Who is a woman who’s made an impact on your career?
People sometimes look at my life and see achievement.
Fourteen years across multiple countries. A career that took me from Indonesia to Malaysia to Singapore to Australia. Awards with my name on them. A business I built from scratch. A LinkedIn profile that reads like a highlight reel of someone who figured it all out.
But I need to tell you about the woman behind all of it. The woman who never had a LinkedIn profile. Who has never received an award. Who never stepped inside a boardroom or sat on a panel or gave a keynote speech. The woman whose name will never trend, whose story will never go viral, whose sacrifices were so quiet that even the people closest to her didn’t fully understand the weight she was carrying.
My mother.
And I need to tell you why everything I’ve ever accomplished feels small. Impossibly, laughably small. Compared to what she endured without ever asking to be seen.
She Chose Silence So I Could Have a Voice
My mother grew up in poverty. She married into a polygamous household, a family structure where my father divided his time, his presence, and his love among multiple homes. This was the life she lived. Not the life she chose, but the life she navigated with a dignity that I am still trying to understand decades later.
I grew up watching her prepare for my father’s visits. The house would shift on the days he was expected. She would cook a little more carefully. Move through the rooms a little more quietly. Put on a touch of makeup. And when he arrived, the warmth would fill our small home. Temporarily, briefly, like sunlight through a window that only opens for a few hours before it closes again.
And then he would leave. And the waiting would return.
She never complained. Not once. Not to us, not to anyone. She swallowed whatever she felt, the loneliness, the comparison, the quiet grief of sharing the person you love with other families, and she turned all of it inward, converting pain into purpose. Her purpose was us. Her children. Making sure we had what she didn’t. Making sure we reached places she could never go.
I used to think that was a strength. Now I understand it was something beyond strength. It was a woman choosing, every single day, to carry a weight that would have crushed most people. And carrying it so gracefully that her children didn’t even realise how heavy it was.
She Borrowed Money She Didn’t Have So I Could Fly
When I was in my final year at university, I received a phone call from Accenture Malaysia. An overseas number. A voice I didn’t recognise. They told me I’d been accepted for a position in another country, starting in two months. I hadn’t even graduated yet.
I was the only woman among eight candidates selected.
I was terrified.
But the terror wasn’t just emotional. It was financial. Going overseas required capital. A passport I’d never had. Enough money to survive the first month before my first salary arrived. For a family like ours, that amount was enormous. It wasn’t sitting in a drawer somewhere. It didn’t exist.
My mother said no at first. Not out of cruelty. Out of reality.
Then she saw my face. She saw something in me that I couldn’t yet see in myself. And she changed her mind.
She borrowed money. From relatives. From acquaintances. From wherever she could find it. Quietly. Without complaint. Without making me feel guilty. She pieced together just enough, just enough, for her daughter to board a plane for the first time and land in a country where no one knew her name.
I’ve closed deals, led teams, won awards, and built a company. But I have never done anything as brave as what my mother did that day. Betting borrowed money on a daughter’s dream when she had every reason to say no.
She Was My 2AM Phone Call
Life didn’t go the way I planned. I won’t share every detail. Some stories are mine to carry, not to publish. But I’ll tell you this: there were years when my life fell apart in ways I didn’t think I could survive. Years where grief and loss piled on top of each other until I couldn’t breathe.
During those years, my mother was my lifeline.
I called her at 2AM. At midnight. At 4 in the morning on weekdays, when she should have been sleeping. I called her from cities she’d never visited, crying so hard I couldn’t form sentences, unable to explain what was wrong because the wrongness was too big for words.
She always picked up.
She didn’t always know what to say. Sometimes she said nothing at all. She just stayed on the line. Breathing. Present. Silent. Letting me pour out everything I was carrying without interrupting, without offering solutions, without telling me to move on or be strong or look on the bright side.
She just held the space.
I think about the cost of those calls now. Not in money, but in sleep, in energy, in the emotional toll of listening to your child break down night after night with no end in sight. She was already carrying her own life. The complexities of her marriage, the financial pressures, the quiet loneliness that she never named. And yet she answered. Every single time. She absorbed my pain on top of her own, as if her capacity for carrying things was infinite.
That silence on the other end of the phone was the purest love I have ever known. No words. No advice. No judgment. Just: I am here. I hear you. You are not alone.
She Carried Everyone. No One Carried Her.
My mother passed away in August 2018. A sudden heart attack. She had been in the hospital for two weeks, but she was recovering. The doctors had cleared her. She came home. She walked through the door. She sat down in her living room.
And within five minutes, her heart stopped.
I was in Kuala Lumpur. Packing my bags. My flight was booked for the next morning. I was coming home to her.
I didn’t make it in time.
I watched her final moments through a phone screen. Through the same device that had carried her voice to me across years and distance and midnight breakdowns, I watched the one person who had always answered become someone who would never answer again.
After she passed, we discovered things none of us knew. Debts she had been carrying in silence. Family members she had been quietly supporting. Money flowed out of her in every direction, to children, to relatives, to people who needed help, while she kept nothing for herself.
She had been holding everyone up. And no one had thought to ask how she was managing.
Her heart didn’t fail because it was weak. Her heart was the strongest thing about her. It failed because it had been carrying too much for too long. Too many people. Too many burdens. Too much silence where there should have been someone asking: How are you? What do you need? Let me carry this for a while.
My Achievements Are Small
So when people congratulate me on the business, on the career, on the awards, on the life I’ve built across continents, I smile, and I say thank you. Because I am grateful. I worked hard for every single thing I have.
But inside, I know the truth.
My achievements are small.
I built a career. She built the woman who built that career. From nothing, with nothing, while carrying everything.
I crossed borders. She never left her small town but somehow gave her daughter the courage to cross oceans.
I lead teams. She led an entire family through circumstances that most people can’t imagine, with grace so complete that her pain was invisible to everyone except the children who paid close enough attention.
I set boundaries. She never had the luxury. She lived within walls that were built before she arrived and never once asked the world to feel sorry for her.
I got awards with my name printed on certificates. She got nothing. No recognition. No applause. No stage. No audience. Just the quiet satisfaction, if she even allowed herself that much, of watching her children reach places she’d been told were not meant for people like her.
The world measures success in titles, revenue, followers and visible achievement. But the most extraordinary thing I have ever witnessed was a woman waking up every morning inside a life she didn’t choose, and choosing, choosing, every single day, to pour everything she had into the people she loved. Without recognition. Without complaint. Without a single person understanding the full cost of her quiet strength.
That is an achievement the world doesn’t have a metric for.
What She Taught Me Without Saying a Word
My mother never gave me a lecture about resilience. She didn’t need to. She was the lecture.
She taught me that strength isn’t loud. That the bravest people often make the least noise. That you can endure the unimaginable and still show up the next morning with softness in your hands and warmth in your voice.
She taught me that education is the one thing no one can divide among other households. It belongs entirely to you. It cannot be shared against your will, diminished by comparison, or taken away by circumstance.
She taught me that love is not always fair, but that it can still be real, even when it arrives in fragments.
And she taught me, in the most painful way possible, that the people who carry the most are often the ones who leave the soonest. Because no heart, no matter how strong, can carry the weight of the world forever.
Mama
If I could go back to one moment, it would not be the day I got my first job offer. It would not be the day I launched my own company. It would not be any of the moments the world considers my achievements.
It would be a quiet evening in her kitchen. Standing beside her while she washed dishes. Her hands in soapy water. The hum of the night outside. A moment so ordinary that I didn’t think to memorise it.
She turned to me that evening and said:
“You are stronger than you think. And even if the world says no to you, you don’t stop. You keep going.”
She wasn’t being poetic. She was telling me the truth, she had lived.
Mama, I kept going. I’m still going. Everything I am started with you. With your borrowed money and your midnight silence and your stubborn, beautiful refusal to let your daughter stay small.
You carried everything in silence.
I will carry your name out loud.
Happy International Women’s Day.
🤍 EG
#IWD2026 #InternationalWomensDay #WomenWhoInspire #TheWomanIBecame
Elsya Goullet 
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