Why high-achieving moms are increasingly ‘hitting a wall,’ according to this executive coach
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During a record-breaking workforce exodus, we asked this executive mom what moms can do to preserve their careers and feel good at home.
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I had my first baby at 23, before I knew myself or had any idea which direction I wanted my life to take outside of being a mother. So I leaned all the way in — helping run a yoga studio when I could, otherwise settling into my post as keeper of snacks and wiper of butts. I had my second at 30 and kept leaning.
Then I hit a tipping point. I wanted more than the snacks and the butts and the creative challenge of sneaking veggies onto plates of people who were never going to eat them anyway. Our finances would’ve thanked me for stepping it up, but it was bigger than money. I wanted something that fed me as a whole person. So I lit a fire under myself — started writing, signed up for a six-week stand-up comedy course (that one didn’t stick) — fueled by ambition and a stubborn desire to show my kids that growing is a lifelong job. I wanted the go, go, go. I wanted my brain used for something other than logistics. I wanted all of it.
And then I got it, and wondered why I’d wanted it so badly. By the time my youngest was three, I was writing about parenthood for a startup and piecing together childcare out of spare parts — an auntie here, a free preschool program there — because we didn’t have a dime to spare. It didn’t take long to arrive at that universal working-mom sensation: that you are, frankly, failing at everything. Stressing about a deadline, dashing off for pickup, then stressing that you can’t stop stressing about work when you’re supposed to be present. A möbius strip of disappointing someone, yourself included.
I’m not alone on that strip, and the numbers are there to prove it. In the first half of 2025, mothers of young children left the workforce at the fastest clip in more than forty years of record-keeping — a 2.8-point drop in six months. Not because they stopped wanting to work, but because the math stopped working. Childcare now runs a national average of $13,184 a year, more than median rent in all 47 states that track it. And the country these women are trying to stay employed in is the only high-income nation on earth without national paid leave — barely a quarter of private-sector workers get any through their job.
The feeling has a cause, and it isn’t you.
And the load only compounds. Motherhood and work both keep asking for more, in a country built to hand mothers less. So I called Sarah Olin to understand why doing everything right had stopped working for so many of us.
Why ‘exceptional’ women are burning out
Olin has spent thirteen years watching exceptional women hit the same wall — and she’ll tell you it’s never the woman who’s bad at her job. It’s the one who’s exceptional at it. She’s an executive coach — co-founder and CEO of LUMO Leadership — and she has spent years in rooms with people who are, by every external measure, winning. Oscar winners. NBA head coaches. Leaders at Google and Bloomberg and the UN. What she noticed is that a specific kind of woman keeps hitting the same wall, and it isn’t the woman who’s bad at her job. It’s the woman who’s exceptional at it.
“For lots of type-A, high-performing, really successful women, they’re used to outworking everybody. Outlast. I’m going to do it better, be more prepared,” she told me. “And that over-functioning strategy — when you have a sick kid or two, or aging parents — it just doesn’t work anymore.”
Oof. No girl bossing your way out of that one. Nope, the strategy that got you here — the grind, the polish, the being-the-most-prepared-person-in-every-room — is the exact strategy that breaks the moment a person who needs you also has a fever. You didn’t stop being capable. Your operating system stopped being compatible with your life. “You are gonna burn out, be exhausted,” she said, “and this is why we’ve seen so many women leave the workforce.”
The data agrees with her, in record numbers. But Olin is careful not to let the structural story become the only story, and neither should we. When a mom tells her she’s failing, her first move isn’t reassurance. It’s a definition.
“Let’s define sucking,” she said. “My mom had two jobs — the kids and the house. And it was a big job. The modern mom has eighteen.” She rattled them off. “Have your well-being, be spiritual, keep a beautiful house, look great, kids look great, crush it at work, be a sex kitten in the bedroom.” Then she offered a dose of reality.
“Pick three, and I’ll be great.”
Underneath the joke is her actual method. Define three or four goals at a time, no more. “If everything’s important, nothing’s important.” Most women aren’t drowning because they’re weak swimmers. They’re drowning because they were handed eighteen things to carry and told a good mother carries all of them. “For most women,” Olin said, “they’re radically undersupported.” Then, in the same breath, the part that is hard to deny: “There’s a societal element, and then there’s the pressure they’re putting on themselves. Don’t make it worse.”
The country is failing mothers. We’ve got no national paid leave, childcare that costs more than rent, and an exit ramp forty years wide. And yet, many of us are quietly adding weight to a load that’s already too heavy, because we’ve confused carrying everything with doing it right.
Make yourself a priority
So what do you do, if the load is real and the country isn’t fixing it this quarter?
Olin’s answer is simple. Start with your own well-being, and you stop treating it as the reward you get after everything else is done. She beats this drum hard, and she knows how it sounds. “People are like, oh, we don’t want to talk about well-being, everyone knows about well-being,” she said. “Well — they might know, but they ain’t well.”
For her, the floor is not a spa day. It’s basic and elemental. “I gotta move some — and it doesn’t have to be a two-hour workout, it could be fifteen, twenty minutes. I have to meditate. Meditation and prayer are my best friends. If I do those three things, I’m good to go. Now I’ve got my pants on.” That’s the whole benchmark. Pants on. Functional. Human. And from that floor, the old “can you really have it all” question quietly resolves itself: “When I have my well-being,” she said, “I feel like I have it all.”
The trick is catching yourself before you’re empty, and here Olin gave me the metaphor I’ll be using from now until I’m an old lady. “When I look at my gas tank and it’s a quarter full, I’m already like — okay, before the gaslight comes on, next time I pass a gas station, let’s just pull in. I don’t want to end up on the side of the road.”
Most of us wait for the side of the road. We wait until we’re, in her words, “face down in the puddle” — and then wonder why the climb out takes so long. The alternative is learning to read your own quarter tank. “When you start to notice that you’re easily frustrated, or you find yourself tired a lot, or you’re complaining a lot, or you’re not having a good time,” she said — “when you start to notice that you’re not yourself. That’s a great time to start looking at support. You’re not necessarily hurting yet, but you’re like, huh, something’s not right.“
Not a breakdown. A dashboard light. The mothers who thrive aren’t the ones with more grit. They’re the ones who pull over at a quarter tank.
It’s ok to fail
I’m 44 now, and I can tell you the tank-reading is a skill you get late. I have never been more sure of myself, more willing to protect the twenty minutes, more done apologizing for wanting a life that’s mine. What I’d give for the 24-year-old with the babies and the veggie plates to have walked around with even a thimble of this. When I asked Olin how you hand a younger woman that spine before her forties, she didn’t pretend there was a shortcut. “The best way I know to grow and learn is to fail and make mistakes,” she said. Her follow up is the part that I want to pass on to my daughter: the sooner you learn to actually know your own needs, “the younger that they are, it’ll lay a good foundation to get there quicker.”
So maybe that’s the assignment. Not to carry all eighteen. Not to out-grind a system that’s rigged to exhaust you. Just to pick three, know your own tank, and get there quicker than I did.
Motherhood and ambition were never mutually exclusive. We were just handed a map that made it feel that way.
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