She felt hands around her throat in a job interview and knew office life was not for her

Dia Bondi, who now works as a communications coach, still remembers the suit. She calls it her stupid blue interviewing suit, and she was wearing it high above San Francisco, on a two digit floor, interviewing for an entry level analyst position with the World Bank.

The job would have meant monitoring bank consolidations from a cubicle. Halfway through the conversation, in a room Bondi described as "a two minute walk from a window," she felt as if two hands were wrapped around her throat.

She felt the moment as refusal, not nerves, what she later called "a really massive claustrophobic feeling" that told her cubicle life would not work for her.

Bondi had grown up in a crunchy household in California, with a surfer father and a mother she describes as a nature girl, and putting on a suit to interview in a tall office building had felt fancy. Her body disagreed.

She had been through a round of formal interviews and a separate set of government exams, and the World Bank meeting became the turning point. As she puts it, "my body won't let me do things that don't work," and this time she listened to it.

Bondi said the experience kicked off a year of asking, "what do I really want to do now?" She knew one answer for certain: "it was not monitoring bank consolidations globally."

She spent that time talking to everybody about what she was up to and doing informational interviews. Through somebody in a room she was in, she connected to a founder with what Bondi called "a small consulting and coaching practice," a connection that kickstarted the career she has now held for 25 years.

Years later, after taking a break after her son was born, she got an out of nowhere note inviting her to help the bidding committee for Rio de Janeiro make its case to the International Olympic Committee for the 2016 Games, work Bondi called "the hardest project I'd ever done from a social and power dynamics perspective."

In her 40s, wanting another adventure, she went to auctioneering school and picked it up as what she calls an "impact hobby," doing what Bondi describes as "fundraising auctioneering for women-led nonprofits and nonprofits benefiting women and girls."