I attended a self-help retreat for top female executives — and ended up in tears

Erin, a performance coach for corporate executives, is standing at the front of a conference room at the Virgin Hotel in downtown Nashville. At 5 feet tall, she's tiny, blond, and freakishly fit. She's also, perhaps, the peppiest person I've ever met — the kind of energizer bunny perfect for rallying a yet-to-be-caffeinated audience at 9 in the morning. So, like any good motivational speaker, she starts with a joke.

"I want to say: Drink the Kool-Aid," she announces. "But the people who drank the Kool-Aid died."

The room erupts in laughter. To be clear, it's not an easy room. Erin is addressing 50 women, every one of them a titan of industry — founders, CEOs, every iteration of "vice president" and "director" and "partner" you can possibly imagine. They have neither the time nor the patience for bullshit. They aren't here for some two-bit pep talk. They're here because after years of killing it in their hyper-elite careers, they had finally made it to the top of the corporate ladder, only to discover that the climb had made them miserable.

They were crying every day. They were exhausted, irritable, apathetic — their burnout so bad, in some cases, that they had to go on medical leave. There was an emptiness to their lives, a nagging is-this-all-there-is-to-life feeling they could no longer suppress. They knew they should work less, but being an ultra-high-performer is who they are. In a world that requires them to do twice as much as men to get half the credit, how could they afford to slow down? These women aren't quiet quitters. They're the people who fire the quiet quitters.

So they decided to see whether they could solve the problem with something they have plenty of: money. For the privilege of attending this life-coaching retreat for female executives and senior managers, they first had to complete an eight-week, $16,000 introductory course over Zoom called Corporate Women Unleashed, after which most of them enrolled in a $1,500-a-month advanced class, also over Zoom. Many are deeply devoted to the program; for one woman, a recently retired executive at a very large tech company, this is her sixth retreat. Erin needn't have bothered with her opening joke. These women didn't just drink the Kool-Aid. They've been guzzling it for months, if not years.

Erin asks us to join her in chanting a mantra of sorts, to set our intention for the weekend. "I vow to challenge the status quo," she begins.

"I vow to challenge the status quo," everyone repeats.

"To make the glass ceiling my floor," Erin says.

"To make the glass ceiling my floor."

"To put my magic into the world courageously," Erin continues. "To use naysayers as gasoline for my fire."

I squirm in my seat. No man would be caught dead saying this stuff, I think. But the women in the room all look stone-cold serious.

The theme of the retreat is "10x," loosely based on a self-help book with the mathematically questionable title "10x Is Easier Than 2x." According to the book's website, 10x refers to "exponential growth." Erin asks everyone to share why they're here this weekend. She points to someone in the front.

"I need to feel that I belong," the woman says.

"Wow," Erin says as everyone claps. "It speaks to what it means to be a woman at the top. It can be lonely."

A senior manager of communications takes the mic. "I'm here to 10x my confidence," she says, her declaration so tentative she offers it more like a question. She's tearing up. "And to be able to figure out how to 10x where I'm at today without giving up on 10x-ing what's next."

The room claps again, and more women chime in.

"My whole life has always been about my career. I feel like there's something more."

"I'm here because I sold my company last year. I'm making my exit now and I don't know what life looks like next."

"I want to 10x my badassery. I'm a badass, but I don't own it."

As the women testify, Kathleen Byars, the founder of the program, stands quietly to the side — smiling, clapping, delivering mics to people across the room. But after a while, she announces that she wants to weigh in. A hushed silence sets in. The women worship her.

"It's so normalized in this room that we do big things," says Byars. "We do them quickly, we do them fast, and we want it. There's nobody here saying: 'You're a little bit too intense. Can't you just be happy with what you have? Just relax.'" Several women nod emphatically.

"Everyone here is like, 'Yeahhh! Yeahhh!'" Byars continues. "Just think about that. That's rare. I can't tell you how many rooms I've been in where people say, 'Kate, you just need to settle down.' You do not need to settle down. So thank you." The room erupts in applause.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, the desire to reorient one's relationship to work is familiar to millions of Americans. But for few has its pursuit been more complicated than for the elite career women Byars strives to help. They have exceptionally demanding jobs, and equally demanding lives at home. Stepping away from their careers doesn't strike them as a desirable option, but there are only so many hours in a day. If they don't cut back on work, how can they hope to achieve a better work-life balance?

Byars says there's a better way. It's possible, she promises, to achieve personal fulfillment at the same time as professional success. You don't have to choose. She has let me attend this retreat in Nashville, and the eight-week Zoom intensive that preceded it, on the condition I don't name any of her clients. I'm here because I want to see whether her method works — not only for these women but also, maybe a little bit, for myself. Mostly I'm just curious to get a rare peek behind the retreat's gilded closed doors into the minds and souls of the most powerful women in American business. In this post-hustle culture, post-"Lean In" age, what does it mean to be a woman and a boss who still wants it all?

Byars, 54, was once an overworked and unhappy corporate executive herself. By the time she was 30, she was the international vice president of marketing at the cosmetics giant Mary Kay. She was flying first class around the world. She had a driver, a housekeeper, and a personal shopper. She was killing it.

But that life was also killing her. At 33, when she lost her job in a management shake-up, Byars could have had her pick of any number of executive gigs. But she was so exhausted she couldn't imagine taking another job. She sold pretty much everything she owned, including her 3,000-square-foot home in Dallas, and moved to the Virgin Islands with her then-boyfriend, Scott. "I did what everybody else says to do: Live the simple life," she says. "I was going to be a dive bum."

The simple life worked for her for six glorious weeks. "And then I realized: Oh shit, I've just given up everything I've spent the last 20 years building," she recalls. "I cried for four months straight. I was just devastated."

When she finally felt ready to go back to corporate life, she looked for a more sustainable way to pursue professional success. She experimented with different strategies for achieving work-life balance, while Scott, an amateur philosopher and psychology geek, read everything he could on the subject. After years of trial and error, they finally got to a place where Byars was thriving both at work and at home with Scott and their two young sons. But her newfound insight had come at a steep cost: She estimated it had required her to forgo some $2 million in earnings. Could she help other women get to the nirvana she attained, without all the messiness in the middle?

To find out, Byars founded The Goodlife Institute in 2017. The program's framework is founded on what she calls "our seven universal needs": autonomy, security, health, leisure, purpose, connection, and esteem. "These seven needs are how human beings have biologically and psychologically evolved in order to survive and thrive," she says in the first of the Week One videos I received for Corporate Women Unleashed. "All seven of them have to be met in order for you to experience optimal well-being."

The issue with high-achieving women, Byars says, is they focus on meeting only two of those needs — security (money) and esteem — while neglecting the rest. As Byars sees it, unmet needs are what lead to unhappiness. Her solution is to figure out which needs you're neglecting entirely, along with which needs you're not meeting effectively. Then her program helps you devise and implement better strategies to consistently meet all your needs.

The videos assigned each week introduce the pillars of her philosophy. After reviewing them, clients have Zoom calls with Erin and Ali, the coaches Byars employs, to learn how to apply the principles in their own lives. Every client gets three one-on-one calls with a coach, but most of the work happens in small groups, where everyone shares their real-life struggles. It's group therapy meets executive coaching, for the world's most successful and hard-ass women.

Many of the moments are incredibly raw. On one call, a high-ranking government official confesses that she's been neglecting her family for months after a recent promotion. "I know it's having an effect on everybody, including me, and I'm trying to be better about it," she says. "But there's a big part of me that doesn't want to. I'm avoiding home." The previous day she wrapped up her work at a reasonable time, but as she was driving home she saw a friend's car at a bar they frequent and decided to join her. She ended up staying for hours. "I'm so mad at myself," she says. "I got home right before the kids went to bed."

Could it be, Erin asks, that you were trying to meet your need for autonomy by hanging out with your friend? The woman nods, and several other women on the call nod in agreement. Raising kids is hard work, Erin observes, and there's no immediate payoff. "You're in a very high-stress job, lots of demands on you," Erin says. "What do you like doing with your kids?"

"Not a whole lot," the official says. "That's what I struggle with." Her son, she notes, likes Godzilla. "I like to work." It's the kind of admission that would seem unremarkable coming from a male executive. But the official felt guilt-ridden about it. "Paying more attention to their intrinsic interests is something I need to do," she says. "It's hard for me because, I mean, I'll be honest, I'm a fairly self-centered person. And that's also contributing to this dynamic. So —"

"Sorry, I call bullshit," Erin interjects. "The role you're in is not a self-centered role. You are giving, giving, giving, changing, changing, changing. In the home world, you're like, I can't do it anymore."

"That resonates," the woman says. "I don't have a lot left to give at home and I need to shift that so I do."

Erin probes further. You're in this deficit where you have nothing left to give, she says, so let's focus on you first. Let's meet your need for leisure. "What did you like to do as a kid?"

"I mean, I worked all the time," the official says. "I did school. I was great at school. I got a job the minute I could get a job. I have not prioritized fun in my life, ever. Ever."

Erin asks her to commit to one thing she'll do for herself over the weekend. Sleep, the official says. Perhaps that will help her feel less depleted at home.

It's the kind of reframing that happens all the time in therapy. But this is different, because these women are also getting validation from their peers. Two of them, both mothers, chime in to thank the official for being so candid. "I have the exact same guilt," a doctor with her own practice says. "You're not alone in that." Another woman cries, sharing how she struggled with a similar dilemma until her son developed an eating disorder so serious that he had to enter residential treatment. "It honestly took me losing my son in the short term — thankfully I got him back — to prioritize and realize what I had."

About the crying: There was a lot of it. I'm not sure I was on a single call where no one cried. And these are hardened executives, who climbed to where they are by being just as stoic and emotionally repressed as the men around them. They're not, as several of them insisted to me, the kumbaya crying-in-group-therapy type. (Or even the crying-in-individual-therapy type — one told me she found therapy "too fluffy.") As one client said, if you had told her she was going to share her deepest feelings with a group of strangers who would rally around and support her while she broke down in tears, her response would have been: "Are you fucking kidding me? No."

When the clients cry, it's mostly related to the need Byars says is the trickiest to meet: esteem. High-achieving women try to fill it, she says, by accomplishing an ever-more-impressive list of things. But when they're not accomplishing, their self-esteem disintegrates, creating a seemingly unbreakable cycle of overwork and burnout. Byars seeks to help female executives develop a new belief — that they're valuable for who they are, not what they do. And the way she gets them to develop that belief is through an exercise she calls an "emotional elevator."

It might more accurately be referred to as "emotional waterboarding."

On every Zoom call, there's a room devoted to emotional elevators. In that room, the coach interrogates reluctant volunteers about their feelings. Every time a woman describes a feeling, the coach pushes them to go deeper by asking them, "What are you making that mean?" The coach does this over and over and over again. Eventually the poor executive is reduced to sobbing, whimpering something along the lines of I'm not good enough in front of the whole group. From there, the coach guides the client to develop a new belief about themselves by asking, "What else could be true?" The goal is for the women to supply their confidence from within themselves, instead of seeking evidence of their value from the world.

These elevators are uncomfortable to watch, and impossible not to find deeply moving. On one call, a partner at a law firm talks through why she feels so upset that one of her junior lawyers just left, even after all the training and mentoring she provided. (Her belief: She wasn't good enough for them to want to stay.) On another call, a young tech manager explores why she doesn't think she'll get a job other colleagues think she'll be a shoo-in for. (Her belief: She isn't good enough for the new job, or even her current one.) I sniffled through the process three times myself — once over the panic I feel before writing a big story (this is the time everyone will realize I'm a bad writer), once over my anxiety at being in a profession beset by unrelenting layoffs (I'll never find another occupation I like this much), and once over the time I sensed I was about to get dumped by someone I was dating (I'm not attractive and I'll die alone).

Through all the tears, though, I watched my cohort make real progress. One weekend, when a bunch of things at her law firm blew up, the partner delegated the fires to her underlings instead of handling them on her own. The doctor who felt guilty about not spending time with her kids booked a trip to go see the eclipse with them. The tech manager landed a new job at her company, to get away from difficult colleagues. A CEO battling a toxic board finally stood up for herself and stepped down. She no longer looks to her job "for validation as a human being," she tells me. "I know my worth better than before. I deserve to be treated differently."

After another CEO started prioritizing her own well being, her husband noticed something different about her. "Man, you look good to me," he told her. The CEO laughs as she shares this with the group, blushing as if she's talking about a teenage crush. In fact, she does look different than she did at the beginning of the program — color back in her cheeks, less depleted, her hair fuller. So do several of the other women. They speak less frantically. They smile more.

I even noticed a change in myself. As I went about my life, saying yes to too many things, writing until midnight, second-guessing everything I said on a date, I started to hear Erin's words in my head. What need was I trying to meet? Was that really the best strategy to meet that need? What strategy could I use next time? My sister, who knows me better than anyone, told me she saw a subtle shift in me. "You're talking about things a little differently," she said.

To my surprise, I'm sad when the eight weeks are over. But next up is the retreat in Nashville. It feels like being called up to the big leagues. The executives attending the event have already finished Corporate Women Unleashed and have moved on to the advanced program, which has a name suited to its power-broker clientele: Optimum. They've been having monthly one-on-one calls with their coach, and meeting regularly over Zoom in small cohorts. Now it's all culminating with a weekend-long event — the first time many of the women meet in person.

The retreat kicks off on a balmy, bright afternoon at the hotel's rooftop pool. The women at the pool are gravitating to their cohorts. A senior manager of communications tells me she signed up for CWU for the same reason everyone else did: because she was burned out. She was working constantly, gaining weight, and sick from exhaustion. But what pushed her over the edge was when her 5-year-old started having panic attacks when she began traveling more for work. "That was the wake-up call for me," she says. "I saw him and I was like, I'm not doing this to him."

Over the course of the weekend, I ask everyone I meet to explain the secret to the change they've undergone through CWU and Optimum. Many of them tell me they have shifted their mindset. But if you're a woman with four kids and a senior-level corporate job, is there really any amount of mindset shifting you can do to avoid burnout? "At home it's a grind," the communication manager admits. But now, she says, whether it's a kid's temper tantrum or a crisis at work, the chaos doesn't get to her the way it once did. Her burnout is gone.

Perhaps no one has changed more than an HR executive I chat with at the bar at the cocktail reception later that night. She joined CWU after burning out during the early months of COVID. What she expected to learn were tools for work-life balance: how to create boundaries, calendar management, that kind of thing. But what she ended up getting, she says, was so much more. She describes herself as a totally different person now. "I was this hard-ass just talking about results. I was hard on people and had no empathy, no compassion." She laughs: "I now have conversations about my soul." She's currently interviewing for a role that would get her a seat in the C-suite, which is something she's wanted her entire career. I note that she sounds oddly relaxed about it. "I'd be good at it," she says. "But I don't need the job, because there are 5,000 other things I could do."

As we talk, Byars strolls by in an emerald-green dress. It's like spotting a celebrity on the red carpet. Every woman here wants to say hello and hug her and hold her attention for as long as they can. "She's amazing," women tell me no fewer than a dozen times over the course of the weekend. "She's a genius."

The next morning we get down to business. We're seated at eight tables in a large conference room. The average age looks to be somewhere in the late 40s. There are a smattering of doctors and veterinarians, a top hospital administrator, a senior engineer at a big oil company, and several founders and CEOs of small firms. The rest have titles that are a testament to the sprawling bureaucracy of modern American corporations, many of which are household names.

Byars begins by explaining the concept of 10x. She describes it as a "quantum leap" that gets you results "beyond our wildest expectations." That's what differentiates it from 2x, which is only a "linear step," doing more or less what you did before. It's all a bit murky, but for the purposes of the weekend, I understand 10x to represent something really, really big that you really, really want, but that feels utterly impossible to achieve.

Byars talks about the two times she has 10x'd her own life. The first was when she landed a senior-level job at Mary Kay, despite a total lack of experience. She did it by calling the hiring manager every week for six weeks, leaving 45-minute unsolicited voicemails with her ideas about the job until they eventually gave it to her. The second was when she went searching for a husband. She looked everywhere: ladies' night at a bar frequented by doctors and lawyers, an opera club for young professionals, Habitat for Humanity. "I was on a mission," she says. Eventually she met Scott at a diving trip off the coast of Chile. But he was partnered with someone else, which required her to wait a long time for that relationship to come to an end. "It is so improbable," she says, "that five years later we were married." Everyone in the room is furiously taking notes.

Byars asks us to come up with our own 10x goal. Think about it, she says. What do you want in 10 years? Then think about it again: Is that what you really want, or is that just what society wants you to want? What if you forget about whether it's socially acceptable, or even doable? What if you could have anything — anything — in the world?

Many of the women struggle to come up with something specific. Through their time in CWU and Optimum, they've already cut their 90-hour weeks to 40 hours, stopped second-guessing themselves, and found genuine joy in their jobs. Given how overworked and unhappy they were before, these are miraculous achievements. What more could they possibly want? Just how big do they have to dream? The senior auditing director and engineering director at my table are stumped. Do they want to change careers? Do they want kids? They seem unsure.

I, on the other hand, have plenty of things I want. I've been noodling on an idea for a book since the end of last year. I would love to write that and for it to mean something to the people who read it. But if I'm honest with myself, what I really want in 10 years is to be married to a great partner and to be raising kids with her. But it's hard to admit that, because it's also what I wish I had right now, and don't.

When Byars comes over to our table to check on us, I tell her that I don't want to declare a goal over which I have zero control. No amount of trying is going to make my future partner appear out of thin air. Believe me, I tell her, I've tried. Don't I just have to distract myself until the right person comes along? Otherwise I'm just setting myself up for disappointment.

Byars tells me about the time she spent waiting for Scott to become available. It was brutal, she says, to be so sure he was the one and not be with him. She asks: Why do you keep saying that you have no control over meeting someone who's right for you? Could it be that you have more control than you think? As we chat, I get why the women like her so much. It's not just that she's confident and unapologetic and funny. In that moment I feel genuinely seen by her: She exudes a true, guru-like charisma that convinces you she can peer into your soul.

The afternoon is devoted to a series of activities designed to get us out of our comfort zones and embolden us to do the unthinkable. One is a "scavenger hunt," where we're tasked with getting photos and videos of ourselves doing slightly embarrassing things in public. (Sample assignment: going up to a stranger and saying, "I like your britches.") I find it all mildly annoying, but the women seem to be having a blast. Byars knows her audience, I realize. If you're at the top of the corporate food chain, you aren't exactly encouraged to make yourself look ridiculous in front of others.

The next morning, the coaches show us the photos and videos from the scavenger hunt. In one, the HR executive who described herself to me as a longtime hard-ass stands next to a gigantic statue of a microphone alongside a CEO and a neurologist and belts out LeAnn Rimes' "How Do I Live." The three of them are totally and stunningly off-pitch. The HR executive's eyes are closed, and she has a huge smile on her face. I think about the government official in my CWU cohort who confessed she had never prioritized fun in her life. Watching the video, the HR executive laughs along with the rest of the room. Her cheeks are bright red, and she fans herself with her hand long after the video is over, never once breaking her impeccable posture.

Before lunch, we break into three groups. In one, the women sit in a semicircle around Byars, peppering her with questions. A management consultant talks about how she's always wanted to start her own company. "I don't see myself as a CEO," she says. "I see myself as a follower." The HR executive brings up her own dilemma. If she stays in her corporate job for three more years, she'll be able to save enough money that she'll never need to work again. "But my patience is zero," she says. "The corporate bullshit is just sucking my soul. It's sucking my soul. I can't wait three years. Now I'm all about this 10x. I want to go get it." Does she give up on her goal of financial independence and go do the thing she really wants to do? Or does she suck it up for three years so she'll be free of the need to earn money?

"OK, this is a good question," Byars says, the way I imagine the Buddha did with his disciples. As she often does, she brings the problem back to her philosophy: our seven needs. "Ultimately, there's no right or wrong," she tells the women. "What you're weighing is, which path, which strategy, is going to best meet my needs?" When she first started Goodlife, she says, she held on to the consulting work she was doing at the time, so she didn't feel anxious about making money while she got the new organization up and running. "Did I like working six days a week? No, but I figured out a way to do it," she says. "Here's what I love about having a job that is more about meeting your needs versus the thing you really want to put your energy into: It takes the pressure off." In a sense, Byars is telling the women something radical: that it's OK for your high-powered, high-paying, soul-sucking job to be nothing more than a means to an end. It's not about staying versus leaving. It's about developing a strategy to get what you want, and taking care of your needs — all your needs — while you get there.

By the end of the day, many of the other women have settled on their own 10x goals. A nonprofit CEO announces she wants to run for governor of her state. A deputy CEO who has a side hustle as a solopreneur wants to get her product on "Shark Tank." A wealth advisor who runs her own firm wants to host a TV show on issues facing women. The consultant who called herself a follower decides she does, in fact, want to be the top boss of the company she intends to start. The communications manager who cried on the first day about wanting to 10x her confidence says she wants to focus instead on what she's good at — being joyful — and instill that in her four kids. A neurologist vows to live a more interconnected life with nature. Two other consultants want to find a partner. The HR executive wants to change someone's life, though she's not sure what form that will take. The auditor who yesterday wasn't sure she wanted kids decides that she does — a conversation she'll need to have with her boyfriend.

Many of the women are surprised by their goals. If you asked them to state their ambitions a few years ago, they would have been entirely focused on advancing their careers. They wanted to make partner at their firm, join the C-suite, expand their business, double their salary, get the corner office. The fact that their new goals have almost nothing to do with the big, prestigious, high-paying jobs that have brought them such extraordinary success isn't just a testament to the power of Byars' program. It also says something about the moment we're in today, after a yearslong national reckoning with the role of work in our lives. It's not that these women hate their current jobs, or that they don't care about the quality of the work they do. It's that their previous dreams of climbing the corporate ladder now strike them as laughably tiny.

When the pandemic killed hustle culture, some commentators dubbed it "the age of anti-ambition." But in this hyper-elite crowd of 50 women, it seems to me the exact opposite. Their ambitions today, no longer constrained by the limitations of the corporate workplace, are way bigger than they ever could have imagined. And even though I spent the weekend questioning the wisdom of aiming ever higher, I wonder if the women are, by the very act of setting these new goals, declaring their freedom from their former aspirations that trapped them in a cycle of overwork and discontent.

To wrap up the retreat, Ali, Erin's fellow coach, gets up and speaks haltingly about her own journey leaving behind her former life as an HR professional. Then she brings out her guitar and launches into a song she wrote a few years ago:

I didn't want to live, but I was too afraid to die
So I checked out
But I'm done being on autopilot
Done keeping my needs so quiet
I want to wipe the tears away

A few verses in, the whole room is in tears. Kitty, Goodlife's unfailingly sweet "client success manager," is taking a video of Ali and crying the way a proud mother would at her child's first recital. The communications manager at my table is sobbing so hard someone gets her a box of tissues. Even the soul-sucked, LeAnn Rimes-singing, hard-ass HR executive raises a finger to her eye, wiping away a sole tear before it can travel down her face. It's a scene that could be straight out of a "Saturday Night Live" skit: a room full of hard-charging female executives, having bared their souls to one another, crying as they watch their coach strum a guitar. I laugh thinking about how cliché it is. But the truth is, I'm crying too.

And then it's time to go home. In the bubble of the retreat, 10x-ing their lives suddenly seemed possible to the women. But the glow of the weekend fades fast. There are deadlines to meet, employees to manage, bosses to placate. Screaming children who need to be consoled and fed and bathed and driven to school. And yet the women somehow manage to take the first tentative steps toward the goals they set for themselves in Nashville. The neurologist who wants to be more connected to nature buys herself a bouquet of flowers at the airport. The auditor has a series of conversations with her boyfriend about what their long-term future might look like. The wealth advisor sketches out a plan for the first episodes of a YouTube channel she has created to focus on women's issues. They're not abandoning hustle culture. They're just rethinking who and what they're hustling for, and how to do it on an even grander scale.

"There's more to me than being a corporate person," the HR executive tells me when I catch up with her a few weeks later. "There's more to living for me, and the impact I can drive, than being in the corporate world. Now, I'm like: What's possible?"

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.