How to Have Balanced Ambition in Your Career
I mostly hate New Year's Eve. If you'd been able to peek in on me on December 31, you would have seen a very grumpy woman whose fight, flight, or freeze system was in overdrive because of all the fireworks going off. Who even uses fireworks anymore?! Miraculously, my toddler stayed asleep and I was in bed by 10.
Even though I feel pretty anti-NYE, I always enjoy New Year's Day. The sense of hitting "reset," the feelings of newness and threshold-crossing, and the palpable opportunities for change are really lovely. I feel all of those things, but I'm also really tired and craving wintry rest.
What's a driven professional to do with the promise of change and the seemingly contradictory desire to keep sleeping?
And what do you do if you feel like you have no ambition but you should?
These topics and more are what I explore in the latest podcast episode of A Wild New Work: Ecological guidance for your career. In "How to Have Balanced Ambition in Your Career," the mountain goat teaches us about how to make room for our internal drive to climb, which we all have - no matter how tired or burnt out we feel at work.
Specifically, I talk about:
What healthy, grounded ambition looks and feels like
What ambition that’s based only on ego looks and feels like
What to do if you feel like you have no ambition
What to do if you have ambition but aren’t sure it’s for the right reasons
What to do if you feel like you have too much ambition
This year, I hope you give yourself permission to use your energy for the things you deeply desire and care about. Name the mountains you wish to climb and let your animal body explore its crevices and peaks. Give your ambition the space it needs to grow into a healthy flame.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
My 6-month coaching program, A Wild New Work
A Wild New Work: Ecological guidance for your career is a podcast about how to take wise, soul-centered action in your career, and it’s all based on the wisdom of Nature. You can find it and listen on iTunes, SoundCloud, and Stitcher.
*Mountain goats are actually part of the antelope family! They’re not truly goats even though they look very similar.