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 burnout, and why almost none of it is about how you show up

• Why imposter syndrome is not a confidence problem, and what happens when you stop treating it like one

• The one in ten women who seemed to be thriving, and what they were doing differently

• The joy question: if you had one day with nobody to take care of, what would you actually do with it

• Essentializing your time, your relationships, and what you let into your brain

• What she wants the woman who thinks she is just bad at balance to understand

You will walk away with language for something you have probably been carrying privately, and with three or four things you can actually start this week without quitting anything or overhauling your life. Meghan's framing is the part that sticks: the return on investing in yourself is not selfish, and your kids will not remember the cookies you stressed over. They will remember how you showed up.

LINKS AND RESOURCES

Meghan's Book: This Isn't Working

Website: https://www.meghanfrenchdunbar.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meghanfrenchdunbar/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghanfrenchdunbar/

Meghan's TedX talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZfuHsa27yk

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