#No ambition professional

That means not only mastering the skills required to pursue your ambitions but also seizing opportunities to demonstrate those skills in arenas where your talents will be valued and publicly praised. To sustain your ambitions, formulate life plans that enable you to earn recognition based on talent, skill, or work-not physical appearance or subservience. Carve out a life for yourself that has profound meaning and immense satisfaction.

To rise above the confusion, assert your own values, priorities, and identity. Women have too many conflicting roles thrust on them: devoted mother, sex symbol, innovative professional, supportive wife, competent employee, talented homemaker. Therefore, organize with other women to form a political constituency with one goal: supporting mothers in the workforce and mothers who choose to remain at home. Women pursue their ambitions only when confident they won’t put their children’s care at risk. Women can use these strategies to defy the odds stacked against their ambitions: Organize Politically When women master new skills and actively claim recognition, they achieve more of their goals-enriching themselves and their organizations. To reverse the situation, women must get ambitious about ambition-including cultivating connections with people who have the power to advance their work and publicly praise their successes. Deeming their work lives unfulfilling, many leave their jobs. Result? To be seen as feminine, women deny their ambitiousness, cede recognition to men-and abandon their dreams.

And they receive scant praise for achievements and personal qualities (drive, decisiveness, assertiveness) that conflict with traditional notions of femininity. Many soon associate ambition with egotism or selfishness.

#No ambition professional

They fully expect to master important skills and earn recognition for their successes-the two essential ingredients of achievement.īut when girls become women and enter the professional arena or start families, they succumb to powerful cultural imperatives that equate ambition and quests for recognition with lack of femininity. So why do many of them walk away from their dreams? It’s not that they lack ambition: Young girls confidently envision becoming renowned business leaders, diplomats, artists, and scientists. Women today have more opportunities than ever to pursue major life goals. They must band together, learn to blow their own horns, and structure their lives in a way that promotes recognition. There are no easy solutions, but there are ways women can hold fast to their dreams. Women face the reality that to appear feminine, they must provide or relinquish scarce resources to others-and recognition is indeed a scarce resource.Īlthough women have more opportunities than ever before, they still come under social scrutiny that makes hard choices-such as when and whether to start a family or advance in the workplace-even harder. The underlying problem has to do with cultural ideals of femininity. Research has shown that such behavior varies according to social context: Women more openly seek and compete for affirmation when they are with other women, but they behave differently when competing with men. But the fear of recognition that many women express suggests otherwise. One could chalk up this behavior to women’s innate modesty or see it as a passive way of highlighting their accomplishments. Most women are demure when praised for their achievements. Yet there are dramatic differences in how women and men create, reconfigure, and realize (or abandon) their goals. And what’s true in childhood is no less true in later life: We all want our efforts and accomplishments acknowledged. In nearly all childhood ambitions, two distinct factors are in place: the mastery of a special skill, and recognition for it. Their goals are grand, and they make no apologies for them. In childhood, the research uncovered, girls are clear about their ambitions.

Getting to the bottom of why this is so required study of what ambition consists of-for both sexes. Most women, however, associate ambition with egotism, self-aggrandizement, or manipulation. For men, ambition is considered a necessary and desirable part of life.