Ep.1/ The Not so simple art of Balance
Balance your work and your life. Balance your diet. Balance your emotions. Balance your ambitions.
Balance is supposed to be simple.
That’s what they tell you, anyway. Balance your work and your life. Balance your diet. Balance your emotions. Balance your ambitions. Like you’re carrying a tray of drinks through a crowded bar and if you just keep your wrist steady, nothing will spill.
Then the requirements start appearing. Quietly at first. Then all at once.
Ep.1/
The not so simple art of Balance
“That Girl” bucketlist
First, your health.
Not just health — that outdated idea of not being actively unwell. You need protein, steps, hydration, mobility, sleep quality. And if you could also look fit while you’re at it — strong, lean, visibly “doing it right” — that would be ideal.
Somewhere along the way, all of this got packaged into a neat little fantasy — the “that girl” routine. She wakes up early. She journals. She hydrates. She moves her body in matching activewear. She eats beautifully balanced meals, earns well, invests wisely, glows quietly, and somehow never seems rushed, resentful, or tired.
She is calm, disciplined, productive, aesthetic — and crucially — never messy.
But “that girl” isn’t a person. She’s a performance. A carefully edited highlight reel that turns self-care into a competitive sport and discipline into a moral virtue. If you can’t keep up, the implication is subtle but sharp: you’re not organised enough, not committed enough, not trying hard enough.
The irony is that many people chasing this routine aren’t really chasing balance at all. They’re chasing control. Control over uncertainty, over fear, over the uncomfortable truth that life doesn’t stay optimised for very long.
And so balance becomes something you display, rather than something you experience.
And that’s before we even get to the rest of the list.
You should have meaningful work.
You should have healthy relationships.
You should have a sense of purpose.
You should have time for yourself.
And somehow — almost as an afterthought — joy. Real joy. The authentic kind. Preferably spontaneous, but also cultivated.
Taken together, this is not balance. This is a full-time job disguised as a lifestyle. It’s a level of perfection no one actually achieves — except, perhaps, people who sell courses about it.
And yet, most of us walk around with the quiet suspicion that everyone else has figured it out. That if we just planned better, tried harder, optimised more aggressively, we’d finally reach that magical place where everything clicks into place and stays there.
Spoiler: it doesn’t.
Life isn’t a system you can perfectly calibrate. Push hard in one area and another starts to wobble. Ignore your body and it pushes back. Ignore your time and it disappears. Ignore your values and suddenly even your successes feel oddly hollow.
The problem isn’t that we’re bad at balance.
It’s that we’ve been sold a version of balance that requires us to be slightly superhuman, permanently.What is possible, though, is something quieter. Less impressive. Far more humane. You can come closer.
Closer to understanding what actually matters to you — not what’s trending or expected. Closer to recognising when you’re pushing out of fear instead of choice. Closer to making decisions that feel steady rather than reactive. Closer to a life that fits, even if it doesn’t look perfectly curated.
That’s where 360 Coaching comes in. Not as a promise to fix your life, but as a way to look at the whole, messy system — your body, your time, your money, your work, your relationships, your voice — and understand how it’s actually functioning.
Not in theory. In practice. On a Tuesday afternoon when you’re tired and still have things to do.
You may never achieve the perfectly balanced life. No one does.
But you can get closer to something better:
A life that feels less like a performance — and more like your own.
And honestly, that’s about as balanced as it gets.