The Leadership Myth of Balance
If you’ve ever been told you need to “find balance,” you’re not alone. Balance has become the go-to prescription for leadership stress, burnout, and the elusive quest for fulfillment. The message is everywhere: balance your career with your family, balance your ambition with your wellbeing, balance your workload with your self-care.
It sounds soothing. Rational. Attainable.
But let’s be honest — balance is a myth. And chasing it has become just another performance.
The Seduction of Balance
Balance has a certain appeal because it feels like control. If I can just get the ratios right — if I give enough here, cut back there, smooth out the rough edges — I’ll finally feel whole.
But balance is almost always presented as an either/or equation: work or life, head or heart, structure or freedom. And that equation is fundamentally broken.
Because real leadership isn’t about keeping things perfectly leveled on a scale. It’s about learning how to integrate the pieces in ways that make sense for you — messy, shifting, dynamic.
Balance implies stasis. Integration implies movement.
And leadership is nothing if not movement.
The Problem with Balance as a Goal
When balance is your North Star, here’s what happens:
You compartmentalize. Your “work self” and “home self” become different people.
You measure yourself against impossible standards — the leader who never tips too far in any direction.
You perform wellness instead of practicing it.
You end up feeling like you’re failing at both sides of the equation.
Balance becomes a trap. You’re chasing something you can never hold onto because life doesn’t stay still long enough to balance.
This is especially true for women in leadership. Too often, balance is code for: don’t be too much of anything. Be ambitious, but not so ambitious you seem cold. Be warm, but not so warm you’re dismissed. Be confident, but not too confident. Balance the extremes. Tone yourself down. Make yourself palatable.
That’s not balance. That’s erasure.
What We Really Long For
What most of us are longing for isn’t balance. It’s wholeness.
We want to feel like we don’t have to leave parts of ourselves behind to succeed. We want to feel like our ambition and our compassion can sit at the same table. We want our clarity to coexist with our care, our drive to sit alongside our rest.
We don’t want to walk a tightrope of balance. We want to feel at home in ourselves.
And that doesn’t come from balance. It comes from integration.
Integration Over Balance
Integration asks a different question:
Instead of How do I balance this? ask How do I bring more of myself into this?
Integration says:
You don’t have to choose between clarity and compassion — you can lead with both.
You don’t have to separate work and life to the point of fracture — you can move with congruence.
You don’t have to filter out the parts of yourself that don’t fit a mold — you can choose presence over performance.
Integration is less about portioning yourself out evenly and more about showing up fully.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Let’s take a real-world example. You’re in a high-stakes meeting where the numbers say one thing, but your gut says another.
Balance tells you to tiptoe the line: bring a little instinct, but not too much. Phrase it softly so it doesn’t sound like you’re being emotional.
Integration tells you: name what you see and what you feel. Bring the data and the intuition into the same sentence. Trust that holding both gives your team a fuller picture.
Or think about decision-making around your energy.
Balance says: divide your time evenly between work and self-care. Manage the hours like a spreadsheet.
Integration says: pay attention to your body, your rhythms, your capacity. Some days will be heavy on the work. Some days will be heavy on the rest. Integration means listening to what’s real and adjusting with compassion.
Why Integration Is Harder — and Better
Integration isn’t as clean as balance. It’s harder to measure. You can’t check a box at the end of the day that says “balanced.”
But you can feel integrated. You can sense the difference between a day when you’re split and a day when you’re whole. You can notice when your words match your truth, when your body isn’t carrying the tension of pretending, when your leadership feels aligned instead of fractured.
That’s what we’re after. Not balance, but wholeness. Not compartmentalization, but congruence.
And yes, it requires courage. Because integration will sometimes make other people uncomfortable. It will sometimes make you the outlier in the room. It will sometimes feel messy.
But balance never gave you belonging anyway. It only ever gave you performance.
A Micro-Shift to Try This Week
Here’s a practice I’ve been experimenting with:
Before you walk into your next meeting, conversation, or classroom, pause and ask:
What part of me usually gets left out in this space?
Then bring just a little bit of that part with you. Maybe it’s your humor. Maybe it’s your intuition. Maybe it’s your directness. Maybe it’s your tenderness.
It doesn’t have to be everything. Just one piece.
That’s how integration starts — not in sweeping transformations, but in daily micro-shifts that remind you: you don’t have to split yourself to succeed.
Closing Thought
Balance is a myth we’ve been sold. Wholeness is the practice we can choose.
As I write Lead Like You Mean It, this is the thread running through every story and every tool: you don’t have to perform your way into leadership. You can lead with your full self — integrated, aligned, present.
And that’s more powerful than balance could ever be.