Dear Lindsay:

Yes, definitely—rest assured that if you and your friends and colleagues are talking about an issue, other women are, as well.  And your question and answer gets to the heart of a critical issue that ambitious women need to discuss and to understand.

Why do women have such a hard time acknowledging the importance of loving their work?

Gail Evans posed this question in her book, Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman (Broadway Books, 2001).  To me, the answer is that we women feel very comfortable saying that we love and value passionately creating the kind of personal life that we desire.  We willingly give of anything of ourselves when it comes to advocating for our kids, fiercely supporting a friend in need, lovingly building a partnership with a significant other or husband, or being an involved community member.  We feel good about these values—and we should. I want to be all of these things, so do you; it is personally rewarding to know that we’re doing right by those we love.

Beyond the personal, society rewards us for being invested in these womanly pursuits—“She’s such a devoted wife and mother. More women should be like her.” 

We don’t get the same sort of socially sanctioned support for also loving our work with a grand passion. Note that I said “also loving our work…”, not  “…loving our work more than or instead of our personal priorities, including finding a soul mate, personal growth and development, being a loving mom and caring friend.”

Think about it.  Women ought to feel just as great about developing and maximizing our professional interests and talents as we do about putting our hearts and souls into our personal priorities. And we shouldn’t feel that we have to choose between the two; we shouldn’t feel that we face an either/or choice.

A Woman’s “Who I Am” Equation

My vision is that we make a collective shift in thinking where we all understand that our right career path, our true professional calling—our ambitious desire to love our work—is as much a part of the "who I am" equation as feeling that we are good mothers, loyal wives, worthy colleagues. And that we do so with an uncompromising, unyielding belief in our right and ability and obligation to do both. 

You Needn’t Choose

The cornerstone of your capacity to live a life with few regrets is laid when you truly understand, on a visceral level, the importance of loving your work—and earning your worth—no matter where you are in your life and career, and no matter what competing obligations and pressures challenge your resolve to be true to your ambition. Living fully and authentically hinges on your ability to stay connected to the experience of lifelong passion for your work, to remain continually inspired, to stretch, to be open to fresh opportunities, and ultimately to be the best you can at what you do. 

Simply put, your ambition should be nonnegotiable. It fuels the core of your being.

Yet all too often, for women of all ages, ambition is negotiable.

It has been said that "the surest way to keep a man in prison is not to let him know he's there." And the surest way to keep a woman from embracing her pure career ambition is to make her believe she's already done it.

Don't Believe It.

Even in 2007, we women are not advancing in our careers the way we should.

We're not getting the fulfillment we desire or making the money we deserve. And this time it's not men who are holding us back. This time, sisters, we're doing it to ourselves, because ambition—for for us—is still a dirty word.

Don't Believe Me?

Look at yourself in the mirror. Now say these words: "I am successful." It feels good, doesn't it? It makes you smile a little. Now say these words: "I am ambitious." How does that feel? Did you cringe, ever so slightly? Did you say it quietly, afraid someone would hear you?

Let's face it, there's just one word that our culture bestows on that supremely ambitious woman who unrepentantly values a career: bitch. 

Think back to just a couple of weeks ago, when Imus fired off his choice epithet for talented, high-achieving young women.  Yes, a firestorm ensued—but let’s not kid ourselves.  Many individuals, many companies, and many organizations—sometimes openly, sometimes behind closed doors, sometimes said to others, sometimes kept to themselves—still hold a double standard when it comes to women and men and ambition.

Recipe for Disappointment—and For Selling Ourselves and Society Short

Our culture encourages women to derive our sense of self from being selfless, by giving to everyone else first and foremost—even at the expense of our career dreams. Could there be a more confusing, contradictory recipe for self-satisfaction? No wonder we drop kick our dreams!  No wonder so many companies, organizations, and society at large are robbed of our amazing potential and invaluable contributions.  

This Damsels In Success career advice column will show you how being the best woman you can possibly be comes from always staying true to your most ambitious self rather than feeling pressured, under social duress, to put your ambition last, after every other priority in you life.  

We’ll talk about:

- Practical, nuts and bolts strategies for doing meaningful, rewarding work, earning your worth, and making the contribution you were born to make.

- Going after your ambitions dreams without sacrificing your love relationships, without messing up your children, without being a self-absorbed, heartless woman who has no meaningful life outside of work.

- The fact that it’s a myth that we, as ambitious women, have to take one or the other, but that we cannot have both a fulfilling career and a full, happy personal life.

To any ambitious woman, I ask:

Does any part of you unconsciously buy into our prevailing cultural paradigm: ambitious men are go-getters, but ambitious women are selfish, barren bitches? If so, you're not alone. Not to worry. We’re going to change all of that.

Calling all Damsels in Success:  Let’s start talking.

In this column, I invite you to ask any questions and share any thoughts (use your name, write to me anonymously, or request to have your name withheld—it’s your choice). Let’s get the dialogue going so that we ambitious women can, well, create a sea change. 

It’s time to link arms.

It’s time to feel great about achieving our most audacious dreams—at the same time we are wholeheartedly nurturing personal priorities that mean the world to us.  It’s time to stop beating ourselves up if we don’t live up to society’s ideal of having a life that’s perfectly balanced each and every moment of each and every day.

Truth be told, the Holy Grail of work/life balance is but another unattainable socially sanctioned objective that makes us feel like we’re always getting it wrong and that makes us question our right to go after a dream, because we buy into the myth that if we aren’t perfectly balanced, we’re doing something wrong.

It’s time to feel fabulous about earning our worth doing meaningful, challenging work that we love, without guilt, and without self-recrimination. We’re getting there.  If you look around, you can see a course correction in the making.  Can’t you feel something in the air?

Join the Damsels in Success community to keep this fresh, powerful momentum going. Here’s why doing so is critical—to you, to me, and to all of us.

Ambitious Women’s Dirty Little Secret

As founder of the Women's Business Alliance, and as a business psychologist, I've coached thousands of women at every level—from those just starting out to the most powerful executives and entrepreneurs. I began to detect a striking pattern: even self-professed successful women were hitting walls, unable to achieve the next level in their professional lives—and they didn't know why. Certainly they were well aware of the famed glass ceiling, lack of support for those who choose to juggle work and family. However, they had no idea that the greatest factor holding them back was a barrier they themselves had created and internalized.

Seven years ago, I began a systematic investigation of women's attitudes toward ambition. For my new book, amBITCHous: (def.) a woman who 1. makes more money 2. has more power 3. gets the recognition she deserves 4. has the determination to go after her dreams and can do it with integrity, I interviewed more than five hundred women from every corner of the country and between the ages of nineteen and sixty-five.

These were all women who regarded themselves as high-achieving. Many were already quite accomplished. Others were rookies with brand-new, promising careers in front of them. I asked these women how they saw themselves, how they visualized an ambitious woman, and what held them back from achieving even greater success and fulfillment.

I made a fascinating discovery. High-achieving women all harbor the same dirty little secret: we all struggle with socially sanctioned failure to embrace our ambition. We all have the same pernicious audio loop playing between our ears:

Will being as ambitious as I dream of being make me less of a woman? Can I? Should I? Dare I? Have I gone too far? Will it cost me my personal life? Will I make enemies? Will it make those I care about suffer? Is it impossible to be ambitious and happy? Am I charging too much? Am I giving my employer or my clients their money's worth? Is it wrong to care as much about making money as I do about making a meaningful contribution and being fulfilled at work? Will I lose an opportunity if I ask for more money? Who do I think I am calling myself an expert? Do I really know what I'm doing or am I in over my head? Does sticking up for myself and taking credit mean I'm greedy, arrogant and that I'm being unfair to people I work with? Am I deserving of recognition and power? Am I worthy of going after my biggest, most precious career dreams?

Each ambitious woman possesses the same fear: 

If she goes after her dream, she'll be seen—or she'll regard herself—as selfish, bitchy, a bad wife, or a bad mother. But it's exactly this fear of ambition that has forced women to leave the best part of themselves—their dreams, their great talents—by the roadside, rendering them half of what they should be in every area of life.

Ambition isn't a dirty word, but as far as many women are concerned, it might as well be. It doesn't matter where we grew up, went to school, or go to work. It's the same whether we're in our twenties and new to our careers, or in our fifties and sixties and among the most highly-regarded professionals in our industries. Today, the greatest barrier to earning more money, getting the power and recognition we deserve, and feeling entitled to stay the course comes from inside of ourselves. We agonize over whether or not we deserve to be ambitious—and about what it will cost us.

This is emphatically not a game of semantics. The women I've surveyed don't simply prefer the word successful to ambitious. They don't mind being regarded as successful, but they're afraid of being called ambitious.
 
"I still think that girls are encouraged to be nice and to be liked, and to be about the team and everybody else," says Mary Lou Quinlan, founder and CEO of Just Ask a Woman, "To say you're ambitious means you want to rise above everybody else or be different. I don't think we cheer on ambition enough among women....I don't know how many people cheered Carly Fiorina's ambition. Or Andrea Jung's...It's almost like the word is 'am-bitchin'."

"Catherine," thirty-one, an M.D., researcher, and associate clinical professor, echoes her concern: "I think we should throw out the word ambition, because I don't like that word. I like the word aspiration, which means 'a desire with focus.'...Or the word passion. I prefer synonyms rather than the word ambition."

Consider what "Vera," forty-six, and a longtime high-seven-figure earner, famously referred to as a rock star and legend in her corporate industry, said to me:

"I want to change the world. True, I couldn't live without my work, without being inspired every day. I'm successful—things have just sort of fallen into place in my career. But no, I'm not ambitious—I want to effect positive change in the world, yet my family is very important to me."

Women have been told—explicitly or implicitly—not to value their ambition.

Instead, we're spoon-fed a culturally acceptable, watered-down definition of success:  You're successful if you master the work/life equation—if you achieve a "life in balance." We're told that when we master this juggling act, we're "succeeding on our own terms."

Few of us challenge the notion that the accepted definition of success might actually be holding women back because it is couched in such a positive way:

"You don't have to be unabashedly ambitious. You're above all that. You're sophisticated enough to realize that ambition isn't as important as getting the life-balance equation right." Or, "You don't have to be ambitious the way a man is. You've come around to realize that success is a different, and better, goal than ambition. You can win with empathy, cooperation and being generous. You don't have to give up being a woman to get ahead."

Count it as a Pyrrhic victory that our modern, progressive culture is no longer pushing the idea that women cannot have it all.

The message that books and popular media are transmitting is: We can have it all—so long as we're willing to redefine what "it" is. Now it's not the killer job and the great home life; it's balancing the two, which, practically speaking, means less of each: women should be just thrilled to have a not-ideal job and a not-ideal life as long as they feel the two are balanced.

How can we take seriously the necessary soul-searching required to discover what we were meant to do professionally when we never explicitly discuss our pure, unadulterated ambition? When we're pacified with a playbook that praises our "softer side" instead of arming us with hardball techniques? When there's more breathless coverage of Madonna's adoption or alleged marital woes than her phenomenal success as a businesswoman? When we're told we haven't truly succeeded until we're always equally happy at home and at work?

My goal is to address the great hunger on the part of high-aiming women for advice that speaks to our discontent—and to our ambition to be freely ambitious. I have a new message and mission: to convince women that ambition is not a four-letter word. Ambition is the best of who you are. You owe it to yourself and the world to make the contribution you were born to make.

Here's my challenge to you:

Go down just as hard for your ambition as you do for any other primary priority in your life, be it lover, friend, child, community.

Think about how a woman whose child is under attack becomes like a mother bear protecting her cub. My own son, Devin, now a sophomore in college, once said to me, after I’d fiercely advocated on his and his classmates’ behalf to have a verbally abusive second-grade teacher removed from her post:  “Mom—you’re like my lawyer.”  We women won’t stand for having our loved ones’ needs sacrificed or compromised for any reason.  I’m proud of being her; I’m sure you’re equally proud of being that woman.  

I’m also proud of my ambition.  I encourage you to fiercely protect your own big ambition dreams—every bit as much as you protect loved ones and personal priorities that mean the world to you. Please—don’t sacrifice your ambition for any reason. I’m here to tell you that either/or is a choice you do not have to make.  In this column, we’re going to talk about real ways to make your life—personal and professional—work, without sacrificing either.

If you don't go down hard for your ambition, you're letting the best part of you, the part that the world deserves to have you contribute, rot in a basement. In 2007 and beyond, let's get her out.

Wouldn’t It Be Great?

Wouldn't it be great if you could reclaim and redefine ambition in its most gloriously positive sense? Wouldn't it be inspiring if you could acknowledge straight up, to yourself and to others, that you have big, wild, and precious professional goals? That you crave excellence? Wouldn't it feel great to challenge yourself fiercely?

Wouldn't it be great if you believed that you could be audaciously ambitious and happy at the same time? Wouldn't it feel great to trust that you could achieve your career goals without compromising your personal life, but rather enhancing it? Wouldn't it be so freeing to acknowledge, in your core, that your ambitious goals are sacrosanct, just as inviolable as other nonnegotiable priorities in your life?

Wouldn't it be such a relief to know deep down that you are great at what you do? Wouldn't you feel fabulous if you could bitch-slap that doubting voice in your head that accuses you of not having earned your spot at the grown-ups' table, of not deserving your share of the power, the recognition, the credit—and the money?

Wouldn't it be great to be a Damsel in Success?

Deborah Saweuyer-Parks thinks this way. She is founder, president, and CEO of Homestead Capital, a huge powerhouse now in ten western states created to address the lack of affordable housing. Deborah thrives on her ambition—and aggressively counsels women who work for her to do the same:

"I believe opportunity is limitless. I am very ambitious. And yes I'm incredibly passionate about my work, but I'm equally passionate about my family, I'm equally passionate about my friends. I think you just have to manage your life so that you can be a full recipient of all of it."

In 2007, let's redefine ambition as a virtue, not a dirty word.

Embracing a virtuous definition of winning as an ambitious woman who believes that the world deserves to hear from her means following three golden rules:

1. You must feel entitled to earn your worth.
You must be able to charge your full marketplace value without self-reproach, without leaving money on the table, and without feeling like an impostor because you make as much as—or more than—a man.

2. You must love your work.
You must be willing to aggressively pursue the professional work you were meant to do and to strive for any career opportunities that inspire you.

3. You must regard your deepest career aspirations as unconditionally sacrosanct.
The real way to have a great life is to see your career ambition as a part of your value system to which you must give equal attention, along with other non-negotiable priorities in your life, including your partner, your kids, your friends.

Shine the Light on Your Ambition

My guess is that if you’re reading this, you too are a woman who struggles with these issues. You too are dying for advice and encouragement on how to stay true to your ambitious career dreams without sacrificing your personal life.

Perhaps you’re barely twenty and are already feeling stymied from the get-go. Perhaps you’re relatively new to the business world but are already experiencing Sisyphean battles in keeping your professional goals at the forefront of your life. Perhaps you’ve been momentarily derailed—by deciding to relocate with a boyfriend so that he can do his ambition dream first, before it’s your turn? or marriage? kids? An ailing loved one? Your own illness? Burned out and biding your time?—and you’re finding that that moment is stretching into infinity. You need help getting back on track. Or perhaps you’ve been in the game for a long time, but you’re not advancing the way you’d like to—or feel you deserve.

No matter where you are in your career, to say that you’ve worked hard is a major understatement. This is undoubtedly true whether you’re a student or recent graduate, or a professional who is well on the way to doing so. You’ve paid your dues. You’re willing to pay plenty more. You’ve had some serious chunks taken from your hide. You’ve had the s___t kicked out of you. You’ve hung in there and pored over your mistakes to figure out how to do it better next time. You’ve built up substantive knowledge and business acumen. You’ve gotten tougher when it comes to taking and learning from criticism. You’ve become more skilled at using your instincts in the marketplace. You’ve gotten into the tough game of business, and you fight every day to keep yourself in.

Yet somehow, for some reason, something’s not quite right. You’re not satisfied. Sometimes you feel that you’re settling for less in your career when what you really want is more. Sometimes your gut tells you that you’re holding yourself back, if ever so slightly, from wholeheartedly going for it where your most ambitious career goals are concerned. Something inside of you wants to be free to be as bold as you want to be. Yet it’s as if you’re pulling back on your own reins.

Here’s What I Know to be True

First, you give a woman support for being ambitious. You encourage her to see that she can have a great, happy life—at home and at work. And you show her that, counterintuitive though our culture makes it seem, the real life course for becoming the happiest woman, the best friend, lover, spouse, mother, and community member she can possibly be is always to honor her ambition as a virtue. You support her to see that the real way to make the contribution she was born to make is to place her inspiring career dreams at the top of her priorities list, not at the bottom of the pile.
Next you give her gold-standard business information and strategies that are easy to use in her day-to-day work and personal life. You show her simple, effective, potent tactics that build on one another and that empower her to hit her career targets.

Then a lightbulb goes on in her consciousness. And she never looks back.

She takes charge of her career destiny. She learns to insist firmly on getting paid what she’s worth. She feels powerful in a new way—and owning it feels comfortable to her. She learns to feel great about being recognized for her professional accomplishments. She learns to set boundaries with colleagues and people in her personal life so that her needs get met, not trampled on. She learns that she can act with integrity and treat others like human beings, but that she feels just fine about the fact that not everyone is going to like her when she stands up to those who would steal her thunder.

She now appreciates the fact that her ambition is a virtue, not a vice—and realizes that she owes it to herself and the world to make the contribution she was born to make. 

I’ve seen this transformation occur with thousands of women I’ve worked with. I’m here to support that same shift in you.

In this column, we’ll talk about ways to get a handle on the overt messages we have been taught about being ambitious women, the covert messages that have filtered in unconsciously, and the self-sabotaging behaviors they cause. I’ll offer proven, fresh solutions—the same ones I use with my career-advising and executive-coaching clients—to help you’ you overcome these internalized barriers.

By the way, none of these strategies will ask you simply to think more like a man. (And by the way, no male bashing and no whining will appear in our discussions either!)  My positive, forward-thinking solutions will help draw effective boundaries around your positive qualities so they won’t work against you. Once you learn to do this, you’ll be free. You can dare to be truly great on your own terms. You’ll be able to redefine the meaning of ambition and embrace the value of unleashing your sacrosanct career dreams.

Protect Your Passion

"I got really serious about deciding what does make me feel alive. What makes me feel like I can face myself every morning? And to me that was living my dream. You know everybody has them. I decided it's all that mattered in the world and that I'd rather die than not live my dream—it just wasn't worth it to be alive otherwise. And this [her singing career] came along and since then I've had no problem getting up working twenty hour days and touring forty cities every thirty days because I feel a lot less alone and I also feel like I get to help other people too, and that gives me great fulfillment." -Jewel, recording artist, interviewed by Sarah McLachlan.

Protect your passion. As a Damsel in Success, as the ambitious woman you are entitled to be, I encourage you to answer for yourself, every day, a question posed in Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day":

Tell me, What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I look forward to hearing from you and to continuing our discussion!

Sincerely and ambitiously,
Dr. Debra Condren.  (And, please—call me Debra!)