The dance between ambition & inner peace

How I crashed & burned, and recuperated all within a week

This past week I sort of crashed and burned. My creative juices were flowing more than usual, largely contributed by 1) my coaching sessions going super well with clients and 2) enjoying my current lifestyle deeply.

Sounds healthy on the surface, but examining those statements more closely, you can imagine how easily the desire to replicate my experience for as long as possible crept up on me. In other words, attachment, clinging…and other Eastern philosophical terms for getting greedy.

I’m intentionally waiting 2 months before I go hard in the paint on my coaching practice because it’ll become the most important thing in my life during daytime hours while my daughter starts daycare and my wife resumes her career.

Until then, I’m doing my best to be hyper-aware of the true cost of pursuing my creative ambition in these last couple of months where my presence and support can dramatically improve the quality of life of the two people I care about most.

The energy I had coming out of sessions with my coaching clients was so peak that I started dreaming about having a fully established coaching practice before my sabbatical is over and I return to a job I also happen to love. You know, the thing that takes 5-10 years for the best in their field to build.

“Imagine having it all?” is my paraphrasing of the much more cunning wording of my internal dialogue.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to dream and then take action on it, especially when it’s in the Ikigai bullseye of achieving purpose, community, wealth, and skillset.

My recurring issue, which I was able to catch faster than previous attempts, is that healthy ambition, which is derived from intrinsic sources of creativity and curiosity, morphs into unhealthy ambition rooted in craving, attachment, and greed without me noticing.

What is pure action coming from my soul gets tampered with by my ego. It turned my ambition to build a coaching practice in a sustainable way that meets my needs into the greed of building a coaching practice in 4 months that exceeds my needs and addresses my luxurious wants.

So with my impure motivation, I took action. I found the most established people coaching on things I want to coach on, read their writing, studied their processes in their documents, their marketing and pricing, connected with them…and before I knew it, felt demoralized.

My action was suddenly driven by the fear of not being able to have a full-fledged coaching practice in a few months, instead of my initial motivation of gradually growing it over a few years.

What got my head out of my ass, frankly speaking, was talking with some friends who know about my ambition for coaching. They reflected to me the stupidity that I’d been acting on and then I quickly saw how unfair I was being to my inner self who had the best of intentions.

What solidified this insight was meditation. This morning, it felt like all the stress that was created by my well-intentioned ambition got washed away and I returned back to my Self (the spacing is intentional).

There’s nothing wrong with this dance between ambition I started with this week and the inner peace I’ve returned to. It’s no different than dying & yang, ebb & flow, dark & light, and any other perceived duality.

What’s important is not focusing on which side you’re in, but how you’re dancing from one side to another.

This time, more than ever, I was gentle with myself in this transition that is inevitable if I continue to honour all parts of my being.

As a result, my ambition didn’t run away because I didn’t shoo it away; instead, the fire of ambition continues to burn as I write this. The difference is that there isn’t smoke clouding my intentions and actions.