Episode Description:
In this episode of What If? For Authors, Claire explores the nuanced relationship between ambition, fear, and contentment. What if your ambition isn’t really gone… but simply changing shape?
With insight, humor, and plenty of hard truths, Claire unpacks how ambition often gets tangled up with fear—fear of worthlessness, fear of missing out, fear of falling behind—and how that mislabeling can make us think we’re “losing” something essential. She offers a reframing that helps authors understand the difference between fear-fueled ambition and hope-fueled ambition, and how to build a healthier, more sustainable drive in your creative career.
If you’ve ever thought, “I used to be so motivated—what happened to me?” this episode is for you.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
The surprising truth about how ambition and contentment actually support each other
Why ambition doesn’t have to feel like a fire under your ass
How fear disguises itself as ambition (especially for Enneagram Threes and Sevens)
Why tying ambition to outcomes you can’t control leads to burnout
How to distinguish between “fear-driven” and “hope-driven” ambition
A practical way to reframe self-talk so ambition feels energizing, not punishing
Why practicing contentment won’t kill your ambition—it may save it
Takeaway Challenge:
Ask yourself: What would I find deeply gratifying to create—even if no one praised me for it? Sit with that answer. Notice how different it feels from fear-driven goals. Then, practice shifting one piece of your ambition toward hope, curiosity, or joy, instead of fear.
Support the Show:
If this episode helped you reimagine ambition in a healthier way, share it with another author who might need it too. You can also support the show by leaving a review wherever you listen—it makes a big difference in helping other writers find this resource.
Want more support? Visit liberatedwriter.com to explore Claire’s coaching, courses, workshops, and books for building a sustainable, liberated writing career.
Happy writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If For Authors. I'm glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors as well as a humor in mystery writer. All my services, courses and books for authors can be found@liberatedwriter.com. Go check it out. If you're curious about how you can build a more sustainable author career.
In uncertain times. Okay. So I work with a lot of writers who either identify themselves as ambitious or simply exhibit signs of strong ambition. I love working with these authors as ambition is a driving force that really moves humanity forward. God love it. Um, it really shows us what's possible that we might not have imagined before.
Now not everyone feels the pull of ambition or they feel it sometimes and not other times. That's fine. Some people are more interested in contentment and don't believe [00:01:00] that ambition and contentment go well together. But in this essay, I will show, uh, seriously though ambition and contentment actually have a symbiotic relationship.
But I'll talk more about that later as we ask the question. What if I'm losing my ambition? Every time I was writing that title, what if I'm losing my ambition? I was just hearing REM Sing. Losing My Ambition. Okay, I won't sing anymore on this podcast. Don't worry. There was this curious trend for a while that I observed where a lot of the authors, the ambitious authors, seemed to believe that by working with me, they would lose their ambition.
I would take it from them. I would take away their toy. , like my goal is to turn you into a little Buddha that sits in meditates all day. First of all, the Buddha was very ambitious in my opinion. But as those of you who've been listening to this podcast for a while now, know I'm not one to tell people there's virtue in sitting [00:02:00] around and doing nothing.
Sometimes it's what's needed, but a lot of the times action is needed too.
I love helping support authors ambitions. What I don't do is allow them to pretend that things like fear. Equal to ambition though. So there's a lot to unpack around the concept of ambition. There's ambition at the cost of everything else, right? Which maybe not. What we want to let ourselves fall into.
There's ambition for ambition's sake. Mm-hmm. And ambition out of a deep sense of fear. So as someone who talks nonstop about motivation, I do have some thoughts here, hence the entire fucking episode about it. , but okay, I'm gonna lay those out for you so you know, if you feel like your ambition might be flagging lately, never fear.
We will walk through it. So probably if you're feeling that like, Ugh, man, I'm losing my ambition. I [00:03:00] don't feel as motivated to do big, ambitious things as I used to. It's probably not the ambition that's lacking, but it's something else that you thought was ambition that is declining. Or it could be ambition, which isn't a terrible thing.
So long as we don't tie our sense of self too much to how ambitious we are when we do that, the declining ambition is likely to cause an identity crisis.
There might also be some people listening to this episode who never consider themselves ambitious, but discover over the course of listening that, Hey. Turns out you are, uh, there's a lot to cover here. So let's talk ambition.
One of the common misconceptions that I encounter is that people assume that all ambition feels like a fire under our ass. Ambition doesn't need to burn. It doesn't need to be a hot stove. Very, very often, authors confuse ambition with the fear of being [00:04:00] worthless or the fear of missing out, which are the core fears of the three, the achiever and the seven enthusiast respectively.
It can also be any of the core fears at work here, but I see it the most common with threes and sevens. So that doesn't mean that this episode is just for threes and sevens by any means, because if you have one of those as your wing or aligned to it. Or if you have it as your second highest type, you might also experience some of this, and you could benefit from just taking a moment while you're already here to differentiate some of these things.
So if you consider yourself ambitious, it's important to ask a few questions to get to what's motivating that ambition.
What does that ambition point you toward? What ambitious thing are you trying to accomplish? Is there something specific, or are you caught in a more, more, more mindset? This is a time for honesty, especially if you're a three and prone to self, to seat. Pause and ask yourself if there's something particular that you want to [00:05:00] achieve and what you believe you'll feel once you achieve it.
Threes, you've been pushing feelings aside to accomplish what you want to accomplish, and there's a good chance you've been secretly promising that you can feel as much as you want once you achieve your goal. But when you look back at your life, has that historically been the case? Did you allow yourself to sit with all those feelings, not take action, but sit with them once you reached a goal?
I ask this because oftentimes threes are more motivated by the secret hope that their ambition will save them from their fear of being worthless or their fear of lacking value, and it won't, not in any meaningful way. In fact, what you're doing is reinforcing the idea that you have to accomplish more and more incredible things to feel a hollow and temporary sense of worth.
You're learning that it's the best you can hope for. In [00:06:00] short, you're losing the game as soon as you decide to play it. This is when the three usually throws up their hands and goes, you're telling me not to be ambitious, Claire, and nah, I'm not saying that at all. I understand that if you've been accessing ambition through a fear of lacking worth your whole life, that it may be hard to trust that there is another way to access it that doesn't feel like fire burning your ass.
Think back to a time when you felt drawn along by something else. Perhaps it was a sense of commitment to others, a curiosity of what might be possible or a hope that you could value yourself along the way rather than waiting for some end result to pass a verdict on you.
Think of a time when you simply wanted to bring something into creation because you thought the world would be better for it, and then you went and did that. That motivation to create something worth existing is very different from the motivation to create something [00:07:00] that makes you worth existing. It's still ambition, but how you feel about it is not reliant on the praise and appreciation you might receive from others, which is not in your control, and that's the key there.
Now, if you're an ambitious seven, the enthusiast, probably the ambition is being driven by the fear of missing out, or what we call the fear of being trapped in deprivation. Ambition promises that you can have everything and not miss out on anything that may bring you satisfaction. The ambition tends to be spread out in more directions than the threes focus on a single objective.
The fear becomes a self perpetuating machine for the seven as the split of focus. The result of the seven's avoidance of limitations means that nothing is really moving along as fast as the seven's ambition would prefer. The fear creeps in fast and hard as restlessness and to avoid it, the seven might split their attention [00:08:00] off into yet another project and that only makes the problem worse.
Again, this is not ambition so much as fear at a frenzied pace to access ambition. The seven can practice pausing, considering what project, if brought to completion, would bring them deep satisfaction. Then they can practice sitting with the discomfort of focusing on fewer things, observing the restlessness and calling it that restlessness instead of ambition.
And then continuing to push one or two things forward that they genuinely wanna see finished and finished well. So this process of slowing down, which all types may need to do if fear is driving them into action for the sake of action, may feel like you're losing your ambition.
But that's only because we've begun to associate ambition with nonstop action ambition. Can coexist with rest. It can [00:09:00] also coexist with contentment. Yes, really. In fact, if you cannot achieve a state of contentment in your life, you're more than likely mislabeling. Fear as ambition. Ambition isn't being unsatisfied, it's not being perpetually unsatisfied.
Ambition isn't discontent. You can be satisfied with your life and also be ambitious. You can be content with the world as it is, and also feel motivated to create something new and wonderful. Now, if that doesn't sound right to you, I challenge you to sit with those ideas. Just chew on 'em, poke at 'em, you know, whatever, and see if something important comes up for you.
How can that be true? That's really the key to that exploration. How can it be true? You can feel content and ambitious that you can feel satisfied and ambitious.
A lot of times in this writing [00:10:00] business, we define our ambitions with audacious earning goals. Now, that's personal ambition to be clear, and it's not the only kind of ambition available to us, though it is the one that's most applauded in capitalist societies.
There's nothing inherently dangerous about having a personal earnings goal, but I always press authors to be clear on why they want that amount of money. What do they imagine it will do for them? Only once we can define this, not let our secret wishes rule the day, can we start to compare our expectations to reality.
Is that really how it works?
If you need to earn six figures writing to be able to quit your day job, great. That is a perfectly acceptable, ambitious goal. But what do you think will be solved in your life when that happens? And will that actually be the case? That's where I show up and ask the tough questions. What [00:11:00] relief is this ambition promising you?
This is important because a lot of times our ambition promises us relief from an unpleasant feeling and the sudden miraculous arrival of a new and desirable feeling. The problem is that's not how things work. We have to cultivate positive emotions through practice and starve out the negative emotions through practice as well.
Positive emotions, the things we wish to feel and to feel about ourselves. They don't just appear magically and stick around forever.
What happens sometimes with ambitious people is that they believe that by withholding positive thoughts about themselves, they'll motivate themselves enough to achieve something that will reign self-esteem down on them. This might look like believing, and this is usually subconscious that by focusing on how we're not good enough, yet we'll motivate ourselves to push ourselves to eventually [00:12:00] be good enough and then, hey, we'll finally feel good enough.
Woo-hoo. We are what we practice, though. That's the key. Our relationship with ourselves is what we practice. If every day you tell yourself you're not good enough, you are practicing that belief. If you wanna feel good enough, you have to practice that belief. You have to start practicing all the ways that you're good enough.
You have to remind yourself of it. You have to really examine what are the voices in my head telling me that makes me think I'm not good enough? And are those real or is that just bullshit? Is that just a misguided protection that I don't need?
If you want to feel good enough, you must practice feeling good enough, but we don't because we're afraid that if we feel good enough every day, we'll lose our motivation and we'll lose our ambition to be better. That's a [00:13:00] lie though. Science backs is up to practicing. Low self-esteem does not lead to high self-esteem.
Later, it leads to continuous low self-esteem. Now, when I say it like that, I'm sure it seems obvious, which only goes to show how tricky our brain can sometimes be to convince us otherwise.
Now you can make decisions that may result in you having breakout success in this industry. Whether you are terrified or not, whether you're letting ambition out of terror drive you or not. In fact, we tend to make better decisions when we're not acting out fear. So here's another subconscious lie. We believe that being afraid leads to sounder decisions. It does not. What it does tend to lead to is a zero sum mindset. Now, that's the idea that there's a limited amount of success or whatever resource available to us. And if someone has it all, then we have none.
This is dangerous and the [00:14:00] basis for most problems in society right now actually, and zero sum thinking is almost always incorrect. Most things are unlimited resources, or the limits are so vast that they might as well be unlimited.
Unfortunately, we've evolved for our attention to find the limited resources and really hone in on that. So it's easy to become fixated on things that are limited. Like if my friend's book is number one in the Kindle store, then mine can't be. There can only be one. Number one, it is limited. We may find some envy in this situation, which is of course a result of fear.
To avoid this fear practice focusing on places where there isn't. A zero sum game, which again is most places. You and your friend can each make a living selling books. There are ample dollars [00:15:00] in circulation for that to happen. You and your friend can both be content in your daily lives. That's an unlimited resource.
Both of you can take on ambitious projects. In fact, every author can take on an ambitious project. Now, not every author can make a million dollars. I don't think there's enough money in circulation for that, although there might be people are hoarding it somewhere. , but a bunch of authors can make seven figures, and if you're not making seven figures and you want to be, it's not because everyone else has taken all the money already.
It's not that there's no room for you that every slice of the pie has already been claimed. It's because of other things, including of course, luck. So this is why I suggest we focus our ambition on things we have control over. You don't have control over your next series and whether it hits the New York Times bestseller list and you get a big movie deal.
You do have control over which project you decide to write [00:16:00] next, and how ambitious of an idea it is. You don't have control over where your book falls on the Amazon rankings. And this is especially clear at the time of recording this episode when Amazon has fucked up their ranking system royally. So books can sell a thousand copies in a day and not move up and rank, and nobody really seems to know what's happening there.
But you do have control over your launch strategy and what that looks like.
When we feel like our ambition has fallen off a cliff, it's often a result of having aimed it at something we didn't have control over. When that thing we don't have control over doesn't meet our expectations, the ambition becomes painful. And we might decide it needs to go sit in the naughty chair in the corner.
And now that's a nanny 9 1 1 reference. By the way, maybe a little outdated at this point. It's not a cuck chair reference, although you might also make your ambition. Go sit in the cuck chair for a while. You know? You [00:17:00] do you.
So, here's some of my personal experience with ambition kicking my ass, because it was fueled by fear, and this is from the lens of a one. But I would say ones are probably the third most common type that freaks out when they feel like their ambition might be sliding. I like to say that ones put the ethic in work ethic.
When I was a teenager, I played a lot of sports. I was incredibly active, incredibly coordinated, incredibly focused, and incredibly deep in a pattern of feeling like the reason I practiced was because I wasn't good enough. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't good enough. While this pattern led me,
while the this pattern did lead me to focusing entirely on all my weak areas and hyper fixating on them until I felt some sort of, I don't know, level of mastery, it also kept me from ever seeing my strengths. It caused playing sports to be a [00:18:00] painful experience, both emotionally and physically. So I basically wrote off sports after high school, , when I went to college, and I felt a lot of relief about that.
You know, it was a pain point. I just didn't have to deal with that anymore. Unfortunately, my health and wellness decreased from avoiding exercise. Probably drinking too much, but the exercise was also a part of it. Only once I had the revelation that the reason for exercise wasn't because I wasn't good enough, but because my body had been so good to me all these years and deserved the love that physical movement represented for it.
Only then was I able to get back into sports and exercise, and if you're wondering what the turning point was, I can't say it publicly, but I'll happily tell you if I see you in person, just ask. So flash forward to today and my ambition for my body is actually stronger than ever, right? I'm older, I got more health stuff going on [00:19:00] now.
You would think maybe my ambition would be falling. It's not. And part of that is because when I go to the gym, I'm reminded how strong I am rather than how weak I am, and that is an attentional pattern I have practiced. I'm able to access that feeling because I practice over and over again. When I hear the voice that say, when I hear the voice that says, that's all you've got today, Claire.
Pathetic. I push back against it and say. I am so glad I gave what I had today. Didn't have to come here, but I did when my health conditions mean that I have to use lighter weights than maybe the week before. I make a point of reminding myself that again, I didn't have to go to the gym at all, but that's.
That just being here is a sign of how much I care for my body as is not trying to lift weights that might cause an injury, [00:20:00] simply because my ego wants progress to be linear.
Fear-based ambition will get us pretty far, but eventually it'll cause us to hit a wall. And the only way forward is by ditching the fear and taking the time to discover something else that sustains us without scaring the shit out of us. If you're afraid to practice contentment because you think it'll kill your ambition, that's a sure sign that you're mistaking fear for ambition.
If you're afraid to allow yourself to feel satisfied with where you are because you think it'll kill your ambition, you are mistaking fear for ambition.
If you're afraid to feel like you're good enough because you think it'll kill your ambition, you're mistaking fear for ambition. So if you feel like you're losing your ambition, here are some things you might ask yourself.
Have I been attaching my ambition to outcomes I can't control? Has doing that [00:21:00] made ambition itself not feel emotionally safe anymore? Have I been fueling my motivation with fear and calling that ambition? Could I be getting burned out on fear? And presuming that means I'm not as ambitious as I used to be?
Have I been doing work around my fear and transitioning my sense of ambition to something more sustainable? Could it be that my ambition feels less like a fire and more like a sense of hope pulling me forward now? What feelings have I been practicing to keep myself motivated? Have I been avoiding practices that would make me feel content satisfied or good enough?
Because I'm afraid feeling those things would extinguish my ambition?
What would I find gratifying to bring into existence if I knew I wouldn't get personal recognition or praise for it? So just start with those questions for exploration, fear fueled ambition, and hopeful ambition do [00:22:00] feel quite different, so you might not be used to experiencing the latter for one.
Hopeful ambition allows you to take breaks when you need them and actually be content in the break rather than feeling like you should be doing something productive. It comes with a sense of knowing that what is meant to be will be, and that it works on a timeframe that benefits from your effort, but is not entirely dependent on it.
Now, that can be a difficult thing to sit with, a difficult understanding to sit in, but it's how you keep from burning out.
Ambition that doesn't allow you to rest. Feel your feelings and connect with yourself and others is always fueled by fear and won't lead to the thing you want it to lead to in the end. So if you're wondering, what if I'm losing my ambition, I'll say that you're probably in a transition point. Maybe you're at a fork in the road.
Perhaps you're [00:23:00] tired from hitching your ambition to wagons you can't control, and it's time to aim it at what is in your control. Maybe you're exhausted from withholding positive emotions from yourself until you reach a goal and you keep, oh wait. Maybe you're exhausted from withholding positive emotions from yourself until you reach a goal that you keep pushing back farther and further.
Maybe some of the ambition you feel like you've lost was fear, motivation you've deconstructed that just doesn't really motivate you anymore. There can be a time of quiet between turning down the volume on our fear and being able to hear the more subtle sounds of our soul. My advice is to practice enjoying that whatever this process you're experiencing may be.
We are what we practice after all. And don't lose hope. The human spirit wants to create it, wants to explore and learn and test boundaries. If you [00:24:00] don't feel that right now, then that probably means it's time for quiet and retreat as much as you can with the practicalities of deadlines and so forth.
There's no rule that says that to be an ambitious person, you must feel ambitious all the time. If you do feel ambitious all the time, we're probably in fixation and fear territory, frankly. So if you don't feel it right now, if you don't feel the ambition right now, or you haven't for a while, that's okay.
That doesn't change who you are. You'll bounce back and if you're intentional about it, the ambition you feel later on will be much more sustainable and frankly, pleasant.
That's it for this episode of What If for Authors. Be sure to check out some of the offerings I have going on right now at The Liberated Writer by going to liberated writer.com. Any upcoming workshops, Kickstarters books, courses or conferences will be listed there. You can also find my coaching offerings if you'd [00:25:00] like to do something nice for yourself and get some one-to-one personal coaching with me around working with your ambition.
I promise, I'm not gonna tell you it's a bad thing to have. I'm Claire Taylor. Thank you so much for listening. Happy writing.