The invitation to a two-day summit in the Berkshires came at a moment when burnout had become my default state. I'd spent years climbing, delivering excellence in a shrinking industry that kept piling new roles onto my director-level position. Content creator, editor, writer, talent booker, social media manager. The ladder was still there, but somewhere along the way, reaching the next rung stopped feeling like freedom.
That's the state I arrived in when Dee Poku, founder and CEO of The WIE Suite, invited me to The New Guard Summit, a gathering for senior women leaders navigating what she calls the third act of their careers. I was skeptical. Another networking event promising productivity hacks and a chance to hustle harder felt like the last thing I needed.
What I found instead was a quiet revolution happening among women who had already won everything the system promised they should want.
The summit drew Victoria's Secret CEO Hillary Super, Scale AI co-founder and billionaire Lucy Guo, celebrity stylist Micaela Erlanger, and Dr. Sharon Malone, a women's health expert. But the real substance wasn't in the credentials on the agenda. It was in what these women were actually saying when they had a microphone and a room full of peers.
They talked about exhaustion. About reinvention. About caregiving and grief and menopause. About the unsettling realization that achievement alone doesn't fill the void forever.
Toni Wallace, a music industry executive at UTA, said something during dinner that stuck with everyone in the room. "I would really love to do something with purpose and impact," she said. "I'm deeply concerned about what's happening in the world right now and I have a very difficult time sleeping. I just feel like we all need to be using the incredible gifts that we have to help make a difference."
Multiple women approached her afterward to say thank you for being real. Because so many of us aren't sleeping either.
The Third Act Isn't About Retirement
Poku describes the third act not as a retirement phase but as a stage of maximum choice and autonomy. Act One is entry level, finding mentors and yourself. Act Two is when you've reached leadership but still answer to bosses and systems. Act Three is freedom. You control who you work with, how you live, and what you do with what you know.
I'm not there yet. The media industry's contraction keeps that autonomy out of reach. But sitting with women who had already claimed it, I felt something shift. The question wasn't how to climb higher. It was what to do once you stop climbing.
The wealth sessions didn't focus on maximizing returns or basic financial advice. One speaker said something that reframed everything: "The real wealth is going from 'how much' to 'what for?'" That simple phrase brought the whole summit into focus. Purpose instead of pressure. Impact instead of metrics.
Poku wanted to address the silence around aging in professional spaces. Women spoke openly about visibility, relevance, changing identities, and navigating workplaces that celebrate youth while benefiting from experience. Rather than framing aging as decline, the conversation centered on expanded perspective and accumulated wisdom.
On generational wealth, Poku noted the advantage wealthy families pass down financial knowledge across generations. For women, especially Black women, who didn't inherit that access, the summit created space to ask how to enter those rooms and gain that information. The answer wasn't to hustle harder for a seat at someone else's table. It was to build your own.
The thing that surprised me most about the summit wasn't the quality of the speakers or the resort setting. It was the permission structure. In most professional environments, admitting exhaustion is weakness. Admitting you're not sure what comes next is failure. Admitting you care more about purpose than promotion is seen as settling.
At The New Guard, those admissions were the whole point.
Poku spoke about the value of curated community. Not just any group of ambitious women, but women at similar points in their careers and lives, who understand the terrain because they're navigating it too. That peer support shifts something. You realize you're not alone in questioning the system that shaped you. You're not weak for wanting different things. You're not failing if success looks different now than it did ten years ago.
I left the Berkshires still in my climbing phase, still frustrated by the boundaries that keep my autonomy just out of reach. But I left with a different question in my head. It's not "What's next on the ladder?" It's "What do I actually want the next phase to look like?" And the women in that room had proven that the second question is the one that matters.
Author Jessica Williams: "The anti-ambition moment everyone's talking about isn't really about women losing their drive, it's about women finally asking ambition to serve their lives instead of the other way around."
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