I asked 40 women one question

On a whim, while getting ready for my first book event last Thursday, I decided I wanted to know what the women coming into that room were ambitious for… So my daughter and I cobbled together a sign at the last minute. We found some colorful pens and grabbed a stack of the little note cards I usually use to put messages in lunchboxes, and wrote one question:

What are you ambitious for?

I put everything on a table in the corner of the bookstore and, at the end of the evening, asked people to write down their answers before they left.

And then I put a rubber band around the cards, brought them home, and didn’t look at them for a week.

(This is more or less how my life is going right now btw—great ideas, very little time)

Then, when I sat down to write this and realized I didn’t have much left in me to write, I finally pulled them out. Now I have a lot to say once again.

I went through them one at a time.

Getting a promotion at work.
Becoming a judge.
Being a leader in my organization.
My children + me.
My health + happiness.
Enjoying as many moments as I can.
Creating happiness for all mothers.
Getting the best out of my kids and finding my own adventure professionally.
To live my truth.

I don’t know who wrote what, but as I read each one, I found myself pausing for a moment with the person who had written it anyway. I thanked her for coming and for sharing. And I thought, “What a beautiful thing to be ambitious for.”

And then I started spreading them across my dining room table.

As they accumulated, in different handwriting and different colors and with completely different versions of what it means to want something, I had this feeling of: Yes. This.

This is the conversation I have been trying to have.

One of the central premises of Ambitious Mother is that ambition isn’t inherently good or bad. What matters is whether we have actually chosen what we are striving toward.

And looking at that table, I could see the web of ambition in real time.

There wasn’t a right answer.

A judgeship could sit beside health. A promotion beside time with your children. Becoming a better leader beside finding peace within yourself.

All of them counted. And all of them could be part of being a good mother.

I’ve been thinking, too, about how different it feels to ask “Are you ambitious?” versus “What are you ambitious for?”

Are you ambitious? makes it binary. Yes or no. Ambitious or not ambitious. What are you ambitious for? assumes something different.

It assumes we all have things we want. That we can all be active seekers in our own lives. And that perhaps what we need isn’t permission to be ambitious so much as permission to name what our ambition actually is.

That’s part of why I asked everyone to write it down. Thinking I want this is one thing. Putting it onto paper makes it a little more real. Letting other people see it makes it a little vulnerable too.

I want this.

Seeing all those wants sitting beside one another yesterday that brought me back to the room itself.

I have conversations for a living.

I have them with clients. I facilitate them in groups and organizations. I have them behind podcast microphones and on stages. But there is something different that happens when we get into a room together.

At that first event, we laughed together. Women asked questions and other women responded. At one point my own mother piped up with a second answer to someone’s question, which was not exactly something I’d planned for the evening.

The event was supposed to end at 8:05, and at 8:45, the bookstore was basically kicking us out because people were still talking.

Later, someone emailed me to tell me that the conversation had followed her into the car. She and a friend had spent almost their entire hour-long drive home continuing to talk about the things the evening had stirred up.

I’ve been mulling over that experience all week. And then yesterday, something clicked for me.

I was doing a virtual event with Fast Company, and one of the women there asked me about something I call “pretending.”

Pretending is one of the ways so many women get through all of this. We pretend we’re fine. We pretend we’re managing. We pretend we don’t need help. Sometimes we pretend we don’t want things that we very much do.

In my office, women stop pretending—but what if there were more spaces where they could do that?

I’ve thought about this before, of course. It’s part of why I run groups. I can tell a woman individually, Trust me, you are not the only person struggling with this, but it’s different when she can look across a room or across a Zoom screen and see it for herself.

Oh. For real. Me too.

What I hadn’t put together until that first event, and then much more explicitly yesterday, was that maybe this is part of what this book tour is becoming too.

Rooms where we don’t have to pretend quite so much. Where a woman can say, I work 60 hours a week and I am still a good mom.

Or, I don’t volunteer for the PTA. I don’t have time. Or, we get takeout four nights a week. Or, I have a really big dream and I want to pursue it alongside raising my children.

And someone else gets to hear that and think: Oh, thank God. Me too.

There’s something about experiencing that in real time that can’t quite be replicated by reading about it. We need other people. We need to see ourselves reflected back to us sometimes, not because we’re all making the same choices, but because we’re not.

And that’s what I loved so much about the cards spread across my table.

Every woman had her own answer. And every answer belonged.

I don’t know yet what that means for this tour, or what happens after the official tour ends. Maybe these rooms become something else. Maybe they don’t. I’m still figuring that part out. (Ideas here? Let me know!)

But I do know that every time I get into one of them, it makes me want to do it again.

Because I get to see, in real time, what happens when women understand a little more about why this has all felt so hard, when we realize we aren’t the only ones figuring it out, and when we give ourselves permission to ask a question we may not have asked in a while:

What do I actually want?

So, yes, I’m going to use this space to invite you to come join me because I’m becoming more and more convinced that we need them.

I’ll be in ​San Francisco​ next week, where we’re building even more time into the event to experience some of this together. Then ​Exeter, New Hampshire​; ​Philadelphia​; and ​New York​, with Raleigh after that and Chicago in the works.

If I’m somewhere near you, come. Bring a friend. Bring the person you always end up having the big conversations with on the drive home.

Come see what it feels like to not have to pretend for an hour or two.

And if I’m not coming anywhere near you, you can still start where we started last Thursday.

Find a piece of paper. And write down your answer.

What are you ambitious for?