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The Mom CEO I Became and Why I Built Amiga Moms™ for Her
- Jun 24
- 6 min read
There is a version of success that looks exactly right from the outside and costs everything on the inside. I know this to be true because I lived it for eighteen years.
I was a former teacher turned school counselor. It was a career I had built with intention, with purpose, with genuine love for the work. I was good at it, I showed up fully, I advocated fiercely, and I gave everything I had to the students and families in front of me. By every external measure, I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
And then one evening in the middle of the pandemic, I sat in my empty office, running a parents night where no parents were allowed inside due to COVID restrictions. And only two parents attended virtually... two.
That night I missed tucking my son in on the eve of his birthday. We had done it every year since he was born... a quiet moment, just the two of us, before the celebration started.
I sat in that empty building and I did the math. Not the financial math, the life math. What I was giving. What it was costing. What was waiting on the other side of my front door while I sat in an empty room for two people.
That was the moment I knew.
When I Became the Mom CEO, Everything Changed
By the time I made that decision I had already been building my private practice Free to Be Mindful on the side. It had grown quietly and steadily alongside my full-time career. I was working part time in private practice and making more than I was making on step 18 of my full-time salary... with less stress, on my own terms, and without missing the moments that mattered.
The math had been telling me for a while. That night in the empty building made it undeniable.
In January of 2022 I left my eighteen-year career in education and never looked back. What followed was the most clarifying season of my professional life. I grew my practice, spoke on stages, led workshops and professional developments, co-founded the Latinx Practice Collective in 2023 and founded The Kid Clinician in 2026. I also leaned into Amiga Moms™ with everything I had because I finally understood from the inside what I had been building it for.
Becoming The Mom CEO who leads everywhere and arrives home depleted? I was her. Not as a case study. Not as a clinical observation, but as a real life lived experience.
I knew what it cost to give your best to your work and your least to the people you love most. I knew what it felt like to be exceptional at your job and quietly falling short at home. I knew the specific guilt of a high-achieving woman who has built something real and still wonders why it doesn't feel like enough.
I had been that woman while I built the brand for that woman, and I hadn't fully seen it until I stopped.
Where Amiga Moms™ Started and Where It Sharpened
Amiga Moms™ was born in 2018 from a single question I couldn't shake after a home visit with a client. I was an in-home therapist at the time, supporting children and their mothers. One afternoon a Spanish-speaking mother broke down - a mix of frustration and relief finally pouring out - and I walked to my car thinking: I'm spending an hour a week helping the kids. But if no one is helping the moms, what good am I really doing?
Within six months the name, the logo, and the first sold-out event existed.
From May 2019 through March 2020 we held monthly gatherings that brought high-achieving moms together in a room built entirely for her. Not for her kids or her career, but for the woman underneath all of it who had been carrying everything quietly and hadn't had a place to put it down.
Every month she came back. Accomplished, high-functioning, and quietly running on empty.
When the pandemic paused those gatherings I sat with the question that had been forming underneath everything: what does she actually need? A monthly event could give her two hours to put the weight down, but she picked it back up on the way home. What she needed was support that went home with her. Support that matched the level she operated at, in every room she walked into, including her own.
That question sharpened everything, and my own life was about to sharpen it further.
The Miracle That Changed Everything
In 2023 I welcomed my miracle baby - a daughter, born after 40, who arrived as if she knew exactly when she was needed.
There is something that happens when you hold a daughter after you have spent years doing this work. Every question about presence, about investment, about the cost of giving your best to everything outside the home... it becomes completely personal in a way that no amount of clinical training can replicate.
I looked at her and understood something with my whole body that I had only understood with my mind before: the inside cannot wait. The home cannot wait. She cannot wait.
She didn't arrive to slow me down (although I struggled with the slow down for quite some time). Instead, she arrived to make everything I had been building undeniable. The career I left. The businesses I built. The brand I founded in an empty parking lot after a home visit in 2018. All of it pointed to the same woman... the one who leads everywhere and is ready to invest in everything that lives on the other side of her front door.
My daughter is that investment made flesh.
Who Amiga Moms™ Is Built For and What Has Changed
Amiga Moms™ is not what it was in 2019. It was never supposed to be.
It started as a room, it became a monthly gathering, it paused during a pandemic, it sharpened into a question, and it evolved into what it is today: private coaching for the Mom CEO - the high-achieving professional mom who has built an empire the world recognizes and is ready to bring that same excellence home.
It is not a course, group or community. It is private, personalized coaching with the clinical depth of a licensed therapist - without the clinical model, the referral or diagnosis -just support that finally matches the level she operates at.
The beliefs she carries
that she has to earn rest,
that asking for help means weakness,
that a successful business and a present home life cannot coexist...
...those are the things we work through. Not because I read about them in a textbook, but because I carried them too.
I became the Mom CEO when I made the decision to leave an 18-year career on the eve of my son's birthday. I built 2 additional businesses after that. I welcomed a miracle daughter after 40. And I have spent the years in between proving - to myself first, then to every woman who comes through this work - that you do not have to choose between the empire and the inside.
Both can be true. The work is learning to believe it.
If You're Reading This
If you found this post through a search you almost didn't do, if some part of you typed something into Google at a moment you didn't want to admit you needed, you are in the right place.
You don't have to have it figured out and you don't have to be falling apart. You just have to be ready for support that finally fits.
The 60-minute discovery call is free. I might be the most honest conversation you've had about yourself in a long time.
Vanessa De Jesus Guzman, LPC, NCC is a licensed therapist, CEO of Free to Be Mindful, Private Coach for the Mom CEO, speaker, and host of the Free to Be Mindful Podcast - named the #1 Latino Mental Health Podcast in 2026 by Feedspot with 300+ episodes. She is the founder of Amiga Moms™, private coaching for the Mom CEO who has built an empire the world recognizes and is ready to bring that same excellence home. Vanessa is a first gen, bilingual mom of two, and brings 20+ years of experience to the mothers and families she works with. She's been featured on the Today Show, Univision, Parents, and other national publications.
