How to Avoid Falling Into the Midlife ‘Ambition Trap'

Yahoo

7 hours ago

Business and executive coach Amina AlTai learned about burnout the hard way: In her former marketing and brand management career, she constantly pushed herself to the point where stress took over her entire body. She unknowingly had two autoimmune conditions, and a doctor told her she was at risk of multiple organ failures if she did not seek further care.
From there, it was a slow, steady process of deciding that her ambition needed to be more of an ebb and flow and that she could not measure her success based on others' standards.
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Now in the new decade of her 40s, AlTai recently released a book called, The Ambition Trap: How to Stop Chasing and Start Living, to help women navigate their goals and larger purpose, both in their careers and lives, while staying attentive to their own mental health and physical well-being.
She recently sat down with Flow Space to answer a few questions about avoiding the 'ambition trap.'
Flow Space: What can you say about midlife women's relationship to ambition and how you've seen it change over time?
Amina AlTai: I define ambition as neutral and natural: It's simply a desire for more life and simply a wish to unfold. But we live in a world that makes it right for some people and wrong for others. So women, people of color and people with disabilities, all of us experience an ambition penalty. Men are rewarded for theirs. For women, it's seen as a detractor, and women who just want to negotiate their salaries are seen as 'aggressive.' And then, women of color are actually the most ambitious cohort in the workplace but experience the most microaggressions and the most headwinds.
I feel it's really important to contextualize it that way and sort of level set the playing field, because how we come to culturally understand ambition is 'more for more's sake all the time,' and that can cost us our health, our relationships and beyond.
I do notice some trends around midlife, generally speaking; that's when a lot of people find me. It's usually when I've gotten to the top of whatever mountain they felt like they 'should climb,' [whether] conscious or unconscious. And then, they get to the top, and they look around and they realize this isn't it. I kind of strived based on other people's goals and ideas of success, and I'm actually at a point where I want to refine this for myself. I want to come home to myself. I want to be in my relationship with my mission. I want to succeed in a way that is true for me. So I feel like there is a reconciliation that happens in midlife around success and mission and purpose.
When it comes to women of color and more recent pushes to incorporate people of many diverse identities in leadership, how can they navigate this shift without having had some of the same opportunities and support thus far in their careers?
I coach a lot of women who are 'the first woman,' 'first woman of color,' 'the first queer person' to make the leadership, and so they haven't had the necessary mentorship or support or allyship in their organizations to get where they are. So they've experienced far more headwinds than most people ever will, and, you know, maybe more headwinds than the next generation.
I don't know if you're familiar with the 'wolf pack' metaphor. As the wolves walk together, the leader in the front will take most of the hits and makes space for all the wolves behind them to emerge unscathed. And I think of it that way. I think it's a really beautiful thing. It's a hard thing, and it's hard not to martyr ourselves in the process. That's a big thing that I work on with my clients, but I think it's so important and meaningful if we are working like that.
For women who are the first, the trailblazers, and have to saddle all of that, how do they take care of themselves and their mental well-being?
So two things: the ebb and flow of ambition and also community. We think of ambition as… more money, more power, and that's being ambitious. But I actually think ambition is much more like a perennial flower. We drop the seedling of desire in the ground. We nurture our inner and outer environments, we grow, we have this momentary peak in the sun, which is so lovely. Seasons change, and we wind down and go back underground. That ground is fallow until it's lush enough that we rise again. So I think that ambition is about facing rest, recovery and growth, not just growth all the time. That allows us to take care of ourselves enough that we have the strength in those other moments.
Community is so important. A lot of these people, they're so lonely at the top. There aren't mentors for them, and there aren't enough allies for them. They need somebody that they can lean on to help cultivate a sense of psychological safety in certain realms and spaces that they don't have at work. And so a community becomes even more important for these people.
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There is, collectively, a lot of panic around the economy, layoffs and changing industries with technology, so people who are mid-career might be feeling like they're being phased out or maybe won't be considered for opportunities moving forward. Do you have suggestions on how people can reframe those anxious thoughts using the the model of ambition as a perennial flower?
In the book, I was really careful to talk about how there's two things at play: our own mindset and our own unconscious patterns, and the system that we're operating in. I think a lot of us have ideas about midlife and what's possible for us in midlife, and also, ageism is really real, right? Yes, we have to look at our own stories about what's possible for us at a certain age, and expand our beliefs. And also, we have to acknowledge that we're working in a system that tends to penalize people at a certain age and reward people of a certain age. We have to acknowledge both things: working on ourselves while also working to shift the system.
I think if we're coming from a place of fear, scarcity and uncertainty, I think it's a great moment to pause, to potentially go underground and to work on ourselves, to look at how we need to nurture ourselves to be able to grow. In this particular context, I think the nurturing would be looking at my mindset, but also, do I need to upskill or reskill in order to cultivate more relevance under myself, to grow and thrive in this moment (which I think is the question a lot of us are asking, regardless of age right now, especially because of AI and how quickly it's changing things for us)? It is a great underground moment to take and reflect on what I need to meaningfully nurture in this moment to rise in the next one.
What does upskilling or reskilling look like, is it kind of stretching yourself in a direction that you maybe didn't originally picture, or taking more more classes, or honing a new skill?
Every next level of our life requires a different version of us. And also the dream is probably a little bit different. But oftentimes we don't pause to reorient. That's why it's a great moment to ask ourselves, the environment is changing, the marketplace is changing, so what's my dream for this next level? And then, looking at that dream and asking, 'well, who do I need to be and what skills do I need cultivate to be able to live into that? Do I need to take classes? Do I need to brush up on this thing?'
Let's say 10% of my job before was driven by AI, but now 50% of it is, so I need to figure out how to collaborate with that in a more functional and supportive way. It's taking stock of the different skill gaps that we have and looking at where we need to fill them in with classes, with learning, et cetera.
You reference a lot of achievement being not about external validation, but being for yourself. That's probably something that a lot of women 40+ struggle with. How can we relate that idea of striving to not seek the external validation of ambition back to midlife women and their careers?
As the old adage goes, 'comparison is the thief of joy.' If I'm always looking externally comparing myself to other people, I'm always going to come up short, because the only thing I can be exceptional at is being myself.
What I notice about women in midlife, in coaching a lot of really senior women, is that we are constantly moving the goal post. I put myself in this category, too. OK, this thing, what's the next thing and the next thing? We're always moving the goal post, and so we never arrive, which is why in the book, I talk so much about cultivating a sense of contentment, this unconditional wholeness. Regardless of what I'm achieving and what's happening externally, I know inside I'm OK; I have this internal ability.
It's not an overnight thing, to stop the external validation, because that's how we've been honed and shaped. That's how we know we're doing OK. Bit by bit, we need to take that back and insource that validation by looking at cultivating a sense of contentment.
In the book you mention finding your 'zone of genius' in your career. How can we approach that?
It's brilliant: where our gifts are innate, we don't need to push or force our efforts, it kind of flows. What I notice about people that I coach when we do work around the 'zone of genius,' they kind of throw it away. Like, doesn't everybody have that thing that I can do this way? No, that is really special and unique to you.
One of the things I do with my clients is we figure out ways to stack their genius. We all have probably more than one forms of genius, and when you put them together, it becomes this just exponential gift to the world. It really shifts things. A lot of us get to the point where we feel like if we don't express that gift, we will wither and die. Honestly, that's kind of the point in time people find me: they know they have something to contribute, and it's so painful to not bring it to the world.
The tricky part for a lot of people is we build our careers oftentimes around our 'zone of excellence,' and that usually benefits somebody else's 'zone of genius.' People are afraid to relinquish the excellence and set into genius, because they're worried everything will fall away. But the invitation is just to start with 10 minutes.
What can you accomplish with that 10-minute model, what does that involve?
If you start with 10 minutes a day with the thing you are miraculous at, and you go up to 50, and then 60, bit by bit, you can shift into that over time almost fully. And you're doing it in a really psychologically safe way. It's not safe for most of us to be like, jumping off the cliff and leaving this job that pays my bills. And so if you do it in those increments, start with 10 minutes a day, it can expand, and you've done it in a way that you didn't put yourself at risk.
First and foremost, do the exercise in the book on 'finding your zone of genius.' It's really helpful to understand what is your 'exceptional.' Then, it's picking the one thing that is at the top of the list for yo, and putting time on your account to spend time today doing that thing. Let's say you're exceptional at nurturing talent. So, I'm going to put it on my calendar tomorrow to do a little bit of coaching for somebody on my team; they've been asking for it and I haven't given them the time, so let me do that.
One of the stories I tell in the book is my own story. I was in marketing and brand management the year that I was building my coaching business, and it was really interesting to kind of watch the scales tip. I started by spending more time in marketing, and by the end of the year, I was almost fully into coaching. And the last marketing consulting project I had, I left the project, and I gave this person months and months of notice. But they were so upset about it, because my excellence with the marketing supported their genius.
It was tempting at that point to let my genius go so I [wouldn't] let this person down. But I just knew I had to go choose this other version of myself.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.