The Monthly Round-Up: May 2026

Work

May 20

Ideas on becoming consciously ambitious and thriving in life and work

My latest Fast Company Article: 5 ways to take breaks at work even when you’re time crunched

One of the biggest challenges I hear from people practicing Sustainable Ambition is, “I know I need to take breaks, but I don’t have time.” I get it. So I dug into what actually can work when your calendar is stacked and wrote about it for Fast Company. These are a few small, realistic strategies you can fit in even on a packed day. Read it here.

Reclaiming Your Metrics to Reclaim Your Success

As part of Sustainable Ambition, I encourage us to define our own metrics of success. Given that frame, I appreciated these two conversations (Design Matters with Debbie Millman, Plain English with Derek Thompson) with C. Thi Nguyen to discuss his new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.

His research and insights about the power and danger of external, institutional metrics resonated. The well that many of us fall into is following metrics that capture our value, that draw us to act to win according to metrics that don’t align with what we truly care about. Such value capture, as he calls it, “occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them.... In value capture, you are outsourcing your values to an institution.”

He goes on to write, “If we let institutional metrics set our values and drive our lives, we end up chasing what’s easy to count, and not what’s really important.” So much of what we truly value in life is hard to put into metrics. It’s a watch-out in an era when we want to quantify everything.

Tapping into Employee Motivation & Joy at Work

This HBR article landed for me on multiple levels. BCG did something I’ve long thought companies should do: create worker segmentations, just like we do in marketing for buyers, identifying different employee segments and what truly matters to each. What they found won’t surprise many of us—emotional needs mattered most. Not pay. Not perks. Things like learning and growth, feeling valued, doing meaningful work, and having clear opportunities for advancement. Even better, employee joy was directly connected to performance outcomes. Intrinsic motivation—doing what we love—is the top predictor of engagement and can reduce burnout, lower stress, and increase well-being.

Critically, they also got the change process right—including employees in designing the solutions and making employee experience a shared, strategic priority rather than a top-down mandate.

If you’re a leader, you don’t need a BCG engagement to start applying this thinking. Get curious about your people. What motivates them? What energizes them and what drains them? What do they want out of their work? Then act on what you learn—increase the energizing moments, find ways for people to do more of what they love, and work to eliminate the drainers. One practical step: map your team’s work journey together and find moments to add joy to daily work streams. Bringing your team into that process creates the very things the research says matter most—agency, autonomy, and feeling valued.

Burnout Is a Systems Problem

This HBR piece from Daisy Auger-Domínguez really resonated with me and rang true. It clearly names how burnout shows up differently at every level of the org chart and how one-size-fits-all solutions miss the mark.

Because imagine treating a patient’s symptoms and then sending them back into the environment that’s making them sick. That’s what most organizations do with burnout—invest in wellness programs without addressing the systems driving the exhaustion. Auger-Domínguez offers tips for every level to get at the root of where burnout starts.

The Sustainable Ambition Podcast Playlist: Conscious Choices on How to Spend Our Time & Energy

These are great conversations from experts on how to use our time well and practices that restore us.

🎙️ Listen to the full playlist here.

🎙️ E180: Why Creating Space Is So Hard — Even When You Know You Need It (Ambition In-Between Series)

I talk about the gap between knowing we need space and actually creating it and allowing ourselves to take it. And I'm sharing my own failures and stumbles in this area, what I've learned from them, and the new strategies I'm putting into place.