Working moms are quietly rewriting what it means to succeed

May 10, 2026 News

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…New book released to support them

By Kamla Devi Sharma

(Kaieteur News) – Today, across Guyana, mothers will receive cards drawn in unsteady handwriting. Breakfast trays will be carried with great seriousness by small hands. Phone calls will travel between countries. Flowers will arrive at workplaces and front doors. Some mothers will be celebrated loudly.

Others will be remembered quietly, by daughters and sons who lost them years ago. And many will spend part of the morning thinking about mothers they have not seen in too long, or children they could not have, or seasons of motherhood that did not turn out the way they had hoped.

As a Guyanese coach and corporate trainer, Mother’s Day is also a moment for me to highlight something happening more quietly across the country: a generation of working mothers who are not waiting for permission to live differently. They are already doing it.

The story we are often told about working mothers is one of overwhelm. That is not the story I have witnessed. The mothers I have coached over the past decade are some of the most capable, strategic, intelligent women I have ever worked with. They are running businesses, leading teams, holding institutions together, making consequential decisions – and increasingly, they are choosing to do all of it without sacrificing themselves in the process. That is not weakness. That is leadership.

It is in service of those women that my newly released book is intended to support.

Shifting From Hustle: How to Succeed Without Sacrificing Yourself is now available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover editions, with physical copies arriving in stores in Guyana within a few weeks. The book is for high-achievers, professionals and entrepreneurs navigating burnout in the age of always-on work – anyone, in other words, “who is capable, disciplined, and tired of the old model, and ready to build something more sustainable.” It speaks to many audiences. But this Mother’s Day, I believe it has particular resonance for the working mothers of Guyana already leading the conversation in their own lives.

 CHOOSING NOT TO  

From her years of coaching working mothers, I have observed a particular kind of tiredness I believe many women are now refusing to accept as the price of success.

It is not the tiredness of a long day, which sleep can usually answer. It is the other kind; the kind that lives underneath everything else. The kind that does not look like collapse – it looks like a competent woman who keeps showing up while running on empty.

For too long, this kind of tiredness has been quietly priced into what we call success for women. The mothers I work with have decided, collectively and individually, that this is no longer the deal they are willing to make.

This is not women claiming they cannot do the work. It is women rejecting the lie that the work has to cost everything. There is a profound difference. The first is a confession of weakness. The second is a claim of intelligence – the recognition that running yourself into the ground is not the only path to results, and that more sustainable methods produce better results, not worse ones.

The daily realities working mothers navigate – the early mornings, the school runs, the work performance that must remain consistent, the aging parents requiring care, the household, the emotional labour of holding everyone together – are real. But for me it is clear that naming them is not the same as describing women as overwhelmed.

Working mothers have been carrying enormous loads for generations. The women in this country know how to work. The conversation now is not about whether they can. It is about what they are ready to stop accepting as the cost of doing so.

THE QUIET REBELLION

One of the things working mothers are increasingly stepping away from,I observed, is the cultural climate of judgment that has historically constrained how women define their lives.

The old script was relentless. A working mother who stayed late was criticised for neglecting her children. A working mother who left on time was criticised for not being committed enough. A mother who stayed home was asked when she would go back to work. A mother who returned to work was asked who was raising her children. There was almost no version of motherhood that escaped commentary.

What I am watching now is a generation of women quietly stepping out of that script. They are no longer organising their lives around the avoidance of judgment. They are organising their lives around their own values, their own bodies, and what they actually want to build.

That shift is happening in kitchens, in boardrooms, in classrooms, and in the conversations women are having with each other across the region. It is a quiet rebellion, and it is reshaping what leadership is going to look like. 

A DIFFERENT PLACE

This is the cultural moment her book is written for.Women are entering the most influential decade of their professional lives – their thirties, forties, and fifties – with more clarity than the generation before them had access to. They are taking on leadership roles, building businesses, raising children, holding marriages and friendships, and doing it with a deeper question running underneath everything: what does success actually require, and what am I willing to refuse?

The cards and the flowers today are real. The love behind them is real. But the most powerful Mother’s Day gift the women of this country can give themselves is the permission to keep choosing, every day of the year, to lead their own lives differently than the model they were handed. That permission is not something the rest of us can

give them. They are already taking it. The role of those around the working mother, I believe, is to catch up.

Husbands and partners, who carry weight without being asked; employers who design work around how it is actually best done; and family members, who help without being summoned and cultures that respond to a focused mother with respect rather than commentary. None of this is charity. It is recognition. The women are leading. The rest of us are being asked to follow them into a healthier model of how work and life can be organised. 

NEW BOOK

Shifting From Hustle draws on decade of my experience coaching leaders ,professionals, and entrepreneurs through the kind of burnout that hides behind achievement. It is built around what she calls the MESS.

Alignment framework – Mindset, Energy, Strategy, and Soulful Outcomes – the four dimensions through which most lives either flow or stall. Each chapter pairs reflection with practical exercises and ends with three closing sections: The Shift, Money Overflows, and Reflect + Apply. The book is paired with a Companion Journal for those who would prefer to do the work alongside the reading.

The book is for the woman who has already started asking better questions of her own life. Not the woman waiting to be rescued. The woman, ready to take the next step in her own thinking, the high-achievers, the entrepreneurs, the leaders, the professionals- and yes, the working mothers among them, who are often the most strategically intelligent readers of their own circumstances. The book offers a different question. Not how do I keep going, but what is asking to change. The answers are usually closer to the surface than a reader expects.”

The book speaks not only to those navigating burnout, but to those around them. “It is for the husbands and partners ready to listen. For the sons learning what real partnership looks like. For the employers ready to update their model; for the daughters watching the women in their lives and learning what is possible. The shift the women in our region are leading is one we all have a part in supporting.”

The book lands at a moment when conversations about workers’ health and well-being are surfacing at the national level in Guyana – a development I  believe is long overdue, and one she sees women themselves having driven into the public conversation through the way they are reshaping their own lives.

If there is a single message I hope might travel into Guyanese homes this morning, it is direct. To every working mother holding this news paper today,  I see what you are choosing. I see the strength it takes to lead a life on your own terms

in a culture still catching up to who you have already become. I see you. May this Sunday be the start of a year in which the rest of us see what you have been showing us all along? My new book is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZ8K6YVj.  Physical copies arrive in stores in Guyana within a few weeks. The book is paired with a Companion Journal.

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• Kamla Devi Sharma, Mother’s Day, motherhood, Working moms

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