Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast, the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work. I'm your host, jean Balfour, master Certified Coach, with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups. I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently, finding the type of fulfillment they never knew possible. They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire. In this podcast, we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership. You're going to hear neuroscience, psychology, leadership models and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader. Every week, you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life, making change possible. Let's start the show. Live your life making change possible. Let's start the show. Hi and welcome to the Fulfilled Leader.

Speaker 1: 1:14

I've had conversations with a few coaching clients recently about ambition. It's something that we can often feel a bit uncomfortable about talking about and yet, as leaders, it's a really important part of our identity, of how we are successful. I covered this topic very early on in the podcast and after these conversations, I thought it was important to revisit it, to spend some time thinking about what ambition means to us to me now and to help you to think about how can you engage with your ambition in a very positive and creative way. Ambition can sometimes be seen as a bit of a dirty word. It comes with often held assumptions about how people will do anything to get into a more senior role, or that in order to express ambition, you have to work day and night to achieve something. But for me, it's actually a really beautiful and complex concept. We can work with it in our career to help us to be fulfilled in a way that is really aligned with us, and so, as I've said, in this episode, I'll share some of my thinking about the idea of ambition and aspiration, and I'll share some different ways to frame it. I'm really curious about what ambition means, but not in the way that we often think about it. But what does it mean for us and how can we express our own ambition? How do we work out what we're ambitious for really, and how do we bring this about? And so this is about rethinking and reclaiming ambition in our working lives and in our broader lives.

Speaker 1: 3:08

I went back to the dictionary, which describes ambition as a strong desire to achieve something, and I noticed when I saw that that this isn't a strong desire to climb the corporate ladder, but particularly in my experience, this is what I often hear it defined, as it's often translated as a strong desire to get a promotion, to get to the top or to be better. I think we've held a very narrow definition of ambition and really, if it's just about climbing the corporate ladder or getting the next role, then I think there's an opportunity for us to rethink it. I think in some cases, we observe ambition. We see it in others as being something that involves us having to achieve something and to get there at the expense of others, but it means so much more than this. It's about a strong desire, as the dictionary says, to achieve something, and that could be a strong desire to make a difference or a strong desire to keep learning. I also went to Google to see what Google would say about this, and the types of things that came up were about ambition to achieve great things, and again I thought well, what if I have an ambition to achieve small things? Does it have to be great? I might have a strong desire to make a small difference and I would still define that as ambition.

Speaker 1: 4:39

I've also heard senior leaders say well, that person lacks ambition, like it's a terrible and bad thing. But what if I'm not ambitious in the way they perceive it, but I'm ambitious in other ways? That doesn't necessarily mean I lack ambition. You might not see it in that person because it might not be expressed through your or our definition of ambition. What if my ambition at the moment is to be at home with the kids while they're small? Or I am ambitious, but not really for the job I'm doing at the moment. I'm waiting to express my ambition elsewhere. Or maybe I enjoy doing a good enough job. I don't need to strive. I don't need to be in the next job, I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Maybe my ambition is to be the best analyst this organization has ever seen. I don't want to be the CEO or a director, or even a senior leader, but I am ambitious to do a really good job at what I'm doing.

Speaker 1: 5:44

And the truth, of course, is that very few people are actually going to make CEO, and so holding that ambition seems to be good for each of us in an individual way seems really important, because it is. It may be that my ambition is to be fulfilled in something outside of my corporate job. I may have a passion that I want to work on and create something. It may be that my ambition is to be an athlete. I have a good friend who wanted to be a Team GB triathlete in her 50s and 60s and she achieved that, but that was an ambition that was outside of ambition at work. And while she was doing that, alongside that, she achieved lots of other big things in her corporate roles, but that was really her guiding light at that moment. And so if we come back to this original definition a strong desire to achieve something maybe we can rethink how we see it and maybe we can begin to reclaim our own ambition.

Speaker 1: 6:51

I have a personal story about the discovery of my ambition and, as I've previously said on the podcast, when I was growing up, all I really wanted to be was a teacher. I was really clear about this. I knew that I would go to teacher's college and then I would start teaching. I also imagined that at some point I would stop teaching, I would have children and I would be a stay-at-home mum, and things certainly didn't turn out like that. I did go to teacher's college and I was teaching by the time I was 20. I had a classroom of seven year olds 30 of them and as a young teacher this was incredibly challenging. I didn't even go to university. Then I studied later and in fact at that point nobody even suggested it. I was doing really well at school and nobody suggested university. So I went straight to Teachers College and it wasn't a degree program, and then I went on to teach in Auckland for a couple of years and then moved to London and taught in London for three years.

Speaker 1: 7:59

But two years into that London job I started to feel something was really wrong. I actually got quite bored. I couldn't see myself teaching five-year-olds for the rest of my life. I love kids, but there was something about being in the classroom doing the same things every year that wasn't working for me. There's a rhythm to teaching and that rhythm wasn't suiting me. I then had a very fortuitous opportunity to do a little bit of teacher training in the evenings after school, which is a challenge because I was usually pretty tired by the time I got to the end of the day. But this was such an amazing opportunity. I did it and I discovered that I absolutely loved working with adults, teaching teachers, and so I boldly left teaching with a plan to go into corporate training roles.

Speaker 1: 8:53

In that moment that didn't work very well, because then there was a big recession, the job market collapsed and I spent the next two years doing any job I could get. At one point I was literally typing postcodes into a very basic computer for the Royal Mail in the UK, but never once during that period did I think about going back to teaching. I think at that moment my ambition had kicked in. I knew I needed to find something different and that feeling of wanting to find something different was powerful. Finally I did.

Speaker 1: 9:26

I found a job in a training department in South London and then my career in organisations actually took off quite rapidly from that moment, and I did get that sense of ambition. I suddenly wanted to do a lot. I wanted to get into senior roles. I at that point was in quite a small organisation and we were about 200 employees, but I created a world-class leadership program. I worked really hard, I thought about work all the time and I really felt that strong feeling, that creative feeling of growth and ambition, and I loved it. I loved discovering that I could be ambitious and have a career. I also at this time found a career coach and, through conversations with her, decided that I wanted to move into health service management. I became very intentional about this, very focused and ambitious. It was quite a hard thing to do to switch sectors and I achieved it. I got a senior role in the health service and then that organization was much larger and I got more and more and more senior roles.

Speaker 1: 10:36

But there came a point where this was also beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable. First of all, I was beginning to feel something weird about my ambition. I had this growing, nagging feeling that there was something wrong with feeling ambitious and I think that had probably been rumbling along for a while. But suddenly I became very clear about it. As I got more senior and felt more ambitious, it began to feel wrong. I wonder if you've had that feeling that there's something not quite right about feeling that ambitious. Then I had a conversation with my mother and talked to her about it and she said well, when you were growing up I believed it wasn't a very nice thing for girls and women to be ambitious. And she said looking back, I see that I raised you like this and I now see that I was wrong. Now her worldview now has changed enormously. But I wonder how many of us have had stories like that, a view about ambition from our early years, from our early career, that we've internalized without even being aware of that. Maybe it's come from society or our families or our teachers and it's something about ambition that it needs to look like this or this is a good expression of ambition and this isn't a good expression of ambition, or even, like me, we shouldn't really be ambitious because it's not a nice thing to do. We shouldn't stand out from the crowd.

Speaker 1: 12:14

In New Zealand, I grew up with the concept of the tall poppy Don't put your head up too tall above others and I think that I had really embraced that. So as I got more senior, I felt more uncomfortable. Once I'd come to terms with that, something else happened and I realized that whilst I was ambitious, actually I was getting close to being on the board and I wasn't sure that I wanted that and I wasn't sure that I wanted to move forward into more senior roles or CEO roles. I just thought that they weren't going to be a good fit for me and I realized during that period that actually my ambition wasn't really a traditional form of ambition. I am ambitious. I'm still ambitious, but it's about doing work I love. It's about growing myself. It's about helping others grow, helping others, particularly leaders, to be aligned in their career. It's about doing meaningful work and it's about getting better and better and better at what I do.

Speaker 1: 13:19

I am ambitious to be financially comfortable. I grew up without much money and that's important to me, but that's not my number one ambition. My number one is about expressing my values and living what's important to me. So at that point I began to see that I had an opportunity to make a change and I got an opportunity to move into an organization and that took me into consulting and coaching and I started my own company nearly 25 years ago and I'm really happy about that. And it doesn't mean I'm not ambitious, it's just I've found a very different way to express what ambition means for me and I feel really lucky that I found that to do work I love, to be helpful to others and still to express that energy and that ambition. So understanding my own ambition journey has been really, really helpful because it's helped me to channel it and I've also, during this process, come to see that I think this is really important for all of us to understand what is our ambition, where does it come from, what drives it, what are the personal stories that we hold about ambition and how can we channel it in a way that is good for us and good for our career.

Speaker 1: 14:40

And if I can tune into my ambition, what would my expression of that be? It's about a way of having a working life that suits us, that helps us to feel fulfilled and happy, and in my role as a coach, I do often find myself helping people to decode ambition. It sometimes comes because somebody didn't get a role that they thought they were going to get, or suddenly their motivation has fallen through the floor and they want to come and work out what that means. For some, it's actually that they're really clear. They know they want to get that job and they want help to make sure that they become as senior as they want to be in the organization. But for others, it's about coming to terms with the fact that their ambition is very different. It may be that they want to care for people, or that they want to put all their effort at that time into raising their kids. It may be they want to express themselves through art. It's really about getting to the nub of what ambition is for me and how I can express that.

Speaker 1: 15:45

A good starting point, I think, is to do what I've done is to go back and look at our childhood or our early career experiences because so much of what our concept about ambition is and what we really want and look for ways to express it in a way that's good for us. But we also want to look for how our upbringing and society might have informed that ambition so that we get to the heart of what it really means for us. Our ambition can be informed by our educators. It's often informed by what we perceive we're expected to do, and if we can dig into that and understand it, we can then work out. Is the ambition that I have maybe to move into senior roles, for example? Is that my ambition? Is that what I really want, or is that what is expected of me? Because that's what the people around me think, or my upbringing or society, and if I'm able to listen to that and truly understand it, then I might make choices that are going to be really good for me. I can understand how I can channel my energy so I can work it out in a way that's really good for me, because underneath our ambition there nearly always is some story and, if we're really honest with ourselves, there was something about that story that helped us to have energy and we want to be able to channel the right energy so that we can move towards our ambition in a way that's good for us, that helps us to express our passion.

Speaker 1: 17:29

One of the things that may have happened early in our career and our upbringing is that we had role models, and these role models often form the definition of what ambition is. I remember there was a person who I really looked up to who went on to be an organisation consultant. She was Australian and she helped the civil service to look at their leadership models and their organizational models and I really looked up to her and admired her and I think that informed some of the work I wanted to do early on. Maybe we saw someone we worked with early in our career who was an ambitious senior leader and we really aspired to be like them. We liked their energy and liked working for them.

Speaker 1: 18:11

But we can also have negative experiences that leave us feeling that we might have to prove something. Maybe we grew up without much money and so our ambition is to make sure that we provide for our family and that we ensure we are comfortably off. Or maybe we've seen and experienced a lot of suffering and we want to relieve suffering in others and in the world. Or maybe we've seen some kind of naked ambition in others and seen them step on people along the way, and we don't want to be like that. Not knowing what drives us or what triggers our ambition can cause a problem down the line, because we can end up on a career journey or on a working pathway. That is about what we want to show others rather than what we want to be doing. We can do what we think we should be doing because of those early experiences, maybe either forging forward or holding ourselves back instead of looking at what we really want.

Speaker 1: 19:12

A really classic example of this is this feeling that maybe I need to prove something to my parents or my family and so my drives and motivations are about I need to prove that. But that's only our story and we don't have to live inside that story. And of course, we may or may not achieve that, and of course they may not be watching and may not even care, because it's a story that we built up as we were growing up. So it's really important for us to reclaim our ambition, work out what's important for us and what we want to achieve. What are our internal drivers and what is it that we want to say to ourselves and others that we're proud of that we're really happy we did. Of course, as we're exploring ambition, we will also see that it has different stages and different points of our lives.

Speaker 1: 20:05

So for some of us we may be very driven and very ambitious early on in our career. I think a bit like me, I had that point in my late 20s and 30s of being really ambitious in an organization, and then that can change. It can tail off. I've had coaching clients who have said you know, I'm in my mid to late 50s and I'm really happy to stay in this job now and be fulfilled here. But I've also had coaching clients who were in their mid to late 50s who were saying, hey, the kids have left home, I'm ready for a new level of career, some new ambition, and I'm going to go after it. We may find there are times when we need to put a lot of energy into our personal lives maybe taking care of children or elders and that that will be a time where we won't be so ambitious. Part of this is acknowledging that we all won't be Richard Branson, who appears to have been driven from day one and never stopped. We will have seasons in our ambition and our drive, and that too is good. There'll be times when we need to take our foot off the gas and some other times where we're full steam ahead. Another aspect of this is that what might have seemed really obvious when we were younger may not seem so relevant now. You know, if you look at my own story, it seems so obvious to me at 16 that I needed to be a teacher and I guess I still am in some form, but I'm not teaching five-year-olds.

Speaker 1: 21:30

I've known doctors who, after 20 years of training, have decided to move out of medicine into something else. That's an enormous leap because of all the time and energy and ambition it's taken to get there. But that ambition to be a doctor had left them and it was time for something else. It was time to engage with some other drives. Some other way for them to be a doctor had left them and it was time for something else. It was time to engage with some other drives, some other way for them to be fulfilled in their career. So it's okay to stop and say you know what my ambition has changed. I thought I wanted to go over there and actually now I'm not sure. I think it's time for a rethink.

Speaker 1: 22:08

So I really encourage you to think about your ambition, to think about what's underneath it, what drives it. Think about when you first notice it. And is it still true now for you, at this point in your career and where you are now? Where would you like to be aiming? And if, as you're doing that, you think, oh, I'd really like to go over there but I'm not sure whether I can do that. Maybe I really am ambitious for those senior roles but I'm not sure I'm capable, then maybe it's a confidence question or an imposter syndrome question, and if that's the case, it may be worth inquiring into that. Asking the question is this because I don't think I can? Or is it because I'm lacking the confidence to believe I can? And it can come up as being a bit secretly ambitious for something but really not wanting to express it or go there? We may be worried about what people will think if they hear our ambition, or even whether they'll think that we can achieve it, or even whether they'll think that we can achieve it. But I really believe that if you inquire into your own story, your own ambition, and you discover that you really want something, then you can lean into that for a while. You don't actually even have to tell anybody that that's what your ambition is, but you can begin to think about it, to feel the fear and do it anyway. You can feel that fear of what if and what might happen, keep calming it and keep aiming high.

Speaker 1: 23:38

Now, all of this is all very good, but what happens if you are really ambitious and you know what you want and you're really struggling to make it happen? And for most of us, if not all of us, this happens at some point in our working life. We hit a bit of a roadblock. We can't get the dream job we want or the promotion, or maybe we're made redundant, or we have a passion project, but we can't afford to leave our corporate role, and it becomes tricky. How do we ride the challenging times and how do we come out the other side still feeling good about our working lives and our career? What happens during this period is we often can lose ambition or we can be a bit demotivated or demoralized. It can feel like a major loss of drive and we can often find ourselves finding it hard to focus and putting our energy on what matters to us and sometimes we go off and just do something else. We lose sight of it, we lose connection with our ambition, and I've certainly coached a number of people who were struggling with this, who either weren't getting the promotion they want or not able to express themselves through their passion projects.

Speaker 1: 24:50

And if this is happening to you, there's a number of things you can do. Firstly, go and talk to a coach because it may be that something's blocking you or stopping you from getting those jobs and you can look at those blockages and see if you can unblock it. You might want to take a cold hard look and say I'm not getting into that next role. Is it right for me really? Is this because actually this role isn't going to suit me? It's not really a good job for me, or is it that the right job for me isn't in this organization? Do I need to move organizations To be really honest with yourself about the reasons that you're not able to get there, that you're not able to get there, that you're not able to achieve your ambition.

Speaker 1: 25:31

I mean, it may be that, when you look at it, actually you need to do some other things. Maybe you need to take a sideways move or get some new experience. Maybe it's about seeing a long game and that you may have to wait and be a bit patient. And while you're doing that that you may have to wait and be a bit patient and while you're doing that, you can look for ways to channel your frustrated ambition into other things. Maybe mentor some younger people and help them achieve their goals. Or go and seek some feedback and do some big, deep personal growth on areas that could help you moving forward. Do some study, go and get another degree, do something that's going to help keep your motivation high, keep you learning and keep you moving forward in the direction of your goal. Maybe it's about being open to rethinking your ambition and exploring other possibilities. Go on a journey of discovery and see what might be possible.

Speaker 1: 26:28

If, at this point, you know you have a passion project, maybe you do want to be an artist, but you can't afford to move into that full time. Make time for it in your personal life Grab time. There's a wonderful book by Julia Cameron, the Artist's Way, and she talks about how we often wait for that big expanse of time to do something. But she says it's not like that, we just need to grab time and take time when we can.

Speaker 1: 26:54

So, as you've heard, I've come to see that ambition, as defined by the dictionary, which is a strong desire to achieve something, is good. It's good for most of us and it motivates most of us. It gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of direction, and so I really encourage you to take time to become clear about your own ambition, to understand what it means to you and to find a way to express it so that you can be living the working life that is really good for you, the working life you seek. And I wish you well as you go on this discovery of your own ambition, and don't forget to follow the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can even rate and review. You can find more support and resources at jeanbalfourcom, or come and say hello on LinkedIn. Take care and keep leading with heart.