For much of my corporate career, “work/life balance” felt less like useful advice and more like something I was permanently failing at. When my boys were small and I was juggling a demanding senior role, the phrase used to make me roll my eyes, teenager-style. I felt like I was expected to somehow be finding it, while being deeply suspicious as to whether anyone actually had – which is probably where my discomfort with glossy social media portrayals of life originated.
Then the conversation seemed to acknowledge that work/life balance wasn’t really a thing and shifted more towards “work/life integration,” which felt closer to something real, but still didn’t quite give me anything useful to navigate that Sunday evening “How am I going to get through this week in one piece?” feeling.
What I do believe, both from my own experience and from working with many women navigating similar pressures, is that far more useful than finding the right label is getting clear on what you actually want life to look like, and how work fits within that. For me it comes down to something fairly simple – a fulfilling career, time to enjoy life, staying healthy, and looking after the people I love. The specific shape of that changes constantly as life evolves, and that’s completely fine – it’s not a fixed destination, but something you actively manage and adjust as you go.
Peaks versus plateaus
Most of us can navigate a busy stretch – a big project, a difficult quarter, a period when things at home are particularly demanding. These peaks are a normal part of working life and most manage them reasonably well, even if it takes something out of them temporarily.
The more serious pattern is when the peak quietly becomes the plateau – when what was supposed to be a temporary stretch just stays, when you look up one day and realise you’ve been in survival mode for six months, that the exercise you were going to restart after the project finished somehow never restarted, that you’ve been turning down opportunities at work not because the timing is genuinely wrong but because you simply don’t have the headspace to imagine taking anything else on.
That shift from peak to plateau is what I see most often in my coaching work, and it’s particularly hard to catch precisely because it happens so gradually. There’s often not a specific moment where things obviously tip. Instead there’s a slow normalisation of a version of functioning that isn’t really ideal and often isn’t sustainable, until it starts to feel like just how things are.
What it costs
One signal that can carry a long tail is when someone stops considering their next career move not because they’ve made a deliberate choice to pause, but because everything has become so much that what’s next feels genuinely beyond them. Exhaustion starts making the career decisions, and by the time that becomes visible, the options available have often quietly narrowed.
Beyond the career cost, there’s a broader one that I think gets talked about even less. A persistent, low-level sense of “there must be more to life than this” that some women I work with recognise immediately but often don’t say out loud. Over time that can harden into something more serious – health that starts to suffer, energy that isn’t there for the people at home, snapping at the kids over something small and knowing that’s not really what it’s about. It permeates, and because it happens gradually, it’s easy to keep normalising it rather than treating it as the signal it actually is.
What actually helps
The starting point is simply paying attention – noticing earlier rather than waiting until something forces the issue. How long has this felt hard? What’s unintentionally dropped off the list? What are you avoiding thinking about?
Once you’ve explored it, the next question is where the pressure is actually coming from. Sometimes it’s your own patterns doing more damage than the situation itself – perfectionism that’s making everything take longer than it needs to, people-pleasing that keeps filling your plate with other people’s priorities, an inability to say no that’s left you overcommitted and under-energised. These are things that can genuinely improve with the right support.
Sometimes, though, the changes needed are bigger than behaviour. Whether your current role could work better with some adjustment, or whether you need a different direction entirely, a different set of goals, a clearer picture of what good actually looks like for you now. That’s a different conversation, but often the more important one.
Either way it starts in the same place – being honest about where things actually are, rather than banking on that quieter moment to think about it. That quieter moment has a habit of not arriving. I’d suggest it’s worth making it happen deliberately.
If this is resonating and you’d like to think it through with someone, I’m always happy to have a conversation.