The Ambition Redirection Manifesto

Last summer I had the phrase “redirecting ambition into a life worth living” pop into my head. This was when I knew I had to shift my business towards something that worked better for me, but also had no idea what that direction would be. So driving along that summer afternoon I repeated the phrase over and over so I wouldn’t forget it before I could stop and write it down.

Did I stop to define it? No! I just stuck it on my new website and got on with the next things. I knew how it felt, even if I didn’t know, exactly, what it meant. Now, however, that feeling is so cemented into the foundations of what I’m doing that it really needs a definition now – a manifesto, if you will. So here we go.

When your identity is wrapped up in achievement…

When you’re a conscientious little girl who turns into a high achieving teenager you become a woman who needs to do more. When praise and prizes become your love languages early on, you spend your life seeking out ways to achieve – from the pet drawing competition at the village hall fair and eagerly reading your school report, to asking for extra review meetings with your boss and spending company money entering industry awards.

You feel held down in virtually every situation because of your desire to achieve. You want immediate promotion, not for the pay rise but for the job title and validation from your bosses. You scroll job boards for shiny step ups where you can be the youngest manager because you want the accolade. You are an ambitious woman, and you love that about yourself.

…but you don’t want to achieve what’s on offer

At some point it starts to wear off. You start to look at your bosses and wonder if you actually want their job, you start to wake up in the morning and wonder if this is all you want for the next fifty years. You don’t want this to be all there is, all your ambition has to work towards. So you start a side hustle that, because it’s you, becomes a business and you love it because your potential to achieve is unlimited – you can just go and go until the sunset and beyond.

But even here, there is something still prickling. You begin, again, to feel like you don’t want to do a lot of this. The more you work the more you feel actual life pass you by. You hit milestones that you thought would make you feel good but they just sort of, happen. The follower numbers and the metrics and the accolades just don’t feel important in the way they once did. You wonder about it, but who will you be without ambition?

We live in an either/or world. Something is good or bad, happy or sad, what we want or not what we want. We think that we are either an ambitious go-getter or a laying around waif. It’s not actually like that.

This isn’t about not having ambition. It’s about having ambition for something different.

Rather than working the most hours, it’s cutting your to do list down to only the most efficient, impactful and joyful things, that you can do in four hours.

Rather than strategising for high growth, it’s approaching content as a creative experiment to find what excites you and others.

Rather than not celebrating until you hit a milestone (and in the end, not even then), it’s making a point to enjoy your actual real life every day.

Rather than aiming to build a team and have an office, it’s aiming to be blissfully unresponsible for others.

It’s being ambitious for more hours at the beach, more yes’s to friends, more projects that excite you, more afternoons with a book, more spontaneous drives, more trips, more seeing what’s round that corner, more nowhere to be, more flowers in your window box.