Lesson #7: Prioritizing Personal Balance – Why It Is Critical When Scaling And How To Do It

Maintaining personal balance as a CEO is not just a matter of health – it’s a strategic imperative. As CEOs most of us all talk about wanting it, yet we all aren’t very good at making a conscious choice and plan to prioritize personal balance.  We say “after this deadline” or “after we hit XX in valuation or revenue” or something along those lines, always delaying the balance that we, and our company, so critically need.  It is very natural to do it as the pressure ramps up dramatically when you are as scaling, selling, or transforming your business.

Your ability to stay steady influences every decision, relationship, and ultimately, the company’s performance.  That is extremely difficult to do if you don’t prioritize personal balance.   As I learned firsthand while building a telemedicine business and leading it through acquisition by Walmart, personal balance is not a luxury; it is critical for sustained performance and for setting the tone for your entire organization.   If you don’t have it, well, you are costing your company, negatively impacting your employees, and making your own job a lot more stressful than it needs to be.

Common CEO Mistakes That Undermine Personal Balance

There are a handful of common mistakes, or traps, that many founders and CEOs fall prey to. These limit their overall effectiveness and ultimately negatively impact their organization’s ability to scale effectively. These include:

• Believing You Can Do It All Yourself – Many CEOs fall into the trap of thinking they must be involved in every decision and project as the company scales. This tendency to micromanage leads to exhaustion and blocks the development of the leadership team.
• Neglecting Boundaries Between Work and Life – It’s easy, especially during scale-up or exit, to blur the lines between professional and personal life. Without conscious effort, work can overtake evenings, weekends, and even relationships, leading to burnout and deteriorating judgment.
• Failing to Delegate and Empower Others – Refusal or reluctance to delegate not only overloads the CEO but also signals a lack of trust. It stagnates team growth and makes the organization overly dependent on one person’s bandwidth.  Additionally, it limits how fast your organization can scale – you as the CEO become the ultimate bottleneck.
• Allowing Health (Physical and Mental) to Deteriorate – Ignoring exercise, sleep, or mental well-being catches up to even the most resilient leaders. Stressed, tired CEOs are less creative, have worse impulse control, and may miss critical opportunities or threats.
• Modeling Bad Behavior Across the Organization – If the CEO is running on empty, never taking breaks, and always “on,” it signals to teams that overwork is the cultural norm, reducing morale and increasing turnover risk.

Best Practices: How CEOs Can Sustain Sanity and Health

The best CEOs learn, often through previous failures, that they need to be better about prioritizing their sanity and health. However, you don’t have to get there that way. Below please find five sure-fire ways to get some of your time and sanity back while also elevating the performance of your organization.

• Prioritize Ruthlessly and Focus on “Only You” Tasks – Excellent CEOs focus time and energy on what only they can do best; strategy, vision, key decisions, and building top relationships. Delegate or outsource everything else. Not only does this conserve energy, it empowers leaders beneath you to grow.
• Schedule Recovery, Not Just Activity – Set aside non-negotiable time for sleep, exercise, family, solitude, and even regular mental health therapy. Top-performing CEOs organize their schedules with intentional intervals for recovery – whether it’s early morning workouts, tech-free dinners, or regular time for reading and reflection.
• Build Robust Support Systems – Having a trusted chief of staff or executive assistant, and cultivating a tight inner circle of peers, mentors, family, and friends, provides outlets for stress and candid feedback. Ask for help before you need it.  Stop keeping everything bottled in – lean on others to help.  It isn’t a sign of weakness – in fact, leaning on others is a sign of strength.
• Foster Well-Being Throughout the Organization – Champion personal balance for your employees as well. Offer flexibility, mental health resources, and encourage downtime. Publicly support vacations, celebrate healthy boundaries, and model vulnerability, making it clear that personal health is a prerequisite for great performance, not a distraction from it.  Be relentless at fostering well-being – model it, talk about it, support it on a continuous basis.
• Train for Endurance, Not Sprints – Scaling a business is more marathon than sprint. Set realistic expectations with your board and team. Sustainable output is achieved by pacing yourself over the long-term, not heroic overnight pushes. Harvard Business School‘s Nitin Nohria notes: CEOs must set a “pace they can sustain for a marathon-length effort, rather than burn out by sprinting over and over”.

Why Balance Matters—For You and Your Team

Personal balance is not just about individual health; it’s about organizational effectiveness. A well-balanced CEO is more strategic, better at making difficult calls, and less likely to react from stress or ego. When leaders model healthy balance, employees feel empowered to do the same, resulting in lower turnover, deeper engagement, and ultimately, better business results. When I led MeMD through rapid scaling and the complexities of M&A with Walmart, it was my routine—a combination of delegation, disciplined scheduling, workouts, family time and mental health clarity breaks —that anchored me. When stress peaked, I found that leaning on trusted advisors and encouraging my team to do the same created stability in the storm.

Final Thoughts

As CEO, you set the tone for the entire company. Protecting your health and sanity isn’t self-indulgence; it’s a leadership obligation. Your ability to operate at your best, make calm decisions under pressure, and set the cultural standard for personal balance ripples throughout the organization and is essential for sustainable growth.  Pace yourself, build a support network, take care of your mind and body, and publicly support your team’s well-being. It’s not just good for you – it’s good business.