The societal term “work-life balance” isn’t sufficient for what ails us.

Let’s face it, having a career and a personal life in today’s modern world isn’t easy. Too often we stretch ourselves like a rubber band and can end up at a breaking point, over-extended and exhausted. We may feel disillusioned, as if our ambitions have steered us wrong. We search for work-life balance, but it remains elusive.

• For those of us who are ambitious about our lives and our work, we likely have more we want and need to do than our finite time and energy will allow. To achieve and avoid exhaustion, it’s not about finding unattainable balance.

• Government and business sectors aren’t changing fast enough to support the need for flexibility to accommodate all the demands on our time and the realities that life stages present.

• Remaining secure and fulfilled in our work over time is challenging in today’s business and economic climate that demands change and evolution.

• We have little guidance and insight on how to manage a career across life stages, allow for the ebbing and flowing of our ambition, and to feel comfortable and powerful in doing so.

I want to offer a better way to navigate these challenges and to manage our limited time and effort so we remain motivated, focused, and sustained.

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.

It offers a way to navigate the conflicts we often feel and to pursue our goals and dreams with resilience by being more consciously ambitious and adopting a practice of aligning the Right Ambition at the Right Time with the Right Effort. The end goal—to be ambitious over time with more joy and ease and a bit less angst.

My use of the term right can throw some people off. I don’t mean to imply that there’s a wrong way to do things. Right means that you make choices and decisions that are right for you. That is how to reclaim personal success and ambition as your own.

The method points toward identifying what is internally motivating to us, a self-defined ambition, rather than allow the external world to determine our ambitions. It has us accept that we need to determine what it is time for now, making personal choices at this time, and put appropriate structures in place to support sustainability, since we can’t wait for societal structures to be righted. And, it has us become more discerning about our effort, having it be a self-directed and desirable or appropriate level, and build resilience to sustain us while we stretch for our ambitions.

It’s a practice for those of us who want to be successful on our terms, to craft our lives with work in the ways we choose, and to achieve while maintaining our well-being. While we recognize that meaningful work is an important part of that, we know that broader ambitions feed our happiness. Life pursuits matter, too. Ultimately, we want to feel fulfilled and to flourish and to stay resilient over time so we can put our effort into what is truly meaningful and matters most to us.

Sustainable Ambition is rooted in the three pillars of Right Ambition, Right Time, and Right Effort.