This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 083 / Honor Your Ambition

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

Is ambition a good or a bad thing? Is it a dirty or a powerful word? I guess the answer depends on how you define it, as well as your experience with it personally. What does being ambitious mean to you? If you think of it as wanting to be successful, powerful, or famous at all costs while sacrificing everyone and everything to get there, I can see how ambition would be unattractive to many people. If you define it as a desire to achieve a meaningful goal, well that might make it more attractive. In this episode I dive into how gender impacts ambition and how we relate to it. I explore how gender changes what are acceptable expressions, displays and levels of ambition. In addition, I share how ambitious women such as yourself, can grow and develop together! It’s time we reclaim and demonstrate what healthy ambition looks, feels and sounds like. I invite you to join me and hundreds of other women as we honor our ambition. This is Woman’s Work. To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com

Coming up on this episode of This Is Woman's Work, ambition, a strong desire to do or achieve something typically requiring determination and hard work. Is ambition a good or a bad thing? Is ambition a dirty or a bad thing? Is ambition a dirty or a powerful word? I guess the answer depends on how you define the word ambition, as well as your experience with it personally. I can literally hear my coach, Lisa Kalman's voice in my head, reminding me that ambition, like so many other things, is neutral and that each of us are bringing our own meaning, perception, and interpretation to it. So what does being ambitious

mean to you? If you think of it as wanting to be successful, powerful, or famous at all costs while sacrificing everyone and everything to get there, I can see how ambition would be considered unattractive to really many people. If you define it as a desire to achieve a meaningful goal, that might make it more attractive to most. But one of the things I really want to talk about in this episode is how gender impacts ambition and how we relate to it. And I don't mean that men are more ambitious than women or even how gender fluidity or being gender neutral impacts ambition. What I'd love to explore today is how our gender changes

what are acceptable expressions, displays, and levels of ambition. I am Nicole Kalil, and on today's episode of This is Woman's Work, I'm going to invite us all to celebrate and honor our ambition. The reality is that ambition has been and still continues to be considered a masculine trait, and the vast majority of women have strong negative reactions or even go so far as to hate the word ambition. For women, it's often intermingled with selfishness, ego, manipulation, or even bragging,

which gives us some unfortunate insight into how far too many people, and frankly, mostly men, because it is considered a masculine trait, are demonstrating their ambition in a way that isn't working. It also shows us how few examples we may all have, men and women alike, of the healthier expression of it. One of the many things that's problematic about this is that women feel they need to apologize for, hide, or feel ashamed for having ambition, even if it's the super healthy kind. I'm not usually a big fan of doing dictionary definitions, but I think it's worth going back to one here. Ambition, a strong desire to do or achieve something typically requiring determination and hard work. I'm not sure about you, but I don't see anything

shameful, dirty, or selfish about that. In fact, you could apply that definition to not only professional or career goals, you could also apply it to relationships, parenting, travel, even charitable work, et cetera, et cetera. As an example, I have a strong desire to have a loving and supportive marriage to Jay. I also have a strong desire to stay married and that has and will require determination and hard work, at least at times. We both fortunately married ambitious people with a shared goal. Our ambition helps our relationship. And I'll point out that I've never seen any small child, no matter their gender, feel bad about having big goals. They not only want to be president, a pilot, a hairstylist, and a veterinarian, but they want to do all those

things on the same day, at the same time, with absolutely no apologies. And they believe they can. Which leads me to believe that the negative feelings we have about ambition as women were learned. Many of us have faced an abundant amount of experiences, feedback, where we were taught consciously or subconsciously that ambition is for men and it's unattractive, or at the very least, there are different rules for women. And let me be clear, women don't lack ambition. There's no research that I can find that backs that up. In fact, most share that women and men are equally ambitious, especially in our younger years and as we enter our professional lives. Women haven't had a situation where it's acceptable for them to honor it without a whole

different set of consequences. As a kid, I can remember being told that I was too loud, too bossy, and even too much. I was the captain on many of my teams and in student leadership roles and was relatively popular, which in my case didn't necessarily mean well-liked, but rather well-known or well-talked about. But all of those things that I did, these leadership roles, these achievements, carried consequences for me that weren't the same as boys in similar positions. By the time I entered my first professional job, I'd learned that the rules weren't the same, but still had no idea how much my ambition could and would be used against me in my career. I want to be fair here and tell you that I'm not suggesting that I've only ever had a healthy

demonstration of ambition. That's not true. I definitely have had to learn and grow. And like many things did a lot of that the hard way, but the same could be said for many men too. And I didn't see them being punished in the same way that I was. I do know that I believed that my own ambition was a bad quality and that I should never share it with my colleagues, bosses at dinner parties, and certainly not with anyone I just started dating. I can vividly remember somebody that I had just started talking to that was in the same career as me. And we were talking over the phone and I shared about a recent huge sale that I had. And I could tell he wasn't that happy for me. He said some of the right things, but I know his heart wasn't in it. And let's just say nothing really happened from there.

So I do believe that my ambition was used against me when the same behavior was being celebrated and recognized in my male counterparts, even those with lesser results and successes. And personally, giving the credit away at every turn, because that's what I thought women and leaders were supposed to do, I never truly acknowledged to myself or to others the part I played in my results and my achievements. And pretending that I didn't want more because I didn't want to be seen as greedy or that my head was too big, I ended up limiting my own opportunities. In short, in having a different bar or different set of expectations, the same qualities that existed in me that were deemed unattractive or problematic, those same qualities were being celebrated and called

leadership in men. And I know I'm not alone in this. At this point in my career, I have a collection of stories and examples so big it would make your head spin of women trying to dial down their ambition or being made to feel as if they were wrong less than, or should be ashamed of having it. I know a bunch of women who don't even want to use the word ambition for fear. It makes them look bad. Well, not me, not anymore, because I think the world needs more examples of healthy ambition. And why would anyone have goals if you weren't meant to have a desire to achieve them?

I believe many of us could use a little support in how to embrace our ambition and that we all need some balance. So we're not only learning from the masculine perspective. Because as it stands today, that's what's happening. More than 90% of business books are being written by men. The vast majority of business podcasts, keynote speakers, and trainers are men. And so what we learn about not only being in business, but also about being ambitious often is coming from that masculine perspective, which brings me to an amazing project I'm participating in.

And I almost never promote anything on my podcast because I really want you to have a disruption-free experience. So I hope you know that I'm sharing this because I greatly believe in the value and the importance of it. I've partnered with two amazing, ambitious women, both of whom you know from this podcast. Leslie Griesel, whose episode on mindset

is the most listened to of any of my guests. Episode 30, if you wanna check that out. And Kristen Burke from episode 33, whose energy and success in coaching women to execute on their goals makes her one of the most sought after business coaches. All three of us connected and commiserated on our own personal experiences of being told we were too ambitious. And we got to thinking, how can we change this? And here's what we came up with. First, we wanted to support more women in building their business acumen, because let's be real, unless you got your MBA, most of us would have been better served by

learning these skills instead of say, I don't know, geometry. I mean, when's the last time you fell back on your parallelogram skills? Second, we wanted to make sure that this was flexible and accessible to many, many ambitious women. With those two things in mind, we've created monthly business acumen training sessions where we will cover topics like mission, purpose, vision, having an ownership mindset, identifying your target market, building confidence, prospecting, networking, financial management, all topics that we know will have great impact no matter your chosen profession. Here's some logistical things you'll probably want to know if you're anything like me. These business acumen sessions will be delivered in monthly sessions. So one hour a month, 40 minutes of content, 20 minutes of open discussion.

And these are starting March 23rd. Now, if you register and join us by then, awesome. But these are ongoing. So you can join us anytime you want. These sessions are not industry or company specific. There are women from all across the country in various stages of their professional careers, in different industries, in different roles, and we're all coming together to grow and develop. There will be recordings and materials shared, So if you can't make a live session, you have access to that.

And all 12 sessions cost $500 for the year. So one session per month, 12 months, $500 total. At the time of this recording, 219 women have already registered for Honor Your Ambition and to build their business skills. And I'd love nothing more than for you to join us because this is for any woman who wants to grow in a safe, connected space with other women. So one of the most common questions we get is, is there an option where I can connect more intimately and directly with other women in a similar career or life stage or with similar challenges

or business structures? And the answer is yes. In addition to the monthly business acumen training sessions, there is also the opportunity to join mastermind growth groups of six to eight women who you've been matched with due to some of these similarities. We have groups for early entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, established business owners, and many, many more. And they start at various times throughout the year. The process here is we ask you to apply for a

mastermind growth group. We ask you some questions so we can get you connected with the right group of women. Whether it's the business acumen training sessions or the mastermind growth groups that appeal to you, the next step for either is to visit honoryourambition.com to learn more and get yourself registered. And if you have any questions or want to talk through any of this, please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly at Nicole at NicoleClill.com. Let me put this in perspective for a minute. I work with many organizations that pay $15,000 for just one of these training sessions, and you can get all 12 for one payment of $500. With a collective 40 plus years of executive experience training new business owners, thousands of clients coached, and multiple millions of dollars of revenue generated,

the three of us are sharing the secrets of not only our success, but so many women we've had the pleasure and opportunity to work with. I invite you to join me and hundreds of other women as we honor our ambition. It's time we reclaim it and demonstrate what healthy ambition looks, feels, and sounds like. To us, ambition is when you trust yourself, you believe you can, and you achieve what matters. You provide the ambition, we'll provide the acumen. And whether you participate and honor your ambition or not, I invite you in the illustrious

words of Dolly Parton to pour yourself a cup of ambition, because that is woman's work.