320: Sustainable Ambition with Kathy Oneto

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of the only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com.

If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome back, Pivoters. Jenny, here with longtime bff both in our private community and irl. As I've had the joy of doing, walk and talks with today's guest in person in New York City. Kathy Onetto is a strategy executive and life work coach who is passionate about helping people succeed on their terms at work and in life. She's the founder of Sustainable Ambition and host of the Sustainable Ambition Podcast. Kathy champions being consciously ambitious and crafting fulfilling work from decade to decade without sacrificing your life or yourself. She's the author of the Sustainable Ambition 12 month workbook and planner and my little book of curiosity, 26 inquiries to inspire what's next for your life and work. Kathy, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Jenny. It's a pleasure to be here.

From the moment that you uttered the phrase sustainable ambition to me, I thought, ooh, that's so good. The world needs this. Go, go, go. Double down. Put everything you've got into this. I'm wondering, how did this phrase come to you? Was there an aha moment or a download of some kind.

So I have to admit this download was to my husband, but it was because we were in conversation about a workshop that I had held in early 2020, and this was just before I joined BFF, Jenny. So this was pre pandemic. This was a few months before COVID really took hold in the state. And I had hosted a workshop at my house with friends and colleagues and with this community of women to really take them through a career exploration, career transition workshop. And one of my friends who had attended had shared in this conversation almost like, well, my ambitions really didn't turn out the way that I had expected. I had gone after all these different ambitions. And yet in the end, I realized at one moment that I really wasn't happy. And so I was talking to my husband about this example, and he said, what you really need is kind of like sustainable ambition. And I was like, oh, yes, exactly. And so it really came from that and it stuck with me. And then, as you said, I started to put it out into the world. And you were one of the people that really gave me that encouragement to kind of, hey, there's something here, Kathy. There's really a core of an idea, and I kind of ran with it from there.

I love that it's this juxtaposition of two things, because we think of ambition as that tenacious drive, go, go, go, make things happen. And yet you're tacking on this idea of sustainable, which almost implies that it's for those of us who have burnt out many times on the road to trying to go after what we want in work and in life. And I also think it's unique how you, more than just about anybody I know, help people take the long view. I know Dorie wrote her book the Long Game, but you're also thinking in decades and you're saying, and I remember when you gave this pilot presentation to the BFF community in the early days, and you said you get to choose how ambitious you want to be in different seasons of your life, and it can change. You can be really ambitious on the family front and you can be step back in career, and you can be intentional about that, and you don't have to have this ambition dialed to a hundred and stay there. You get to choose. You get to toggle them up and down. And I just think that's so powerful how you're helping all of us zoom out a little bit and think of ambition across the arc of our lives and career. It seems much more reasonable that it would ebb and flow when we look at it that way. I don't know if that's been your experience too.

So I really love what you're pulling forward here because there's an element of sustainable ambition. People often think about just like, how am I making sure that I'm keeping things sustainable in the moment? But I do believe this longer term view allows us to have that ebbing and flowing of our ambitions and gives us that permission to adjust our ambitions to accommodate what's happening in our life in the moment.

Ambition hasn't always had a positive correlation or tone. There's some fancier word for it that I'm forgetting right in this moment. What's your take on that? Do you feel like ambition is a dirty word or has negative connotations of people who claim to be ambitious or we judge others if they seem overly ambitious? Do you think the word itself is tinged in one direction or another?

For sure, I definitely think that unfortunately that societally it has this negative connotation and everyone kind of thinks of Gordon Gekko in that movie from the 80s around like, you know, greed is good and that's what they see as ambition. And that ambition is always often also just tied to work and what we're trying to achieve there. And yet, based on the research I've done, the reality is to be human is to be ambitious. We all have goals that we want to achieve and that's being ambitious. And so research shows too that ambition actually is good. It does help us achieve the success that we want to achieve. And yet it also has a dark side. If you start to be reckless with your ambition and you start to invest too much of your energy or effort and start to ignore other parts of your life that give you joy, that support happiness, and research has shown this too, then it can start to go into having these negative impacts on both you and your life and the outcomes and potentially the people around you. So this is why I talk about this idea of dialing in your ambition. Are you putting appropriate effort against the ambitions that you want to go after in your life and work?

And what would you say to somebody who has ambition and yet something about their life? It's almost like there's a ambition, desire, capability gap. So somebody has ambition or it's like we have the ambition eyes of our 20 year old self, but we're in a 40 year old or 50 year old body. Or maybe it's the ambition of the 20 year old self and you've just had a kid and it's like applying that same logic to parenting a newborn. It just clashes. Where does this come in for people who feel angst or friction or tension around what was their ambition versus, like, what's actually possible now in this moment?

So I want to start with capability first, Jenny, because you started there, like, if we didn't have the capability. Ayelet Fischbach is a behavioral scientist. She is at the University of Chicago. She studied motivation. She's one of the people on the forefront in this research. And one of the things that she talks about is that if a goal is really personally relevant to us, and then if we feel confident and capable in terms of being able to reach that goal or that ambition, we then believe it is worthy of our effort. When one doesn't feel as capable at something, I think this is just an area where, well, how can you feel more capable and or confident in what you're trying to do? And one of the things I talk about is around sustainability. What are the structures we can put in place to support our sustainability? But what I've really learned even more recently and really become more clear in my own head, it's kind of a no dud in some respects. But it's like, we also need structures to support our ambitions and going after our ambitions. And so even for myself, there are some things that I'm working on right now, like writing a book that without more support, without getting some expertise and help through this journey and this process, I did not feel as capable. And so sometimes it's, how can we go get those capabilities? But the second thing you were kind of alluding to was, you know, when we might step into another part of our life. I was just having this conversation with somebody yesterday, and it was exactly what you just described, Jenny, which was, she just had a baby. Her son's about three months old. And even around something like breastfeeding, where she's like, you know, but my goal is to get to one year. But she's like, but it's not quite working out. How can I give myself a little bit of leeway here to redefine my goals and still say that I met it? Because she's very goal oriented. So this is something that is really real. And I think that we need to allow ourselves to be able to redefine our ambitions. Oftentimes our ambitions are rooted in our values. That's one of the places where I point people and one thing to consider doing is like, how can I renegotiate with myself what it means to deliver on this Value around this ambition such that I can still feel like I'm successful on my terms. So I think it's allowing yourself a little bit of wiggle room in terms of is there another way that I can still meet that objective in just a different way?

And it seems like the unsustainable form of ambition is where we keep hitting our head against the wall of trying to do it the old way, that something about our life is demanding something new, some new approach, 90 degree turn, shift in perspective, that that's where the unsustainable piece comes in, is trying to just power forward as if we're machines or as if we're even still our past self with all our past capability.

I think that's right. I think it's being, allowing ourselves that space to really hear ourselves. You know, there was an article, I'm going to forget who wrote it now, that talked about, you know, if you start to sense yourself grinding away at things like something's off, something has likely shifted. If it's becoming much harder for you to do something and to move along a certain path, something around what that ambition is, is likely off, something has likely shifted. And you know, there's four places where I kind of point people to look at their personal motivations and that's around your vision for your life and your work, what your values are, what you want to give and contribute and what you love. And if you're starting to grind and it's feeling like something's now off, I would point you to look there because something has likely shifted in terms of, hey, what I want for myself now is just different. You know, take that situation of either life stage or I had a child or your values, what you're valuing right now in terms of your life, like this happened for me where in my mid career I was willing to lean in and I wanted to progress up the ladder, if you will. But at this stage of my career, at some point I was like, I just want more flexibility, I want more space for creativity. What I valued and where I wanted to put my time and attention had shifted.

When you were in that phase of leaning in, it sounds like that would be a moment. If I can picture little radio dials, it's like ambition for work, but in a certain specific form of work, I'm guessing corporate, that ambition was dialed up. And then I wonder if you can tell us about the moment where you realized, maybe I don't want to lean in so hard or maybe I want to lean sideways, what would that look like? Do you remember what started to spark that shift in you and where it was coming from?

Realistically? It was two things. The first part of it was that I did get burnt out. You know, I am somebody that is a hard worker, I'm overly committed and I was working in an environment, an agency environment that is really demanding. And you know, I was a senior leader in that organization. And at that time people might not be familiar with these terms but like I was a hundred percent billable. I probably should have been like 50% billable. So that just shows you how I was stretching myself during that time. And at some point I was really longing to take a sabbatical. I just needed a break. I had done a startup and then I went to agency. And yet it took me another four years to be able to actually take a break and kind of fully recover. But I did step into a job during that time. After that that allowed me to recover a little bit. It wasn't quite as demanding. It allowed me to have a little bit more flexibility. So I think the first piece was just getting exhausted, was a little bit just feeling overly stretched and needing to recover. But the second piece was that my ambitions had started to shift. I was just like, you know, I've always had an interest or desire to own my own thing, not knowing exactly what that was going to look like. I've had an entrepreneurial bug. I helped co found a startup through an incubator. I also have learned now and this has really been a newer insight even in just the last couple of years and being able to claim like I am creative. I say I am an artist who creates art through left brain thinking. And I was just having more of this creative side of me calling to me and also wanting to own more of my own personal thought leadership as opposed to it being owned by a company that I was working for. So there was just this shift in what I was wanting to do with my time and my effort.

It's interesting you mention working under a paradigm of billable hours and being 100% billable because that's straight up time is money. That's the paradigm of billable hours. Was it hard shifting into your own business and breaking that way of thinking?

I feel like I'm still struggling with this a little bit, Jenny. And yet I do think about values based pricing, things of that nature. I do think about my time beyond just the dollars for certain. I think it was challenging because even crafting proposals it's like, well, what's your hourly rate? How do you build up a proposal. So it is something probably that I'm still wrestling with a little bit. And the other thing is I actually do track my time. I'm not as great as it I used to be, but I started that practice because I wanted to have a better sense of like where was I putting my time. Especially as I step into this creative work. Just so I understand where is my time going. So it's not like I do do like the calculation. Actually I think I have done the calculation you have in free time in terms of like thinking about, you know, well, what is my billable rate almost now and I don't even know Jenny. I read the book a little bit ago so I don't know if I'm getting that quite right. You can correct me. I mean, I don't know if I'm giving you the best answer here. I would probably say I'm still wrestling with it, but I think that I've certainly opened my lens in terms of how I think about the value of what I bring as opposed to thinking about it as like time is money.

I guess the reason I mention it, not that any of us this is the water we all swim in, but it's sometimes hard, I think, to decouple time, effort and then money and survival.

We'll be right back just after this.

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When I think about sustainable ambition and now that you have more autonomy as a business owner and can even just consider contemplate value based pricing, I feel like some of those shifts are what also start to free you from the paradigm that well, I need to work harder or work more so that I can earn more so that I can pay for what I need as this linear treadmill that is really hard to get off of. It just feel like the treadmill keeps going faster and faster and it gets harder and harder to keep up.

I mean, I have to thank you for your thought leadership and inspiration because really, you're putting the mantra out there around how can we earn twice as much in half the time? Has been a mantra that I've kind of taken on and used as inspiration. Like, yeah, how do you do I do that? Getting outside of this idea of like necessarily working harder in order to earn more. The other paradigm that I think about with my time, and this has helped me because again, you just heard me say, like, I'm a creative and I actually think I'm creating art. It's not fine art by any means, but part of the reason I say it's art is because I'm not always worried about monetization. It's like I am being called to create this. I want to create it. That's more motivating for me versus worrying about how am I going to monetize this. It actually stresses me out. It takes away the joy from what I'm creating. And one of the ways that I think about it though, is that this is an asset and it is going on my balance sheet. It is still very valuable to me on so many levels, both feeding my soul as well as creating a body of work, which is valuable. And so it's interesting. I think oftentimes people just think about a profit and loss statement, if you will. And yet we don't think about what are the assets that we're building for ourselves. Even if it's something that's an asset that feeds your joy and your happiness and feeds your soul. Like, why is that not a worthy place to put our time and our energy.

Absolutely. And our resources.

And our resources.

You and I have both traded voxers about gulp. We're investing in this area or we're stepping it up in podcast production before the money's there, which is even more nerve wracking for sure.

For sure.

This reminds me of a book that you talked about in your Dialing in ambition episode that Michael happened to recommend to me as a must, must read recently. So now it's twice in one week. Thankfully, I already own it. I just haven't read it. The book is by Paul Arden called It's not how good you'd are, it's how good you want to be. The subtitle is the world's bestselling book, which is very cheeky and I know I flipped through. It's like every page has gems of wisdom on it. But I'm curious what stands out to you about this title as it relates to sustainable ambition, this book was really.

Seminal in my thinking. And there's a page in the book that I just called the Napoleon page. And he has in the book on that page, he shows individuals and different people. But he says, like, well, how good do you want to be? Do you want to be good? Very good, you know, and he goes up to like, the best in the world. Like, do you want to be Napoleon taking over the world? And in reflecting on that, I was like, oh, my gosh, how many of us actually ask ourselves, what is my ambition? How good do I want to be? And then what is the commensurate effort that I actually want to put in? So that book and that picture is one of the things that started to get me to think about sustainable ambition and also being able to be choiceful around. Like, you know, I say ambitions are not created equal. You know, we can make dinner. You know, my ambition for dinner during the weekday is very low versus we just hosted a dinner party this past weekend and it's like, okay, my ambition for dinner, I want it to be really good. Same outcome. I'm going to eat dinner, I'm going to eat healthy, but in terms of, yeah, during the week, good. You know, a cheese sandwich is fine during the week, but I want to make a really enjoyable meal for my friends. That's different, right? That's a simple example. But I think that we can bring this into our own lives and really ask ourselves, well, how good do we want to be? And then what commensurate effort do we want to put in? And I will say around this, like, I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday and it was just a good reminder for me where we often think that all of us are supposed to be stretching for being the best in the world, and then we beat ourselves up because we aren't reaching that. I used to be an endurance athlete. I used to be able to run a heck of a lot better than I can now. But even when I was running back then, it's not like I was ever going to be an Olympic athlete. I wasn't going to be an elite runner, but I did pretty good. And I was still motivated by that. And it's okay. Like in sports, we often are doing things, most of us right, where we accept the fact that we're not going to be the best in the world and we can really have enjoyment and feel fulfilled being just very good or good, playing tennis, running, whatever it might be, and we don't beat ourselves up about it. And so it's just an analogy to get us to think about how can we think about our ambitions differently and allow ourselves to dial them in to the appropriate level and effort that makes sense for what any particular ambition might be.

I love thinking about the Napoleons and how you call it the Napoleon page. It's interesting using the sports analogy, but then what do you do when there's a project you're working on? Like you mentioned you're working on your next book, you have a podcast, just your business itself. And I don't know, sometimes I get sad if I dial down my ambition. And yet realistically I know, well, maybe that's what I need to do. And so my self talk around this comes in at least when it's the imposter monster as like you're delusional, you know, so I'll have these big dreams like free time is gonna sell a million copies and that's this. I don't know what it is. It's like, oh, you kind of need to be that delusional to write a book at all and think anyone should read it and then wanna put in the effort of spreading the word. But then if I try to decide, well, okay, maybe it's almost like I'm dialing the ambition so high and then maybe I dial it too low to the point where I feel sad that I need to dial it back so far. But I also don't want to be delusional. I don't know if you can relate to any of this, but I'm just curious about how we continually reconcile having ambition, especially when it feels like reality doesn't match up, at least on certain metrics. And this is what I talked to Jay Acunzo about on Free Time because he's been my creative coach for a while and he says, well, you need to pick your own metrics that are more meaningful on the part of readers and listeners of the book, telling me how much it means to them, how much time they've set free. Priceless. I'm a gazillionaire, but in terms of actual sales, it hasn't quite climbed up to where my ambitions are. You never know. Anything is possible. Like how do you hold these when they seem to compete in your own mind?

I probably go a little bit similar to where Jay goes. I've been struggling with this myself, Jenny, around this book project and there's this natural tension between my own agency, autonomy, how I want to kind of think about this project, and what the external structures kind of Demand in order for you to write a book. So people will say, well, if you're going to write a book, even you're saying it, Jenny. Like, gosh, if you're going to put all this time and energy into it, you should make sure that it's worthwhile and that it's going to pay out. Right? And for me, I'm not saying for you, but for me, when I think about that, it just stresses me out. It causes me a ton of anxiety. And I've been experiencing this with my book project, which, by the way, everybody who writes a book, I'm a part of this book community. And I don't know about you, Jenni. You know a lot more authors than me, but I think we all experience this. For me, where I point is to those four areas that I was talking about around how I think about, right. Ambition and where to find our personal motivations so that we can really have our own personal reward. And I will just say, Jen, this is not easy at all for me. Like, but this is where I'm practicing and playing with this idea of, okay, put aside those external metrics and just, why are you doing this for yourself? How does it fit into your vision? Why does this satisfy your values? What do you love about this process? Such that you're getting those intrinsic motivators and how is this allowing you to contribute to the world? For me, trying to root it back in there. And even as I think about. Because where I get tripped up on the book side is on the marketing side, I'm trying to. And I'm in process on this now. It's not easy. I'm trying to think about, like, okay, well, then how do I come at marketing that is more aligned, say, with my values or in doing it in a way that it's activities that I love or that is more in sync with how I want to contribute. I'm trying to root back to my personal motivators. And then, like, you and Jay were looking at these meaningful metrics, like, what really is meaningful for me. So I'm kind of going in a similar direction. One thing, Jenny, that I might throw out in terms of this, like, holding these big ambitions, but yet kind of dialing them in. You know, I interviewed this woman, Ruth Godian, who wrote a book called Success Factors. And she has interviewed Nobel laureates, all these famous scientists, and also a number of Olympians. And what she found was that with their ambitions, most of them say Olympians. They didn't start thinking, I want to be an Olympian. She Said most of them really just start and their ambition grows over time. And Ayelet Fischbach also shows this in her research that when we make progress, it builds our confidence and it can also increase our motivation. So I actually think sometimes for having those limiting beliefs or our fear of failure or what have you, like, maybe we need to start closer in and maybe it is okay to actually dial down those ambitions and so that you can make progress. I mean, you shared your book sales numbers and like, oh my gosh, I was kind of like, that is amazing, Jenny. Like I can only dream of selling that many books. And I'm like, you're on your way. Like, this is a must read book. That was just year one as you say, like Malcolm Gladwell on the Tipping Point. It took a couple years for that to get going. So I don't know, those are a few thoughts.

I love everything you've just said. It's all super helpful. You call it truest fit, reduced ambition versus an upper limit problem. So for example, in my case, and thank you for the encouragement, let's say I go, oh, selling a million copies, it was just too ambitious and it's causing me stress. I'm ignoring all the good things that have happened because my goal is too ambitious, it's too stretchy. How do I know if I'm truest fit, reducing my ambition versus an upper limit problem. Just thinking, well, I just haven't hit it yet, but why don't I keep my big hairy, scary goal and keep pursuing it?

I mean, I don't know if I have this completely figured out, Jenny, but what I think about is like to get really curious and to try to tap into your somatic wisdom and what your body is telling you. So for example, I'm not sure if each of these is going to match up with what you're feeling specifically. But just to kind of illustrate, someone might be feeling like, gosh, I'm just bored or I'm not engaged with this goal. That's not you with this. Like, you sound like you're still engaged. You're really passionate still about this topic. So it's kind of like if you're finding yourself like not engaged or bored with the ambition anymore, maybe it's not about fear of failure or feel of outshining or a limiting belief. That's just like, okay, I'm not interested in this anymore. Another thing might be like, I don't have the energy for this right now. Well, that could be a signal that you might be burned out, right? And that Maybe you just need to rest before you take back on that goal. Also, there's anxiety. I experience this quite a bit, and I think that's where it's kind of like what's behind that anxiety is that where a limiting belief might be coming up and where you kind of need to question that and kind of explore that to see what's really here? Do I really want this ambition now? Should I still continue to stretch and strive? That's kind of where I would point people now. And I don't know if that's giving you a formulaic kind of answer, but it's there. And then I kind of come back to, well, is there a capability or problem here? Or maybe it's not a problem, Jenny, but it's kind of like where might capability be able to support you in making progress? Or can you bring it, dial it, bring it closer in? So it feels a little bit more achievable to go from selling, you know, 6,000 books to your next goal of like 10,000 books or whatever it might be.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I love this language around stretching and sustaining ourselves. I almost picture it like we're all rubber bands and you're helping us see that there are periods where we stretch and sometimes we stretch to the point of almost breaking. Okay. And then we know we need to pull back, we need to sustain. You mentioned this phrase, ambition, anxiety. I'd love for you to just describe that a little more. What does that mean? What is that?

For me, that means I Think it can show up in a couple of different ways. And I just described earlier my own ambition anxiety that I'm having around writing my book. And I think that there's different ways to potentially deal with that anxiety. But I talk about with sustainable ambition, there's three pillars. Right ambition, right time, and right effort. And just to illustrate how ambition anxiety might show up around right ambition, there's a lot of times most of us, not most of us, many of us often start saying like, I don't know what I want. And that can be really anxiety provoking. Especially like when people are going through career transitions, these career inflection points. Oftentimes they'll say that I don't know what I want. And there's a lot of anxiety around that and a lot of angst around that. So how can we take back some agency and actually start to make those ambitions a little bit more conscious or another ambition anxiety might be. I don't know what to prioritize. And so how can you utilize some tools that I think about with sustainable ambition, utilizing your future self or mapping like, well, what's your energy versus urgency around ambitions? How can you support yourself in making these choices around, like what to prioritize now? Or a final one around right effort is like, well, how do I manage the stress? You know, stress can be related to anxiety. So there's various tools I think that one can look at around ambition anxiety to kind of help support you in getting past that anxiety.

Yeah, those three levers are so great. Right ambition, right time, right effort, that this is our Venn diagram or however you want to shape it visually. But these are the levers that we can toggle that we can choose that. And we also can deal with reality. Like in the reality, how much effort capacity do I have? How much time capacity do I have? And that that can also inform right ambition? Well, maybe I do need to recalibrate because you talk about how to know when ambitions or a life season truly shifts versus a short term setback. How do you know that for yourself, as someone who's even studying this, writing about it, having podcast conversations, how do you know? Because sometimes I think a true life season, it's almost like tectonic plates, they shift so slowly, it kind of weirdly catches off guard, paradoxically, versus a short term setback feels very obvious. But in the moment, it might seem like the end of the world.

That's a really great illustration. And kind of the sense of some things that are gradual versus feeling it kind of more immediately what's really interesting and my experience has been it can be a little bit of both. It's interesting to me and this is one of the reasons that I started to think about the sustainable ambition is I have a chapter in the book right now that's called Is It Normal? And because it's not uncommon for me to have these questions from people where they've gone through a life inflection point or they're at this point where maybe it has been gradual, as you said, Jenny, and they're just shocked and kind of surprised that things have shifted on them and that things have changed. And yet the world around us changes. Our lives change. We change all the time. We are always becoming. I finally realized with Michelle Obama's book, like how brilliant her title was, We Are Always Becoming and Shifting. So where I look around this and I know I've come back to vision, values, love and kind of give these terms around right ambition several times in this conversation. But for me, I look at the right ambition kind of pillar, if you will, to kind of have a sense of, ooh, has something really shifted in terms of has my vision for my life changed and what I want? Have my not my values shifted, but has the priorities around my values shifted? So again, if we take the example of somebody starting a family, they might have had a value around family being important always, but as soon as they have a child, all of a sudden that value, you know, and the percent of time that it takes up in their life immediately changes. And even if they've chosen to have a child, et cetera, oftentimes they are surprised by like, okay, how do I navigate this and how do I make choices around this? I kind of look at the right ambition elements as opposed to, you know, a short term setback may be, well, gosh, is it the right time for this? Maybe I just need to adjust the time. If it's still a right ambition, is there like life circumstance. Like, I still am really ambitious about this thing. I still really like this ambition, if you will. I really want this. But wow, something in my life has changed and the timing just is off. So I might have to think about maybe it's not this arc. Maybe I need to shift it out into a different time horizon or it might be effort, like maybe it's that, wow, I did get burnt out. I still really want to do that thing, but I don't have the energy and effort right now. So, you know, let me recuperate, let me recover and then I'm going to go at that Ambition again, when I have more energy and effort.

What's the area of all this that you struggle with the most?

Even having a front row seat, not surprisingly. Right.

Effort.

Say more.

Well, I mean, the sustainability piece. We all go and do work that supports ourselves. Right. On some level. It's interesting because as I started to research this topic and start to write the book and kind of explore my own adult life, I can step back and actually be like, oh, wow, I've actually been living in a sustainable ambition way all my adult life. But that doesn't mean that I'm not a hard worker. It doesn't mean that I'm not ambitious. It doesn't mean that I haven't ever gotten burnt out. I am a hard worker and I need to work on these dials myself. And yet, at least now I know, okay, if I am going to stretch and strive, then I need this plan to sustain myself and I need to build up my resilience. And so I'm much more thoughtful now about my sustaining plan and am I doing things to make sure that I'm sustaining myself and building resilience. I am able to put into place practices like pacing myself, pacing my calendar, pacing how I come at my year. So I've certainly still struggled because I'm a hard worker and I'm still highly committed. And so I have to dance between that, managing myself in that way, but making sure I'm really being true and honoring my sustaining practices to make sure that I don't get burnt out.

Yeah, it's almost like it's for a certain type of person who is wired this way. And I remember having numerology readings where they say I'm a four life path, which means I'm a worker bee. That's what someone told me. And I go, oh, gosh, that does not surprise me that, like, my nature is to be a worker bee. And since I was a kid, Since I was 10 years old, I gave myself deadlines. Somebody said to me, oh, you must have learned how to work in a really kind of stressful way when you were in corporate. And I said, no, no, I was 10 years old giving myself deadlines for my little family newspaper, being stressed, worried I wasn't meeting the deadline for a project I created. You know, where does that come from? There is a certain point at which it's innate that for those of us who do naturally work hard or want to tick all the boxes, get everything done, that we do have ambitious goals. And even, as you said, I love how your approach to Art and creativity is through left brain thinking. But like, we are ambitious about putting ourselves out into the world. So we're the ones that need this message of sustainable ambition the most of right ambition, right effort, right time. Because I have other friends where I'm like, oh, their natural set point just seems so much more relaxed and easeful about how they go about their day or their life or navigating work and family. It just doesn't even cross their mind as any sort of conflict.

I think this is so true, Jenny. I've just been having more conversations recently where people will say, I am ambitious, I have big dreams and I'm not willing to sacrifice. So how can I see these things as not having to be mutually exclusive, that I can be ambitious and also make it sustainable? And I was just saying to somebody else that this idea that it's almost as if, if you don't put sustainable in front of ambition, it's almost as if we believe that ambition equals burnout. Why does it have to be that way? I don't think it has to be that way. We can be ambitious and make it sustainable. I also just want to get out there. You know, I said that I've kind of been living this in a way. I also really believe that ambition is not just about our work and our careers. We can be ambitious about other parts of our lives and sometimes some of those things we're doing in our other parts of our lives. Like I've experienced this where I was just as ambitious about my running and doing triathlons as when I held a job in a corporate world earlier in my career. And yet I probably got more personal satisfaction from my endurance activities that I was doing in that training and the racing. What's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with that. I think we can hold more holistic ambitions as well across our life and work.

Yeah, I love how you pull that piece in because sometimes in our culture it feels like if you dial back career or money, ambition specifically, you're really going out on a limb, like away from what's kind of quote, normal to be ambitious about. I mean, I'm sure a lot of parents who take parental leave feel this way. It's a big part of the conversation, even books written and things of just the identity crisis that can happen. Stepping back from work. Even if I know many men who say, I want to be the best husband and father, my life mission is to be the best husband and father that I can, everything else comes second. And just as I've heard It from just as many men as women. So it's not even gender based. But I love thinking about people who have this passion and ambition for anything, anything at all. My dad has a passion and ambition to like play a live show in New York City. Of these songs he wrote decades ago for his band, Mr. Gasoline is like, I love it. It's so energizing. When you meet someone, you encounter someone who has right ambition, as in it's something, anything at all in their life that's lighting them up. And you're someone who I really do think is putting a stake in the ground saying it doesn't just have to be work related. It's every bit as valid and valuable and interesting to have right ambition for anything you choose, but just choose it consciously and then know you might need to dial other areas back. And it also doesn't have to be forever. That's why I love the seasonality of what you teach of just like you're gonna make these adjustments for this season and then you can change them again. How fascinating.

I love that. Absolutely.

Okay, Kathy, so if you could leave listeners with one small experiment that they could try in the next week or two after they finish listening, what would it be?

I'm going to go back to this idea of dialing in your ambition. So think about how good do I want to be around some goal task, project that you have and just say, you know, do I want to be good? Very good, the best. Just do it on a spectrum and then think about as well the spectrum of and how much effort do I want to put against this. And by the way, you can say I want to be really good, but I only want to put in this amount of effort. So then that's now your challenge. How can I be that good and only put in this amount of effort? So really just practice with being discerning around, setting your ambition and what it looks like and then what you want your effort to be against that ambition.

Beautifully said. What a great prompt and reflection question. And I love how you're connecting too because you can't just say, oh, I want to be the best, but I'm not willing to put the effort that the best put in to get to that position. So yeah, thank you so much. This is amazing listeners. Of course you can go find sustainable ambition wherever you're listening to this show. Kathy, where else would you like to send people to learn more and keep in touch?

They can go to sustainableambition.com and find a number of resources there for them as well as they can find me on LinkedIn.

Amazing. I'll put all these in the show notes including all the book recommendations. Kathy, thank you so much for doing this work and for being here on Pivot. I'm so happy to have you as a guest.

Oh thanks so much for having me Jenny. This has been such a fun conversation. Yay.

Thanks everybody for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

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