How your gonna get ‘what’s next’?
Feel like you need more than just clarity on where you’re going? Like the fire of action to attain your next promotion or opportunity?
Ambition. Someone might say…. “you just need more ambition”.
Truth- I’ve described myself, in relation to this term. “I’m ambitious”, I’d say. Often to white men in power. I’d do it to underscore my education, experience, or smarts in the face of institutional gender barriers. As a way of trying to speak their language and convincing them to take me seriously, damn it!
On the good side, ambition is the expression of our will and bold self-determination in the face of systems stacked against us.
Ambition can imply creating and meeting a set of goals that catapult us forward. To a time or place when we’re taken seriously and have more influence and connections.
On the down side, it becomes an empty echo of the “[North] American dream”. It fuels our desire to climb high so we get the illusion of certainty: financial security, pensions, and hot holidays.
Climb the ladder.
Make it as an entrepreneur.
Be the “go-to” academic voice.
Become the CEO.
In our capitalist society, ambition asks us to plan our moves with chess-like precision. Get the right training, mentors, and experience (and then visibility) and then you’ll lead with confidence, they promise, you’ll land the next opportunity.
And yet, many leaders are asking themselves in these times of destabilization – where does ambition get me?
Why ambition might be dead
Ambition can’t be entirely knocked. As you well know, bold women, gender-non binary folks, and BIPOC visionaries have cultivated enough determination and collective movement to make tremendous, positive changes to society. And that’s taken some serious grit and future thinking.
So I don’t think it’s ambition that’s bad, but that our underlying faith in it’s foundations are falling apart.
It might be too bold to assert, but ambition is under fire from all directions.
Tight brothers with the free-market system- individuals, if exceptional enough, could rise in rank, wealth and power if they pushed hard enough.
Yet now, in the post-modern (or meta-modern) era we’re facing collapses of systems and structures we’ve taken for granted. Whether you’re exceptional or not, or have access to systems of power or not, there’s too much uncertainty. Or far more bends in the river to know or plan beyond what’s just a few hundred meters ahead.
The pandemic is a perfect example.
In this case, our individual will only takes us so far. The ‘culture of ambition’ that implores us to carefully plan our experience, training or mentors can’t promise a set outcome.
No matter how much we ‘get’ and ‘plan’, there are too many bends. Ambition only takes us so far, and in some ways is no match for the wildly collaborative and cooperative times that are necessary for the level of complexity at hand.
These times are asking us to develop something else instead.
The Rise of Surrender
Two of the greatest challenges we face, is the culture of productivity and the culture of urgency. Messages of “more, more” and “now, now!” pervade the way we make decisions, run our organizations, and structure our social systems.
The primacy of the individual will, often in the form of ambition, plays into both of these- where we’re conditioned to compete, push and strive to get influence and resources.
So if much around us is falling apart- from the ways we talk to each other civilly, to how we govern- what do we need to cultivate to lead well?
Less ambition, and more surrender.
Or more accurately, a renewed balance between self-determination and surrender.
Surrender highlights our ability to pause and adapt in the moment. To let go of ego and our assumptions that we’re right. It asks us to enter an important meeting with curiosity and humility. It invites us to cultivate other intelligence, like intuition, instinct and our body-wisdom.
It asks us to trust the push of the river, angling our boat just enough that we can safely navigate the blind corner of a river. It doesn’t require we’ve got all our moves planned in advance.
At it’s heart, surrender is a capacity to be more comfortable with the unknown. And this asks us to trust the experience we already have, to be open to difference and be willing to get it wrong.
In contrast, ambition presupposes that we know where we’re going. It assumes we know the steps to get there, and the milestones we’ll reach along the way to our ‘what’s next’. But this river we’re on, friends is not wide and straight. We’re deep in the waters of uncertainty and our leadership is being invited to expand some new capacities.
The context of success is being reconsidered, redrawn and remade. Ambition, and the primacy of our individual will, is not the only thing driving our growth. Our planet is asking for something different. More surrender, more comfort with the dark and the questions we need to live into, so that we can find our way together into the next evolution of being.
You’re ‘what’s next’ is found in this beautiful tension between self-determination and surrender.
Practice + Inquiry
For the next week or so, play with these questions to explore your relationship with ambition and surrender. Become acquainted with their distinct energies, and where they support or undermine the cause you’re working towards and how you want to show up.
Where are the edges of ambition in your leadership and life? How would you describe its felt sense within you?
Where does that serve you?
Where does it limit you?
If you trace the contours of surrender, where does it show up? How would you describe the sensations within you?
What is the upside to surrender?
Where could it support greater influence for the collective good?
Drop a comment below and share your impressions of this musing and the practice. We’d love you to share with our wider community!
xo
Jennifer
