🧩 Why Work-Life Balance Doesn't Work (And What to Do Instead) (Ep.38)

What if work-life balance is the wrong goal?

For years, we've been told to chase work-life balance—but what if the reason it feels impossible is because we're only looking at two pieces of a much bigger picture?

In this episode, Nicole Mixdorf introduces her transformative framework: The 10 Pillars of Wholeness™.

Drawing from her own journey through chronic illness, caregiving, grief, entrepreneurship, motherhood, and healing, Nicole explains how true balance isn't about dividing your time between work and life. It's about creating harmony across every dimension of who you are.

The 10 Pillars of Wholeness™ include:

✨ Physical Wholeness
✨ Mental Wholeness
✨ Emotional Wholeness
✨ Spiritual Wholeness
✨ Energetic Wholeness
✨ Social Wholeness
✨ Personal Wholeness
✨ Professional Wholeness
✨ Financial Wholeness
✨ Environmental Wholeness

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why work-life balance is fundamentally flawed
• The four states every pillar can exist in: Balanced, Out of Alignment, Neglected, or Impacted
• How to identify which areas of your life need attention right now
• The biggest mistake people make when trying to solve life's problems
• The exact order to restore balance when life feels overwhelming
• Why joy is one of the most powerful healing tools available

If you've been feeling stressed, burned out, disconnected, or like you're carrying too much, this episode offers a practical roadmap back to yourself.

Because balance isn't a myth.

Balance is your nature.

And you are already whole.

🎧 Listen now and discover which pillar of your life is asking for your attention today.

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https://nicolemixdorf.mykajabi.com/abundance-activation

✨ WORK WITH NICOLE ✨

💜 Ready to Heal at the Root?

Experience a private Akashic Healing Session with Nicole to uncover and release the energetic, ancestral, and soul-level blocks impacting your life.

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https://calendly.com/nicole-balancebynature/akashic-healing-journey-60

🌙 Website
https://nicolemixdorf.com

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https://www.instagram.com/nicolemixdorf/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Heal with Nicole Mixdorf. Let the journey begin. Welcome back, beautiful soul. I'm your host, Nicole Mixdorf. I am a transformational healer and intuitive guide. And I have also spent 14 years running an award-winning corporate wellness company called Balance by Nature. And today I want to talk about one of the frameworks that I've created around life balance. And it was really out of my own need for creating balance in my own life that I developed this framework to help you create more sustainable balance in your own life. You see, I was dealing with a lot, just like I'm sure you'll be able to relate to. I mean, life was insane, honestly, for a long time. And sometimes when I think back to those periods of life that were so crazy, I try to go, how did I do all of that? How did I maintain a sense of normalcy, a sense of sanity in the midst of all of the heartache and challenge and pain and difficulty that was happening in my life? And I'll tell you, I didn't just navigate through it. I navigated through it with a good attitude. I navigated through it while also being so deeply connected to gratitude and joy and happiness and purpose. And that's really because I learned how to balance out stress and I learned how to balance out all of the different elements of my life. And I'll tell you from my own experience that a lot of organizations are seeking something impossible, which is what they call work-life balance. Work-life balance is innately flawed because if you're just trying to bring balance to work and life while ignoring all the rest of the parts and pieces of who you are, you're never going to win. Because work is only one of the 10 pillars of wholeness that make up our lives. I'd like to introduce you to the concept of 10 pillars of wholeness because you are going to be able to have a better understanding of what balance really is in your life. Because at the end of the day, when we are in balance, when we are in alignment, that means that we feel good. We feel whole. We feel complete. When we have something that's out of alignment, we are not feeling whole in that moment. And that's okay. We're not meant to be these perfect people. I certainly am not one. Nobody is immune to challenges. And it doesn't matter if your challenge is that you're taking care of a sick parent or if you're dealing with a financial crisis, or maybe work is just crazy, or you just feel lost and disconnected to your purpose. We are all going through something at any given time. But what I've learned from my own experience is that when you can balance out what's happening in your life, you feel better. You are a better, more whole version of yourself that allows you to navigate through the difficulty with a little bit of greater ease. And isn't that what we all want for life to feel a little bit easier? I know for certain I did. So what I've really come up with is that there's 10 areas of your life that make up all of the different aspects of who you are. You have your physical wholeness, which is your body. So how are you nourishing, taking care of your body? What's your health like right now? What food are you eating? What's your nutrition? Are you moving your body? Those are important pieces. What about sleep and restoration? That's a huge component of your physical health, your physical well-being, your physical wholeness. So looking at that, when you think of your physical wholeness, it's how am I feeling in my body? Then we have our mental wholeness, which is how am I feeling in my mind space? What's my mindset? What are the belief systems that are running on autopilot? How am I feeling in my mind? Where am I at in my headspace? What are my stress levels like? That's a huge part of your mental load that you carry. I've noticed for myself that when I do some healing work on the mental level, I have physical healing results from that. It's amazing. Then you have your emotional wholeness. How are you feeling emotionally? Where are you holding on to trauma in your body? Where are you having emotions that you're not allowing yourself to fully feel and access? What is it inside of you that needs to be felt, that needs to be released? Is there an area where you're not allowing yourself to forgive and let go? That's huge. Then we have our spiritual wholeness, which is your connection to self. Are you connected to your purpose? Are you connected to something greater? Are you connected to some sense of faith? Do you have a connection to nature? Being outside is also where some people find it. Maybe this is your religion, this is your prayer practice, this is your journaling, this is your reflection. It's doing that inner work on yourself if you feel that connection. Sometimes people feel it and sometimes people don't, and they feel very disconnected from that. Then we have our energetic wholeness, your energy levels. What is your energy like all day long? Do you have good energy or is your energy gone? Do you have no energy in your day? Right? We don't need to feel drained all day long. So are you feeling drained? Do you feel like you've got great energy all day? Is it up? Is it down? It's also your motivation and your drive and how much you are able to just be in your passion. Then we have our social wholeness, which are our relationships with other people. How are your relationships? What's your communication like? Are you connecting really well with your friends, your family, your tribe, your team, your community? So when you are having challenges in your relationship, in your marriage or with your child or at work, it's those social relationships that might be the part of your life that's not feeling in balance, that's not feeling aligned for you. Then we have our personal wholeness. These are the things we do for ourselves. This is the stuff that lights us up inside. The things we do for fun. Like, what do you love to do? What are your hobbies that you enjoy? How are you taking care of yourself? This is where self-care falls in. This is where we do things to nourish ourselves or to grow personally. So personal development, education, travel, like all the things that are exciting live inside of your personal wholeness pillar. Oftentimes I find when people are really stressed and overwhelmed, personal wholeness is the first thing that goes out the window because they say, Oh, I don't have time to take care of myself. I don't have time to do fun things. I lived that story for a really long time when I was sick at first. It was like, I don't have time to do anything. I don't have time for fun and joy. I was just trying to survive. But that attitude, that disregarding the things that light me up inside made me worse. So much worse. I realized at some point that even though I was busy and stressed and overwhelmed, that I needed to double down on my personal wholeness. Because that was what was going to bring life a little more into balance for me. It was missing from my life, to be honest with you, for a long time. And I know it is for a lot of clients that I work with. So that's something to think about for yourself. Are you having enough fun all day? Are you prioritizing joy into your life every day? It's powerful. Now, the next one is your professional wholeness. This is the work part. So, what's happening at work right now? Is work feeling in alignment? Is it so stressed? Is it overwhelmed? Are you out of work? I mean, what's going on there? So, this is your career trajectory. It's also about time mastery and how you're structuring your day on purpose. And it's also about leadership and how you are showing up or not showing up as a leader within your own life or within a team. What is happening with work? Then we have our financial wholeness. And this is our relationship with money. So it goes so far beyond traditional planning and estate planning and retirement planning. I mean, that is part of it for sure. The accounting is a part of it. You got to do it, even if you don't love it. Hello, not my favorite thing. But it's more about your energy with money. How do you feel about money? Is money something that you feel scarcity and lack, or is it something that you feel connected to and supported by money? How you feel about money and the stories that you tell yourself about money have an enormous effect on how much you allow yourself to have. And I will repeat that. How much you allow yourself to have, how much you feel worthy of having. Because whatever is showing up in your financial life right now is how much you feel worthy of having. So that's an opportunity right there to do a little bit of digging, a little bit of inner work. If you're in a situation where you're not feeling fully abundant right now, to be able to dive into that and say, what are my relationships with money? What are my original money wounds that are getting in the way of me having excess from being in overflow in my life? Powerful work that you can do there. And then the final pillar of wholeness is our environmental wholeness. And that's really about the spaces we occupy: your home, your office, your neighborhood, community, the planet, being of service. So that's really about what's going on in your home life. How you feel when you go to work? How do you feel in the spaces that you occupy? This is how we can clear out clutter to invite more in? How can we be good stewards of our spaces, of the land? And so all of these make up all the parts of your life because you are a beautiful whole. And all of these parts, all of these little pillars of wholeness, are really about you and how you show up. Now, what I've discovered on my own journey is that these pillars can be in one of four main categories. They can be either balanced, which is great, like it's going really well, your health is good, you're feeling great, like awesome. Your physical wholeness, that's in balance. Keep going. But maybe it's out of alignment completely. My physical wholeness pillar was out of alignment for a long time because I was dealing with chronic illness. But maybe it's your financial pillar that's completely out of alignment right now. When something's out of alignment, it's because it is too stressed, it's too overwhelmed, too much energy, too much attention is being given to it. When that happens, it pulls your whole life out of balance. You don't feel whole. When something has too much, it's it falls out of alignment. On the flip side, if it's not having enough, if it's being neglected, if there's a part of your life that you're not paying attention to, then you're also not going to feel whole. That's going to bring life out of balance too. So if you're disregarding your personal wholeness, if you're not prioritizing fun and joy and personal development and self-care into your life, that's missing. A whole pillar of who you are is missing. You're not going to feel whole. Life is not going to be in balance when something is missing. So that's the third category. What's missing? What's being neglected right now? And then the fourth category is what is being impacted by the other ones. So, for example, let's say in your financial situation, that is what feels completely out of alignment right now. Like it's so stressed, there's nothing good happening financially. Well, that might start affecting, impacting some of the other pillars. Maybe if you're in a financial crisis, now all of a sudden you and your partner are butting heads and you're arguing about money. And now that's starting to affect your relationship. So now your social wholeness, your relationships is being affected. Now that pillar is impacted by something else. The problem wasn't your relationship. The problem is really coming from the money issue, right? But it's affecting your relationship. And guess what? It's also affecting your mental wholeness because now you are stressed about it. You're feeling so stressed, you're feeling so overwhelmed. Your nervous system is in that fight or flight all the time, which is now starting to impact how you feel in your body. Maybe you're not sleeping anymore as a result, or maybe it's gone on long enough that it's leading to illness, you know, within the body, dis-ease within the body. So now maybe your mental wholeness is impacted by the financial situation. And now, all of that, if it went on long enough, now it's affecting your physical wholeness. Your emotional wholeness is typically the one that's impacted by other things too. And so is your energy, your energetic wholeness. Those ones are often impacted by something else that's going wrong in your life, by something that's difficult in another area of your life. It's causing you to feel emotionally drained. It's causing you to feel energetically drained. It's causing you to feel mentally drained. So when we're looking at the bigger picture of our life, I invite you to take a step back and think through all these different parts and pieces of who you are and go through them one at a time and say, okay, how am I doing in my physical body, in my physical pillar? Does that feel imbalanced? Does that feel aligned right now? Is it totally out of alignment? Is it being neglected right now? Or is it being impacted by something else? And you want to just kind of categorize every single one of your pillars like that. You know, ask yourself about your spiritual wholeness. Is that feeling balanced, aligned right now? Is it being neglected? I see that neglected in a lot of people all the time. They feel very disconnected to their truth. They're disconnected to their purpose, they feel a little lost, they don't know what they're here for, they they're not connected to their intuition. So all of that is a sign that you're not putting enough energy into that area of your life. Now, here's the most important part of this entire concept. So let's say you figured it all out. You know how you're feeling in all these different parts of your life. You know which parts are balanced, you know which ones are being neglected, you know which ones are totally out of alignment, you know which ones are being impacted. But how do you actually bring life back into balance? Because that's the part that no one teaches until now. I'm gonna teach you right now. This is the recipe to bring your life back into balance, back into alignment. You don't start by focusing on the thing that's completely out of alignment in your life. So if finances are completely out of alignment in your life, that's not where you're starting. Even though that's where the mind wants to take us immediately, it's like, that's the problem, that's what I need to focus on. No, that's not what you need to focus on right now because you cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. You are not in a place where you can receive the creative solution to get out of the problem. You have to focus on bringing the other parts of you back into alignment first. Here's the trick. Ready? You need to focus first on what is missing, what is being neglected in your life. Because that is gonna be your quickest win. For myself, when I was feeling so sick and so depleted in my life, let me just put it to you this way: I was really sick at the time. I was dealing with babies and family issue. My dad was dying of cancer. Work was growing and was very overwhelming at the time. And I was feeling so sick, so energetically drained, emotionally drained from dealing with what was happening with my dad and babies and all of it. It was so freaking overwhelming. It felt like life was on fire. So a lot of those pillars were out of alignment, or they were being impacted by the things that were out of alignment. But what was missing for me at the time was my personal wholeness. I was not prioritizing self-care. I was not prioritizing fun. I was not prioritizing joy. I was the first to say, I don't have time for that because I got way too much going on. But I realized that if I was going to survive it, that I had to double down on taking care of myself. The illness forced me to do it, where I had allowed myself to just be so consumed by work and all of my other responsibilities. I had to scale certain things back in order to prioritize taking care of myself. And quite honestly, it was the decision to stop watching TV. Because I realized that was how I was unwinding at the end of the day. I just needed to chill out. Can you relate? But I also realized that one of the only windows of time that I actually had for myself was that window after putting my kids to sleep before I went to bed at night. That was a window of time that I could control. And I was using it to just watch television. So instead, I started taking hot baths. I started meditating. I started getting back into my yoga practice. I started journaling. I started pulling my oracle cards. I started reconnecting into my soul. So those were the two things that I needed to focus on. My spiritual wholeness and my personal wholeness were being neglected at that time of my life. And as soon as I started putting energy into that part of my life that was missing, I started instantly feeling better. Immediately feeling a lot better. I started having a little bit more energy. I was able to see things a little bit more clearly. I started getting a little bit better sleep, which gave me a little bit more energy in my life. So when you give back to the area of your life that's been neglected, that's your quick win. That's going to be the thing that allows you to boost yourself up a little bit. From there, what you need to focus on then next, after you put energy into the pillars that are neglected, you need to focus on the pillars that are being impacted by the other things. So for me, that was my relationships. My relationships were being impacted. And I was like, oh, I need to focus energy on that. But my mental and emotional wholeness was massively being impacted by those other stressors that were going on in my life. So I needed to double down on some of the mental wholeness techniques. That meant doing some things to let go of stress. And I always say joy is the antidote to stress. Because if you want balance and you have so much stressful moments in your day, the only way to bring it into equilibrium is to give yourself enough quiet. It nourishing moments or fun moments to balance out the stress. So for me, that meant prioritizing more joy, doing more things that I love, letting go of some of the mental things, therapy, right? What can you do to release the mental load? Can you talk to a friend? Can you journal out and get some of your thoughts just out? One of the practices that I love to do is I do a brain dump at night. If I find that my mind is just racing, racing, racing, racing, I will just write everything out on a piece of paper before I go to bed. I will take 20 minutes and just write out everything that I'm thinking. What is going on in my mind? How am I feeling about these situations? Just raw and real, just write it down. This is not meant to be edited. It's not meant to be shared. It's not meant to be even read back. Just get it out of you. You feel so much better releasing it out. Sometimes people feel better talking to their therapist about it. And that's okay too. Do that, but let it out. And the emotional part, that was a big thing for me. I had to do some emotional healing work. How can I let out the emotions that I'm feeling? How can I allow myself permission to actually feel more deeply? Because our emotions are meant to be felt. We suppress them, we distract ourselves from them. We push ourselves away from them because we don't want to feel it, because it feels like too much. It's too sad. It's too scary. It's too painful. It's whatever. But the truth is, we're meant to feel it. Because when you don't let yourself feel it, when you choke back those tears, when you deny your anger, all of that, it stays inside of your body and it creates dis-ease. We don't need that. I noticed that when I started doing some emotional healing work and I was doing some Reiki healing, I have an amazing Reiki healer that does distant Reiki healings. And she just pulled so much grief out of my body that I didn't even know was in there. After my dad died, I was the strong one. I was the one that was holding it together throughout his whole illness for everyone else. I didn't realize how much pain, emotional pain and grief was sitting inside of me as a deep, deep wound in my heart. But when I decided to heal my body because I was so sick, like I needed to heal. The emotional healing was a huge piece of that. As I started releasing and letting myself like finally shed all the tears that I needed to shed to get it out of me, I started to heal. I started to feel better. So focus on bringing those pillars that are impacted by the other challenges in your life. Bring those back into alignment before they become completely out of alignment. And once you've put your energy first into the things that are neglected, so that you can have your quick wins and feel a little better, then you start putting your energy into the pillars that are being impacted by everything else. That's gonna allow you to feel more whole. So that now, now I can address the bigger issue in my life that's completely out of alignment from a place of greater strength, from a place of being able to think more clearly, from a place of being able to allow more solutions to come in. When you are in that better place, you can all of a sudden resolve the bigger problem in your life because you are a more elevated version of you than the shell of yourself that was completely out of alignment, out of balance in your life. So that's really how you can bring your life back into balance. It's about the order that you approach things in. It's about what part of your life you focus on first, what you focus on next, and after that. Because if you do it intentionally in this way, it allows you to feel good as you still navigate the bigger issue in your life. Because we all have something going on. No one is immune to it. No matter what it is in your life, the suffering, suffering is the optional part. You can absolutely release some of the pain, some of the suffering by focusing on making sure there's enough good happening in your life at the same time. And I know it's hard because we only have so many hours in a day, but it's really about getting intentional with how you spend that time, about getting clear about what your priorities actually are. And you can only get clear about your priorities when you take that bigger step back and look at your life to realize where it's all at. So if you want a little bit of support with this, check out the show notes because I will list out all of the different pillars that are in there so that you can see it. And if you want a deeper hand with it, I'm here to support you on your way. And I can do that because I've been through the fire, I've walked through it, I've created balance in my own life. And that's why I'm so passionate about teaching other people how to do it too. Because you deserve to feel good, regardless of what's going on in your life and in the world around you. You get to feel good. It's our birthright. And that's what I want for you. I want you to lead a life of greater balance and greater wholeness. But the most important thing I want you to remember is that you are already whole. You were born whole. You are whole. It's just a matter of remembering who you really are, reclaiming your power over your own lived experience by intentionally figuring out what to put your focus on, where to put your energy, what you want to shift. Because when you don't feel good, when life feels overwhelming, and when it feels like it's out of balance, it's information. It's just telling you that something needs to shift. It doesn't mean it needs to be thrown away. Something just needs to shift. It might need a little tweak. Sometimes it does need to be completely thrown away because it's no longer working for us, and that's okay. But only you have the answer for that. You're the one that's going to know the right step forward in that direction. But you're not alone. So if you're at a point on your journey where you are feeling overwhelmed, where there's just so much going on and you just need help, reach out and get some help, whether it's from me or someone else. There are so many amazing healers in this world, amazing therapists, amazing people that can support you on your journey. I like to take a holistic approach where we can look at you and as a whole person. And that's really the approach that I take with my corporate wellness programs when I work with organizations. Let's look at the whole employee because you're a whole person. You're not just the worker that shows up at work. You've got a whole life, you've got everything going on, and we're all juggling something. So I encourage you to have a little more compassion for others as they may be stressed out about something, because everyone's going through it. And have a little more compassion for yourself in the process, too. Because the more that we can love ourselves, the more we can accept ourselves, the easier it is for us to create these positive shifts in our life. So I hope that this framework on the 10 pillars of wholeness gives you a new way of thinking about balance, to recognize that balance is not a myth. Balance is by nature. That's why my company is called Balance by Nature. Everything in nature is in natural harmony. We just get in our way. We're the ones that pull it out of harmony. We overcomplicate things. When you look at nature, you can see that when it's left alone, it's in complete harmony. It's in balance. Balance is our nature. Balance is what's possible for us. So it is not a myth. We just don't need to focus on work-life balance. What we need is life balance, balancing all the dimensions of life, bringing all of our pillars of wholeness back into alignment so we get to feel good and enjoy ourselves as we go through life every single day. Thank you so much for joining me Unhealed with Nicole Mixdorf. If today's episode inspired you, please take a moment to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who's on a healing journey too. And be sure to follow me on Instagram at Nicole Mixdorf for more inspiration, healing tools, and to find out about my program. Remember, you have the power within you to create a life of balance, vitality, and joy. Until next time, stay grounded, stay open, and stay healed.