Wouldn't It Be Great? : Part 3

Ambition Is Not a Dirty Word: A Woman's Guide to Earning Her Worth and Achieving Her Dreams
by Debra Condren, Ph.D.

(Page 3 of 3)

I've worked with women of every stripe, from students and recent graduates embarking on their brand-new career paths, to successful women in the corporate, nonprofit, and government sectors. I've met with small business owners, heads of fast-growing start-ups, consultants, physicians, attorneys, investment bankers, architects, and executives and professionals in a wide array of fields. I've advised women as young as sixteen to women in their early sixties. Wherever they've been on their professional paths, my mission has been to increase women's business acumen by teaching them strategies for identifying meaningful, challenging work; increasing profitability; building and keeping wealth; competing with power and confidence in traditional and male-dominated corporate sectors; establishing themselves as experts; and tapping their competitive advantage.

As I spoke to and coached thousands of women, however, I began to detect a striking pattern: even self-professed successful women were hitting walls, unable to achieve the next level in their professional lives-and they didn't know why. Certainly they were well aware of the external barriers to their success-the famed glass ceiling, lack of support for those who choose to juggle work and family. However, they had no idea that the greatest factor holding them back was a barrier they themselves had created and internalized.

Based on my conversations with so many women, I suspected I knew exactly what mistaken belief was holding them back. Seven years ago, I began a systematic investigation of professional women's attitudes toward ambition. I interviewed more than five hundred women from every corner of the country and between the ages of nineteen and sixty-five.

These were all women who regarded themselves as high-achieving. Many were rookies with brand-new, promising careers in front of them. Many were already quite successful. Many had established impressive track records of in-the-trenches professional experience, had broken through at least some gender barriers to become established in their fields, made comfortable to sizable incomes, and either had the title and position they wanted or were drawing a bead on the prize. I asked these women their definitions of success and ambition, how they saw themselves, how they visualized an ambitious woman, and what held them back from achieving even greater success and fulfillment.

I made a fascinating discovery. High-achieving women all harbor the same dirty little secret, no matter what our backgrounds: we all struggle with socially sanctioned failure to embrace our ambition. We all have the same pernicious audio loop playing between our ears:

Will being as ambitchous as I dream of being make me less of a woman? Can I? Should I? Dare I? Have I gone too far? Will it cost me my personal life? Will I make enemies? Will it make those I care about suffer? Is it impossible to be ambitchous and happy? Am I charging too much? Am I giving my employer or my clients their money's worth? Will I lose an opportunity if I ask for more money? Who do I think I am, calling myself an expert? Do I really know what I'm doing, or am I in over my head? Does sticking up for myself and taking credit mean I'm greedy, arrogant, and that I'm being unfair to people I work with? Am I deserving of recognition and power? Am I worthy of going after my biggest, most precious career dreams?

Ambition isn't a dirty word, but as far as many women are concerned, it might as well be. It doesn't matter where we grew up, went to school, or go to work. It's the same whether we're in our twenties and new to our careers, or in our fifties and sixties and among the most highly regarded professionals in our industries. Today, the greatest barrier to earning more money, getting the power and recognition we deserve, and feeling entitled to stay the course comes from inside of ourselves. We agonize over whether or not we deserve to be ambitious-and about what it will cost us.

I looked for books to recommend to supplement my own findings and recommendations. I found that most proposed to teach women how to succeed on their own terms, with a huge emphasis on mastering the life-in-balance issue. None of them challenged the notion that the accepted definition of success might actually be holding women back because it is couched in such a positive way: "You don't have to be unabashedly ambitious. You're above all that. You are sophisticated enough to realize that ambition isn't as important as getting the life-balance equation right." Or: "You don't have to be ambitious the way a man is. You've come around to realize that success is a different-and better-goal than ambition. You can win with empathy, cooperation, and being generous. You don't have to give up being a woman to get ahead."

I count it as a Pyrrhic victory that our modern, progressive culture is no longer pushing the idea that women cannot have it all. The message these books and popular media are transmitting is: We can have it all-so long as we're willing to redefine what "it" is. Now it's not the killer job and the great home life; it's balancing the two, which, practically speaking, means less of each: women should be just thrilled to have a not-ideal job and a not-ideal life as long as they feel the two are balanced.

How can we take seriously the necessary soul-searching required to discover what we were meant to do professionally when our pure, unadulterated ambition is never discussed explicitly-only game plays and hardball techniques, softened for the female player?

I decided to write this book to address the great hunger on the part of high-aiming women for advice that speaks to our discontent-and to our ambition to be purely and freely ambitious.

Copyright © 2006 by Debra Condren

About the Author

Debra Condren, Ph.D., is a psychologist, a business and executive coach and career advisor, and the founder and executive director of the Women's Business Alliance. Dr. Condren received a U.S. Small Business Administration's Women in Business Advocate of the Year Award in 2000. Her client roster includes a diverse list of Fortune 500 companies, and a wide array executives, professionals, and students between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Her advice has been featured in major media outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and NPR's Morning Edition. She lives in New York City and San Francisco with her husband, son, and stepson.