ponder | the boundaries of ambition

Don't let anyone crush your dreams, but don't let your dreams crush you. 

Here I am in the middle of my annual work busy season, where my team and I work around the clock to try and help our clients meet their deadlines. I've been doing this for 4 years now, so I have become accustomed to the pace and the expectations that come with being a consultant. However, this year I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated about small things, to the point that I feel like I should take up weekly Body Combat classes (and punch some imaginary heads in). So I've been spending the last few months exploring that in my mind in order to try and pin-point the source of my frustrations. 

Here is what I found - unbeknownst to my conscious mind, my subconscious has latched on to my ambitious goals and instead of being supportive as I try and kick through my daily goals, my mind has wrapped itself into a loop of negative self-talk, one of the most destructive behaviours that an ambitious person can ever engage in. 

Here is an example of a typical conversation that has been playing in my mind in recently: 

"Here we go, another startup success story in the news. Oh look, the founder is under 30, surprise surprise! Oh and they started this while they were working full-time in a corporate job, and decided to ditch the suits to pursue their passion instead and now they're expanding their business into 10 different countries and have just raised $200 million in seed funding. Here you are still going to work in a traditional firm, going down a path that many have tread before which you didn't even plan on treading in the first place so why are you still here?! Well anyway, you've got another 4 years to make something of yourself before turning 30 so tick tock!" 

Another example: 

"Didn't you want to start your own stationery line 2 years ago? What's happening with that? Look at all these people on Instagram just building up followers and their business within months. Why is it taking you so long? What's the point in spending your every day trying to meet other people's expectations at work/life when you're not moving forward with your own goals?! What kind of person fails at goals that they have set for themselves?" 

Vicious isn't it? That is how I have been talking to myself for the last couple of months and even writing those two examples have brought me to tears. To think that I would never talk like that to a friend, to a colleague or to a person that I'm mentoring, yet here I am talking to myself like that almost on a daily basis. No wonder I am frustrated. 

I think it is definitely important for us to have ambition, and to have dreams and aim for big goals. Ambition propels us forward and encourages us to strive to be the best that we can be. Certainly it is a trait that is appreciated in society and almost synonymous with success. But now I know that when ambition becomes destructive, it is a sign that we should check in with ourselves and re-align our goals. Otherwise, we risk crushing our own dreams and sabotaging our own efforts in performing at our very best. 

This also came up in conversation with my mentor this week, who acknowledged that she herself had experienced negative self-talk and feelings of guilt when she could not tick off on a goal, especially if the goal is not achieved within the time frame that she had originally envisioned. But then again, she said, what is the time frame but an arbitrary deadline set for yourself when there were still uncertainties as to how things would pan out? What is the point then in beating yourself up when you don't achieve an arbitrary deadline, or when you realise that your goals are now different because you want to pursue a different direction, maybe even a direction that had been previously unknown to you. 

I must admit, I have not found the magic solution yet on how to suddenly stop this train of negative self-talk. But I am gradually seeing how this kind of thinking can take one further and further away from achieving their dreams. So instead of continuously prodding my mind with questions about "why haven't you done this or that", I am now learning to set boundaries for my ambition and to work on the ways that I "talk" to myself so that I am not crushing the dreams in the process of trying to achieve them. 

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: 

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." 

xoxo