Embrace your new year ambitions, gently
Happy New Year, everyone.
It’s been interesting to think and rethink what I should write at the start of this year, given my own feelings and the current state of the world.
The start of the year has been harsh—with frigid cold in the north and threatening fires in Los Angeles—I’m called back to where I ended the year, inviting us to embrace paradoxes:
Nurturing joy and delight along with witnessing and being with the darkness
Embracing hope amidst uncertainty
Cultivating awe in the face of complexity
Being a northern California native and living through past fire seasons, I watch the situation in Los Angeles with disquiet and grief. The situation is a real-world reminder of the paradoxes we face. If you are in Los Angeles, you are in my heart.
So, as we start the year, I’m wondering:
How are you feeling?
Have the last two weeks been what you expected?
What’s your “mood” and level of energy now?
Over the last few weeks, it’s been common for me to hear that people haven’t been able to meet this year as in year’s past. They don’t feel like doing deep self-reflection or choosing a word for the year. Or, they just aren’t eager to jump into the new year push. It’s a reminder to me that we have seasons, our ambitions ebb and flow.
For me, starting the year with a rush never feels good. I resist it. And I lean toward pacing myself. I create my own tempo.
Perhaps foreshadowing this longing, in December I was drawn back to one of my favorite books, Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman in which there are vignettes that share different views of time that Einstein has fictitiously dreamed up. What if time repeated itself? What if time stood still? What if our past history shifted day-to-day?
The time I want to conjure now is one suited for the season—I long for “wintering,” not exactly the way Katherine May writes about it in her book related to a dark period that one might be going through, but along the lines of natural rhythms. Trees going dormant and animals hibernating to conserve energy. Letting what’s inside do what it needs to do to be ready for spring when the earth comes alive again. I want to allow myself to slow down, let ideas percolate, and trust that a rebirth will materialize.
Each year I also tend to cling to the holidays, because I feel like I never get enough of the specialness the season has to offer. I want to enjoy that part of the year without all the hubub of buying and making and gathering. To instead just have space for pausing and delight.
And I know that’s a core part of what I want for this year—unbridled and unencumbered joy, play, and discovery. That may explain why:
I loved reading about “research as a leisure activity” by Celine Nguyen, as if given permission to indulge in my curiosity.
Or doing this exercise to uncover my “secret interests” from Carolyn Yoo to see if it would contribute to insight about my new ambition brewing.
Or why reading about burnout in the Marginalian, exploring David Whyte’s essay in his book, Consolations II, resonated.
Building on the last reference and the idea of paradoxes, Whyte’s writing on burnout is complex and nuanced. He suggests:
First, that burnout can be a response to chasing external rewards, not pursuing what I call Right Ambitions.
It may be the result of “feeling continually out of season,” incongruent with both the external world and, perhaps most importantly, with our inner longings.
Or, it might simply signal that it’s time for a new creative pursuit.
I’m experiencing the latter at the start of this year, along with another duality.
On the one hand, I have a yearning and longing for more space for creative exploration. I’m resisting putting anything more concrete on my goal list on this front. I simply want to be free to play without expectations.
While on the other, I have two big goals that will require a lot of focus, like the launch of my book in June. Exciting!
In both of these areas, what’s true is that I want to take a gentler, kinder, more sustainable approach to the start of the year.
Perhaps you do, too. So that’s where I’ll invite you to start the year: with a more gentle beginning. To ease into the new year. To ease into choosing where you want to put your attention in the coming months. And to accept uncertainty, met with hope.
A slow start doesn’t mean that you have to put your ambition aside. Quite the contrary: I’ve grown to believe that being ambitious and having goals is a sign of hope. In my research for my end of year podcast episode, I learned about the Synder Hope Theory, defined by positive psychologist Rick Snyder. According to the Hope Theory, there are three main elements to hopeful thinking: 1) goals - approaching life in a goal-oriented way, 2) pathways - finding different ways to reach your goals, and 3) agency - believing you can change and can persevere to achieve your goals.
So we can embrace our ambition, even in the face of uncertainty—that's meeting it with hope. And I have just the podcast guest to help us do that. Because combining our ambition with curiosity, we can actually pursue our goals in a gentler, more joyful way, without feeling the need to work hard to gain clarity.
This was the lesson from my first podcast guest this year, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Ness Labs and author of the book, Tiny Experiments. I was so excited for this conversation. If you haven’t been introduced to Anne-Laure’s work, I highly recommend it, her newsletter, and the book (the book is on pre-order and comes out in March).
In her book and in our conversation, Anne-Laure shares how what she champions, living an experimental life and conducting tiny experiments, lives at the intersection of ambition and curiosity. She said on the podcast:
“If we abandon both our curiosity and our ambition, then we become cynical. If we abandon our ambition, but we're still curious, then we have a little bit of that Peter Pan syndrome. We become escapists, where we just want to have nice experiences, but we're not going to push ourselves and challenge ourselves anymore. If we abandon our curiosity and keep the ambition, then we become the hyper-productivity obsessed people who will try to get things done at all costs, including at the cost of their mental health. So to me, in order to be happy and feel alive, and live lives of meaning, really, you need both. You need both curiosity and ambition.”
I love this! And in the conversation, she shares how we can move forward without having certainty and full clarity (hint: it involves tiny experiments). We don’t have to worry about outcomes, rather just learning. We don’t have to keep pushing, but can listen to ourselves and when we need to rest.
Overall, I found it to be a conversation about that gentler, kinder, sustainable way to approach our ambitions and goals. (You can listen to the episode here and find the show notes here.)
So as you move into this year, I invite you to embrace both ambition and curiosity and to experiment, so you can experience a gentler, kinder, more sustainable start to the year.
Cheers to a slow January! Take good care of yourselves.
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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.