The power of knowing who you are
Knowing and stepping into ourselves is not easy but is foundational to Sustainable Ambition.
Yet given the conditioning we learn from cultural and familial structures and given today’s modern demands on our time, it’s easy to get wrapped up in daily living and doing and end up feeling like we have lost ourselves. When we pause to reflect, we realize we don’t know what we want, and, therefore, don’t know what action to take next.
As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in his seminal book Flow: “These seemingly easy questions are almost impossible to answer for someone who has lost touch with his own experience. If a (person) has not bothered to find out what he wants, if his attention is so wrapped up in external goals that he fails to notice his own feelings, then he cannot plan action meaningfully.”
So, there’s power in knowing who we are. It helps us know what we want, or at least a direction to head in, and plan and take meaningful action, stepping into who we are and are becoming.
As we move towards self-authorship and away from socialized norms, we need to know ourselves to guide us. When following the should becomes unsustainable, the answers lie in tuning into oneself. Ambitions become more sustainable when they are yours, rooted in what you want for yourself and who you want to become next.
In our round-up of podcast episodes below, we speak with wonderful guests who offer inspiration around knowing ourselves across three areas of Sustainable Ambition—Right Ambition, Right Time, Right Effort:
Right Ambition. As suggested above, a core aspect of a right ambition is making it yours, and to do that you need to know yourself. Self-reflection helps. Al Dea shares how his “default mode is self-reflection” and how it has “fueled a lot of [his] curiosity.” In our conversation, we delve deeper into the power of self-reflection, paying attention, and getting to know oneself to guide action. And you can always be learning more. I just took yet another assessment, and it unlocked new insight that is helping me progress in an area I had been blocked.
Right Time. Right time speaks to the idea of, “What is it time for now?” That could be needed to prioritize where to put your attention because we can’t do everything at once. It could also be knowing what work is calling to you now. In my conversation with Stephanie Movahhed, she shares how she has navigated her career and has paid attention to both what was calling her next and what she wanted to experience at different stages of her career like when she was at Google: “[Google delivered on] a lot of the things that I was looking for at that time like international travel and professional development. Also a lot of community.” And now, she’s crafted her career to really lean into this: “What I love about this phase of my career is that it's a portfolio of things. Every six months or every year, I could decide which ones I want to dial up and which ones I might want to wind down.”
Right Effort. Right effort considers both aligning one’s effort to the ambition at hand and also identifying how you operate best. It’s like what Serena Williams said in a podcast episode with Meghan Markle: “I have to win being Serena.” When she tried to play a different game, she lost. Or, I loved how Jeffrey Shaw spoke about the self-employed life in our conversation together: “It’s rare for me that I fear burnout. And the reason it's rare for me is because I don't fight myself. I've always respected being self-employed. I see it as something to be really proud of, and I don't apologize for it. And I just kind of train the people around me to deal with my reality.”
Knowing yourself allows you to align to the ambitions that are right for you at the right time and apply your right effort. At this intersection lives Sustainable Ambition.
Inspired by our three guests, consider these three inquiries to step further into who you are:
What currently has your attention? If you pause to reflect on yourself around what has your attention, what are you curious about? Based on your inquiry, what next action might you take?
In your current work, what are you looking for from the experience? What do you want out of it? What’s one small action you can take to ensure you get that from the experience?
If you weren’t to fight yourself, what’s a way that you might like to get your work done? Where might you want to make a request to work better aligned to who you are? Where might you need to train others to know that is how you work best?
My hope for us all is to deepen our knowledge about ourselves and step further into who we are to make things a bit more sustainable. As David Brown said in E9 , “There really isn’t a sustainable option other than to be yourself.”
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Sustainable Ambition™ is about crafting a fulfilling career to support your life from decade to decade.
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