I have been thinking a lot lately about balance, mostly because I am starting to believe we have given it far too much credit.

We talk about work-life balance as though it is something we should all be able to achieve if we are organized enough, disciplined enough, or good enough at setting boundaries. Work, family, friends, health, travel, community: somehow everything is supposed to fit.

That has never been my experience. And increasingly, I am hearing the same thing from the women in The Room.

Balance comes up on our marketer calls all the time. It came up again and again at our Women’s Leadership Summit this summer, sometimes directly and sometimes inside conversations about ambition, caregiving, leadership, money and stress.

Across 27 workshops with 120 senior women in marketing leadership, many conversations returned to some version of the same question: What is all of this costing me, and is the trade-off still worth it?

Someone in our community put it simply: “I like their job, but I do not like their life.” That landed with me. We can want the responsibility, influence, and opportunity that come with senior leadership without automatically wanting the lifestyle we have been taught comes with it.

Gary Vaynerchuk has talked quite a bit about happiness, self-awareness, and understanding what success actually looks like for you. If you genuinely enjoy what you are doing, spending more time doing it does not necessarily mean you have failed at balance. The problem comes when you are giving that time and energy to something that no longer gives much back.

There have been periods in my career when I worked an enormous amount and loved it. I was learning, building, traveling, meeting people, and pushing toward something that mattered. From the outside, it probably looked completely unbalanced. From where I was sitting, it felt pretty good.

There have been other periods when almost the exact same level of activity felt exhausting.

The schedule could look nearly identical. The difference was me. That is why I keep coming back to the idea that balance may simply be the wrong measurement.

At the Summit, balance kept showing up even when balance was not the topic. In conversations about ambition, leadership, caregiving, and stress, women asked what “enough” looks like, what they were willing to trade for the next title, and whether results should matter more than hours. They talked about protecting weekends, taking real time off when life requires it, and being more deliberate about travel. In another conversation, ambition itself was described as seasonal.

These were different sessions and different women, but the tension underneath them was remarkably similar.

This is especially relevant for ambitious people because we can become very good at accumulating activity and calling it progress. Another project, another meeting, another board, another dinner. None are inherently bad. But volume is not proof that we are doing the right things.

Sometimes the answer is to keep pushing. If you are building something or pursuing a goal you genuinely care about, work may take more than its fair share for a while. There will also be times when family, health, friends, or you need more.

One marketer in our community rejected the whole idea of balance and described it as finding what works for you: some days work gets more, some days family does. Another preferred “work life harmony”: fully on when working, fully off when not.

Different language, same point.

For me, the more useful goal is not balance. It is making sure the imbalance is intentional.

These are the four things I am paying more attention to:

  • Choose your priorities instead of inheriting them. Not everything asking for your time deserves it.
  • Pay attention to what gives something back. Energy is useful information.
  • Allow life to be uneven. Not everything needs equal attention at the same time.
  • Change the equation when it stops working. What was right for one chapter may not belong in the next.

 

Maybe we do not need to keep trying to balance everything. Maybe we need to get better at deciding what deserves more of us right now, understanding what we are willing to trade for it, and knowing the answer will change. That feels a lot more realistic.

And judging by what I keep hearing in The Room, I am definitely not the only one.