Melissa Bonde

I measure myself against myself. That is the only competition that has ever mattered to me.

Every year of my career has been better than the one before, and I can directly correlate that success across industries and titles to the fact that I have never stopped studying, adjusting, and raising my own standard. That is not a professional habit. It is a personal one. It applies in every direction I have ever grown and has provided me an upward trajectory that exceeds any expectation I would have had when starting out.

I go forward with blinders on. Obstacles are not stops, they are data. If I want to be in a room, I find my way in. If I want to learn a new skill, I find a way to learn it. If I want to make a career move or take on a new challenge, I seek it out and embrace it. I have never once looked up and seen the ceiling as the limit.

Try anything. Track everything.

I learned that working alongside startup founders early in my career, people fully immersed in their markets who knew their customer, their product, and their industry from the inside out. They were completely unafraid to build, shift, tear something down and rebuild it better by morning. They had earned their certainty, and it showed in how they moved.

What I did not expect was how measured they were underneath that fearlessness. Not a single design, color, or button went live without a tracked link and a split test. Performance was tracked live, reported daily, and analyzed weekly. Every result was treated as real-time data and an immediate opportunity to improve. Every hypothesis was worth testing if you could support it. Every idea had a path to proof.

What looked reactive from the outside was deeply strategic on the inside.

That dichotomy shaped how I operate. I move with conviction. And I measure everything.

Get a mentor. However you find one, find one.

Find someone who is invested in your personal development, not tied to your performance.

Get clear about where you want to grow, and then seek out the person who is already where you want to be; who has access you want to have, who has built what you are trying to build.

Look for opportunities within your organization, your industry, your network. If they aren't obvious, look somewhere else.

This was critical to the rapid advancement I achieved very early in my career. After 2 promotions in a short time, I was selected for a year-long executive mentorship program after landing in the top one percent of my company. Strategically paired with a VP-level executive based on my goals and my strengths. Formal agendas. Organizational accountability. A high-level presentation at the culmination. She gave me tangible, teachable skills and helped me translate what I was already doing naturally into language a corporate environment could recognize and reward. She was like a big sorority sister, ushering me into the business world, sharing her experiences to save me from making the same faux-pas. A wealth of knowledge, stories, resources that I still lean on 20 years later.

That experience gave me an appetite that has never gone away.

Be deliberate about who you let into that role. And when you get there, go back for someone else.

The conversation has shifted: what were once considered competing technologies are now being deployed together to solve the same problem, closing the connectivity gaps that still exist across this country.

Fiber and wireless are not rivals anymore. They are partners in the same infrastructure solution, and the operators who understand that are the ones moving fastest.

The more complex challenge is funding. Federal and state programs exist to support broadband expansion, but the variation in how those dollars are distributed and the pace at which they move creates real planning challenges for the operators trying to build. The opportunity and the obstacle often live in the same place at the same time.

Navigating that balance requires knowing when to move, when to wait, and how to keep a long-term strategy intact while the landscape shifts underneath it. That is where the work is right now, and it is not a small ask.

Everything I value professionally traces back to the same place: a lifetime of theatrical training that taught me excellence is not a destination. It is an ongoing practice.

Professional dancers still take weekly technique class. Singers still work with vocal coaches on everything from sound to breathing (no kidding).

The training does not stop because the performance begins. I have carried that into every role I have ever held. Skill development, coaching, collaboration, these are not supplements to the work. They are the work.

Preparation is non-negotiable. What you do before anyone is watching determines everything.

My children sit at the center of all of it. I work from home, and they watch the same way I once watched my mother. I soaked her in like a personal masters program, and now I’m modeling for my own children. They are watching someone build, lead, compete, and try and fail and try again - in real time, and already envisioning what they will be capable of when it’s their turn.