Quiet Ambition

Why I’m embracing this new approach to living life and setting goals.

Photo by Alexa Williams on Unsplash

This month’s theme and this article in particular is something I’ve been sitting with for quite some time. It’s a blending of two theories by women I’ve been following in the online world. One, Nicole Antoinette, is someone I’ve come to deeply admire and trust. Her way of viewing the world and her work in it is truly inspiring and her commitment to how she shapes and pivots in her business is something I’ve been taking notes on.

She wrote an article called Soft Ambition that broke me into pieces (and was the impetus for this new way of life I’m calling being quietly ambitious). It’s an essay I’ve returned to many times. In fact, I used it to develop a journaling technique I call the Essay Overlay (which I share with my members in my Rebel MFA Sanctuary — come join us so I can share it with you, too!). The essay is beautiful and relevant to me in so many ways. And it highlighted something that I seemed to have been missing for so long… the one piece of the puzzle that I couldn’t figure out in order to make things work.

It was figuring out what was enough.

But it’s not that easy, you see. Because in a world like ours… a world that tells you that you should want more, need more, be more… how do you determine what is enough? How do you appropriately define enoughness? Not just for the material things in your life… but in your financials? In your business? In your life? In yourself?

You do it by getting granular and detailed as Nicole does in her essay.

And that shit is HARD.

It’s really fucking hard, you guys.

Here’s the other thing from the article that I feel like I have to call out because it matters — we live in such a paradoxical world. For so long, women have been told to sit down and shut up and play small, right? So for me to see so many women taking the positions of CEOs, or making six figures, or selling out retreats — it makes me undeniably giddy. When women play big — it makes my heart swell with happiness.

But…

It’s okay if not every woman wants that, either. There’s been a shift in the last few years (and this is where I really resonated with what Nicole says) that if you’re not trying to do those things… if you’re not trying to play big or go home… if you don’t want to sell out retreats or make six-figure launches… you’re somehow playing small and therefore not living up to some unmet potential.

Or on the flip side — that if you have a dream and you’re not willing to go after that dream with full guns blazing… then you must not want that dream bad enough because, by golly, someone who really wants that dream will do whatever it takes.

Twelve years ago, that was me. I did do whatever it took and it nearly killed me because of the stress and the burnout.

Hell, even five years ago, that probably would have been me. I probably would have done whatever it took to get me my dreams.

But I am a changed person, now. And I’m no longer willing to do whatever it takes to achieve something at the expense of other important things. I’ve seen that movie. It doesn’t end well for me.

So this comes back around to the question of enough. Because that version of me who was willing to do anything to achieve her dream? The concept of enough was foreign. The truth is — once I got the dream, it converged with the next one, and then the next one. There wasn’t enough… only more.

All of this is to say that leading a quietly ambitious life is not easy. It does not mean standing back and saying, “Nah, I think I’m going to sit this one out.” Rather it means working harder than ever to get super specific on what exactly it means to have a goal, reach that goal, and have it be enough. It means knowing how to balance your time, energy, and money to align your life in support of that enoughness. It means knowing your non-negotiables… what will you not compromise on? It means knowing what you will and won’t stand for in your life, in your morals, in your business.

[Sidenote: Since penning this piece, I’ve now read about six or seven articles from other brilliant women on the topic of enoughness. This is clearly a topic/issue that is touching a nerve with many people (especially women, it seems). I am really feeling the global and collective energy on this one.]

It also means knowing that your goals have to come without self-punishment. Because without that piece, there is nothing quiet about them. When self-punishment enters the equation, so does self-abandonment, and then the goal has ultimately changed. It’s become misaligned with my original intentions. And I think that’s the measuring stick by which I will learn how to “come home” to myself with these goals.

Once I felt like I had the concept of being quietly ambitious grasped, I stumbled upon the other person who had begun using the term, Ruth Poundwhite. I was less familiar with her and her work, but I found her book and podcast, both aptly named of course, Quietly Ambitious. I read her book in one sitting and ended up with over 100 highlighted passages. And I’m working my way through her delicious juicy podcast episodes. A lot of what she says is echoed by what Nicole Antoinette talks about as well. With Ruth’s experience in the online world though, she has developed an intuitive sense of how quiet ambition can work successfully when so much of the world exists in an extroverted, noisy way. And it’s predicated on honoring natural cycles of creation and prioritizing rest which, again, is something that our society hates to talk about.

So being the rebel that I am… let’s talk about it.

Let’s talk about how this hustle culture… this toxic productivity, life hacking, do more, more, more society tells us one thing when really, the key to success for many of us is actually doing… less.

This actually dovetails so beautifully into my human design which is a splenic projector. (Side note, this is a topic I may do a deep-dive into in a later episode because there is so much juicy stuff here) but I digress. Remember in episode one, when I told you that even as a child, one of my superpowers was being able to take in massive amounts of information, deconstruct it, connect it, and spit it back out? Turns out, that is quite common for someone who is a projector. And as a projector, another one of our gifts is being able to hyper-focus our energy and work to the point where we can complete in a 4-hour time frame what takes many people 8 hrs to do. It is not because we are better at or more gifted than others at whatever that thing is, rather the way we process and move energy through us allows for laser focus and high output. But because of that, it also means that we often need more rest and recovery time than most people.

This is where a lot of us projectors and the intersection of quiet ambition come up against the friction of conditioning and societal norms. Because even though we may have gotten in a full day’s work within those four hours and are now ready to rest, it’s extremely difficult to shake off the feeling that taking that rest isn’t “selfish” or “unnecessary” or “lazy.” It’s a product of the inherent worth/value conundrum so many of us face. It’s something I’m constantly struggling with which is one of the reasons this whole quietly ambitious way of life is appealing to me and why it’s something I’m committed to. Because I don’t want to live my life tied to the belief that my worth and value are tied to how productive I am or how much content I produce or how much money I make or how many retreats I sell out, etc.

So instead of living like that, I’m going to try to live a quietly ambitious life, as slow and sweet as I can.