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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Overview

It’s easy to get caught in the loop of looking to external markers of success and constantly striving toward ever-moving goalposts of what it means to be successful.

Striving doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We can strive towards our goals and strive to improve ourselves, our relationships, and our work. But when striving towards someone else’s definition of success creates suffering in our lives, it’s time to question what and whose purpose we’re serving.

Today, I’m in conversation with the CEO of Hello!Lucky, Sabrina Moyle.

Sabrina shares her journey through founding the company with her sister, redefining success on her own terms, and the inner work she’s done to support creating a sustainable, creative, joyful life for herself and her family. We discuss finding purpose in our day-to-day and she shares valuable insight about managing time and nurturing the community around us.

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Overview

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Charles (Charlie) Gilbert, a lifelong creative, a writer, a composer, a director, and a teacher.

This is a continuation of the conversation we started in the previous episode with D’Arcy Webb — who happens to be Charlie’s wife — around sustaining our ambition and creativity throughout our careers.

In this episode, Charlie talks about sustainable creative habits, how retirement has opened up new possibilities for his work, and his big ambitions for this chapter of his life.

Charlie also shares his perspective on defining success, particularly in an industry where rejection can be the norm, and the importance of support and partnership in pursuing creative goals.

Ambition isn’t just for the young. Both Charlie and D’Arcy demonstrate that we can be ambitious at any age, if we so choose.

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Overview

What does it look like to sustain ambition over time?

Today, I’m joined by D’Arcy Webb, an award-winning speech and vocal coach with decades of experience in her field. She and her husband, Charlie Gilbert, are a power couple (Charlie will be my next guest) who come from the performance and creative world. Both are in their 60s and both continue to be ambitious. 

Among her past roles, D’Arcy served as the voice, speech, and performance coach for TEDx Cambridge and was the head of vocal training for Heroic Public Speaking. Today, she runs her own voice coaching business that she founded at the age of 67.

In this episode, D’Arcy talked about what it’s like to be ambitious at this stage of her life and how she’s able to sustain her drive. She also talked about the power of using your voice, no matter your age, and how stepping into that kind of power can change your life.

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Overview

What is sustainable? What is ambition? What happens when you put these two seemingly incongruous words together?

Some people think they are mutually exclusive, but I disagree. 

In this episode, I dive into what I mean by each of these terms with a hope that you can better understand that these two words can live together, making you a believer in Sustainable Ambition, too.

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Overview

Today I'm in conversation with Christina Wallace, author of the new book, The Portfolio Life: How to Futureproof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger Than Your Business Card.

This book is on point with what we explore here on the podcast, the idea of having big ambitions and navigating the natural rhythms of our life and work, while also allowing ourselves to craft these in a way that results in more joy and less stress.

What does Christina mean by a Portfolio Life? We’ll dig into that in the episode, but briefly, Christina writes in the book that Charles Handy coined the term in 1989 in his book The Age of Unreason.  “He bristled at the notion that your life’s work should be one narrowly-defined job and argued that instead, it could be a collection of passions, interests, and hobbies.” Handy’s definition broadens the possibilities for your work.

Christina’s book expands that definition to include relationships, community, personal growth and impact, creating a full portfolio across work and life. In her book, Christina explains the why, what, and how: why this is so important now, what your portfolio looks like, and how to make it a reality.

In the episode, you’ll hear how the portfolio life invites you to own your agency in crafting the life you deserve.

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Overview

Today, I’m joined by Jessica Marati Radparvar.

Jessica serves as inspiration as someone who is practicing Sustainable Ambition, crafting a life with work that works for her. In Jessica modeling this for us, it makes it feel more possible for all of us to thrive in life and work.

Jessica works in the field of sustainability, and regularly sees firsthand how building resilience is critical for impact practitioners who carry the weight of, and champion, making change in the world. As she says, “You can’t drive change from an empty cup.”

Today we’ll discuss how Jessica practices Sustainable Ambition in her life and work, as well as cover the work she does to support changemakers in the world.

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