The Truth About Chasing Work Life Balance

A Personal Look at What It Means to Build, Lead, and Live in Seasons

Tamika Curry, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Morse Regent

It took a conversation with my best friend for me to finally say it out loud. I have never really believed in work life balance. Not truly. I thought I did for a long time. I subscribed to the idea of it. I used the language. But when I actually looked back at how I have moved through every season of my life, what I saw was not balance at all. What I saw was someone who has always known how to go all in on one thing at a time. And I realized that is not a flaw. That is just how I am wired.

This is not a critique of work life balance as a concept or of the people who pursue it. This is a reflection. My own. About the pressure I finally released when I stopped trying to keep a scale even that was never going to stay that way.

Picture a balance scale. Work on one side. Your personal life on the other. Your relationship, your children, your friendships, your rest. All of it sitting across from your career, your business, your ambitions. The premise of work life balance is that you are supposed to keep both sides even. That is the goal. That is what success is supposed to look like. But what I know, and what I think many of us know quietly, is that scale is always going to tip. One side is always going to be heavier. Trying to hold it level does not create balance. It creates exhaustion.

The scale is always going to tip. The question is not how to keep it even. The question is whether you are choosing which side is heavier or letting life make that choice for you.

What Nobody Says About Women and This Conversation

Before I go further I want to say something that I do not think gets said enough. The pressure of work life balance does not fall equally. For women who are also caregivers, mothers, daughters taking care of aging parents, partners holding households together, the expectation of balance is not just unrealistic. It is unfair. Most women are not struggling with balance because something is wrong with them. They are struggling because the systems around them were never designed to make it possible. And yet we keep handing women this framework as if it is an aspiration rather than an impossible standard built on top of an unequal foundation. Releasing the myth is not giving up. For a lot of women it is the most honest and compassionate thing they can do for themselves.

Emma Grede, the co-founder of Skims and Good American, sparked a polarizing conversation recently when she shared on The Oprah Podcast that she spends about twenty minutes a day with each of her children and described herself as a max three hour mom on weekends. The reaction was swift and divided. I am not here to have an opinion about how she mothers. What I will say is that the conversation she opened is worth having. Because she said out loud what a lot of high achieving women are actually living but not saying. She is not pretending to have it all at the same time. And the alternative, performing a balance you do not actually have, costs more in the long run than the honesty ever would.

Seasons, Not Balance

The framework that has actually worked for me is seasons. When my girls were young I was relentlessly focused on my role as a mother. Not because my career did not matter but because that was my season and I knew it. We had a system. Morning routines. After school there was a snack, then homework, then dinner, then a little playtime, then bath, then reading, then prayer, then lights out. Every single day. Rinse and repeat. It was methodical. It was predictable. It was the structure my children needed and that I needed to give them. Other areas of my life got less during that time. Work got less. That was the choice I made. Deliberately. And I had to learn to be okay with it.

As our girls grew more independent I became that same version of myself in other arenas. In the volunteer organizations I committed to. In the executive leadership roles where fourteen and fifteen hour days were not a burden but a reflection of how much I cared about the work. The same relentlessness. The same structure. Just a different season and a different priority. And now, building Morse Regent, I am all in again in the same way. Same discipline. Same daily consistency. Same showing up even when nobody is watching yet. Because I have learned that is exactly how momentum gets built.

I want to be honest. I am not standing here claiming a mother of the year award or an employee of the year prize. Choosing your season is not the same as choosing perfectly. There were jobs I turned down or did not pursue because they did not fit where I was. There were social connections that got less of me than they might have deserved. Seasons have a cost. I remember sitting with my daughter after school daily helping her read what her school called "Books in a Bag". Ms. Cress (her teacher then) sent home about five little miniature required reading books. Same ones. Every single day for what felt like months before they finally switched to the next set. I will be honest, there were evenings when I thought this cannot possibly be the most efficient use of our time. But the research was clear. Repetition builds readers. And so we read the same five books every single night. That same daily showing up even when it felt mundane, even when nobody was watching, even when I could not always see the point, that is what seasons actually look like from the inside. And that is what they build.

You can have it all. Just not all at the same time.

The Foundation Is Not on the Scale

There is something important I want to be clear about. What makes the seasons framework sustainable is not discipline alone. It is what is underneath it. And what is underneath it is not on the scale at all. My christian faith is not something I balance against my work. It is the ground I stand on while I do the work. My daily prayer. The questions I bring to God before I bring them anywhere else. My marriage. These are not competing priorities. They are the foundation. They are not in the rotation. They are what makes the rotation possible.

I did not always have that clarity. In my earlier years when that foundation was not yet fully rooted, the laser focus led to burnout more than once. I was relentless but I was not grounded. What I know now is that the foundation is not a reward you tend to after the real work is done. It is what makes the real work sustainable in the first place. Without it the seasons just become seasons of depletion.

The Pressure I Finally Put Down

I took the pressure off myself the moment I admitted out loud that I do not do balance well. I never have. What I do well is choose what matters most in this season and give it everything I have. When I was in my mothering season my girls got 110%. When I was in an executive season the organizations got everything I could give. Now Morse Regent is my season and I am building it with that same relentlessness, that same structure, that same daily discipline of showing up and doing the same thing over and over even before anyone notices. Because they do notice eventually.

If you are exhausted from trying to keep both sides of the scale even I want to offer you this. Maybe the exhaustion is not a sign that you are failing. Maybe it is a sign that you have been trying to do something that was never actually possible to begin with. The scale is going to tip. That is not failure. That is life. The question is whether you are choosing which side tips or whether you are just surviving the weight of trying to manage it all at once.

Choose your season. Build your foundation. Stop apologizing for the fact that one side of the scale is heavier right now. That is not imbalance. That is intention.

Morse Regent is a turnaround advisory and interim executive leadership consulting firm partnering with mission-driven organizations, particularly those in healthcare, behavioral health, and education, at pivotal inflection points in their financial and operational performance, so that the organizations doing the most important work in our communities can continue to make the impact they were built to deliver. If any part of this resonated with you, let's talk.

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