Why "balance" is the wrong word for what women in business actually need
I've stopped using the word "balance." Not because I've found some enlightened alternative on a wellness retreat somewhere, but because every time someone asks me how I balance running Bloom with everything else, I want to laugh, mostly at them, slightly at myself.
Balance implies two things sitting nicely on either side of a scale, gently adjusting until they're level. Work here, life there, both getting their fair share of attention if you just manage your time properly. Whoever came up with that image has clearly never run a business, raised kids, tried to keep a client happy, and remembered to eat lunch, all before 2pm on a Tuesday.
Here's what actually happens. You don't balance anything. You triage. Something always gets less than it needs, and the skill isn't achieving some mythical 50/50 split, it's getting good at choosing what drops and living with that choice without spiralling about it for the rest of the day.
Why this word does actual damage
The "balance" narrative isn't just unhelpful, it's quietly punishing. It suggests that if your work and life feel lopsided, you've failed at some skill everyone else has mastered. So women (and it is disproportionately women who get sold this idea) end up carrying two loads: the actual imbalance, and the guilt about not having fixed it yet.
I see this constantly with the founders we work with at Bloom. They don't come to us saying "I need help balancing my business." They come to us exhausted, apologetic, half-convinced that needing support is a personal failing rather than a completely reasonable response to running a business while also being a person. The word "balance" has quietly taught a lot of capable women that struggling with an unreasonable workload is a them-problem.
What actually helps instead
If not balance, then what? A few things I'd put ahead of it, in no particular order because none of them work in isolation.
Sequencing over splitting. Instead of trying to give work and life equal weight every single day, we look at what needs full attention this week and let other things sit quieter. Launch week gets more of you. The week after, it doesn't. That's not failure, that's just how energy actually works.
Delegation that isn't a last resort. This is the one I'll bang on about because it's genuinely the biggest lever. Handing off admin, inbox management, or the client follow-ups you've been avoiding isn't giving up on doing it "properly," it's recognising your time is better spent somewhere else. We built the delivery side of Bloom entirely around this idea, because I got tired of watching brilliant business owners burn out on tasks that were, frankly, beneath their skill set.
Boundaries that are actually enforced, not just declared. Saying "I don't check emails after 6pm" and then checking emails after 6pm isn't a boundary, it's a suggestion you're making to yourself and ignoring. The ones that stick tend to be structural, not aspirational: turning off notifications, blocking the calendar, having someone else own the thing that would normally pull you back in.
The bit nobody puts on a LinkedIn graphic
None of this makes the juggling disappear. You will still have weeks where the business needs more than you have to give, and weeks where life does, and the goal was never to smooth that out into some flat, manageable line. It was to stop treating the wobble as evidence you're doing it wrong.
So if you're reading this mid-scroll, slightly guilty about the thing you didn't get to today, that's not a balance failure. That's just Tuesday. Sort the one thing that actually matters, let the rest wait, and stop measuring yourself against a scale that was never a fair way to keep score in the first place.