Lara Schmoisman (00:12)
Hi guys, welcome back to coffee number five. And my God, we have such a busy schedule this month, but we have an incredible guests, don’t we? And today we’re gonna go a little bit of track here, but at the same time is on track because who doesn’t in the business and all the people that we have here, ambition. We don’t get where we are without having ambition, right? Amina?

Amina AlTai (00:39)
That’s right. You nailed it. You got it right. It’s perfect.

Lara Schmoisman (00:39)
Did I say it right? No. ⁓ my god, I

did it for once. Welcome to copy number five. And okay, you are the writer of the author of the Ambition trap. And I was telling you that ambition could be a scary word. For a lot of people it’s a negative word, but to me it’s kind of sexy. I knew it for you too.

Amina AlTai (00:47)
Thank you.

That’s right.

Mm-hmm.

I fall into the same camp. Ambition is a really interesting word because it’s one of those politically loaded words that will either highlight our benefits or our drawbacks depending on our identity, right? If you’re an ambitious woman, you often experience an ambition penalty, right? Where your ambition is penalized. But if you’re an ambitious man, that’s really celebrated. And if you’re an immigrant, a person of color, there’s all those complexities that make our ambition often difficult to express. So in the book, one of the things…

Lara Schmoisman (01:29)
Let’s start from the beginning. What is ambition to you?

Amina AlTai (01:31)
Yeah.

Yeah. So I define ambition as a desire for more life, a wish to grow, a wish to unfold. And it’s neutral and natural. And it’s in every living thing on the planet, from plants to humans. And we live in a world that has a bit of a complicated relationship with ambition because some people actually, Resume Lab did a study and they found that 4 % of people think that ambition’s about winning.

43 % of people think that ambition is about distinctions and achievements, and 53 % of people think that ambition is about growth. So I agree with that 53%. I think that it’s about growth. Yeah.

Lara Schmoisman (02:06)
Me too.

And it’s about possibilities.

Amina AlTai (02:10)
Yeah, it’s about a desire

for more. And I think that’s a beautiful thing, a desire for more life. But here’s the caveat. Though it’s a beautiful thing, I think that there’s two orientations of it. We can have painful ambition, which is driven by our core wounds, or we can have more purposeful ambition that’s connected to our truth. And I’m sure you’re living into that more purposeful paradigm, but a lot of what we see in the world is that more painful ambition.

Lara Schmoisman (02:34)
but also was thinking about all the people that that I say well I’m not that ambition and but everyone is worth and a very popular word that we have out there right now is manifestation. Manifestation is not that far from ambition you’re manifesting something that you want that you you have the ambition to have.

Amina AlTai (02:39)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with you, right? So when I was socializing the idea about the book and the conversation of ambition, people fell into two camps. The first camp was I’m really ambitious, but that ambition has kind of been expensive. Like it costs me my health, my relationships, my joy, and that’s my story. And then there were people that fell into another camp and they said, I’ve only seen a toxic version of ambition. So I kind of reject it. But I think that those of us that reject ambition are, we’ve only seen that dysfunctional version of it. We’ve only seen what I call painful ambition.

And so I think everybody is ambitious.

Lara Schmoisman (03:27)
the painful condition. What is that?

Amina AlTai (03:29)
Yeah.

Painful ambition is ambition that is driven by our core wounds. So every single human has a core wound. It’s just a very human rite of passage. And for every wound, we wear a corresponding mask. So the wounds are rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, and injustice. And so for example, if you have an abandonment wound, the mask you wear is dependence, where you’re often overly emotionally reliant on people.

Lara Schmoisman (03:53)
Yeah.

Amina AlTai (03:53)
If you have a rejection wound, the mask you wear is avoidance or withdrawal, right? Where you will avoid conflict or not throw your hat in the ring for things. If you have a betrayal wound, the mask you wear is control, where you try to control everything. If you have a humiliation wound, the mask you’ll wear is martyrdom or masochism, where you’ll be overly helpful, know, hurting yourself to put others first. And then if you have an injustice wound, the mask you’ll wear is rigidity or perfectionism.

And when our ambition is built upon those wounds or those masks, it’s kind of a house of cards.

Lara Schmoisman (04:25)
So can you get over this time condition?

Amina AlTai (04:27)
Yeah.

So I don’t like to use the word heel, right? Because I feel like we want to wave a magic wand and never feel that thing again. And I think that every next level of growth, some of these wounds will tap us on the shoulders. in my work as a coach, I really think that 80 % of it is awareness. So as soon as you kind of start to notice which is your wound or your mask, you’ll see it everywhere. Like when I shared those wounds or those masks with you, did one or two jump out at you?

Lara Schmoisman (04:53)
Yeah, absolutely. I think all of them.

Amina AlTai (04:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of us will have all

of them, right? I have three. And then, so for example, betrayal and control. So the betrayal wound is mine and the control mask. And as soon as I saw that, I could see control everywhere. And as soon as you see it, you say, hey, you know, maybe I can choose something else in this moment, right? It’s a moment to moment practice. And so I don’t love the language of heal because it makes it feel like one and done. But I do think that we can do a lot of work and just noticing them shifts us dramatically.

Lara Schmoisman (05:15)
Yeah.

Absolutely, feel like noticing our pain points is the first step of overcoming.

Amina AlTai (05:27)
Exactly, exactly right.

Lara Schmoisman (05:30)
So what does it take to have the right mindset to have a healthy ambition?

Amina AlTai (05:37)
Yeah, well, first and foremost, we want to identify those core wounds and see if we can choose not to be coming from them, right? Because every single story that we see in the world of painful ambition and these dramatic business crashes, usually it’s somebody coming from a core wound, right? We’ve got so many examples of them in the world. And so in painful ambition, we’re driven by the core wounds. In purposeful ambition, we’re connected to our truth and our deeper why. We’re really collaborative versus being hyper individualistic.

we take aligned action as opposed to moving with unsustainable urgency. We’re really focused on our deep why, our deep purpose versus just needing to win and shine as an individual. So there’s these different traits of purposeful ambition. But I think one of the biggest ways that we pivot into it is by acknowledging and looking at those core wounds.

Lara Schmoisman (06:22)
How we satisfy our ambition? Is there a point that I felt satisfied? I don’t have an ambition anymore or when you get to a point you get into new ambitions?

Amina AlTai (06:34)
Yeah, so it’s just a

desire for more life. And I think as long as we’re alive, we’re gonna have a desire for more life. And when I put together the framework on purposeful ambition, there’s five parts that allow us to do purposeful work. And one of the pieces is contentment, right? And so many people are like, how do ambition and contentment sit side by side? Well, contentment from Eastern traditions translates into English as unconditional wholeness or the knowledge of enough.

So it’s this idea that regardless of what we achieve on the outside, we have this knowing inside of ourselves that we are enough. We have this knowledge of enough. We have this unconditional wholeness. And so I don’t think that ambition is more for more sake all the time. I think that never ending reach toward the sky is problematic. I think ambition goes in cycles and we have seasons where we’re really ambitious and we really want to grow. And then we have seasons where we rest and we go underground. So I think it’s contentment based and it needs to be cyclical. So it’s not about more, more, more, more all the time.

Lara Schmoisman (07:27)
So when this concept of ambition came to you or something that you were experiencing through your coaching and you were seeing it in people, was a painful, how do you start? Because this is a very unique word that I don’t think that we use it enough in our vocabulary for once. But also I feel like it’s something that it was coming through your, I don’t know, patients, clients.

Amina AlTai (07:46)
Mm.

Lara Schmoisman (07:56)
Noticing lack of ambition, too much ambition, how did you come out with this book and with this concept?

Amina AlTai (08:04)
I honestly feel like I’ve been a student of ambition my whole life. I’m the child of immigrants and watched my dad when he first came to this country have a really interesting relationship with ambition. I picked up a lot of those traits. My origin story is that I started my career in marketing and brand management, but I was very ambitious and was like, let me just do all these things, but I was coming from painful ambition. I ended up getting really sick and burning out and developing two autoimmune diseases. That set me on my trajectory of like

I noticed the way that I’m working isn’t working, right? I noticed that my definition of success isn’t setting me up well. And so that kind of started me down the path, but I’ve been a coach for the last 10, 11 years and we attract a lot of what we are. So I was attracting a lot of these really ambitious women that were building companies or at the top of their game inside of organizations. And they also had kind of a wobbly relationship with ambition. A lot of them were getting sick or a lot of them were, you know, a lot of people that I was coaching were building these businesses, but these businesses were

getting called out for not having great practices and stuff like that. And so we started to piece apart the behaviors that were driving us either to burn out or to get in trouble or whatever it was. And I was seeing all of these patterns around ambition and I built a framework around it.

Lara Schmoisman (09:15)
Yeah, but I mean, this is very interesting, something that you mentioned, and I see that in a lot of my clients or companies that I speak with all the time, sometimes ambition make us push in the wrong timing for things.

Amina AlTai (09:31)
Yeah, 100 % push it in the wrong direction and push with the wrong amount of force, push for the wrong timing. Yeah, 100%, right? Because you have this insatiable desire to grow and to succeed, but without any real why connected to it. So you’re pushing and forcing in all the wrong directions or at the wrong time or with the wrong level of force.

Lara Schmoisman (09:36)
or even get the world partnerships.

So how do you work of having a a blueprint for your ambition or a path?

Amina AlTai (09:57)
Yeah. So there’s the painful versus purposeful ambition, right? So kind of noticing what traits we’re embodying. Am I living more in painful? Am I living more in purposeful? How can I turn the volume up on the purposeful ambition? But inside the book, there’s this five part framework on how to live into purposeful work. And it needs to leverage our zone of genius. It needs to be values aligned. It needs to be connected to the impact that we want to have. It needs to cultivate a sense of contentment, which we just talked about, and then our needs have to be met.

And if we’re checking the box.

Lara Schmoisman (10:26)
I always

break down a little bit each one of them. This is fascinating.

Amina AlTai (10:29)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓

Totally. And if you’re checking the box on those five areas, you’re likely living into purposeful work. So the first area is our gifts, our zone of genius. Every single one of us has a zone of genius, but so many of us work outside of our genius. And that’s what I think can tip us into burnout because it’s like pushing and forcing in the wrong direction. So we want to tap into our gifts. And our gifts are the things that are really innate to us.

So we don’t have to effort a lot. We find ourselves in the space of flow when we’re living into those gifts. So that’s the first one. The second piece is our values, right? Each of us values something. Right now, I think it’s four out of five of us are disconnected at work. And I think a lot of it has to do with working outside of our values. Because if you’re working outside of the thing that you really care about, it’s going to create a lot of friction. So there’s that piece. Then there’s the impact.

Well, what’s the impact that you want to have, whether it’s on your family, community, or the greater good, you get to decide the size of that impact. But that piece is important, right? Because if we feel like our work isn’t having the knock-on effect that we want it to have, it’s going to feel like we’re, again, we’re laboring in the wrong space. And then needs, right? So whatever work we’re doing, our needs have to be met, whether that’s in terms of salary, paid time off, support staff. Most of us

don’t, especially women, I notice this a lot with my clients, we have a hard time asking for what we need and centering our needs. But if we don’t center our needs, we’ll be in that work just for a season, right? We’ll probably burn out, it won’t be sustainable. So our needs are a big piece of the equation. And then the last piece is contentment, which we talked a little bit about earlier.

Lara Schmoisman (11:58)
Yeah, so I, how, I mean, let’s talk about burnout because it happened to me, happened to you. I’m sure that anyone who has a career, you also juggling being a parent driving around. you drive in LA, you guys know what it is that you live in your car. How do you prevent the burnout?

Amina AlTai (12:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this is a very big question. We could probably have a conversation just on this alone. But I think that burnout is the function of five things. So first of all, it was 2019 that the World Health Organization first recognized it as a real workplace phenomenon. And there’s three dimensions to it, right? It’s usually we’re feeling exhausted. We’re feeling negativism or cynicism around our work, like a distance from it. And then our work usually starts to suffer. But I think it’s because of five things. Well, the first is biology.

So unfortunately, women and people with a uterus have a higher propensity for burnout. It’s a biological piece, right? And I’m not the expert on the biology piece, but it’s something that we do have to consider. The second thing that I think is a big one for women is invisible labor, right? The work that we do that is unseen and unpaid for. And we do that both at home and we do that at work, right? So if you were like being the office therapist, the person that’s always taking the notes, there’s a lot of work that you’re doing that you’re not paid for that is probably tipping you into burnout.

The third thing is visible labor, right? So that’s the work that we do that’s seen and paid for. And we all probably do too much of it, right? We’re probably all clocking way too many hours a week, and we want to keep a handle on that. The next piece is a systemic piece, right? Systemic oppression, right? The motherhood penalty is a really great example of stereotyping racism, the things that we experience inside of a system that wear away at us, right? It is exhausting.

Lara Schmoisman (13:42)
That’s really

exhausting because you keep putting pressure on and this comes from a Jewish Latina, immigrant, woman, executive and I can tell you with all those and I probably have a few more, it gets pretty lonely up here.

Amina AlTai (13:48)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

It does.

And think about all the things you’ve probably experienced in each of those categories, right? Like the motherhood penalty where women are paid less and given less opportunities, or the wage gap as a woman, or stereotyping because you’re an immigrant, right? All of those things wear away at us and there’s a cost. And I think that can tip us into burnout for real. And then the next, the last piece is tolerations. What are the things that we’re tolerating in our work and our lives that we need not be tolerating that we want to raise the standard on?

because each and every one of those things has a handle in tipping us into burnout.

Lara Schmoisman (14:29)
I mean, these are impactful, meaningful words. And also it’s like, we really need to look at ourselves and where are we giving too much and how we stop that pattern.

Amina AlTai (14:39)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly. And why are we giving too much? Right? That’s the question I’m always interested in, not just where, but why. And so many of us either were indoctrinated to believe that we have to do that as women or historically excluded people, right? It’s culturally co-signed that you over give, or we’re doing it from a place of not feeling good enough, right? So what is that big why underneath the over giving?

Lara Schmoisman (14:45)
Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. And what do you find when you ask people? It’s like, can they tell you right away or is they need to go inside and find deeply where they are?

Amina AlTai (15:13)
It depends, right? For some people, it’s really on the surface and they know because they’ve been thinking about it for a long time. For some other people, you know, they’ve built such a hard exterior to be able to get through the world that we have to do a little bit of softening before we can touch the surface of that thing. So it really depends. Some of us just have that. I know it took me a little while to understand the answer because I built up so much armor. But some people can just access it right there.

Lara Schmoisman (15:37)
Okay, I like that about the armor. How do we build our armor and to identify each one of these places that we are failing that is creating us a burnout?

Amina AlTai (15:48)
Yeah, so I’m a big proponent of not wearing armor, right? So many of us, like, and Brené Brown uses this language, right? So many of us feel like we have to armor up to get through the world because in lots of ways, the world is not psychologically safe. And so we definitely need to create workplaces that are more psychologically safe so we don’t need to armor. But armor in a workplace context or relational context never really helps anything, right? Like, what if you had a conversation with somebody and putting on your armor has helped? It never does. Right, so we want to understand

Lara Schmoisman (16:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Never.

Amina AlTai (16:18)
why we put on our armor, right? Because I don’t feel safe here because I don’t feel a sense of belonging, whatever the story is. And then what are the ways…

Lara Schmoisman (16:24)
Well, that’s

a good thing to help you identify. I’m putting an armor here. So, okay, this is something is something off is happening.

Amina AlTai (16:29)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly, right? Something in my body doesn’t feel safe, so I put on armor. That in and of itself is a huge insight, a huge aha. So we want to understand why we’ve armored up, when we armor up, and then what are the tools and practices that we can bring in so we feel a little safer so that we don’t armor up, right? Whether that’s a mindfulness practice or we have community at work, what are the things that we can do to help ourselves feel like we don’t need to use that armor day in, day out?

Lara Schmoisman (17:00)
yeah I’m processing, I’m processing how you can okay you have the arm on but how you going to break in these patterns

Amina AlTai (17:04)
Nyeh!

Awareness, I really believe awareness is 80 % of it, right? And our brains are plastic, meaning that they can change. So even if for years we were doing the same thing every single day, choosing again needs to be a habit and then we can shift in that direction. I always give this example to my clients. So I live in New York City and to get into my apartment building in New York City, there’s like a passcode downstairs.

Lara Schmoisman (17:32)
Mm-hmm.

Amina AlTai (17:33)
And

a while ago we changed the passcode and for six weeks, every day I’d get to the building and I would put in the old passcode because my brain and my muscle memory remembered the old passcode. But it was literally on the, that first day of the six week that my brain remembered, we need to go in another direction. And so the practice, right, our brain is plastic and if we practice enough, we can go in another direction. So if our brain is so used to defaulting into the core wounds or defaulting into the armor through

practice and repetition and saliency we can eventually go in another direction. It just takes a little bit of time.

Lara Schmoisman (18:07)
Yeah, so let’s talk about your book. What people will get in your book and who should be reading your book.

Amina AlTai (18:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, my book is for any, so it’s called The Ambition Trap, How to Stop Chasing and Start Living. And it’s for anybody that’s had kind of a funky, stressful, strenuous relationship with ambition or success, right? Maybe you’re somebody that is really ambitious. Like I identify as very ambitious, but that ambition has cost you something, like it cost me my health. Maybe it’s cost you your joy, it’s cost you something. Or maybe you’re somebody that has not wanted to be ambitious because you’ve only seen kind of a gross dysfunctional version of it.

the book is gonna lay out a pathway for you to have a more harmonious relationship to growth. So it’s not that we don’t get to want things or get to get to grow, right? I want that for all of us, but we get to do it in a way that honors ourselves and our bodies and the communities that we love, right? That we wanna support, not that we have to step over people or hurt ourselves to get to the goal. So it’s offering a more generative and harmonious path to growth.

Lara Schmoisman (19:05)
Love that. mean, anyone, mean, we have a lot of entrepreneurs that are listening to our podcast and we have a lot of business owners, also CEOs. I always say that you can be working in a company, you can working in an enterprise role, but you can have the entrepreneur mindset.

Amina AlTai (19:06)
Right? Who wouldn’t love that? I think it’s a great thing.

Yeah, exactly, right? I call them intrapreneurs. Even if you’re inside of an organization, perhaps you have this entrepreneurial mindset and there’s hopefully enough agility inside of that organization that you can lead in a way that feels true for you. So whether you’re an entrepreneur or intrapreneur, there’s something in this book for you.

Lara Schmoisman (19:46)
I think that a lot of people are having problems with ambition, that they feel like in the environment that they are, they cannot grow enough.

Amina AlTai (19:54)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Lara Schmoisman (19:56)
How would

you suggest to deal with this? It’s like, it’s time to move on. If the environment doesn’t work for you, it’s something you need to say, okay, accept that here doesn’t work for me. What I have is more important for me, my ambition or this role.

Amina AlTai (20:11)
I think it’s really context dependent, right? So if you’re inside of a role and you’ve looked at those five areas that we talked about, right? Gifts, values, impact, needs, contentment, and if the role is not checking any of those five boxes, but you really need the job to pay your bills,

it might not be the time to make a change, right? One of the things I often advise my clients to do is to, if you can, build your money parachute, I call it, so that you could eventually jump off the cliff and step into something that you really wanna do, or buy yourself some time to recover and then get a new role. But if you have the privilege of being able to, hey, I could quit today and I have the cushion and safety net, then you might wanna find something that’s more aligned. But I always advise my clients to not jump from the frying pan into the fire, because…

so much of the time we’re like, want to leave this job, I want to this organization, it doesn’t work for me. But oftentimes it’s our own habits that are getting in the way, right? And everywhere we go, there we are.

Lara Schmoisman (21:04)
It’s the same being an entrepreneur. I see that a lot of failure comes of having that ambition and thinking that you need to do it yourself. Even if it happened to me, I know where I want to grow my agency. I know how I want to grow it, but it took for me to get the right team to be able to start experiencing that growth.

Amina AlTai (21:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So making sure that you have the right people around you and that they’re aligned with your ambition as well. And I think it also goes back to a question of worthiness. So much of the time we don’t have the right people around us or we’re not all moving in the same direction because we don’t feel worthy of that support. And that comes back to the needs part of that framework that we were talking about.

Lara Schmoisman (21:45)
Absolutely.

So if someone has a problem with their own growth and their own, do you think growth is how we can align it with ambition or there are two different things because a lot of people feel like they’re not getting there fast enough and that they’re chasing and never gonna get there.

Amina AlTai (22:05)
Yeah, well, that’s the part that we want to look at, right? If you’re chasing and you feel like you can’t get there fast enough, oftentimes there’s a story there, right? Because we’re all right on time for our lives. And so the need to get there with speed and before everybody else is usually painful ambition, and it’s usually some scarcity. And so we want to look at the stories that we’re telling ourselves about when we’re supposed to do something and by when and how big it’s supposed to be, right? A lot of the times those are somebody else’s beliefs.

and those are somebody else’s definition of success. And so we want to sift out what is somebody else’s and what is our own.

Lara Schmoisman (22:37)
Thank you so much, Amira. This is very helpful. And I think it’s going to be very helpful for everyone out there that is listening and to start thinking about themselves and where you are at and how you’re dealing. Because many times we deal with our emotions and are we happy and we’re sad, but we don’t go to the other emotions. We are going with the big known ones. And I think this is a huge one that we should start analyzing more.

Amina AlTai (23:01)
well, I’m so glad that you had me here today. Thank you so much and thank you everyone for tuning in. Yeah, three days, yes. ⁓ I drink my coffee with oat milk and a dash of cinnamon. And on like fancy weekend days, I’ll put the milk in the milk frother and I’ll add a teaspoon of maple syrup.

Lara Schmoisman (23:04)
⁓ But before we have one more question for you. How do you drink your coffee?

Ooh, that’s fancy. I should try that. Thank you so much for being here. This was fantastic.

Amina AlTai (23:22)
you

Thank you so much for having me and thanks again everyone for tuning in.

Lara Schmoisman (23:29)
Okay, and to you guys, I will see you next week with more coffee number five.

Amina AlTai (23:34)
Thank you so much.