Jamaican strategist Dr. Kerriann Peart is challenging Caribbean women to rethink burnout and strength

For generations, Caribbean women have been praised for their ability to endure. To carry families, workplaces, communities, and crises without interruption. To continue functioning regardless of exhaustion. To “push through” without complaint. Strength, in many Caribbean households and professional spaces, has long been measured by the ability to absorb pressure quietly and continue performing.

But Jamaican organizational psychologist and leadership strategist Dr. Kerriann Peart believes that the definition of strength is costing Caribbean women far more than many realize.

Through her work as founder of Peart Consulting LLC and IslandRootedCo, Dr. Peart has emerged as a leading voice examining the intersection of burnout, leadership, culture, and identity among Caribbean and diaspora women. Her work focuses on how deeply ingrained expectations around resilience and responsibility continue to shape the way Caribbean women lead, work, and live, often at the expense of their own well-being.

“I define toxic resilience as buying into the idea that you can keep going, even when you know you are running on empty,” Dr. Peart says. “It is how we lie to ourselves that we are bouncing back.”

A career built inside high-pressure systems

Dr. Peart’s perspective is informed not only by academic expertise but by more than two decades spent working within high-performance environments across the United States.

After relocating from Jamaica in 2001 to pursue higher education, she built a career spanning nonprofit leadership, public health, education, executive coaching, and organizational transformation. Over the years, she worked with organizations including the Inter-American Development Bank, Pan American Health Organization, and International Monetary Fund, while also leading large-scale restructuring efforts within U.S. county government systems.

Yet beneath the professional accomplishments, she says she was simultaneously navigating environments where well-being was often treated as secondary to productivity.

“If you needed to have a human moment, you were holding up progress,” she says. “If you needed support to maintain your well-being, you were costing too much.”

Over time, the cumulative effects became impossible to ignore.

“Burnout has not been a one-time thing for me,” she says. “It has been a multiple-cycle event.”

Burnout hidden behind competence

In recent essays and public reflections, Dr. Peart has spoken candidly about the personal experiences that forced her to reconsider how Caribbean women are taught to define leadership and success.

In one essay published through About Her Culture, she described reaching a breaking point after years of functioning in survival mode.

“In 2020, my body made a decision my mind was not ready to make,” she wrote.

What followed was not simply recovery from exhaustion, but a deeper interrogation of the cultural beliefs that had normalized overextension in the first place.

Dr. Peart argues that burnout among Caribbean women is frequently misunderstood because it rarely looks like collapse from the outside. Instead, it often exists alongside competence, achievement, and continued output. Women continue showing up to work, managing households, supporting relatives, and meeting expectations, even while emotionally and physically depleted.

According to Dr. Peart, many women describe themselves as simply “tired of feeling tired,” while interpreting chronic stress, emotional detachment, and exhaustion as normal parts of being responsible adults.

She believes these patterns are deeply connected to Caribbean history and culture, where generations of women were conditioned to survive under immense pressure without space for rest, vulnerability, or refusal.

“What we now often describe as strength is, in many ways, a continuation of this system,” she explains in her work examining burnout and Caribbean womanhood.

Why Caribbean women are especially vulnerable

Migration, Dr. Peart notes, has intensified many of these pressures for Caribbean women living abroad. Without extended support systems and communal caregiving structures, responsibilities often become concentrated on individual women attempting to balance professional success with family obligations and cultural expectations.

She also points to the reality that many women are simultaneously navigating demanding careers, caregiving responsibilities, grief, and significant life transitions without adequate support systems or language to describe what they are experiencing.

In her own life, Dr. Peart has spoken openly about balancing full-time professional responsibilities and doctoral studies while caring for both parents during serious health crises, including her mother’s cancer diagnosis and her father’s fifth stroke.

Those experiences, she says, reinforced for her how unrealistic the expectation of separation between personal and professional life truly is.

“This is why I say keeping personal and professional separate is not a real thing,” she explains. “They are always interacting.”

Reframing leadership & strength

Today, through executive coaching, leadership development, and her proprietary frameworks, including iROOTED™ and GALE, Dr. Peart works with women and organizations to examine how workplace culture, emotional intelligence, cultural identity, and leadership practices intersect.

Her approach moves beyond productivity and performance metrics to address the underlying systems and behaviors that lead many high-achieving women into chronic cycles of burnout.

In her personal reflections, Dr. Peart has emphasized that one of the most difficult lessons she had to learn was that leadership does not require constant self-erasure.

“Real strength,” she wrote, “looks like knowing when to stop before the stopping is forced on you.”

That philosophy now sits at the core of her work with Caribbean women across the region and diaspora.

“I want women to know they are worth being supported in letting go of the façade,” she says. “Let go of the masks you are wearing and come back to yourself.”

As conversations around mental health, workplace wellbeing, and leadership continue to evolve globally, Dr. Peart’s work is helping to bring a distinctly Caribbean lens to those discussions — one that acknowledges the historical, cultural, and emotional realities shaping how Caribbean women experience work, responsibility, and burnout.

More importantly, it is challenging the longstanding belief that survival alone should be considered success.