The Sustainable Ambition Practice: Summer 2026 Cohort

Reclaim Your Ambition and Shape What’s Next

A 6-week small-group coaching program for people at an inflection point who want to figure out what’s next across life and work and pursue it sustainably.

Ready to enroll? Jump ahead.

You’re at an inflection point.

Something’s shifted—maybe at work, maybe in your life, maybe just in how you feel about both.

The way you’ve been doing things—it doesn’t quite fit anymore. You’re still ambitious. But ambition looks different now.

You want to figure out what’s next, what really matters to prioritize across life and work, and how to pursue it without sacrificing your well-being along the way.

This may look like pursuing an exciting new ambition, reprioritizing where you put your focus now, or realigning where you put your time, effort, and energy.

This isn’t about applying new time management techniques or productivity hacks, because they aren’t what will guid our way forward. You’re ready to ask the harder questions and are looking for something deeper—a way to reclaim your ambition on your own terms and build a life and work practice that sustains you.

If that’s where you are, you’re in the right place.

A small-group program to shape what’s next.

Hi! I’m Kathy Oneto, founder and author of Sustainable Ambition.

This summer, I’m running a 6-week group coaching program for a small cohort of 8-10 people who are ready to do this work together.

Summer is a natural moment to do this work—a mid-year checkpoint to pause, take stock, and set yourself up for back-to-work, back-to-school, the holidays, and the horizon of 2027. We’ll do the deeper work now so you head into Fall with clarity.

Over six 90-minute Sunday sessions, we’ll work through the Sustainable Ambition Method—Right Ambition, Right Time, Right Effort—and you’ll leave with clarity, plans, and ongoing practice to pursue what matters to you through the end of 2026 and into 2027.

This is different than a workshop where you can choose to just listen. It’s group coaching: a balance of teaching, group discussion, and individual sharing where you’ll apply the method to your own life, get coached, and learn alongside others working through similar questions.

The program will use the frame of Sustainable Ambition and will be customized based on participant input, intentions, and desired outcomes.

What is Sustainable Ambition?

Sustainable Ambition is about directing our ambitions and effort wisely, to create the lives we actually want.

Rather than sacrifice our lives to our ambitions, it’s about becoming more conscious about our goals and learning how to address what really plagues us—managing the conflicts and tensions across all we need and want to do within our finite time and energy.

It’s about being able to pursue all we want in life and work without sacrificing our personal fulfillment and well-being over time.

Sustainable Ambition is a mindset and method I developed over years of coaching, research, and my own questioning, and it’s the foundation of my award-winning book, Sustainable Ambition: How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work.

Sustainable Ambition offers a way to go from not knowing what you want, feeling like you can’t prioritize your life, and being overly stretched to being able to guide yourself in defining goals at any life stage, prioritizing across life and work, and achieving success with more resilience.

Learn more about the method:

  • Right Ambition considers what you want to pursue aligned to what is personally meaningful and motivating to you—your vision, how you want to give and contribute, your values, and what you love.

  • Right Time considers your life and work together and means choosing where you want to put your attention, effort, and energy based on what’s personally important and matters most in your life and work now.

  • Right Effort is about being discerning around the level of effort you put against ambitions and goals, not treating them equally, and about how you manage your effort for sustained energy.

While not a magical solution, Sustainable Ambition offers simple, effective practices to make confident choices aligned with what matters most to you now. And when these three elements align, I believe you can pursue your goals and dreams with a bit more joy, peace, and ease.

This is for you if you’re:

  • At a career or life inflection point and rethinking what success and ambition mean at this stage

  • Shaping and navigating changes in what you want for your life and work

  • Excited to pursue a new ambition and are wanting to explore how to move forward

  • Wanting to figure out what's next and how to prioritize across competing demands

  • Ambitious, but not at all costs and looking for a wiser, more sustainable way to pursue what matters

  • Tired of the overextension-exhaustion cycle and ready to build a practice that actually sustains you

If the description above sounds like you, you’re welcome here. Sustainable Ambition tends to attract thoughtful people looking for a more conscious, creative way of working and contributing to the world.

The Program

Over six 90-minute Sunday sessions, we’ll move through the full Sustainable Ambition Method together—building on each other’s insights, applying the framework to your own life, and creating the plans and practice you’ll carry forward.

The program will use the frame of Sustainable Ambition and will be customized based on participant input, intentions, and desired outcomes.

  • We'll start by getting grounded — meeting each other, setting the ground rules, and exploring you’re current state of ambition. You'll learn the foundational beliefs of Sustainable Ambition and get a clear picture of what this stage of your life is asking of you.

  • You’ll be introduced to Right Ambition and the four Core Motivators — Vision, Give, Values, and Love. Through paired exploration and reflection, you’ll begin building your personal Right Foundation: the grounding place for everything that comes next.

  • You’ll evaluate your current life and work ambitions against your Right Foundation to see what’s truly yours and what you’ve absorbed from external expectations. You’ll create personal success metrics for the ambitions that matter most. We’ll also introduce Right Time and the Horizon Map.

  • You'll organize your ambitions across now, near, and next time horizons, and we’ll work through the tensions and trade-offs that come with making real choices. You’ll leave with practical strategies for prioritizing what matters most to you now.

  • You’ll learn about Right Effort and how to be discerning about where you put your energy. We’ll build your break plan and your personalized sustaining plan, including a Minimum Viable Sustaining Plan for the high-demand stretches that inevitably come.

  • We’ll bring it all together. You’ll be introduced to the Sustainable Ambition Evaluation Tool, establish a check-in cadence and a mantra to return to when ambitions shift, and commit to the community and structures that will sustain you beyond the program.

  • By the time the program wraps, you’ll have:

    • A clear-eyed read on your current state of ambition and what it means for this stage of your life

    • Your personal Right Foundation — a grounded understanding of your vision, how you want to contribute, your values, and what you love

    • A Horizon Map of your life and work ambitions for the end of 2026 and into 2027, organized by now, near, and next

    • Personal success metrics so you can measure progress on your own terms

    • Practical strategies for navigating the tensions and trade-offs that come with conscious choice

    • A personalized sustaining plan — including a break plan and a Minimum Viable Sustaining Plan for high-demand stretches

    • An ongoing practice with a mantra, a check-in cadence, and a community you can return to when ambitions shift again

Plus: A pre-program Getting Started call and a post-program Moving Forward call (20 minutes each) so you're set up for success going in and supported as you practice after the program.

How it works

When:

  • Six Sundays, late July through August 2026: 7/19, 7/26, 8/2, 8/9, 8/16, 8/23

  • 10-11:30 am PT | 1-2:30 pm ET

Where: Live virtual via Zoom

Duration: 90 minutes per session

Group size: Limited to 8-10 participants

Format: A blend of teaching, group discussion, and individual sharing and coaching—with light pre-session prep and between-session exercises to deepen the work

Recordings: Each session is recorded and provided for participants only for up to 1 month post-program, so you can revisit the content. Group sharing portions are kept private to protect the cohort’s space.

What’s included:

  • Pre-program input survey to help shape the program around the cohort's needs

  • A pre-program Getting Started call and a post-program Moving Forward call (20 minutes each) with Kathy

  • Six 90-minute interactive group coaching sessions held live via Zoom

  • Pre-session preparation and post-session move forward actions to deepen the work between sessions

  • Digital worksheets, templates, and exercises to support each session

  • A resource library of tips and tools for ongoing use

  • A community of like-minded participants for mutual support and accountability

  • A copy of the book, Sustainable Ambition: How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work

  • Optional add-on available: two 45-minute private coaching sessions

Meet your facilitator

MORE ABOUT KATHY

I’m Kathy Oneto—an executive and life-work coach, speaker, and strategy executive with 25+ years of experience helping ambitious professionals and organizations thrive by reimagining how we live and work in today’s world.

I’m the founder of Sustainable Ambition®, host of the Sustainable Ambition podcast, and author of Sustainable Ambition: How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work. My mission is to champion more expansive views of success and ambition, helping people craft a life with work that offers more joy, satisfaction, and ease.

I’ve spent years asking the questions this program is built around—about success, ambition, and how to navigate life and work without losing yourself in the process. I created the Sustainable Ambition Method drawing on what’s worked for me, academic research, interviews with experts and authors, and my work with coaching clients.

I hold an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a BS in Commerce from the University of Virginia. I’m a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC) and am ICF Certified.

I live in San Francisco with my husband and the fog.

Listen to the Sustainable Ambition podcast to learn more about my approach and philosophy.

TESTIMONIALS

  • “Kathy led a phenomenal workshop on Sustainable Ambition for the Girls Club Collective Community. In it, she helped us examine and right-size our own ambitions for the year, thoughtfully answered questions about ambition and identity, and shared a wealth of resources for diving deeper. We walked away with a roadmap for reimagining our ambitions, feeling curious, empowered and inspired.”

    Lis Best
    executive coach, sustainability strategist + founder of Girls Club Collective

  • “Kathy's Sustainable Ambition workshop was an active, productive and engaging session to help reframe personal and professional intentions. In just an hour she was able to take us through an actionable process on how we can better align our intentions, work and time. We came away with insightful reflections and actionable next steps. Kathy's style is warm, personable and focused, making the process both fun and effortless.”

    Brooke Golden
    CMO Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

  • “Kathy led a workshop for a group of biotech startup CEOs that was eye-opening for a group trained in hard sciences. She gave them tools and a language to think differently, about themselves, their work, and their teams. Months later, they’re still using her terms and frameworks as they navigate current challenges. Many have said they feel empowered to work in ways they hadn’t considered before.”

    Ellen DiResta
    Founder, Pearl Partners, Innovation Strategy

  • "Kathy’s career workshop was incredibly valuable to me. As a busy professional and mom, I had struggled to carve out the time to focus on my career. The exercises Kathy walked us through forced me to examine my career and myself through a different lens – one that I had never looked through before. The diverse perspectives of everyone in the workshop really made a lasting impression and I’m so grateful for the experience."

    H.S.
    Business Operations Executive, San Francisco

  • "I have unlocked more clarity in my time with her than I have on my own in the past few years. Her help and support has led to greater fulfillment in my career and personal life. From our first meeting, Kathy was extremely engaged and easy to talk to, asking thoughtful questions that pushed me to explore my larger purpose and career goals."

    L.M.
    Marketing Manager

  • "She takes the long view of what a successful career can be, and she helped expand my definition of what success looks like on my terms, both personally and professionally. After each coaching session I felt uplifted and more empowered to create the career I need to live the life I want."

    Robert
    Management Consultant, San Francisco

  • "Kathy provided tools, guidance, and support to help me navigate a career crossroads. I so appreciated her amazing ability to listen to and distill my swirling thoughts into insightful observations. There were multiple times where Kathy challenged me to think in different ways, recommended activities and frameworks that were spot on, and made me think 'why didn't I think of that?'"

    Erica M.
    Startup co-founder and Design leader

  • "Kathy is a brilliant and accommodating coach. She flexed her schedule to be available for an immediate need with thoughtful preparation, rewarding exercises, and guidance in a literal 24 hours, 2-session whirlwind. With Kathy’s guidance, I was able to make really big priorities and choices and ascertained such clarity. I felt so prepared—I had all the insights to be able to lead a pressure-filled conversation on what I wanted (and didn’t want). It feels so powerful!"

    Carol Best
    VP Brand Marketing

Your Questions, Answered

  • This program is for people at an inflection point — rethinking what ambition means at this stage and looking for a more sustainable way to pursue what matters across life and work. It tends to attract thoughtful, mid-to-late career professionals, but anyone who resonates with the "Who This Is For" section above is welcome.

  • When:

    • Six Sundays, late July through August 2026: 7/19, 7/26, 8/2, 8/9, 8/16, 8/23

    • 10-11:30 am PT | 1-2:30 pm ET

    Where: Live virtual via Zoom

    Duration: 90 minutes per session

  • Plan for about 1-2 hours per week on light pre-session prep and between-session exercises. The work is designed to deepen what we do together. I’ll offer choices for lighter to more engagement post-session to allow for variable levels of capacity.

  • Each session is recorded and available via a Dropbox link (with a password), so you can catch up on the teaching portions anytime. That said, attending live is where the magic happens—the group discussion and coaching are hard to replicate after the fact. Please prioritize attending live whenever you can.

  • Yes, each session is recorded and available via a Dropbox link (with a password). The teaching portions are recorded, but group sharing and coaching moments are kept private to protect the cohort's space.

  • 1:1 coaching is fully personalized and built around your specific goals and questions. This program offers a method, applies it to your life, and gives you the experience of working through it alongside others. Many people find that the group adds something 1:1 work can’t—perspective, normalization, and a sense of not being alone in their questions. If you want both, you can add the 1:1 coaching add-on to deepen the work.

  • If you need to drop out before the program before Friday, July 17, you’ll receive a full refund less the credit transaction fee. Past Friday, July 17, refunds aren’t available, but you can contact Kathy to see how the investment can be applied to working together in a different way so you don’t forfeit the program fee.

  • Yes. I’m happy to speak with you. Please schedule a discovery call for us here.

Ready to enroll?

Group Coaching Program

Price: $679 (USD)

Early Bird Discount until 7/5/26: 33% OFF, Use code SUMMER33

  • Six Sundays, late July through August 2026: 7/19, 7/26, 8/2, 8/9, 8/16, 8/23

  • 10-11:30 am PT | 1-2:30 pm ET

  • See more details above in How It Works

ENROLL NOW

Optional 1:1 Coaching Add-On: $300

Price: $300 (USD) (a 33% discount from my typical fee)

Two 45-minute private sessions with Kathy to go deeper on your specific situation

Add coaching

This program bridges strategy and personal development, giving you both the mindset and the method to consciously design a life with work that offers more joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment. You’ll gain the tools to be ambitious with more adventure and ease, and less angst.

Reclaim your ambition

Space is limited to 8-10 people to keep the group small and the conversation real.

If this is the work you’ve been waiting to do—for yourself, for this next chapter— I’d love to have you join us.

Still have questions? Schedule time with me. I’m happy to chat.

Introduction
The Program
Meet Kathy
Testimonials
↑ Top ↑