Having an Ambitious Mindset

Learn about adopting an ambitious mindset and how to harness it to fuel growth in your career and personal life.

To reach your career goals, you need to be willing to put in the hard work, focus, and effort. Ambitious people use these things to succeed in their work and personal lives. They have an inner drive and resilience that helps them stay motivated when working toward their goals. You, too, can use the same techniques to adopt the right mindset to achieve your ambitions.

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Having an Ambitious Mindset

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Today, you'll learn about adopting an ambitious mindset and how to harness it to fuel growth in your career and personal life.

To reach your career goals, you need to be willing to put in the hard work, focus, and effort. Ambitious people use these things to succeed in their work and personal lives. They have an inner drive and resilience that helps them stay motivated when working toward their goals. You, too, can use the same techniques to adopt the right mindset to achieve your ambitions.

Through this guide, we will learn some of the skills you need when adopting an ambitious mindset, including

* surrounding yourself with the right people
* competing with yourself, not others
* keeping your ambitions to yourself
* taking risks

To be successful in life, having a high level of ambition is essential. It will help you remain motivated as you strive toward worthwhile goals that require a lot of effort and perseverance. An aspirational mindset allows you to see your goals and devise strategies for achieving them.

Having the right mindset and learning some key practices is one of the best ways to ensure your ambitions will eventually become a reality alongside a lot of hard work and patience.

Being prepared to take risks is one of the essential characteristics you need to embrace to achieve your ambitions.

Without taking risks, you can't give yourself a chance to explore new opportunities. Being ambitious means breaking out of your comfort zone to progress towards your goal.

Michele Meyer-Shipp, KPMG's chief diversity officer, says of those who get to a position in their career and are afraid to pursue higher ambitions:

They're trying to preserve their gains, so instead of playing to win, they're often playing not to lose – whether hesitating to take perceived big risks or feeling the need to take outsized chances.

Brian Tracy - the author of The Psychology of Achievement and several other self-development books - believes that you need to take risks to achieve ambitions. He believes that risks come in different categories, including those you can afford to take, those you can't, and risks you can't afford NOT to take. This last type is the one that includes more risk but a potentially more significant payoff. As he writes on briantracy.com:

The fifth type of risk is the risk that you can't afford NOT to take. The downside may be costly, but the upside is so exciting that it is very much worth taking a chance to go after it. If you are working on a big prospect whose headquarters are a long way from your main office, it's certainly a risk to travel all the way there and back several times, but it's a risk that you can't afford NOT to take to achieve goals you have set for your career.

Even if you make a few missteps, this may be a valuable part of the learning experience. Taking action is the first step in making positive changes.

Another aspect of having an ambitious mindset is how you think about and measure your success. The key here is not to try and compete with others but to compete only with yourself.

That means setting only goals that are important for you to achieve, even if someone else would find the same goals too small, too big, too crazy, or even worthless. You should also measure your performance and progress only against your own past performance and not measure yourself against others. By working like this, you are only working on ambitions that are important to you. You are not getting sidetracked by others or losing motivation by comparing yourself to anyone else's achievements. This mindset will help you reach more of your ambitions over the long term.

The people around you can also influence your mindset. If negative people surround you, this will likely hurt your ambitions and how motivated you feel about going after your targets. If you surround yourself with ambitious people who motivate and support you, you're likely to have a positive mindset that helps you achieve more of your ambitions.

As John C. Maxwell says: "The better you are at surrounding yourself with people of high potential, the greater your chance for success." In fact, entrepreneur and previously mentor-to-Tony Robbins Jim Rohn takes it a step further, saying, "You're the average of the five people you spend most of your time with."

Essentially, surrounding yourself with smarter people than you will increase your own knowledge. Playing tennis against a better player will improve your own game as you learn from them. Being around ambitious and successful people allows you to set bigger goals and stay motivated to reach them.

But it's not just about relying on others. You can develop your own methods. Every person has different ways to stay motivated. For example, you could create a personal reward system, treating yourself for every step forward you achieve. You could be motivated by asking your peers for feedback on your recently completed accomplishments and use this as motivation to push further and do even more.

Another way to push yourself is to remind yourself of your overarching purpose and what is driving you. Doing this can give even mundane or hard-to-complete tasks a purpose and meaning that make you want to complete them and do them well.

It's easy to think that achieving your ambitions is too arduous or fall into the trap of competing and comparing yourself with others. If this happens, adopting the abundance mindset is a great idea. What is the abundance mindset? It's deciding to focus on the good things you already have and the idea that there is more than enough abundance in the world for everyone to achieve their own goals. This approach makes you more secure in working towards your ambitions while allowing you to support and be happy for others as they reach their personal goals. The real upside is that this way of thinking does not limit you or your ambitions - it enables you to set bigger targets and always aim upwards.

Marianne Williamson says of this way of thinking: "The key to abundance is meeting limited circumstances with unlimited thoughts."

Another technique you could try when working towards an ambition is to keep it to yourself until you achieve it. This is related to psychology and how the human mind works. Studies have found that sharing your ambition with someone else means it's less likely to happen. The reason behind this is that once you express the goal to someone else, your brain can trick itself into feeling you've already achieved the ambition. That can mean you end up less motivated to actually do the work and make it a reality than if you'd kept things to yourself. As Derek Sivers explains:

"Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it. Ideally, you would not be satisfied until you'd actually done the work. But when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it's called a 'social reality.' The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it's already done. And then because you've felt that satisfaction, you're less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary."

Today, we've looked at some of the thought processes you need to really go after your ambitions. We've discussed how surrounding yourself with other ambitious and optimistic people influences your own mindset. We looked at the need to take risks and how it's essential to compete with yourself, rather than others, to achieve your own ambitions.

This week I'd like you to think about the five people you spend the most time with and what kind of influence they have on your mindset. Are they positive? Do they have ambitions, and do they help and motivate you to achieve your goals?

As Mark Twain once said: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too can become great."

That's all for today. Thanks for listening.