Inside the women-only executive retreat that turns boxing into leadership training

Erin Renzas spent nearly two decades dutifully climbing the career ladder before she hit a breaking point.

She had achieved many of the outward markers of success, like a high-paying tech career, including a stint as marketing lead during Square's IPO. So why wasn't she satisfied?

"I decided, like so many women do, the thing I hadn't changed was my body," Renzas said. "I was looking for how I could perfect myself into the point of happiness." That included becoming "the perfect version of what society tells us to be," she said, losing more than 100 pounds through diet and exercise.

Rather than finding happiness as she got smaller, her mental health deteriorated. She said she found herself experiencing dissociative episodes. At times, she was convinced she had died.

Renzas was working as an operating partner at investment group Prosus in Amsterdam at the time. "I would go into big, huge meetings and then I would go to the gym, and then I would come home and tell my mom I didn't exist — for basically two years," she said.

Her gym had a boxing ring in the back. Sick of running, she decided to give it a try.

She was immediately hooked. Boxing was the only time that she "felt whole," Renzas said. Unlike other sports, she found it impossible to dissociate while boxing. "You have to be so grounded in your body."

She's now an amateur boxer who has competed in four fights, all wins, and is writing a memoir about how boxing "fixed" her brain.

This year, she also co-launched a new retreat for senior executives, encouraging other women to give the sport — and the perspective that boxing can provide — a try.

"Left hook, left liver," boxing coach Malic Groenberg calls out over the rhythmic din of punches.

He and three of Renzas' other coaches have flown out from Amsterdam to Gleason's in Brooklyn. Groenberg talks through a basic combination, watching closely as two women wearing boxing gloves jab at punching bags being held in place by a pair of novice boxers.

"So we start, 1,2, catch, and then, as soon as you feel the punch here … Yeah, you've got it," he says to them.

Most of these women hadn't put boxing gloves on before until 24 hours ago, let alone trained at Gleason's, the longest-operating boxing gym in the country. With its bright red walls and crooked portraits of past heavyweights, the bustling institution is an unusual place for a women's executive retreat.

That's exactly the point.

"Boxing is about operating in the chaos," said Renzas. "It's about finding the clarity and rest and seeing your shots in the midst of everything else going on."

The sport gives you a chance to consider: "What do you do when your back is against the corner?" said somatic and executive coach Shea O'Neil, who cofounded the retreat with Renzas. "And how do you pivot and reclaim space?"

O'Neil used to be Renzas' executive coach, and the pair discovered that the vocabulary and philosophy surrounding boxing was especially relevant to their work.

"Shea and I began bringing the language of boxing — what I was learning about fight strategy — into our conversations exploring career, the definition of success, and what was worth fighting for," she said.

Renzas said she was having similar conversations with other leaders in her network, and O'Neil was using the same ideas with other executive clients she was working with, too. It "really struck a chord," Renzas said.

So, they decided to offer a formal program for women executives, which they named Fight Co.Lab — a hybrid boxing intensive and personal development workshop. Eleven women participated in the inaugural three-day retreat in November in New York, and a second session is planned for early March in Los Angeles.

The executives who participated in the first retreat were generally at an inflection point in their lives, Renzas said. Some were starting new companies, pondering next career steps, or figuring out how to restructure their teams. Others signed up seeking an antidote to the pressure and isolation that many female leaders face.

A recent report from McKinsey and LeanIn.org found that burnout among senior-level women is at its highest point in the last five years. "Compared with senior-level men, senior-level women see a steeper climb ahead," the report said.

The retreat's design is intentional. Boxing is tiring, which means it "lowers the barriers to having connection," said O'Neil. "People's defenses dropped."

The physicality of Fight Co.Lab, coupled with the vulnerability of the coaching sessions, made the experience more intense than other retreats and networking programs she'd participated in, said Emily Barron, cofounder and CEO of Zaria, a newly founded crypto loan-servicing startup.

"You're so physically tired, and you just want to lay down," said Barron, who flew out from California to participate. "But then you're like: Go deep — emotionally and mentally and intellectually."

Barron met Renzas when they worked together in San Francisco nearly a decade ago. But coming up in the finance and capital markets industry, Barron said she didn't have a lot of female role models to connect with. So she jumped at the chance to spend a few days with women in similar positions.

"This created that community for me," she said.

Christina Lang, who also participated in the Brooklyn retreat, said that as she gets older, she has to be more intentional about making time to spend with peers.

"Having this type of environment, where we all kind of opted in to check out of our lives for a few days, was really wonderful," said Lang, who is the VP of global marketing at Mozilla.

Fight Co.Lab is designed for senior executives and isn't cheap. The base fee for the Brooklyn retreat was $5,250, not including lodging or transportation. March's LA session will be priced lower, starting at $4,200, with discounted rates available for nonprofit leaders, said Renzas.

Lang said the members of this first cohort — which has since dubbed itself "The Coven" and continued to stay in touch via WhatsApp group — are holding themselves accountable to achieve the personal and professional goals they set during their time together. That was an unexpected perk, Lang said. "I was very, very surprised that we left with a to-do list."

She said the experience provided an opportunity to think more deeply about the gendered pressure she's felt during her career.

"My experience of continuing to move up has been that you get to a certain level and everyone asks you to be a smaller version of yourself," Lang said. Men aren't asked to do the same, she added.

Similarly, learning to box felt like a reprieve for Barron.

"As women, we're so told that if we have that instinct to want to fight, that's wrong," said Barron. "I'm a fairly intense person; I acknowledge that. But I feel people do not like that about me."

She said she's spent time over the years trying to "unravel" that drive. "How do I calm myself down, or how do I remove the intensity, or present myself differently than how I'm feeling?"

But in boxing, that intensity was an advantage, said Barron, who is now taking boxing lessons back home in California. "Like: No, you don't have to hide that. You have to harness it."