This blog was originally sent as an email to my subscribers on March 6, 2025. This is an archive, so it’s possible some links are missing or expired. If you want me to deliver these emails directly to your inbox, click here to join my email list.
Subject: work/life balance is a hoax
Stop holding yourself to impossible standards.
Meet my friend, Work/Life Balance. š
She’s like the popular girl everyone loved in high school. She looks beautiful, always knows the perfect thing to say, and everyone secretly wants to be her, but no one can quite measure up.
The sad thing is that behind-the-scenes, Work/Life Balance is a hot mess of insecurity and loneliness. She’s become a walking illusionāa fashionable blank slate upon which others constantly project their fantasies and desires.
She wants to scream, “This isn’t real! Stop trying to be like me!”
Instead, she smiles and keeps the reality of her suffering to herself.
Work/Life Balance is an illusion.
It’s a set-up for failure wrapped in a good intention.
The problem with the concept of balance is that it forces us to separate work and lifeātwo things that, as a business owner, are intrinsically linked.
Trying to separate work and life to find balance is like trying to rip a ball of yarn in half. You sink your fingers into the ball and pull until you’re left with two severed halves. Now, you can place them on two sides of a metaphorical scale, and attempt to find balance between them. But it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve separated two things that belong together. So no matter how hard you try to find balance, you still feel like something isn’t quite right.
It makes sense that we do this to ourselves.
Weāre told we need a healthy Work/Life Balance, and that enforcing boundaries is the way to create that balance.
But, in an effort to take care of ourselves, many entrepreneurs go too far, turning well-intentioned boundaries into a full-on separation between our work and personal lives.
We try to follow rules likeā¦
āDonāt bring your work home with you.ā
AND
āDonāt bring your personal problems into the office.ā
Itās a paradox of absolutes that sets us up for suffering.
Instead of moving through the world as a whole person, we separate our different parts, only allowing the business owner to show up at work and the parent to show up at home, etc.
Sounds good in theory, but binaries never work in reality. When youāre juggling separate identities, things will inevitably get a bit wonky.
I see business owners fall into two balance traps:
Your business is thriving, but your personal life is a hot mess.
>> You are an expert at communicating with your clientsā¦ but your marriage is in shambles and your best friend feels like you’re MIA.
>> You had your highest grossing revenue month everā¦ but were so busy that you almost forgot to pick up your kid from soccer practice.
>> You are organized and focused at workā¦ but your house is a certifiable disaster and you havenāt eaten a fresh vegetable in months.
Then there’s the second trap:
Your life is going great, but your business is suffering.
>> Youāre the go-to organizer for your friend groupā¦ but you havenāt networked in years and your client inquiries are disappearing.
>> You have a lovely spiritual practice in your personal life that helps you feel groundedā¦ but your business is all logic and no soul.
>> You spend lots of time caring for the people you loveā¦ but youāre phoning in it with your clients and have no energy for your business.
It feels like juggling fire while walking across a tightrope.
No matter how hard we try, we can never perfect the juggling act.
That’s because juggling is ridiculous!
(No offense to any jugglers reading this email.)
Why are we juggling? Why are we trying to knit a scarf using a severed ball of yarn? Why are we driving ourselves crazy in an attempt to live a well-balanced life?
Life isn’t meant to be balancedāit’s meant to be integrated.
Work/Life Balance is a hoax sold to us by (sometimes) well-intentioned self-help aficionados who are themselves trying to find a way to keep a smile plastered on their face while some facet of their life descends into chaos in the background.
Balance is for the birds. š¦āā¬
The key to becoming Deeply Rested is to integrate your life and your businessāweaving the ball of yarn back together so that your life informs what’s happening in your business, and your business operates in service of your life.
It’s a symbiotic relationship that requires attunement and connection.
Plus a heavy dose of deconditioning from all the ways we’re taught we’re supposed to separate our life and business.
That’s what the Spring Business Planning Workshop is all about.
I will walk you through a process of:
- Clarifying your mission for your work and personal life will act as your compass for all your planning decisions.
- Connecting to the wisdom of the seasonāReconnecting to nature is the best way to get off the hamster wheel of capitalism.
- Planning your lifeāWhat’s happening in your world? What’s important to you this season? We always start with life first so we don’t miss out on what’s most important.
- Planning your businessāBring your big dreams and goals! We’ll walk you through a process to distill those visions into realistic and actionable plans for your business.
- Integrating your plans for your life with your plans for your business to ensure they fit together seamlessly and symbiotically. No balance necessary. š
- Create a 3-month action plan so you know exactly what step to take when to make your vision your reality.
We also want this process to feel integrative by balancing cognitive work with somatic practices.
Rigid cognitive planning sessions don’t work for my brain. They make me feel overwhelmed and tired.
This seasonal planning process is embodied.
We’ll take frequent embodiment breaks to connect to our intuition and the wisdom of our bodies. You’ll enjoy live crystal bowl sound baths and somatic movement breaks with special guest facilitators.
Not gonna lie, this workshop is going to be awesome, and you should be there.
We’re keeping the cost super accessible ($97 for a half-day workshop with three facilitators!), the replay will be available, you can reuse the Google Doc workshop for the rest of your life, and most importantly…
You’ll leave with an embodied understanding of how to integrate your life and businessāand a plan to make that vision a reality.
Let’s dive in together to do some spring cleaning and seed planting for all the dreams we want to sow and grow this year. š·
Have any questions?
Offended by my juggling joke?
Hit “reply” and let me know!
Here’s to your integration,
Maegan
