Mm.

And so I like to kind of bookend every engagement with let's do celebrations, let's do acknowledgments, and let's do a closing.

So what are we celebrating from this moment? What are we acknowledging? And acknowledgments are anything that isn't a win that we want to never shame or judge ourselves for, but to mine and growth mindset for the next go 'round.

And then closing, like, what are we leaving in this particular chapter? And it's this lovely ritual that allows you to kind of reflect and pause and take in the moment, but also learn from the moment.

And then I think also a gap between our achievements is really important.

I know a lot of ambitious folks are gonna hear that and be like, "Nope."

[laughs]

And that ground might be fallow until you've nurtured it enough that you can rise again.

Could you tell listeners a little bit about why you wrote a book about ambition? What makes ambition such a like sticky topic for you?

Yeah, I wanted to write a book about ambition and identity specifically, because I am someone who felt like you could not separate them.

And when I think about it, I think I've been a student of ambition my whole life.

I'm the child of immigrants, I'm a woman of color, I'm someone that has invisible disability, and I'm also somebody that's really ambitious.

And what I noticed very early into my career is that Ambition isn't the same for all of us.

And some of us are told to take up space and some of us are not allowed to take up as much space.

I didn't have the language for it in the beginning of my career, but I had this stop moment that opened my eyes to some of the tension.

I'm a 3-5, so that's relatable to me.

When, in your opinion, does ambition become unhealthy or disconnected from who we really are?

Yes.

Okay.

So I think ambition is neutral and natural.

It's just a desire for more life, a wish to grow, which is inherent in every living thing on the planet, right? From our plant babies to our human babies.

But where it gets a little wonky or corrupted is that there's two orientations of it.

There is painful ambition, which is driven by our core wounds, and I'll tell you all about those in a moment.

And what would you say to someone who feels like everyone else is further along than they are?

Mm.

But when I'm talking to my clients about purposeful work, I think it's the function of five things, and I think that it evolves over our lifetimes.

So it needs to leverage our zone of genius.

It needs to be values-aligned.

It needs to connect to the impact that we wanna have.

Our needs have to be met, and it has to help us cultivate a sense of contentment.

And if we're flowing with those five areas, doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be 100% in each of them, but if we're f- I say 60/40 in each of them, we're, we're doing quite well, right? And we're living into purposeful ambition.

Mm.

It's a negative word, but to me, it's kind of sexy.

I know, it's true.

I fell into the same camp.

Ambition is a really interesting word because it's one of those politically loaded words that will either highlight our benefits or our drawbacks, depending on our identity, right? If you're an ambitious woman, you often experience an ambition penalty, right? Where your ambition is penalized.

But if you're an ambitious man, that's really celebrated.

And, you know, if you're an immigrant, a person of color, there's all those complexities that... make our ambition often difficult to express so in the book one of the things let's start from the beginning yeah what is ambition to you yeah so i define ambition as a desire for more life a wish to grow a wish to unfold and it's neutral and natural and it's in every living thing on the planet from plants to humans and we live in a world that has a bit of a complicated relationship with ambition because some people actually resume lab did a study and they found that 4% of people think that ambition is about winning.

43% of people think that ambition is about distinctions and achievements.

The painful ambition.

Just like that at Lowe's.

Yes, we can really conflate our worthiness with our achievements.

And that's the biggest challenge.

Right.

It's like I'm only as good as the last meeting that I had.

I'm only as good as the last milestone that I achieved.

And, you know, it sounds trite, but it's like we have to be content with the journey.

What's your game plan to kind of reset your brain, reset your body to get back on it?

How do we know what our gifts are?

So I love the body of work from Gay Hendricks around zones of genius.

And I have a version of his four areas.

I think it's three areas that we live in too.

So we have our zone, which is the space that we're average at.

We have our excellent zone, which is the space that we're practiced, polished, and really proficient at.

And most of us spend our lives in that zone.

And what was

Mm-hmm.

And so the thoughts that we have impact our body.

Our nervous system impacts our thoughts, right? So all of these pieces are so intertwined, and if we live our lives in a dominantly sympathetic or fight or flight state, we're gonna have fight or flight thoughts.

It's also going to express as disease, right? So when we're thinking about ambition and our careers and hard charging and all these things, we have to bring our minds and our nervous systems on the journey.

And it's exactly what you said.

It doesn't mean that we can't hard charge, but it means we need to work harmoniously with these things.

Let me give you an example.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm

... and then in the same breath we're told not to.

So there's this push-pull double bind, right? This not good enough to taking up too much space.

And I saw all of us really rumbling with that, and so I wanted to deeply study and explore ambition.

And I came up with this framework where I think ambition is neutral and natural.

It's just a desire for growth or a wish for more life, and that's inherent in every living thing on the planet, from our human babies to our plant babies.

But we make it right for some people and wrong for others, and there's two orientations of ambition.

Mm

What do you want readers to walk away with? Not just in work, but in how they see themselves?

The whole reason that I wrote this book is that I wanted people to understand that ambition is for everyone.

It is neutral and natural.

We all have a right to it, and we've made it right for some people and wrong for others, and I think we really need to course correct that story.

And I think that our ambition will look different to what we've seen to the dominant paradigm, and it's supposed to because what we've seen has been so dysfunctional-

Yes.

Okay, abandonment and rejection.

The next one is humiliation, where you felt like one or more of your caregivers were ashamed of you and there was an underlying feeling that it was impossible to feel safe or joyful and safe in that joy.