Debunking Work Life Balance Myths For Ambitious Women (Vault)

We challenge three myths about work life balance and show a practical way to define it for yourself. Growth, connection, and health can coexist when you use leverage, not longer hours, and treat balance as an ongoing practice.

• myth one: there is no single formula for balance
• defining balance by personal fulfilment and season
• myth two: balance does not block career progression
• tools that compress hours into outcomes
• shifting from time spent to influence and clarity
• myth three: balance is a journey, not a destination
• three pillars: fulfilling work, present relationships, vibrant health
• simple check-ins to rebalance through change

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The Balance & Beyond Podcast Hosted by Jo Stone, founder of The Balance Institute

For women who are already succeeding, but beginning to wonder if they're willing to keep losing themselves in the process.

We know high achievers, because we are one. This podcast draws on Jo's 20 years in global leadership and thousands of hours coaching executives and ambitious women: the patterns she sees, how to untangle them, and what it actually takes to keep your success without paying for it with yourself.

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🎙️https://www.balanceinstitute.com/podcast
🔗 www.balanceinstitute.com
💼https://au.linkedin.com/in/stonejoanne
📷 @therealjostone

Transcript

Welcome And Why Balance Matters

Jo Stone (Host) 0:04

Welcome to Balance and Beyond Moments, your weekly dose of insight, wisdom, and mindset shifts, all in 10 minutes or less. Whether it's a powerful truth, a fresh perspective, or a spark of inspiration, this is your space to pause, reflect, and reset. Let's dive in. Work life balance, one of the most overused words, and yet it's the thing women tell me every single day that they want. Today I want to share with you some common myths around the word balance. By understanding these myths, you're going to get to the bottom of them and discover what work-life balance actually means for you. Yes, I'm aware that I'm talking about balance and I've put it in my company name. And at the end of the episode, I'm going to share with you why I've actually done that. Now, work-life balance routinely topped in surveys as the thing we most want when finding a job. Often more than money, especially for women with families. But on the other side of the pandemic, everybody has become so much more aware of the impact of crazy hours. But ironically, as focus has increased on the need for balance, and it's something everybody's looking for, very few people have been able to articulate what it actually means. So let's crack in to the three myths. So the first myth is that there is a successful formula that exists for balance. I know, I know. You're probably going, oh, but Joe, balance is, you know, maybe working three days a week. Yeah, that's a societal collective definition of what some people have assumed balance means. And yet, I know some people who on the surface have the textbook balance and they are miserable. So there is absolutely no successful formula. There is nothing that you can follow. It's really, really important for you to understand what balance means for you, for your personality, for your career, for your occupation type, for your family, for the stage of life that you're in, for whether you have kids or not, how old they are. And so balance means different things for different people. What I really encourage you to do is deciding what actually makes you fulfilled. Is your career really important to you? Do you want to thrive? Do you want to grow in that area? Well, taking a step back and working two days a week because that's what everybody tells you is the key to balance, is probably not going to work for you. But all I will say is that the successful formula for me has been that I have built a life where everything that I have ticks all my boxes. It's time alone for me to do the things that make me feel fulfilled. If you can try to put aside any external judgments, any societal expectations and do what works for you and your family, that is half the battle. So let's move on to myth number two. If you want balance, you also are unable to progress your career. As in, balance must equal going part-time, or if you want balance, you have to plateau. Because there is an old paradigm of thinking, which was based on how the corporate world used to work. And that is that the higher you go, the more impact and the more responsibility you take, the harder you have to work. And because you have more, therefore you work more and therefore you work longer hours. But as you progress, as you start becoming a woman of influence, your productivity or your output is no longer tied to hours. Because let me ask you, have you ever had this genius of an idea and it's just all flowed out of you in five minutes? And other times you've sat and looked at an empty piece of paper or an open email and something's taken you an hour and a half. What you do is not tied to time. I pride myself on helping women progress in their career if that's what they want. And I've had many clients that have progressed, that have taken on multiple promotions, and they're working less. If you have the right tools in your toolkit, you will be able to step out of this paradigm rather than something taking two hours. You know who to have a conversation with, how to have that conversation, what language to use, what to do with your state before you have it. And instead of it something taking two hours, you have a three-minute conversation and get that done. So balance doesn't have to equal progression. I want you to absolutely know that with the right tools in your toolkit, you can continue to have balance and you can also have progression. They are not mutually exclusive. You just need to know how. Which is a beautiful segue into myth number three. And this is that balance is a destination. I will go part time and I'll do this on a Tuesday, and then I'll have balance. Well, balance with a toddler is very different from balance with a teen, because I've now got a teen and a tween. And if I tried to put the same definition of balance now in place, I would be sitting there alone with nobody around me because they're at activities. So it is really, really important that your definition of balance remains in flux. That balance is actually a journey. It is a way of being. It's this continual adjustment. And while a lot of people don't like the word work-life balance, other words that are thrown around are things like work-life integration or work-life harmony. And while I think they're a bit kitsch and I don't necessarily use them, what I do like about those words is they imply that it is this constant juggle. It is, you know, your circumstances are generally continually changing. Sometimes they change too much. But so are you, ideally. Ideally, you're continuing to grow and to develop and to evolve. And so the balance in your life also has to evolve. And if you don't know how to do that, then you're going to hold on really tightly back to myth number one and think that it's all about my circumstances and there's some definition that I have to follow because I don't have the headspace to try to find it out myself. For most women who come to me, work is so tied up into their identity that without work, they wouldn't know who they are. Making changes to that really rocks them to their core and makes them feel really, really lost. So the thought of stepping back and giving up all those hours and all those projects, and I don't want to have to put my career down. But once again, you know, your work is not just this set of external circumstances that you are white knuckling and trying to hold, you know, trying to line up. It's not about that. Something magical happens when you realize that this journey towards balance is just life. It's all about trying to juggle the things that really mean something to us. And my experience says that there are three key things that we have to continuously check in, reassess, twist, pivot, whatever buzzword you want to throw in here. And that's that you need to have really a really fulfilling career where you feel like you're reaching your potential. Now you notice I didn't say the word become CEO or run the joint, because that's not for everybody. But I want you to feel like you've gone to work on a day and that made a difference, that you've learned something, that you are everybody really wants to reach their potential. They want to see what they're capable of. They love learning. They want to see what they can do. On top of having this fulfilling career, you need to have present relationships. And by relationships here, I mean relationships with a partner, if they're in your life, relationships with children, if they're in your life, and relationships with friends and family and other people who make this whole. As humans, we are tribal creatures. And if we spend our life with our head down trying to get through our to-do list, will we miss the enrichment and the fun and the joy and the connection that is an integral part of being a human? And lastly, with our fulfilling career and our present and loving relationships, we must have vibrant health. And I don't mean living on the smell of fumes. I mean having energy. I mean having, you know, a clear brain so that you can think, so that you can go and have fun and you don't end up collapsing on the couch at the end of the day because you've got nothing left in the tank. So if you can find a way and have tools to continuously be juggling between these, because again, it's not a destination. There's not, right, my health is done. Tick, great, right, the kids are now I'm connected with them. Great. The kids are gonna change, your health is gonna change, your body's gonna change, work goes up and down, you get a new job, there's a new project, you lose a team member, you gain a team member. It's always changing. And when we spend our lives trying to lock it down and thinking that right, right, right, shoving there, shoving there, okay, okay, okay, that's balance. Well, we wonder why. It's exhausting. It's like trying to keep an octopus in a string bag. The tentacles just keep falling out and falling out and falling out and falling out because it's not possible. It always has to switch. And underneath, you know, this balance being a journey, not only do you need the tools, but you also need the self-awareness to know that it's okay to sometimes get out of balance because you know how to bring yourself back, to better find calm even amongst the chaos, to be confident even when things are falling over and you have no idea what you're doing. So they are the three myths that I am very, very proud to debunk and essentially are the pillars on which I've built my entire business. And that is that there is no successful formula for balance. It's so important that you have to find the right balance for you. I want to absolutely and passionately debunk the myth that if you want balance, you can't have progression. They are not mutually exclusive. You do not have to plateau your career. You do not have to step back if you want balance. And lastly, that it's a destination that you write, tick. It's not something on your list to be ticked off. It is a journey, one that you get to go on. It's not something that you have to do, it's a journey that you get to build your life around. Thanks for taking this moment for yourself. If this resonated, share it with a friend who needs to hear it today. And don't forget to subscribe to Balance and Beyond for full episodes and more of these bite sized breakthroughs. See you next time.