Overview

Do you have a hard time allowing your ambitions to shift and change? Do you feel uncomfortable when at times you don’t feel as committed to your ambitions? 

These are among the dominant narratives and conventions about success and ambition that I want to challenge, so that we can thrive in our lives and in our work.

Today I want to dig into why evolving ambitions are inevitable, and even desirable, and offer three alternative ways to reframe ambition so it is sustainable over the course of our lives.

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Overview

Are you afraid to ask yourself what you really, really want?

It can be daunting, but getting clear about what you want is critical to creating the life you desire.

Today’s guest presents a compelling example of what it looks like to live boldly, with intention and imagination, from the inside out.

Bonnie Wan joins me to discuss the journey of developing The Life Brief and expanding it from her own personal practice to something she now teaches others and brought to life in her new book, why you have to get messy to get clarity, and how to courageously create the life you want.

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Overview

Having support structures in place is vital to sustaining our life and work ambitions particularly as we transition through different life stages.

Support structures take many forms, large and small, internal and external, across work and life. Entrepreneurs and people who are self-employed have an acute need for strong support structures because they tend to wear all the hats and stretch themselves too thin.

Add in pregnancy and childbirth, and the need for strong support systems is even more intense for women entrepreneurs managing and running their businesses while also caring for new life and recovering from birth.

As part of my periodic series where I invite guests across disciplines and experiences to share their insights into shifting narratives of work and life, I spoke with Arianna Taboada. She shares her unique perspective on the need for support systems, particularly for expecting entrepreneurs.

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Overview

We all have ambitions for both our personal and professional lives. The question is how do we pursue them sustainably and with resilience so we can get fulfillment and joy from both. 

In this new post-pandemic environment, we need new ideas, narratives, and models to consider and to test for ourselves.

As part of a new periodic series, I’m speaking with people from a variety of disciplines about how they live and work. In the next two episodes, I’ll be speaking to entrepreneurs about their experiences with the ambition it takes to start a new business and the resilience required to make it sustainable.

In today’s conversation with Ashley Donahey, we’ll touch on how personal and professional dreams enrich our lives, how our ambitions evolve and take shape as we grow, and why it’s so important to find ways to enjoy ourselves along the journey.

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Overview

If you’re feeling exhausted, overwhelmed or burned out, you’re not alone. But rather than push or grind through it as so many of us try to do, today’s guest offers a different approach: a resilience plan.

A resilience plan is a proactive strategy for managing our resilience, even as external factors impact us. Building resilience isn’t just for individuals either, it’s vital for the health of our teams.

In this conversation, Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier and I talk about consciously building resilience so that we can operate at our best and achieve our goals and ambitions without burning out.

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Overview

As we leave January behind, many of us are still in the process of figuring out what we want out of this year.

When we’re setting goals or ambition seeking, it’s not uncommon to be unsure of what we want, while at the same time longing to be clear on the path forward.

That desire for clarity can put us on a path of aiming for what we should be doing or pursuing. But if our ambitions are going to be sustainable, we have to make them our own.

Living with the ambiguity as we define our own ambitions can feel challenging. Today, I want to offer some ways of navigating the uncertainty with a bit more ease.

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Overview

The world of work is changing. And it’s not just about what industries are growing or shrinking. Attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and motivations around work are all shifting.

It’s more important than ever to be clear on who we are and what we want in order to navigate the evolving landscape.

Connie Steele joins me today to discuss the fluid future of work and what it will take to succeed at leading ourselves and others in 2024 and beyond.

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Overview

Welcome to 2024! As we look to a new year, I’m offering some ideas and reflections to set the tone as you craft the year ahead.

I’ll talk about what the James Webb Space Telescope can teach us about shifting our own paradigms and give you several prompts to help you dial in your Sustainable Ambitions for 2024.

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Overview

As we end 2023, I’d like to offer a few prompts and reflections to help you stay grounded as you close out this year and head into 2024.

I truly believe that self-reflection is an important and powerful tool to help us learn about ourselves and craft a more positive and empowering narrative, with learning we can take forward into the future.

My hope is that these ideas and prompts will help you end your year with a little more peace and ease.

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Overview

In today’s special episode, my dear friend Sonya Thomas turns the tables and interviews me.

We explore how the concept of Sustainable Ambition has evolved for me through the conversations I’ve had with my guests on the show and my research. We discuss the  importance of defining success on personal terms, aligning ambitions with personal motivations, and the necessity of taking breaks.

Sonya shares some of her own journey and experience with ambition and navigating career pivots, and I share updates on my book project.

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Overview

What does it mean to find home? How do we develop a sense of belonging, whether to a place, a community, or even to our work?

As our world has shifted, our answers to these questions are no longer as straightforward as they may have once been. In crafting the lives we want, it’s vital that we open ourselves to experimentation as we define what finding home and community means for each of us.

Today, returning guest Amy Bonsall and I discuss making hard decisions feel lighter, why “squishy ground” is where the magic happens, and how building belonging helps us to flourish and create the life we want.

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Overview

How do we sustain a successful career over time? When we define ambition and success on our own terms, based on what’s important to us internally vs. an external yardstick, we can end up with a life and career that are fulfilling and sustainable. 

My guest today has embodied this approach in his long and successful corporate career and now in a new endeavor after retiring from his corporate role.

In this episode, Doug Milliken shares his career journey and how he shaped his roles to align with what he loved to do, what he was good at, and what his organization valued from him. We also talk about how he shaped his team’s culture to create psychological safety and honor people’s gifts, resulting in increased engagement and higher performance, and how he’s now carrying that experience forward into his latest ambition, a new business venture focused on helping companies build powerful cultures.

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Overview

Crafting a fulfilling life and career is the work of a lifetime.

Our ambitions will naturally ebb and flow over time. How we may need to balance the areas of our lives will evolve, often requiring us to pivot and transition in our roles. How can we navigate through these shifts with ease and embrace new beginnings?

My guest today is Karyn Flynn. Karyn has built a varied resume, stepped back from her career to focus on her family, and pivoted in and out of multiple fields and roles. Her trajectory hasn’t been straight, but considering her purpose and values and continually leveraging her skills has allowed her to create a more fulfilling, sustainable career and life.

She shares how building confidence through your skills and not your title can bolster you through major transitions and why getting clear on your values and holistic goals can help you create a well-rounded life.

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Overview

Ambition can guide us toward the things we want in life. But constant striving can take away from those things that contribute to our overall fulfillment.

In this episode, I’m joined by author and journalist Rainesford Stauffer.

We discuss her new book, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive, what happens when ambition defines us, the conversations we should be having about ambition, and getting curious about ambition with a more expansive, holistic view.

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Overview

Overwhelm can happen to anyone, even me.

As we enter the often especially busy season of the fourth quarter, with holidays and end of year pressures, I want to share a few thoughts on sustaining ourselves through these particularly full periods.

We can set goals and priorities, and they can be the right ambitions, but managing a packed schedule takes intention and thought if we want to avoid burnout.

Today, I’m sharing some strategies that helped me make conscious decisions about how I was spending my time in pursuit of my goals during an active few months.

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Overview

How can we craft our goals in ways that actually support our well-being? How can we reduce frustration and, in turn, increase fulfillment as we pursue our goals?

Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Valerie Tiberius to discuss pursuing our goals, reducing conflict around our goals, and why it’s so vital to be clear from the outset on our values and how they impact what we want in life.

Valerie’s work explores the ways in which philosophy and psychology intersect and contribute to the study of well-being and virtue. 

Her most recent book, What Do You Want Out of Life? A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters has been especially relevant to the way I think about Sustainable Ambition, going after our goals, and navigating the conflict we can experience around our goals.

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Overview

We have more agency around our motivation than we realize.

It’s true, we are subject to circumstances and situations. But we can design our motivation and, in some cases, alter those external factors to better support us.

Today, I’m in conversation with Ayelet Fishbach, an award-winning psychologist who has done extensive research on the science of motivation.

We discuss how motivation connects to both ambition and how to manage our goals. You’ll hear how we can make choices about where we want to pull ourselves and how to create the circumstances that best support our efforts. We also delve into the idea that it’s okay to be ambitious and try to do a lot in our lives, while also needing to hold our goals and ambitions lightly so that we can offer ourselves more kindness around the pursuit of our goals.

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Overview

What lies at the intersection of ambition and expectation? 

On today’s episode, I’m welcoming back Wade Brill to discuss just that. We start first by getting clear—what are definitions of ambitions, ambitious, and expectations? And how do we manage when expectations are present? 

Expectations are tricky to manage and can cause a lot of suffering. Wade shares practical advice for noticing when expectations are present and how we can have more compassion for ourselves as we navigate these intersections, and we talk about learning to work with expectations to bring more ease into our lives. 

If you’ve been struggling with managing expectations of yourself or from others, this episode is for you.

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Overview

How do we help the next generation define success on their own terms?

My guest, Irena Smith, offers wisdom and advice from her years of experience working with college applicants and her own life experience in her memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays.

Her book explores the college application process from the perspective of a parent, college counselor, and admissions officer. She challenges the societal expectations of success, especially for young people, and encourages parents to meet their children where they are and not to force them into pursuing a passion just because it's expected.

Many of Irena’s insights don’t apply solely to young people. In fact, from my perspective, many of the college application questions in her book are good self-reflection questions for us older folks, too, and the questions Irena raises are important for us to consider as we continue to shape and grow our notions of success throughout our lives.

In our conversation, we explore the impact and consequences of well-intentioned expectations, be it if they are parental or societal, and we cover the topics of ambition, striving, finding one’s spark, and more.

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