I remember the moment I realized that “work-life balance” would never work for me.
It was a few years into building Project Petals, my impact and environmental organization, and I was deep in burnout. My work was so deeply connected to my values that drawing a boundary felt near impossible. Whenever I prioritized rest, it felt like I was doing so at the very expense of my mission. But every hour spent on my business felt like an hour borrowed from my personal life, often at the expense of my sleep, my social life, wellness, and time with loved ones—all things I need to be productive.
That distinct separation between work and life kept me in a constant state of negotiation, ultimately causing imbalance and leaving me chasing a goal that felt unattainable. I wasted years trying to fix the problem with time-management fixes: I read all the self-help books, tried time-blocking apps, and developed strict boundaries between my work and personal life. No matter what, I found myself facing burnout because I always felt like I was neglecting parts of myself trying to find the perfect balance.
Finally, it dawned on me that the problem had nothing to do with my schedule; rather, it was all about the meaning behind everything I was doing. I found the answer in working toward alignment rather than arbitrary balance by building a work-life mission.
What is a work-life mission?
A work-life mission is your driving force—the why behind life and work. It’s about getting your work, values, beliefs, and personal commitments to flow in the same direction instead of pitting them against each other.
My work-life mission is to create a sustained legacy of positive impact in the world, while cultivating joy, success, and harmony in both my personal and professional life.
It’s guided by values of impact, community, sustainability, and environmental innovation. By extension, these values reflect heavily in my personal life in how I spend my time, my home environment, and the events I attend. They are the core of who I am, what I am building, and what I am putting out to the world.
While this functions most easily if you have a job that you love, ultimately, it’s about knowing what you are doing your job for, not about loving every part of your job. Maybe your work-life mission is to make an impact on the world. But a person working a job that they find draining might have a mission that centers on their future, travel, community, homeownership, or financial stability that they’re aiming for.
The goal is for both to reside in harmony, not against each other and requiring a constant balancing act.
What a work-life mission looks like in practice
With the help of this mindset shift, I notice a vast difference in how I feel about my day-to-day life.
Recently, I was walking up to the stage to give a talk on why women belong in leadership, and my mind was everywhere but the room. I was already running through the emails and meetings waiting for me, feeling guilt about whether I’d carve out real time with my family that night.
Then, mid-speech, it hit me: the talk wasn’t stealing time from my life—it was my life’s mission, happening in real time. Making an impact, connecting with people, leaving them with something to think about and move forward in their own lives. The very things I’d built my work around were the same things I care about outside of it, and here they were in one room, pointing the same direction. I decided I would stop quantifying my worth one checklist item at a time and let the moment simply be what it was: my mission, alive.
It doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes work around the clock or spend time with family. I just no longer feel guilty when one of those is taking the front seat. When the things that I do outside of work feel like they belong to the same mission as the work itself, I am no longer borrowing time from one aspect of my life to pour a bit of it into another. I am simply living.
It all boils down to taking the time to clearly understand why you are doing what you’re doing, so much so that the time spent, be it personal or professional, aligns.
How to find your own work-life mission
At its core, the question we should be asking ourselves is, “What is my life’s mission, and is my work a part of that answer?” When you can answer that honestly, the balance question inadvertently takes care of itself.
The first step is finding your own work-life mission. It’s what inspires you and keeps you going even when things may not be perfect. It encourages you, drives you to do the hard things and brave things. Here are some questions to get you started:
- What do you want to accomplish in life?
- Your reason or purpose for entering into your job or career?
- What is important to you outside of work?
- What has been a constant thread in your life?
These answers should help you start to shape your own work-life mission—and get closer to finding real balance within yourself.