Hi {{ Name | there }},
I’m excited to bring you a guest post by Jessica Wilen, PhD, LCSW, PCC, an executive coach, regular columnist for Fast Company and author of A Cup of Ambition, a newsletter for high-achieving working moms. We have a shared passion to help driven moms build meaningful careers and be connected to their kids. Today’s post is a perfect follow-up to my email last week about the Third Path. Enjoy!
Ambition is one of those words women learn to be careful with.
Say you’re ambitious, and people quietly start wondering what you’re willing to sacrifice. Say you’re a working mother, and they wonder how committed you really are. Say you’re both, and suddenly the room feels… tense.
I didn’t set out to write about ambition. I just kept noticing how many capable, thoughtful women were saying some version of the same thing to me, often in a lowered voice: I still want more, but I don’t want it the way I used to.
That sentence has stayed with me. Not because it sounds conflicted, but because it’s honest. For many of us, ambition doesn’t disappear, but it does change.
Before I had kids, ambition looked pretty clean and legible: titles, trajectory, momentum. I worked at a prestigious institution, did work I believed in, and could explain my job without qualifiers. There was a rhythm to it, a sense that I was doing things “the right way,” moving forward in ways that made sense to other people.
Then I became a parent, and the frame widened.
I still cared deeply about my work. I just cared about other things, too—being present in my own life, not constantly performing seriousness, not having to prove (over and over) that motherhood hadn’t somehow dulled my edge. I remember being pregnant and proud of a role I had essentially designed myself, only to be warned that becoming a mother might soften my ambition.
It didn’t. But it did make me more selective.
Ambition Isn’t Linear… and That’s Not a Problem
One of the quieter lies we tell working mothers is that ambition should move in a straight line. That if it pauses, softens, or reroutes, something must be wrong. That clarity should always look like acceleration.
But real ambition—adult ambition—rarely works that way. It expands and contracts. It responds to context. It makes room for complexity. Wanting meaningful work and a meaningful life isn’t a contradiction; it’s often a sign that someone is paying attention.
Many of the women I work with aren’t less driven than they used to be. They’re more discerning. They’re asking better questions: What’s actually worth my energy right now? What kind of leadership do I want to practice? What version of myself do I want my children to see?
Those questions don’t signal fading ambition. They signal clarity.
Parenthood Is Not a Professional Liability
Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the idea that good leadership requires separation—that the most credible professionals are the ones least encumbered by real life.
So we turn off our cameras when a kid is home sick. We apologize for interruptions. We try to keep our parenthood neatly out of view.
But this is a real disservice, because parenting sharpens skills most organizations desperately need. Parents develop emotional range. We read rooms quickly We negotiate constantly. We tolerate ambiguity. We recover when things don’t go as planned (because they rarely do). We learn how to influence and how to set boundaries without losing connection.
That’s leadership. Not the theoretical kind. The lived kind.
The irony is that many women underestimate how much parenting has strengthened their professional judgment. Not despite the messiness, but because of it.
A Different Kind of Ambition
The ambition I care about now isn’t about constant acceleration. It’s about alignment.
It’s about doing work that feels meaningful enough while staying connected to the people and values that matter most. It’s about resisting the false choice between achievement and presence. It’s about letting ambition grow up alongside us, instead of forcing it to look the way it did ten or fifteen years ago. For working mothers, ambition doesn’t need defending, it needs reframing.
And if you’ve felt unsure how to name what you want—or worried that wanting multiple things means you’re unfocused—consider this permission to stop explaining yourself. Ambition doesn’t have to look the way it used to.
Sometimes, it looks like wisdom.
In my coaching work, I sit with women in exactly this in-between space: successful, capable, often outwardly “fine,” but quietly renegotiating what ambition means now. Not because they’re stepping back, but because they’re stepping into something more honest—and often more sustainable. The work isn’t about fixing ambition. It’s about making room for it to evolve.
Was this email forwarded to you?