Ambition was never meant to be linear
It’s coming up to two years since I stepped into my greatest role — my biggest promotion, and the goal I had worked towards for so many years: becoming a mother.
And yet, recently, I’ve found myself returning to the same questions again and again:
“What are my goals now? What do I want to achieve?”
After a career shaped by progression, promotion, annual objectives and five-year plans, I was surprised by how difficult these questions felt to answer. Instead, a quieter and more unsettling thought kept surfacing:
“Have I lost my ambition?”
For most of my life, ambition had been framed as something that must be visible, linear, and constantly accelerating. When that familiar shape no longer fit, I assumed ambition itself had diminished.
But on reflection, I’ve realised the mistake I was making:
I was trying to go back — back to a version of myself that existed under very different conditions.
What helped was turning, as I often do, to research.
The first body of research that resonated focuses on motivation and goal adaptation.
This work consistently shows that ambition does not disappear under constraint — it becomes more selective. When circumstances change, people naturally move from expansive goal pursuit to values-led goal refinement, directing effort toward what feels most meaningful rather than most visible (career transition research, Journal of Vocational Behaviour).
The second was Beyond the Ladder, a report by Chief, which explores how senior women are redefining ambition and success. It found that:
• Senior women leaders are stepping into power with renewed focus and redefined purpose
• Ambition increasingly includes autonomy, influence, and flexibility — alongside financial success
• Success is no longer linear; it is multi-dimensional and often portfolio-based, with 52% of women maintaining a portfolio approach even within corporate roles
I also found myself returning to something far simpler. The Cambridge Dictionary defines ambition as: “A strong wish to achieve something.”
Nothing about visibility. Nothing about ladders. Nothing about pace.
Stepping into your greatest role doesn’t mean choosing between who you were and who you are now. It means allowing identity, ambition, time, and power to take on new shapes, without assuming that change equals loss.
If this resonates, I’m curious about your experience.
I’m beginning to gather reflections from women navigating this shift — not to fix it, but to understand it better. If you’d like to be part of that conversation, you’re welcome to share a thought, a question, or a moment of recognition in the comments or by replying here.