You Cannot Spreadsheet Your Way Out of an Identity Shift

On High-Achieving Mothers, the Competence Trap, and What Postpartum is Actually Asking For

This is a story that will resonate with high-achieving mothers in the postpartum period who are navigating new challenges and redefining themselves.

Priya Rednam-Waldo has achieved remarkable things. She graduated from West Point and served as a combat veteran in the Army. She went on to lead national medical and nonprofit organizations at the executive level. Priya is, by every measure, a woman who has faced tough challenges and kept moving forward.

And then she had a baby.

“I jumped out of perfectly good airplanes,” she told me. “I’d led teams at national medical and nonprofit organizations. So I thought—how hard could a squishy baby be?”

She paused. “And it’s not the baby that’s hard. It’s the radical shift in life and the internal identity that’s hard.”

Priya is now a licensed perinatal mental health therapist and postpartum coach who specializes in supporting high-achieving mothers. She built her entire career around the thing that caught her off guard. But before she became the expert, she was the woman who thought her résumé would protect her. It didn’t. And she knows now that for women like her—capable, accomplished, conditioned to figure things out—postpartum doesn’t get easier because of those qualities. It gets harder.

That is the competence trap. And it is far more common than anyone is talking about.

When Your Tools Meet Their Edge

I am someone who is very in tune with my intuition and always have been. I am so aware of the inner reality that I talk through problems, I process out loud, I name things as I feel and see them, and I reach toward language when I’m trying to understand what’s happening inside me. That capacity has served me in almost every season of my life.

Postpartum has asked for something much more significant.

I’ve gone inward in a way I never had before. Not because I didn’t have the capacity prior, but because this season has been moving through me in ways that language is finding a way to speak. The emotional intensity, the heightened attunement, the radical recalibration of what matters—these aren’t malfunctions. They are transformations doing their work. What I’ve written about before is that this inward turning isn’t the problem.

The problem is that not many have been here to meet me when I arrived at it all.

There was no real village to hold me through deep, complex emotions other than my dear husband and a few dear friends. I wasn’t given a framework for what I have actually been moving through. No one saying: you don’t have to navigate this alone, you don’t have to have words for it yet, and let me truly hold you through this recalibration. Just the quiet, inherited expectation that a capable woman figures it out. And so I did what capable women do—I have managed complex emotions on my own. Not because I felt I needed to perform for myself, but because no one has shown me another option.

And this is the part that rarely gets said: even the people who love us don’t always know how to show up. Not because they don’t care, but because they’ve been conditioned by the same culture we have. They, too, were never taught how to sit with someone else’s complex emotions without trying to fix, explain, or move past them. So we find ourselves surrounded by people who want to help, yet still feel profoundly alone—because the support being offered is shaped by the same toxic individualism that made asking hard in the first place.

That is where the competence trap lives. Not inside the woman but in the absence of support built around her.

When I named this with Priya as toxic individualism—the deeply conditioned belief that we have the tools, the resources, the clarity to navigate postpartum alone—she stopped me. “I love that phrase,” she said. “Because we are so hyper-focused on the individual. And we bring that mindset directly into motherhood.”

When Anxiety Looks Like Good Mothering

Here is the part of this conversation that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Priya described a pattern she sees consistently in high-achieving clients—one that explains why so many of them suffer in silence for so long. She calls it rewarded anxiety. And once she named it, I can see it everywhere.

“For a lot of high-achieving, high-functioning people,” she said, “that anxiety gets rewarded in society. Someone says to you, “You can’t be away from the baby for a minute? You’re such a good mom. You stay up all night to make sure the baby’s breathing? You’re such a good mom. Are you always doing a million things at once? You’re such a good mom.”

Think about what that does. The very symptoms of postpartum anxiety—hypervigilance, inability to rest, constant doing—get reframed as evidence of devotion. The mother is praised for the very behaviors that harm her. And so she learns to perform them harder.

Meanwhile, asking for a night doula so she can sleep? Taking a Wednesday afternoon for herself? Admitting that she’s not enjoying this as much as she thought she would? That could get read as failure. As a lack of commitment. As something to be ashamed of.

The culture has built a perfect machine for keeping high-achieving mothers sick and calling it dedication.

“For a lot of high achievers, that anxiety is rewarded in society. ‘You can’t be away from the baby for a minute? You’re such a good mom.’ The very symptoms that signal distress get reframed as devotion.” — Priya Rednam-Waldo

There is another layer to this that Priya named carefully: what happens to the partnership. The high-achieving woman has often been the steady one for years. The one who holds things together, solves the problems, and keeps the household running. Her competence is not just her identity—it is the foundation on which her relationship has been built. Her partner has never seen her not have it together. That steadiness has become the baseline.

And then postpartum arrives, and the baseline breaks. “These big swings happen,” Priya said, “and their partner may be a brand new parent too. It can feel really disorienting for both.” They don’t know what to do with her as she falls apart. She doesn’t know how to let them see it. So she manages her collapse the same way she manages everything else—quietly, efficiently, alone.

So she performs fine for them, too. And the echo chamber gets smaller.

The Trap Itself

Priya gave this pattern its clearest name in a moment I keep returning to.

“Moms who know how to navigate stress—they’ve navigated it in their lives before. And I think that’s really what makes it hard to ask for support. Because in theory, we say, I should be able to figure this out.” â€” Priya Rednam-Waldo

In theory. Those two words carry so much weight.

Because the high-achieving woman doesn’t just believe she should cope. She has evidence. She has a track record. Combat deployments, boardrooms, ladders climbed, systems mastered. Every time life got hard, she found a way through it. That competence is real. It is earned. And it becomes the very thing that delays her from asking for help, because asking would mean admitting that this—a baby, a joyful thing, a wanted thing—is harder than everything else was.

Priya described her own version of this with a detail I found both cheeky yet so familiar: “I had a lot of Excel spreadsheets for naps and bottles. And I was like, I can do this all by myself.”

The spreadsheet. The organizing. The type-A instinct to systematize the problem into submission. “We’re so used to grinding alone, achieving alone, problem-solving on our own,” she said. “We think: I can just organize my way out of this.”

You cannot spreadsheet your way out of an identity shift.

You cannot optimize your way through profound change and recalibration. And the longer you try, the more isolated you become, because the people around you are watching you manage beautifully and have no idea you are drowning.

Here is what I want to say clearly, to every woman reading this who has quietly believed otherwise: you are not the problem. The fact that your capabilities haven’t fixed this is not a failure of your capabilities. It is evidence that you are inside something that was never meant to be fixed alone. 

The competence trap is not a character flaw. It is what happens when the exact skills that built your life—self-reliance, endurance, high standards, internal drive—meet the one experience that requires the opposite of all of them. It is a systems problem masquerading as a personal one.

What Actually Helps

Priya didn’t build her practice around telling high-achieving mothers to lower their standards or slow down. She built it around meeting them where they are—and then building something real from there.

She works in three stages, and I think every postpartum mother deserves access to this framework.

The first is values clarification.

She uses one question to cut through the noise: “What would you teach your little one about rest?” She’s found that our authentic values lie in what we’d want for our children, not in what we’d admit we need ourselves. When a mother is too depleted to articulate what she wants or needs, she can almost always articulate what she’d want for her baby. That becomes the entry point.

The second is painting the picture.

This is a realistic portrait of what life looks like right now —with one non-negotiable instruction: put yourself at the center of it. “I always help moms recognize the value of painting the picture with themselves in the middle,” she said. “It is counter to our urge. But it is essential.” For the high-achieving woman who has spent years making herself small in the service of outcomes, this alone can be transformative.

The third stage is the playbook.

Not vague self-care advice. Operational planning. Who can provide the five hours of continuous sleep that are actually necessary for healing? Is there someone who can cover Wednesday afternoon? Who in your circle genuinely enjoys cooking and would find it meaningful to contribute that way? Priya does what she calls “the heavy lifting” here—because asking the depleted mother to also project-manage her own recovery is a disservice in itself.

For mothers who can’t even get to the point of knowing what they need, she uses the magic wand technique: imagine waking up feeling exactly the way you want to feel. What would you do next? “Would you be able to breathe before someone handed the baby to you? Use the restroom? Brush your teeth?” The needs underneath the overwhelm are often that elemental. And they deserve to be met without shame.

“You’re allowed to want a doula to come at night so you can sleep. You can be an amazing mother and have a doula at night.” — Priya Rednam-Waldo

This is the reframe that the high-achieving mother needs most. Not a lower bar. A different understanding of what excellence in this season actually looks like. It does not look like doing it alone. It looks like building something sustainable enough that you can actually show up—for your baby, for your relationship, for yourself. And it looks different for every woman. “There are infinite right ways to create your vision of what it means to feel really well and fulfilled and joyful in motherhood,” Priya said. The standard you’re failing to meet may not be the right standard for you at all.

What I Would Have Done Differently

Near the end of our conversation, I told Priya something I hadn’t quite said out loud just yet. If I could go back, I would have sought professional postpartum support earlier, before my daughter arrived. People who are dedicated to supporting postpartum moms. I quietly sat back, waiting for support from the wrong people when I should have asked for real help. And that you don’t know what you don’t know until you’re already inside it.

She met me there immediately. “I was that mom.”

She didn’t start her own healing journey until after her second child. This from a woman who knew, professionally, every statistic about postpartum mood disorders. Who had dedicated her career to this exact work. The competence trap caught her, too. And it wasn’t until she gave herself permission to say “I deserve a different experience” that anything began to shift.

“Why am I not enjoying this more?” she said she asked herself. “Why do I feel like I’m running in wet sand?”

Those questions were the beginning. Not a failure. A door.

She made meaning of that struggle by turning it into her life’s work. “It is in my fiber,” she said, “to ensure that moms who want to feel really well, who want to have the life they deserve—I’ve dedicated myself to that effort.” She isn’t helping high-achieving mothers because she studied them. She’s helping them because she was one who didn’t get help in time. That distinction matters. It’s the difference between expertise and witness.

“But it’s never too late,” she said. “If you realize that you don’t have it totally together, or you just deserve better than what you’re experiencing—it’s never too late to reach out.”

At the very end, I thanked her—not as a host wrapping an interview, but as a mother. As a postpartum mother who needed to hear what she said. She turned it back outward immediately: “Thank you for highlighting this and for sharing the challenges of the experience. The more of us who can have these real conversations—that is how change happens.”

That’s why I’m writing this. Not to perform healing or wrap a hard season into a tidy arc. But because the only thing that breaks the echo chamber is another voice getting in.

I think about the women reading this who are in it right now.

• The ones who have mastered everything else and cannot understand why this feels so impossible.
• The ones whose anxiety is being called dedication.
• The ones building spreadsheets at 3 a.m., trying to organize their way out of something that cannot be organized.

You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re inside it. And now you know. So let this be the door.

If you don’t know where to start, start here—with the question Priya uses with every client who can’t yet find the words for what they need: imagine waking up tomorrow feeling exactly the way you want to feel.

• What would you do next? 
• Would you breathe before someone handed you the baby?
• Use the restroom alone?
• Drink a full cup of coffee while it’s still hot?

Whatever that answer is—that is your entry point. That is the first thing on the list. Start there.

The skills that got you here are real and empowering. They will serve you again. But they are not what this season is asking for. This season is asking you to let something in. To let someone in. To trade the spreadsheet for a village—a real one, intentional and honest, and built around you at the center of it.

“When we center our lives around ourselves, our babies benefit. Our spouses benefit. Our workplace. Everyone benefits. When we are allowed to shine, everyone gets to bask in the glow.” — Priya Rednam-Waldo

You were not designed to do this alone. The most capable thing you can do right now is stop pretending that you are.

About The Postpartum Voice

The Postpartum Voice is a publication by Ashley Graham dedicated to maternal advocacy, honest storytelling, and the parts of early motherhood that rarely make it into the highlight reel.

About Priya Rednam-Waldo

Priya Rednam-Waldo is a licensed perinatal mental health therapist and postpartum coach who specializes in supporting high-achieving mothers. She is an Army combat veteran, a West Point graduate, a former executive leader, and a mother of four. Her work centers on the belief that ambitious mothers deserve to feel well, joyful, and fulfilled—and that it is never too late to reach out for support.