Power Women: Shay Levister of Bonding Biology Institute On How To Successfully Navigate Work, Love and Life As A Powerful Woman

How does a successful, strong, and powerful woman navigate work, employee relationships, love, and life in a world that still feels uncomfortable with strong women? In this interview series, called “Power Women” we are talking to accomplished women leaders who share their stories and experiences navigating work, love and life as a powerful woman. As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Shay Levister.

Shay Levister is the Founder and CEO of Bonding Biology Institute and the creator of the Bonding Biology™ methodology, built from 18 years of research and 8,000 client profiles across 47 countries. Her programs have served more than 180,000 women worldwide and produced a documented 98% success rate. Known publicly as Shay Your Love Diva, she has been featured in Forbes, the Tamron Hall Show, and A&E’s Fatal Attraction.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood “backstory”?

I grew up watching my mother experience abuse. That was my normal. I didn’t have a blueprint for what a healthy relationship looked like because I had never seen one up close. Years later, I found myself leaving in abusive relationship, homeless with a child, starting over with very little. I wanted more for my daughter so I made her a promise that mommy would figure out what it took in order to attract a healthy relationship and break the pattern of dysfunctional abuse in our family. I’m a science girl. I love science and so I knew that if I can do an experiment to prove that there was a science to attraction or I can predictably attract any men I wanted then I would be able to attract my soulmate. I began documenting a dating experiment on YouTube, just talking honestly about what I was learning, what was working, what wasn’t. Women started watching. Then they started reaching out. Then they started hiring me. What felt like rock bottom turned out to be the beginning of everything I’ve built.

Can you tell us the story about what led you to this particular career path?

What led me to this career path was that I made my daughter promise that mommy would figure this love thing out. Again I found myself at my rock bottom even though I graduated with honors, got accepted into medical school and had so much potential. I felt like I let myself and my daughter down because of my toxic imprinted patterns that taught me that love is equal pain. I was determined to break this pattern so that my daughter didn’t experience the same.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

One client came to me after her marriage of more than three decades ended. Her children had stopped speaking to her, and she had lost one of her children years earlier but was still carrying that grief as if it had happened the week before. She was living in isolation and had almost completely given up on herself.

She was one of the most challenging clients we had ever worked with — not because she was difficult, but because she had been hurt so many times that she had become deeply guarded and jaded.

Over time, she committed to the process. Little by little, everything began to change. She started enjoying life again. A life-threatening illness she had been battling resolved within five months. She significantly increased her income. Her relationships with her children were restored, and she became an active part of her grandchildren’s lives again.

She eventually entered a healthy, loving relationship, wrote a book, and today she’s speaking on stages, inspiring others with her story.

One day she told me, “This work gave me my life back.”

That’s the story I come back to whenever I need to remember why this work matters. It’s never just about helping someone find love. It’s about helping them heal, rediscover themselves, and create a life they never thought was possible.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

The first is an obsession with excellence. I learned it partly from watching Michael Jackson and how he committed himself to mastering his craft at the highest possible level. I apply that same standard to everything I build. Second is resilience. I have been homeless. I have been dismissed. I have had agencies reduce me to a niche label that had nothing to do with who I actually serve. None of it stopped me because I genuinely believe in what I’m building. Third is belief, which I got from my father. He believed in me long before I had any evidence to justify believing in myself. That kind of early belief becomes the foundation you stand on when things get hard.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. The premise of this series assumes that our society still feels uncomfortable with strong women. Why do you think this is so?

Power without apology disrupts the social contracts people have quietly agreed to. A woman who knows her value, sets her terms, and doesn’t need external validation to feel secure challenges the systems that were built around her being manageable. The discomfort isn’t really about her strength but the fact that her confidence makes other people’s insecurities visible. She becomes a mirror, and not everyone likes what they see.

Without saying any names, can you share a story from your own experience that illustrates this idea?

I think that for a long while people had a hard time when I would say that I was the best in the industry at what I did. I know that in every fiber of my bone and I’m not saying it from an arrogant place I’m saying it from a factual place because I paid my dues, done the research and demonstrated the results which are repeatable and for women they’re taught to shrink themselves they are taught that being able to claim a title of being the best is distasteful. It scares people when you have a woman that’s so confident in her gifts. However I have learned over time that women need permission to stand in their power even though men do not need the same permission and the more women who stand in that power then the more women who will confidently step into their greatness.

What should a powerful woman do in a context where she feels that people are uneasy around her?

A powerful woman doesn’t notice . She simply is powerful and there’s nothing that she can nor is she willing to do to change that . It’s like asking a fish to stop swimming because those around it feel uncomfortable with its nature of swimming . Women are powerful by nature and when you have a woman who’s worked hard to achieve her success she should stop trying to shrink herself to manage other people’s comfort. The women who come to me have spent years making themselves smaller so that the people around them could feel bigger, and that strategy costs them in every area of life. My advice is to stay calibrated. Read the room for strategy, not for permission. A powerful woman can adjust her communication style without abandoning her standards. She decides which environments are worth her energy and which ones aren’t, and she stops auditioning for rooms that were never built to hold her.

What do we need to do as a society to change the unease around powerful women?

We need to separate power from threat in the cultural story we tell. A woman who has built something, who has standards, who leads confidently, poses no danger to anyone around her. The story that equates female strength with aggression or unlovability is what keeps women self-editing their whole lives. We also need men who are secure enough to be in genuine partnership with women like this, and we need to stop training boys to interpret a woman’s success as a status problem they need to solve. Change starts in how we talk about powerful women, whether we frame them as anomalies or examples.

In my own experience, I have observed that often women have to endure ridiculous or uncomfortable situations to achieve success that men don’t have to endure. Do you have a story like this from your own experience? Can you share it with us?

The biggest one is the double bind between success and likability. Directness, decisiveness, high standards, and confidence produce results in business, and women who lead with those traits get described differently than men who do the same things, and they pay a social price for it. On top of that, the high-achieving women I work with carry an enormous amount of invisible labor. They are managing teams at work and managing emotional dynamics at home, with very few people managing anything for them. That compounds over time. What people call burnout is often a woman who has been running a full support infrastructure for everyone around her while operating without one herself.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women leaders that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?

One of the biggest challenges I see is that high-performing women often have to work much harder than their male counterparts to achieve the same level of recognition or results. Because they’re expected to project strength, confidence, and competence, their need for support, rest, and softness is often overlooked or even viewed as a weakness.

Over time, many women begin living almost exclusively in “doing mode.” They’re leading teams, making decisions, solving problems, and carrying the weight of everyone around them. That constant state of responsibility can create a pattern of control, not because they want to control everything, but because they don’t feel safe enough to let go.

From my perspective, this isn’t just an emotional issue, it’s a biological one. Living in a prolonged state of stress can elevate stress hormones, increasing the risk of anxiety, heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions. It also keeps the nervous system in a state of protection rather than connection.

The challenge is that the same traits that help a woman succeed in the boardroom can make it difficult for her to experience ease, vulnerability, and healthy intimacy in her personal life. Many women don’t have a safe space where they can put down the armor they’ve worn for years without worrying that their vulnerability will be used against them.

I believe every woman deserves a place where she can feel seen, heard, supported, and safe enough to reconnect with the softer parts of herself. Ironically, that’s often where her greatest strength, fulfillment, and capacity for healthy love begin.

Let’s now shift our discussion to a slightly different direction. This is a question that nearly everyone with a job has to contend with. Was it difficult to fit your personal and family life into your business and career? For the benefit of our readers, can you articulate precisely what the struggle was?

Yes it was extremely difficult at first to balance personal and family life into my business. I had to be willing to sacrifice spending as much time with my family as I would prefer so that I could dedicate that time towards building the business and supporting my clients. As the business continues to develop systems then I’m able to spend more quality time with my family however with the achievement of greatness it always requires some type of sacrifice. Thank God I had the support of my family so that I could pay it without guilt.

What was a tipping point that helped you achieve a greater balance or greater equilibrium between your work life and personal life? What did you do to reach this equilibrium?

I think the idea of achieving perfect work life balance is an illusion for someone who is pursuing extraordinary success. At least it has been for me. I haven’t mastered it yet, and honestly, I’m okay with that for this season of my life.

I think the popular answer is that you can have it all perfectly balanced, but I don’t believe that’s the reality when you’re building something meaningful. There are seasons that demand more of you, and right now I’m in one of those seasons.

When I’m working, I give it everything I have. When I’m with my family, I’m fully with my family. There are times when I can’t personally pick my son up from school or take him to every activity because my business requires so much of me. That’s a sacrifice I don’t take lightly.

What matters most to me is how I show up in the moments we do have together. When my son talks to me, he has my full attention. No phone. No distractions. Just him. We hug, we laugh, we pray together before bed, and I make sure he knows he is deeply loved.

I’ve learned that, for me, balance isn’t about dividing my time equally. It’s about being fully present wherever I am. When I’m building my business, I do it with purpose. When I’m with the people I love, I give them my whole heart. I don’t resent the sacrifices because I know they’re part of building a legacy that I hope will create opportunities not just for my family, but for thousands of other women and their families as well.

What are the “Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Powerful Woman?”

1. Know your value before you walk into any room. A woman who needs external validation to feel secure will always be negotiating from a deficit. Your worth doesn’t increase or decrease based on who recognizes it.

2. Do the inner work. The patterns that hold women back in love are the same ones that hold them back in business. Subconscious programming runs on autopilot until you interrupt it. Therapy, coaching, honest self-examination, whatever the method, the work is mandatory.

3. Build your support infrastructure. Powerful women are usually excellent at supporting everyone around them and genuinely poor at accepting support themselves. Receiving is a skill, and it requires deliberate practice.

4. Learn how relationships actually work. The skills that produce extraordinary results professionally require a different application in love. Excellence in relationships comes from emotional availability, self-awareness, and healthy standards, and those are learnable skills for anyone willing to study them.

5. Protect your energy with the same discipline you apply to your calendar. High-achieving women are very good at managing time and very poor at managing energy. The two are completely different resources. Who you spend time with, what conversations you participate in, what you consume, all of it either fills your cup or depletes it. Treat your energy accordingly.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I would love to have a private breakfast with Tony Robbins. I would love to pick his brain so that I can strengthen my ability to help more women to get transformation faster and deeper. I would like him to do what he does to provide massive transformation in a short period of time to me so that I’m able to operate at Peak Performance without feeling drained

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.