Why Balance is a Myth and Rhythm is the Real Key to Growth
- Jul 15
- 4 min read
Kirsty Gaitens-Smith is the founder of Murni Studio and Murni Retreats, known for her multidisciplinary approach to branding, business strategy, and founder development. With 15+ years in marketing, she helps founders build brands that integrate strategy, psychology, and a deep sense of self.
Balance is such an interesting concept to me. I have lived through almost every version of its absence and spent years searching for what I thought would be the cure. If we’re going to define these eras, we can start with what we knew as the girl boss era. Then came the “hustle leads to burnout” era, the self-care era, and the soft era that followed as a course correction to it all.
Let’s start with what balance actually is. Balance is a state of equilibrium, a state in which opposing forces hold each other in check. That is one version of the dictionary definition. When a system is balanced, the forces acting on it cancel one another out, so there is no acceleration. In the version of balance we tend to imagine, the thing stays exactly where it is. Nothing moves. Nothing changes.
In business, we have taken this idea of balance and made it the ideology that defines a life well-lived. Balance your work with your rest, your ambition with your self-care, and your work with your relationships. Distribute yourself evenly. Let no part of your life tip too far in any direction, and you will have arrived at perfect balance.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth. A life held in perfect balance is, in fact, a life in which the forces cancel each other out.
So, when we seek balance, we find we aren’t moving, growing, trying and failing, expanding, shifting, resting, or enjoying. We’re left with the heaviness of the disappointment that we are doing everything perfectly, but nothing is changing at all.
When we observe how living things actually grow, we find that they do not spread their energy evenly across all their functions at once. A tree does not put equal resources into its roots, trunk, leaves, and fruit during every month of the year.
Instead, it concentrates heavily on whichever one the season asks of it and lets the others wait. Growth of any kind requires a concentration of energy, focus, and commitment, often at the expense of something else.
Balance arrived as a correction to too much focus in one area and to the idea that “we can have it all at the same time.”
It was offered as medicine to a culture working itself into the ground, and it was so needed. We needed something, anything, to give us permission to say out loud that we are not machines. But somewhere in the years that followed, it stopped being medicine and started becoming another measurement. Now it just feels like hustle culture dressed up as “wellness.”
So where do we go from here? Business is cyclical, and so are we.
Fifteen years of working alongside founders have convinced me that building anything meaningful follows the same pattern as everything else in nature. It moves through seasons, and each season asks something completely different from us within it.
There are seasons for sprinting. There are seasons for cocooning. Some are for being outward, on show, and reaping the rewards of all those seeds you planted. Others are for actually planting those seeds in whichever way fits your own unique rhythm and timing.
What balance doesn’t want you to know is that you cannot reap what was never planted. We weren’t meant to be outwardly connected while experiencing the depths of the soul. You certainly were never meant to be so busy that you miss it all.
This has always been the case, but what has changed is our access to people’s lives online. We think everyone is in their summer or spring, reaping it all. We are rarely exposed to the actual work it took to get there.
So, I have stopped chasing balance, and I have stopped reading its absence as failure. What I seek instead is rhythm, the honesty to name the season I am actually in, the concentration to give it what it asks for, and the trust that everything I’ve set down will come back around.
You are not behind because your life is unbalanced. You’re in your own season. Maybe it is a season of planting, shedding, sprinting, or deep reset. The only measure worth holding is whether it is true to you.
That is the whole point, to be exactly where it feels true for you to be.
Kirsty Gaitens-Smith, Brand Ecosystem Expert | Retreat Facilitator
Kirsty Gaitens is a founder, brand strategist, and retreat facilitator known for her multidimensional approach to branding, business, and human behaviour. After more than 15 years working across corporate marketing, agencies, and founder-led businesses, she created Murni Studio and Murni Retreats to help founders build brands that are both emotionally intelligent and strategic. Her work bridges strategy, psychology, and embodiment, with a focus on creating businesses that feel sustainable, meaningful, and human in an increasingly AI- and digital-driven world.
