Intentional Ambition E-Book

Rha Goddess

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 324

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Proven strategies for a more intentional and thoughtful approach to your ideal career

In Intentional Ambition: Redefining Your Work for Greater Joy, Freedom and Fulfillment, soul coach and visionary career consultant Rha Goddess reveals a proven blueprint, already used by hundreds of breakthrough changemakers, cultural visionaries, and social entrepreneurs, to radically and thrillingly reset your life by renegotiating your relationship to work. Drawing on personal anecdotes from highly successful individuals Rha has worked with across industries and roles, this book delivers strategies to intentionally reconsider what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.

Based on Goddess's work with private and small group coaching as well as corporate collaborations with organizations such as Google, Delta, and Lululemon, this book explores topics including:

• Resigning versus being resigned—intentionally choosing a new path versus letting your environment make your choices for you
• Raising the standard of renegotiation, where we have a renewed vision for our mental, spiritual, emotional, and financial aspirations
• Unhealthy compartmentalization of our work and real personalities, leading to painful compromise and internal emotional turmoil

Intentional Ambition earns a well-deserved spot on the bookshelves of all professionals, no matter where they are in their careers, who know they deserve better and are looking to intentionally plot a more joyful and fulfilling path forward.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

You See Resignation ... I See Renegotiation

Where I'm Coming From

Renegotiation, Step‐by‐Step

The Bottom Line

Part I: Negotiation

Chapter 1: You Say Career Wall, I Say Life Wall

The Problem with Our Ambition

The Negotiation‐Resignation‐Renegotiation Continuum

You Say Negotiation, I Say Navigation

Are You Resigned or Did You Resign?

Why Renegotiation Is Essential

Chapter 2: Success as Sacrifice: An Unchallenged Story

Hard Work as the Holy Grail

When Sacrifice Becomes a Badge of Honor

Work as Safety, Security, Purpose, Community

Notes

Chapter 3: When Failure to Succeed Is Almost Guaranteed: Thwarting

Thwarting Feels Personal … but It's Actually Systemic

The Myth About Merit

Who's in Charge?

Thwarting Is Big Business

Notes

Part II: Resignation

Chapter 4: One Coin, Two Sides: Giving Up vs. Quitting

What Did You Quit During the Pandemic?

What We've Been Taught to Tolerate

Who Was, and Is Still, Quitting and Why?

The Distance Between Quitting and Giving Up

Notes

Chapter 5: The Suck in Success

The Suck in Entrepreneurship

The Trauma in Success

What Happens When Superhumans Resign?

The Truth Lies In Your Energy

Notes

Chapter 6: Wounded Ambitions and Wounding Ambition

Five Types of Wounded/Wounding

Note

Part III: Renegotiation

Chapter 7: Reclaiming: Whose Story Is It, Anyway?

How Do We Reclaim Our Stories

and

Our Lives?

Making the Journey from Wounded to True

Chapter 8: Realigning: The Truth about Getting True

The Six Frontiers of Renegotiation

Having the Courage to Stop

Chapter 9: Reimagining: A More Successful Definition of Success

Gathering the Strength to Dream

Answering the Call

Five Ws and an H!

Notes

Part IV: How to Renegotiate with Yourself

Chapter 10: Changing Your Mindset about Change

How

Do

I Change My Mind?

Where Am I Ready for Change?

Changing Your Mind in Community

Notes

Chapter 11: Signing Your Own Permission Slip

Oh, Yes You Can!

The Five Permissions

On the Road to Permission

Chapter 12: Cultivating Your True Ambition

Five Wounds and Five Redemptions

The Journey from Wounded to True

Part V: How to Renegotiate with Others

Chapter 13: Setting Up Your Game Plan (and Guardrails) for Reentry

Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

Boundaries Are Good (for Me

and

You)

How You Spend Your Days Is How You Live Your Life

Chapter 14: Coming to the Table Prepared

Setting the

C

ontext

Aligning with

P

urpose

Achieving Your Intended

R

esults

Important! A Final Word about Preparation

Chapter 15: Overcoming the Scarcity Scare

Collaboration and Cooperation Are Not New

Not One, But Three Bottom Lines

The Authenticity, Vulnerability, and Transparency Generation

A Call to What Really Matters

Notes

Part VI: How to Renegotiate with the World

Chapter 16: Renegotiating with the World: The “Yeah, But” Chapter

They Are YOU!

The Journey of 1,000 Miles

Chapter 17: Who Wins? A Pep Talk to Send You on Your Way

Meet the New You

On Zero‐Sum Thinking

On Artificial and Augmented Intelligence

On Intergenerational Bridge Building

On Transforming Systems

On the Individual and the Collective

Who Else Is at the Table?

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 12

Figure 12.1 True Ambition Framework.

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Begin Reading

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Index

End User License Agreement

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FOREWORD BY WILLIAM URY, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GETTING TO YES

INTENTIONAL AMBITION

REDEFINING YOUR WORK FOR GREATER JOY, FREEDOM, AND FULFILLMENT

RHA GODDESS

FOUNDER AND CEO OF MOVE THE CROWD

Copyright © 2025 by Move The Crowd LLC. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per‐copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750‐8400, fax (978) 750‐4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748‐6011, fax (201) 748‐6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.

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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

The names and identifying characteristics of the persons described in this book have been changed and some persons are composites based on the stories of more than one individual. Timelines and circumstances have also been modified in some cases to protect anonymity. Any resemblance in name or circumstances to individuals who have not been authorized to be included in this book are purely coincidental.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is available:

ISBN: 9781394299683 (cloth)

ISBN: 9781394299690 (ePub)

ISBN: 9781394299706 (ePDF)

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: © Shpak Anton/Shutterstock

Author Photo: Courtesy of Sheldon Bolter Photography

For Zuri, Harlowe, Charles, Adana, Matt, Benjamin, Ethan

And all my beloved future generations … in honor of your ambition

Foreword

As an anthropologist and a mediator, I have enjoyed the opportunity to be a lifelong student and practitioner of negotiation—of all kinds: from family quarrels to labor strikes to peace negotiations around the world. So it is with distinct pleasure that I introduce a book by my dear friend Rha about what is perhaps the most important personal negotiation of our lives.

What does true success mean for each of us? How can we spend our working hours and not come to the end of our lives with a lump of regret that we did not have the courage to pursue what we truly want to do and offer this world? What is our calling? What is our gift? What will bring joy? Discovering the answers to these questions is what Rha calls “re‐negotiation.” It turns out to be key to our ultimate sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Rha's wise and practical message resonates deeply with me, leading me to reflect about my own life experience and the hard and valuable lessons I have learned along the way. I remember times when I felt I was on my path and other times when I felt I was straying away.

My first adult job was as a young assistant professor working at a business school. It had the allure of recognition, financial security, and a structured and comfortable path through life. But inside, I felt a certain hollowness. At the time, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was intensifying with the risk of an unthinkable nuclear conflagration. From childhood, it had been a troubling concern of mine—I could never understand why humans would be so foolish as to risk destroying everything we hold dear in life. I dreamed of finding a way to personally engage on this issue.

So, I left the business school—and all its promises—and took a chance creating a project on how to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear war. Looking back four decades later through the prism of Rha's useful framework, I realize it was a “renegotiation” that served me and others well.

Reading Intentional Ambition calls to mind all the people I know who are on this journey of renegotiation as they grapple with the hard questions Rha raises. While the questions may be the same, the answer for each of us will be different. Rha has a way of speaking to each of us, in whatever phase of life we may find ourselves.

I reflect on my three children as each seeks to figure out the work that satisfies them and how to reconcile that with the life they want to lead. I think of colleagues like my friend Claire who this very week is faced with the unexpected challenge of leading a nonprofit and the travel it calls for while being available for her teenage daughter who is struggling at school. At the other end of life, I think of friends who are not wanting to retire yet but wish to renegotiate a new relationship with work.

I first had the pleasure of getting to know Rha in an unusual setting, walking through the contested land of Israel/Palestine in the footsteps of Abraham, the legendary ancestor of much of humanity. As we trod the ancient footpaths, we conversed deeply about life and the search for one's true calling. We remembered that Abraham's story too was of renegotiation. Well advanced in years, he heard an inner call that said: “Go. Go forth. Go find out who you really are.” He mustered up the courage to leave the land of his forefathers in Mesopotamia and travel with his family in search of the Promised Land.

Renegotiating how we spend our lives turns out to be not just a timely modern question in these tumultuous times, but a question for the ages. On his journey, Abraham learned his true vocation which was to offer kind‐hearted hospitality to strangers in need. And that is what he is known for to this day—embodied in the astonishing hospitality woven into the cultural fabric of the region, all conflict apart.

As Rha suggests in this valuable offering, there are three negotiations contained in this great renegotiation.

The first and perhaps the hardest negotiation is with ourselves. As we consider what we want in our lives, tension and conflict naturally arise within us—between, for example, our desire for security and our desire for fulfillment. How do we reconcile what seem to be opposing tugs? Here Rha offers us a framework for navigating these delicate internal negotiations—changing our mindset, confronting our fears, and granting ourselves permission to pursue a life of greater freedom, joy, and fulfillment. Renegotiation, it turns out, is an inside job, proceeding from the inside out.

The second negotiation is negotiating with others about the things that truly matter to us. How do we advance our dreams and implement our new terms and conditions in a way that enables us to meet our needs and at the same time address the concerns of others—whether it is our colleagues or our families and partners. How do we overcome what Rha calls the “Scarcity Scare”?

The third and final negotiation has to do with the larger world. What contribution do we aspire to make to the community around us? How can our renegotiation serve as a model for others in helping transform the bigger systems that entrap so many of us? How can we help bring about the larger shifts in the world that we would like to see? Here Rha invites us to be heroic—in her own words, “to leverage our own growth and evolution for the good of the world.”

What I love about Rha's book is its spirit of possibility and humble audacity. If not us, who, and if not now, when? You, my fellow reader, are in for a treat. I wish you every success in your own noble renegotiation.

—William Ury

New York Times best‐selling author, academic, anthropologist, negotiation expert, and co‐founder of the Harvard Program on negotiation

November 2024

IntroductionYou See Resignation ... I See Renegotiation

Have you ever been woken from a deep sleep and felt utterly disoriented? Jolted awake so violently, you didn't know where you were? It's unsettling, right? Especially if you didn't even realize you were sleeping.

I published my first book, The Calling—a guide to finding your purpose and getting paid to pursue it—in January 2020, when the world was a different place. We were pre‐COVID. Pre‐Ahmaud Arbery, pre‐Breonna Taylor, pre‐George Floyd. Pre‐January 6 and the near end of American democracy. Back then, people got out of bed in the morning as they always had, commuted to work as they always did, and lived the lives they were accustomed to living. Business as usual.

Then everything changed, so much so, so joltingly, that instead of just getting out of bed, people started waking up—the kind of waking up where you can't make sense of where you are. And one of the things that made the least sense, because it was connected to every part of our lives, because it ruled our lives—was the way we work.

You know what I mean: that sacrificing way. Signing away our precious time and energy; forgoing our mental, spiritual, and physical well‐being, squandering our true gifts; sanding down our natural contours—all in the name of chasing a vision of success that for so many is actually unattainable. Or that, if attained, so often feels like what's the point?

I think of the Great Resignation—that mass exodus of American workers, roughly 50 million in 2021 and then again in 2022—as our mutual primal scream upon waking up to a few radical truths: That life is short. That money isn't everything. That we want to show up and make a difference. That what we do isn't who we are, yet how we do it can be everything. And that business as usual isn't going to cut it anymore (and, if we're being honest, it never did). At a time of massive uncertainty about the future, the people who've resigned know two things for sure: We are not going back to the way we were, and we are not going back to the way we used to work.

Even if you haven't quit your job in the past few years, I suspect you've at least experienced the stirrings of such feelings. Maybe you've asked yourself: What am I doing this for? Why am I living like this? Is it worth it? Is it even what I want? And boy, do I get it. My own “no going back” moment took place 28 years ago, when I left corporate America to see if I could help others in search of a better way of living, working, and leading. Today, my coaching and consulting company, Move the Crowd, is one of the places people turn to when they feel as though they've hit the wall. We work with entrepreneurs and mid‐level corporate managers, executive assistants and CEOs, budding social‐media influencers, and leaders of nonprofit organizations—all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, all of whom are seeking greater purpose and meaning. Recently, I've been paying special attention to one cohort in particular. Historically, they've been the most undervalued in the workplace and yet possibly, at this moment, have the most to offer: Women of color. My data shows that this group has been the most impacted by COVID (especially when we recognize the pressures on frontline workers and mothers, and the national racial reckoning). As such, they have a unique perspective on questioning the status quo and understanding how to make work more bearable—for everyone.

When journalists and analysts started writing about the Great Resignation, there was a lot of surprise involved: Millions of workers! Just up and quitting! Across all industries! Month after month! From where I sat, it was not nearly so surprising. In my view, this major cultural shift, though absolutely catalyzed by recent events, has been brewing for over two decades (just think about our world of work post‐9/11). The entire time, I've been working with people who, in a culture that values work‐based productivity above all else, have finally reached their breaking point.

Through Move The Crowd, I've helped tens of thousands of these people radically and thrillingly reset their lives by renegotiating their relationship to work: What they do, why they do it, and how to do it so it feels more meaningful and more aligned with who they really are. Demand for our services has grown dramatically as more and more people wake up to the certainty that they want—I would even say need—to do more with their work than just work. They want to contribute and be fulfilled. They want to be doing something of value, for which they want to be valued.

This is especially true for those who feel like being valued is a constant fight. Our most recent work with women of color (WOC) has only underscored this tipping point. They continue to be the most heavily impacted on all fronts post‐pandemic (e.g. health, economic, social/political) and the most enthusiastic about the need for change. We've even developed seminars to help fed‐up WOC executives architect their own emancipation plans. The results of the work have been game changing as the women who participate emerge with a whole new vision and blueprint for their life and their work. As word continues to spread about the impact, the demand for these seminars continues to grow. WOC are recognizing through this work that they can do it differently and on their own terms.

No one is happier than I am when one of my clients publishes a New York Times bestseller or gives a TED Talk that goes viral or wins a prestigious fellowship. But I see my greatest success as the countless people I've helped create a path to doing work that feels authentic and makes a meaningful contribution to the world—and doing it in a way that lets them go home happier at the end of the day, with more bandwidth to engage with their families. I've helped people give themselves permission to step off the corporate ladder (which for most people is more like a treadmill) to pursue their greatest passions and to prioritize their commitment to doing good both off the job and on.

I call this work—the work of transforming what it means to work—renegotiating.

I help people do it by helping them radically rethink their beliefs about ambition and success. They don't do this in a vacuum, but in the context of an evolving understanding of themselves, the world, their place in the world, and the entrenched and largely invisible systems that attempt to dictate who can succeed and on what terms. That, in a nutshell, is renegotiation, and the insights in this book will help you achieve it. Just as they helped me.

Where I'm Coming From

When my dad passed away in 2016, I was overwhelmed with grief, and my response was to double down on what I'd always done: Work. I threw myself into 20‐hour days, stacked meetings back‐to‐back‐to‐back, and made my team members' business my business and their problems my own. Without realizing it, I grew a little more miserable every day, felt a little more trapped, and became a little more resentful.

That resentment started seeping into every interaction, no matter what or whom I was dealing with. Yet for the life of me, I couldn't understand how my dream of building my own company had become such a nightmare—until circumstances in the outer world (the white‐supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia; thorny racial and gender dynamics within my team; the entrepreneur's never‐ending need to balance mission and revenue—to name just three) crashed into my pressure‐cooker inner world, and BAM. It wasn't my first moment of awakening, but it was a big one. So big, it set me on a path to transforming—renegotiating the way I worked. That, in turn, transformed the way we work at Move The Crowd. And this renegotiation has now become central to the work we've helped so many people do—the very work this book is all about.

So, what is the work? In my case: I affirmed that I was in the right place—Move The Crowd was indeed my calling, my dream job—but I was going about it the wrong way. I had to take an honest look at how I'd been working—and hence living. I had to untangle my identity from a way of working that didn't align with or fulfill me. I had to get real with who I was and what I could and could not tolerate. I had to get radically honest about my ambition. Why was I really doing what I was doing? What did I really want? Was success really what I'd thought it was? Was the kind of success I'd bought into even possible? I had to connect the dots between my inner and outer worlds, and when I did, I came to understand that the way I'd overworked myself as a way of hiding from grief wasn't so different from the way I'd always worked—it was only a matter of degree.

And further, my lifelong work MO was tangled up in the unconscious urgency I felt to redeem my father's legacy as a Black man who'd grown up during Jim Crow, intertwined with his deeply ingrained assumptions about survival and success. I came to discover that I was terrified that I would never be able to work hard enough to create the change I wanted or to receive my proper due.

Informed by this new understanding of myself in relation to the world, I then had to give myself permission to forge a new and better way of working—of being. That new way involved honoring my gut‐wisdom about people and situations; accepting (really accepting) less than constant perfection; and setting boundaries—mental, spiritual, emotional, financial—that allowed me to put my own well‐being first. It was about telling myself the truth about who and what was for me, and who and what was not.

In all of this, I was bolstered by a new sense of clarity about how our system of work perpetuates itself. How it tries to convince us—falsely—that we are what we do. How it deceives us into thinking we have no choice but to do its bidding.

None of this, of course, happened overnight. It was definitely a process. But it was a process I emerged from with an electric sense of renewal. Instead of wanting to pull the covers over my head in the morning, I was eager to get going. At work, I was tuned in, present, focused, and it was an expansive kind of focus. I felt as though I was going through my days in 360 degrees, receptive to new ideas that might come from anywhere, connecting dots in new and fruitful ways. I had silence and room to breathe. I was more creative at troubleshooting and solving problems. Above all, I was happier!

But enough about me. We're here to get you happier, more engaged, and more fully alive, where you wake up feeling not just ready but actually inspired for each new day.

Renegotiation, Step‐by‐Step

This book will guide you through the same steps that I and so many Move The Crowd clients have undertaken to renegotiate their relationship to work, and therefore to life—a renegotiation based on redefining, on a personal level, what I call true ambition and success.

As you work through these steps, you can download more tools and resources at www.movethecrowd.me/IA-resources.

The initial steps focus on getting your bearings.

Negotiation is the give‐and‐take process we think we're signing up for when we're striving for conventional success. We work hard, we pay our dues, we climb the ladder, we get the prize, and we live happily and wealthily ever after. But there's a reason it's called a “success story.” For almost all of us, this version of success is just a story, a myth. In our secular culture, it's almost a religion, and success stories are its parables. Unfortunately, these stories tend to have two gaping holes. First, they gloss over the sacrifices, often very deep and very painful, that so many of us are asked to make in pursuit of success—the wheeling and dealing we do with ourselves as we try to negotiate or navigate our way upward. Second, they fail to acknowledge that for vast numbers of us, the deck is stacked against us in such a way that our failure to succeed is almost guaranteed from the start. I call this thwarting, a term you'll come to know well.

The work you'll do in thinking about Negotiation is twofold. One, you'll identify the things you've forfeited as you people‐pleased and team‐playered your way toward your dream job. Two, you'll consider thwarting and the baked‐in systems designed to limit access to success. I'll help you discern where you fit into those systems and reckon with whether you want to continue being part of them—all the while acknowledging that conventional success stories originated in a different time, a time when the road to opportunity was not open to all but rather blocked by a narrow and jealously guarded gate.

Realizing that what you were striving for hasn't happened—and, for reasons that are now more readily apparent, may never happen—brings us to stage two on our continuum: Resignation. But which kind? In the old paradigm, resignation meant being resigned. Grin and bear it. It's a living. It is what it is. Then there's what I call Resignation 2.0: the Great Resignation kind of resignation, where you've had enough and you need out, now, even if no new job is waiting for you. The difference between the two types of resignation is partly a matter of the times we're living through and partly—hugely—a matter of you. Here we'll get acquainted with the concept of the tolerance threshold: the point at which the distance between where you are and who you are becomes untenable. And you'll have a chance to explore your own, because every person's tolerance threshold is unique.

We'll also dig into the destructive belief—fostered by our system of work—that your job is your identity. Not true! Far too many miserable workers have stayed put in their misery because they don't know who they'd be if they weren't doing what they do. This is especially true for people who are, according to conventional wisdom, successful. The more money you make, the higher you climb on whatever ladder you're climbing, the more you tend to believe that your job is you, as opposed to being just one of innumerable things about you. (And in all probability not the most important one.) This is one of a few reasons why success can sometimes suck. We'll get into those reasons in a productive way.

Untangling your identity and your job paves the way for a more complicated untangling: of you and your ambitions. So often our seeming aspirations are actually other people's expectations—a parent, a spouse, the culture at large; it could be anyone. Or, as in my case, and often with no conscious awareness, we do what we do, the way we do it, because we're trying to right a past wrong or fulfill a legacy or do someone else's do‐over. That might sound noble, but it's no way to live. My best definition of a worthy ambition? Following your own ambition. I'll guide you through an ambition inventory that will give you an accurate understanding of what can and does truly motivate you.

What comes next is where Renegotiation begins—the work I do best, the work I'm going to share with you. And it starts with reclaiming the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. These stories have a profound impact on how we move through life, and they reflect everything we experience in life—the good, the bad, the memorable, the regrettable. Something happens, we process it a certain way, and we draw conclusions about what it says about us. These conclusions become our stories, our narratives. When they're inspiring and serve a positive role, that's great. But when they're rooted in dysfunction, it's trouble.

Reclaiming your personal story is one part of preparing to craft a new success story. The other part is stepping back to do what I call an alignment check, to confirm the core values you'll want to be syncing up with. With those values top of mind, you can then begin to reimagine what real success, meaningful success, will look like for you. You'll get granular about the ideal who, what, when, where, and how of your work and your life, in a way that is inspiring to you.

Of course, we're not just here to tell stories. The goal is to turn your success story into reality—which brings us to the real nitty gritty of this book: the how‐to. It's one thing to understand renegotiation, but how do you actually do it?

My answers come in two parts: one involving renegotiating with other people and institutions, and the other—which in some ways is trickier!—involving renegotiating with yourself.

Since I love a challenge, we'll start with the trickiest part of the tricky one. It is perhaps the most important part of renegotiation: changing your mindset about the possibility of change. In the Resignation phase, when it seems as though your two options are either stick it out and be miserable, or quit, it's easy to forget that—just like success stories—our whole system of work is a creation, based on manmade structures, and that what was made can be unmade and indeed remade. I'll help you challenge your beliefs about change (often inherited) and examine your attitude toward risk (also often inherited). And we'll take a page from the millennial/Gen Z playbook—the “Says who?” generation—as you work to accept your own agency and power.

“Says who?” also applies to our next step, which is all about permission—specifically, giving yourself permission to matter.

I will show you that giving yourself permission to matter is about giving yourself five individual permissions: to want what you really want, to pursue your goal, to be a work in progress (what I call being on the journey), to succeed or fail on your terms, and to be supported in the ways you truly need to be.

Next, we'll turn to the how‐to of renegotiating with others. I'll give you tools and a game plan for reentry. This includes setting boundaries—oh, how I love a good boundary! I think of them as guardrails on the road to happiness and true success. I'll also give you a fantastic tool for doing the thing that scares so many of my clients: actual negotiating.

Part of what makes real negotiating intimidating is that our economy—really, our entire culture—is based on the notion of scarcity. You ask for something and are told there's not enough. Not enough room at the table, let alone at the top. Not enough profit to share. It's used to foster competition rather than collaboration and cooperation. A win for you is a loss for me.

We'll examine the scarcity scare, considering all the ways that it's a myth. The scarcity mindset wants us to believe that there simply aren't resources to fairly compensate, promote, value, and appreciate women of color—that more for them would mean less for others. In fact, our data demonstrates the opposite: that women of color are a massively underutilized resource at a time when their wisdom, skills, and insights are sorely needed and could benefit entire divisions, entire companies, and an entire economy. That's the truth I want to share: that making work better for some of us makes things better for all of us.

The Bottom Line

Over the course of a lifetime, the average American will spend some 90,000 hours at work. 90,000 hours. If you love what you do and how you're doing it, those hours will be a blessing. If not, they'll be a slow and steady selling of your soul. A bit of your soul every day, in exchange for a job that doesn't make you happy.

For so many years, millions of Americans viewed that exchange as necessary, inevitable, unavoidable. We were, in a word, resigned. Then, in the past few years, many of us went from being resigned to resigning. Now, whether or not you've walked away from a job, it's time for the next step: re‐signing. As in making a new contract with yourself for who you'll be and how you'll work, drawing up new terms for what you are and are not willing to do, for how work will fit into the rest of your life, for how it will align with your true ambitions and reflect a more vibrant relationship to the world. In a word, renegotiating.

All of this is the work of Intentional Ambition. And it just might be the most important work you'll ever do. Because if you're living for the end of the work day, for the arrival of the weekend, for the can't‐come‐a‐minute‐too‐soon vacation that will finally be here next month, then what you're really doing is wishing this day away, wishing this week away, wishing this month away. In other words, wishing your life away. You're on the “wake me when it's over” plan—with your life. I don't want to live that way, and I know you don't either.

This book is a guide to avoiding those regrets—to seeing through and beyond the systemic structures and ingrained beliefs that make work so unrewarding for so many. It's a book for people who've woken up to the hard truth that buying into business as usual comes at a price, and that price is just too steep. It's a book for people who know they can't go back but aren't quite sure how to go forward. It's a book for people who believe that, as Brené Brown has said, “You cannot change the world if you don't change the way we work.” It's the book I wish I'd had when I was stumbling through my own renegotiation. I wrote it to help you move—with grace, with purpose, with optimism, and even with joy—through yours. So what are we waiting for?

Part INegotiation

Chapter 1You Say Career Wall, I Say Life Wall