Unleash Your Secret Ambitions

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Unleash Your Secret Ambitions

Do you have ambitions that you can’t even muster the courage to whisper to yourself? A lot of us do. Why is that? It’s one thing to not shout your ambition from the rooftop, but to be unable to even admit it to ourselves? Why can’t we do that?

Last week, I talked about the difference between our True Self and our Role Self—and how our Role Self keeps us from having real, lasting impact. There’s another thing our Role Selves do: they limit our ambitions—because they limit what we believe we can accomplish.

No matter who you are, you end up with roles projected onto you. If you’re the oldest child in the family, you’re expected to be the responsible one. If you were labeled the class clown in school, you aren’t expected to do anything serious. Society can be particularly hard on women and people of color in this regard. We end up spending years living inside these roles and shushing that other, quieter voice—because the Role Self is afraid of what it has to say.

Our Role Self worries about what others will think. It worries that you’re not good enough or that realizing your dreams will mean leaving some people behind. It worries that acting on our ambition might require a different version of ourselves that we aren’t ready to create.

When you hear those whispered secret ambitions, that’s your True Self trying to get your attention. Sometimes it takes something major for us to finally pay attention to that voice. For me, that was being diagnosed with breast cancer. When I heard those words, “it’s cancer,” everything went into slow motion and I thought, “But wait, I haven’t reached my full potential yet.” Even though I had done amazing things in my career up to that point! My soul was telling me that it had other ambitions.

So how do you unleash your secret ambitions??

Get in touch with your True Self. Go back to last week’s Leading with Your Soul and do the True Self vs. Role Self exercise. Get in touch with who you were before you got buried under everyone else’s expectations.

Normalize bigness in yourself. You were born with greatness. Start thinking of yourself as already great.

Take small steps in order to take big steps. My nephew reminded me of a quote by Bill Gates: “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.”

Keep a hype team around you. Put together your own board of directors to mentor and motivate you. And it needs to be a team, not just one person. Just like a sports team, one person can’t play every role for you.

Give voice to that secret ambition. When you say it out loud, it ceases to be a secret. You don’t need to share it with people whom you know won’t support it. But you do need to give voice to it, even if it’s just to yourself or in your prayers. You have more than enough soul power to realize your ambitions.

To help unleash your ambition, join my live mentorship program below.