It had no clients, nor long track records, and was helmed by two 23-year-olds determined to figure it out. They did.

Seven years later, however, another signal arrived. New projects that once excited Cole left her crying from burnout. She took a sabbatical, began studying Human Design, a framework for personality and decision-making analysis, and eventually operated two practices in parallel before stepping down from Purpose Generation at the end of 2025. Human Design now occupies her full professional life while returning her to corporate environments to work with leaders and teams, this time within her own designed system.

At BONDE’s first Catskills retreat, Human Design came up repeatedly in conversations with members, one of whom was Cole’s friend. The friend connected Cole with Gold and Emami. What began as discussions for a virtual session became an invitation to facilitate an entire retreat, four days, 25 women.

“For the women who are more ambitious in the more traditional climb the corporate ladder way, I think it can be very isolating and lonely,” Cole said. “They don’t have that ability to feel super connected in the way that the feminine wants to be connected, and BONDE has created a space to do that that feels safe, where there isn’t the judgment.”

Cole’s work centers on helping executives to stop measuring their progress against external corporate benchmarks.

“They start to recognize that their success is not contingent upon them fitting someone else’s mold, or living up to these expectations that they have for so long used as the benchmark. They start to recognize the more authentically me I am, the more differentiated I am, is actually how I am going to become successful on my own terms.”

What Executive Women Need Beyond the C-Suite

“If I was to ask for an open door, if I was to ask for an access point, like a true power open door, like something that would make a significant difference in my life, or in my business, or in my goals, or whatever, what is it?” Gold said, describing a conversation from the Catskill retreat. “And so many women, if you ask them point blank, would be like, ‘I don’t—I don’t know. I actually don’t know what my number-one ask would be.’”

For executive women traversing ambition, leadership, caregiving, entrepreneurship and personal reinvention, identifying the most consequential ask can be harder than making it. BONDE’s membership model suggests four ways to get closer to the answer.

Permission to ask for more. Matlock needed people who could help quiet the internal argument insisting she hadn’t earned the right to ask for a promotion her record already justified. By giving her space to speak her deepest fears without judgement, BONDE members helped her see the absurdity of those fears. She didn’t have to perform for women who’ve long understood the cost of keeping up the act.

A more honest definition of success. The C-suite remains a worthy destination for many women but it’s not the only one. While Winter’s 13-year trajectory includes senior corporate leadership and motherhood, Cole left Bain to create an empathy-driven career that ultimately returned her to corporate through a different door. Success can be whatever operating model gives you the most room to breathe.

Freedom from the professional costume. Executive women spend years learning how to edit themselves for the workplace. Keep grief private; make caregiving invisible; turn a health issue into a scheduling problem – all to make ambition look graceful even as their private life is anything but. Fear of judgement keep these women from having conversations that could deliver clarity. BONDE insists members not act as if life outside their title has no bearing on decisions they make within it.

A less lonely version of leadership. The higher an executive climbs, the fewer people inside the organization she can safely use as a sounding board. Sometimes she’s carrying information her team can’t know while compartmentalizing the consequences that information will yield. BONDE gives her a place to examine the human cost of those decisions without confusing empathy for indecision. The idea of “it’s just business, not personal” is deconstructed, where she can freely admit to foreboding without feeling assessed as too weak to do what’s required of her title.

“Sometimes we’re like, where do I go? Who do I talk to?” Emami said. “Because you still want to protect yourself, you still want to make sure you don’t open up to the wrong person. That’s why it’s so important to know that when you walk into a room, you are safe, that you are able to open up, that there are enough boundaries in place, like confidentiality, so that we can talk about what’s going to help us move forward as women.”

In the pursuit of luxury towards a well-balanced life, BONDE’s differentiator from other executive women’s organizations is that corporate ambition isn’t a prerequisite for joining. Membership is catered towards those who seek more from life, where more doesn’t necessarily include a hammer to demolish a glass ceiling. Sometimes, it’s simply offering hands other women use to hoist themselves into their own definition of success.