About Balancia
Women in transition are ambitious. Their support should be too.
Why we exist
Built for women in the middle of everything
Balancia exists for women navigating the transitions that reshape working life — midlife and menopause, new leadership roles, career pivots, caregiving, returning from leave, and every combination of these that tends to arrive at once.
These transitions are common. What's uncommon is support that takes both the woman and her career seriously.
Most of what exists asks women to choose a lane: wellness support that ignores professional stakes, or professional development that pretends life isn't happening. Balancia was built for the intersection — because that's where women actually live.
What we believe
Three convictions drive everything we do
Transitions are not decline.
The narrative that midlife, menopause, or a major life change means a woman's best professional years are behind her is not just wrong — it's expensive. For women, for companies, for everyone. We reject it completely.
Capability doesn't disappear. It gets buried.
Under fatigue, under brain fog, under the invisible work of holding everything together. Our work is excavation — helping women reconnect with the judgment, expertise, and edge that never actually left.
Support should be intelligent.
Evidence-based, practical, and respectful of the fact that our clients are accomplished professionals — not projects to be fixed.
Who we serve
Women who refuse to accept that a transition should cost them their trajectory
Leaders navigating perimenopause and menopause while running teams. Professionals stepping into bigger roles. Women rebuilding momentum after caregiving, leave, or a career pivot. High performers in the middle of everything — who want to come through it still themselves, still sharp, still leading.
Meet the founder
Charmaine Brown, PhD
Charmaine founded Balancia after her own transition arrived early, uninvited, and completely unexplained — and she realized how little support existed that treated women in transition as the capable professionals they are.
In her own words
I know career transitions firsthand — my first big one came at the end of my PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at UT Austin, when I realized the traditional academia path I'd been working toward wasn't the life I wanted. The hard part wasn't the decision. It was that I didn't know a single person who had finished their degree and not gone into research or teaching. There was no map. I had to figure out — through a lot of honest self-reflection — what I was actually good at, which skills from my research years would transfer, and what the options even were.
I pivoted into health tech, and went on to build a career in product management — working in large corporations and startups, and helping launch 14 healthcare companies along the way. Today I serve as Head of Product at a health tech company, in a role that's highly visible to customers, the board, and investors.
Then, at 38, something shifted. Anxiety and depression seemed to come out of nowhere. I was waking up at 3am, night after night. By 39, I was forgetting words mid-sentence and losing track of things constantly — and my brain and memory had always been my greatest professional assets. My husband noticed. I noticed. I started to wonder if something was seriously wrong.
Then I had my first hot flash, and everything fell into place. I wasn't losing my mind — I was in perimenopause. At 39.
Medical treatment helped enormously, but it didn't fix everything. I still lose focus on complex projects sometimes. I still occasionally reach for a word that isn't there. I feel better — but different. And I've had to learn, in real time and in a demanding role, how to keep performing at the level I expect of myself while my brain and body renegotiate the terms.
That experience — and dozens of conversations with friends and colleagues quietly navigating the same thing — is why Balancia exists. Because I know I'm not alone. And because women in transition don't need to be fixed. They need support that's as intelligent, evidence-based, and ambitious as they are.
Charmaine Brown, PhD is an ICF-trained Leadership & Performance Coach. She brings the same evidence-based rigor to this work that she has brought to her scientific and product career.
Today, Balancia's work begins where transformation is most personal: one woman, one career, one transition at a time.
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