Are You Ambitious?

Happy Monday, friends! I hope you all had a safe and fun weekend.

Today’s post is courtesy of a fantastic free workbook that I downloaded from the Tory Burch Foundation website. As a newbie female entrepreneur, I’m constantly on the lookout for information that can help me to successfully grow my businesses. I’m fascinated by how many individual “parts” need to sync in order to create business success. So I read a lot of guides and do any of the associated exercises to ensure that I’m testing the theories and learning – for myself – what works and what doesn’t.

The Tory Burch Foundation’s Ambition Guidebook is a wonderful resource for anyone beginning on the entrepreneur path. The exercises in the booklet lead you through self-discovery, and if you do the exercises, you’ll eventually reveal to yourself the strengths that you possess, potential roadblocks on your path, and actionable steps that you can take to achieve your goals.

That leads me to the title of this post: are you ambitious? Many of us have been taught to shy away from this personality trait, out of fear of offending others. Women, particularly, may have gotten the messaging that ambition is a “masculine” trait and thus undesirable in any authentically “feminine” woman. For those that are still a bit nervous about the word “ambitious”, you can easily substitute the words “passionate” or even “enthusiastic”. When substituting different words, it’s clear that ambition is a good thing: one could even say that ambition is the spice of life!

Yes, so many of the things that we enjoy are the products of extreme ambition. Strong desire is what inspires us to create new things, even in a world where it seems like “everything” has already been created! One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen what someone that no longer had any ambition: a lack of desire leaves a person feeling lost and disinterested in life. Most of us have had brief periods when we don’t feel very ambitious, but that’s not an energy that we want to linger in. We want to always find something to “light us up” and inspire us to do/have/be MORE.

So, I’m going through the exercises in the guidebook and enjoying it so far. I love how user-friendly this is, and the fact that it’s free is definitely a good thing! If you have a few friends that are interested in finding their life’s purposes or rekindling their passions, this booklet would be great for you all to download and complete together as a group. If you decide to download it, let me know how you enjoy it!