Conscious Ambition Tips: Allowing ease in the pursuit of our ambitions
Ambition is often associated with the grind, a pursuit that’s arduous.
To be sure, goal pursuit isn't all fun and games. In addition to finding flow in parts we love, we often have to put in the work doing less pleasant tasks in service of our larger goals—think doing scales if you're a musician or weight training and wind sprints if you're an athlete.
Yet, does going after our ambitions always require hard effort? I think not.
There are ways for us to allow ourselves to step into more ease. I say allow, because some of us (🙋♀️) who are hard workers or have a strength around achievement can have a tendency to push a bit too hard. I'm sharing a few ideas below on how we can allow more ease in the pursuit of our ambitions.
It's perhaps a reminder as we spring forward into the season next week to come out of hibernation unhurried and deliberate.
Conscious Ambition Tips
Find your motivation.
One way to create more ease is to link your personal motivation to what you are pursuing. This may sound obvious—shouldn’t I already be personally motivated by my ambitions? Perhaps yes, but often we are not. Because we humans are social creatures, we’re influenced by societal norms. Our ambitions often aren’t always actually ours. More ease can come when we make our ambitions ours and turn them into want to’s vs. a have to’s. Look for ambitions to energize you rather than feel like they enslave you. To naturally pull, rather than feel like you need to be pushed.
Allow for slow growth.
The concept of slow living isn’t new. Building upon that has been a growing movement around degrowth, an economic, social, and political movement that pushes against endless economic growth and instead advocates for the downscaling of production and consumption to achieve environmental sustainability, social justice, and well-being.
We can take this concept and apply it in different ways to our own lives for more sustainability. For example:
Move less. Slow things down and manage our pace to reduce the feeling of being frantic and retain energy.
Do less. Doing more is not always better. It can fracture our attention and energy. Doing less can create more space and focus, often paradoxically resulting in more progress. (I’m actively working on this one!)
Want less. As humans and social beings, we want. Capitalism, social influence, and marketing drive us to want more. Can we fight this urge and be satisfied with simpler and fewer to create more sustainability?
How might you think about slow growth to create more sustainability for yourself?
To sustain the pursuit of our ambitions, it helps to actually take breaks.
I know this sounds like a no duh, but the problem is we don’t take them. This article offers smart strategies that I write about, too, in my forthcoming book on Sustainable Ambition.
Embrace what athletes do for sustainable performance—a periodization strategy. It's about putting in hard work, then resting. Work on, take off. Cal Newport talks about it as a cycle of: Deep work, deliberate rest.
Set boundaries between work and personal. Keep work at work. Have personal priorities.
Deep play. Within your personal priorities, have a serious hobby. I would say have a Life Ambition. And make it active vs. passive (think painting vs. watching TV), something that can absorb you and take your mind off work.
Take your vacations. And protect them from work.
Play the long game. Allow yourself to pace your effort, not expecting immediate success.
Want to get insights, tips, and tools on how to live with Sustainable Ambition? Join in here. WELCOME!
Sustainable Ambition offers a strategic approach for pursuing our professional and personal goals in a way that is motivating, meaningful, and manageable from stage to stage, rather than be all consuming in a way that compromises other important aspects of our lives or sacrifices our well-being.
We offer 1:1 Executive Coaching, Leadership Coaching, or Career Strategy Coaching, as well as VIP Leadership Brand Sessions and Workshops on a range of Sustainable Ambition topics. We also provide tips and inspiration, advice on career management over the decades, guides on key Sustainable Ambition topics of interest, and coverage of tools and inspiration.