Ambition: Unapologetic Pursuit of Success and Why We Need You

The message to “be the best you can be” for young girls can be a huge smack in the face as we grow older - because even though many strides have happened over the years, this message has limitations based on gender. In today’s episode I unpack the topic of ambition for women and the cultural stigma we need to overcome in order to be supported and respected for our pursuits of purpose. Your episode worksheet: Femmefluence.com/ep7   Key Points from this Episode Many women (me included) were taught at a young age that it is commendable to be ambitious and to be the best you can be.  I got that message growing up. I also got the message to expect to have to have a tidy household, to make sure my husband felt manly and to be more feminine, and to not trust anyone outside of my family. Talk about confusing! Ambitious men are supported, encouraged, and recognized for their achievements. Ambitious women are often viewed negatively; their right to reach advanced status is sometimes denied, and their motives are often questioned. Ambitious women are sometimes seen as nasty, self-serving, and unlikeable. I’m certainly not immune or not guilty of this. I became a feminist who wanted to prove women wrong - weird right? What I REALLY wanted is to find a posse of women who had the ambition to change the world together.  I recently went to a retreat for women where I thought I belonged. It was amazing. I gave this particular retreat a glowing review before I left. And after the fact I found out that it was not as it appeared. That person expected because they had done that at their event for me to do the same.  Whenever you do something with the expectation of taking, instead of the expectation of giving, it puts a sour taste in the other person's mouth. And we tend to do that with women.  High-profile successful women have a complicated relationship with ambition. Savannah Guthrie’s comment at a Real Simple/TIME Women & Success event in 2015 that she “hates the word ambition and thinks it’s impolite” is indicative of the negative nuances we as women associate with power and ambition. (I wonder how she felt about Matt Lauer as her showmate for all those years #hmm)  Where does our discomfort with ambition come from? Society tends to be overly critical of powerful and ambitious women. In one New York Times Op-ed, the author notes that although women have made some progress in reaching powerful positions in the political and corporate world, “Progress is not inevitable, though, nor is it fixed. The country has a complicated relationship with powerful women: They have to keep proving themselves over and over again, being twice as good, and dragging one woman through the process doesn’t make it easier for those who follow.”  Another article in Fortune speaks to how former presidential candidates Carly Fiorina and Hillary Clinton were measured against the conventional idea of female behavior with Clinton labeled as “overbearing and shrill.”