What is Sustainable Ambition?
My hope for all of us: to be ambitious with more adventure and ease, with a bit less angst
Let’s face it—having a career and a personal life in today’s modern world isn’t easy. Too often we stretch ourselves like a rubber band and can end up at a breaking point, over-extended and exhausted. We may feel disillusioned, as if our ambitions have steered us wrong. We search for work-life balance, but it remains elusive.
I want to offer a better way to navigate these challenges and to manage our limited time and effort so we remain motivated, focused, and sustained.
Sustainable Ambition offers a strategic approach for pursuing our professional and personal goals in a way that is fulfilling and manageable from stage to stage, rather than being all consuming in a way that compromises other important aspects of our lives or sacrifices our well-being.
It offers a way to navigate the conflicts we often feel and to pursue our goals and dreams with resilience by being more consciously ambitious and adopting a practice of aligning the Right Ambition at the Right Time with the Right Effort. The end goal—to be ambitious over time with more joy and ease and a bit less angst.
My use of the term right can throw some people off. I don’t mean to imply that there’s a wrong way to do things. Right means that you make choices and decisions that are right for you. That is how to reclaim personal success and ambition as your own.
The method points toward identifying what is internally motivating to us, a self-defined ambition, rather than allow the external world to determine our ambitions. It has us accept that we need to determine what it is time for now, making personal choices at this time, and put appropriate structures in place to support sustainability, since we can’t wait for societal structures to be righted. And, it has us become more discerning about our effort, having it be a self-directed and desirable or appropriate level, and build resilience to sustain us while we stretch for our ambitions.
It’s a practice for those of us who want to be successful on our terms, to craft our lives with work in the ways we choose, and to achieve while maintaining our well-being. While we recognize that meaningful work is an important part of that, we know that broader ambitions feed our happiness. Life pursuits matter, too. Ultimately, we want to feel fulfilled, to flourish, and to stay resilient over time so we can put our effort into what is truly meaningful and matters most to us.
What brought me to start Sustainable Ambition?
I’ve asked questions about success, ambition, and navigating life and work starting with a time in college when I questioned the pursuit of one goal over another and then as I navigated choices entering adult life on my own and beyond. For decades I’ve been curious and searching for the answers to questions like:
What is success for me?
Do I really want this?
Where and how do I want to contribute in this world?
What choice will I make at this time to allow room for both my career and the life I want to lead?
How can I pursue my ambitions and not destroy myself?
I’ve asked myself these questions many times over the years, having navigated and made career transitions over my 25-year career. Through these adventures, I’ve worked with several leadership coaches and career strategists, participated in career planning sessions (even created and hosted my own while in business school), have taken multiple assessments (haven’t met one I wouldn’t try!), have read extensively on the topic, interviewed and counseled friends on their own path, conducted research with mid-career changers, and so on. I finally took the plunge and got trained as a Co-Active Coach several years ago to complement my other work experience.
I’ve often found I am just as ambitious, if not more so, about my non-work pursuits—pursuit of life ambitions like marathons, triathlons, and long-distance backpacking where I learned the challenges and strategies to be resilient and sustain myself. Or, researching and writing about ideas and concepts, like I do with Sustainable Ambition.
It’s this aspiration—to help us be ambitious with more adventure and ease, with a bit less angst—that has my attention now.
Thanks for reading!
Here I’ll explore a more expansive view of success and ambition. My hope is to help each of us craft a life with work that offers more joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment and, in turn, create a butterfly effect, that the more of us who embrace Sustainable Ambition can make it easier for all of us to thrive in life and work.