Redefining Success: What the Women Who Are Actually Thriving Do Differently

Who's got that end of the week feeling? The one where you did everything right, answered the messages, kept every plate spinning, and still went to bed feeling like you came up short?

Not tired in a way that sleep fixes. Tired in a way that has quietly become your baseline.

Meghan French Dunbar calls herself a business anthropologist, which is a generous way of saying she has spent years studying how work actually works and who it actually works for. Whatever your work looks like, outside the home, inside it, or some impossible combination of the two, her answer lands the same way: the rules you have been exhausting yourself to follow were never written with you in mind.

She got here the hard way. She studied journalism at a time when everyone was telling her print was dead. She went into nonprofits, then into magazines, and then one Friday night in 2014 she turned her phone off to be present at dinner with a friend. She woke up to more than sixty text messages from her boss and a one in the morning email telling her she had been fired for being unreachable. The next morning she told her husband she thought the universe wanted her to launch a print magazine about sustainable business. She crowdfunded it with a friend, and the first issue got picked up by every Whole Foods in the world.

That became Conscious Company Media, which she co-founded and led as CEO. She has since interviewed more than a thousand business leaders, consulted with companies including Coach and Kate Spade, and founded the World-Changing Women's Summit. She also resigned as CEO in early 2020, weeks before lockdown, after coming back from maternity leave with significant postpartum depression on top of being completely burned out. Her recovery took about two years. Her book came out of wanting to know whether there was a way to do ambitious work without destroying yourself, and out of noticing that of all the high achieving women she met, roughly one in ten seemed to be genuinely thriving. Those were the women she set out to study.

Together we talk candidly about:

The one in the morning email that ended her magazine job, and the decision she made by the next morning

Getting told print was dead, crowdfunding a magazine anyway, and landing in every Whole Foods

Resigning as CEO after maternity leave, in the middle of postpartum depression and full burnout

Why her burnout recovery took two years, not two weeks, and why that is the norm

What the research actually says drives burnou