Are You Doing Too Much? Or Maybe Too Little? Let’s Talk About Healthy Ambition and What It Looks Like!
Ambition is defined as “a strong desire to do or achieve something/success” - a quality that we often praise when we notice it in ourselves and in others. Although ambition can be positive, too much or too little ambition can become problematic.
Too Much Ambition
When we have too much ambition, we might be assigning too much value to certain goals, rather than to our actual values. This leads us to feeling unfulfilled, because we are not moving towards our values. For example, if we value family time but sacrifice it constantly to try and further our career instead, then we are moving away from our real value of family time.
Too much ambition can also lead to perfectionism. Being overly perfectionistic can lead to a cycle of chronic dissatisfaction with one’s life, because nothing will ever seem perfect enough.
Perfectionism is associated with a host of psychological problems including anxiety, depression, and OCD symptoms (Callaghan et al., 2024) as well as eating disorders (Stackpole et al., 2023). Excess ambition can also fuel self-destructive behaviors such as exploiting yourself, and sacrificing your needs. For example, you might no longer allow yourself to sleep long enough out of fear you won’t have enough time to work on your goals, or you’ll stop meeting up with friends because that time can’t be invested into your goals, causing you to push them away, damage relationships and lose important social connections.
For expat families and expat kids, international schools can sometimes put children and adolescents under a lot of pressure. Although we want our children to challenge themselves by striving for ambitious goals and have them experience personal growth and success, schools and parents should be careful about how they communicate their expectations to their children. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to help our children get the most out of their education, but parents may not realize that they implicitly communicate certain expectations to their children that might foster less healthy behaviors. For example, most expat families send their children to international schools, which tend to have pretty steep fees. If parents keep nagging about how expensive their child’s education is, the child might feel guilty about this and start to overwork themselves, hoping that at least their good grades will ‘satisfy’ their parents. The IB curriculum in particular can be very intense for adolescents. For example, if sleep is being compromised to finish assignments or study for exams, a reevaluation of the demands put on the child (either by themselves, parents, the school, or a combination) might be necessary. Parents can support their child’s healthy pursuit of goals by modeling both a good work ethic and a good work-life balance. Many of us think we need to earn our rest, but actually, without a healthy amount of rest, we won’t function well enough to do our work!
Too Little Ambition
On the other side of being overly ambitious, we have a lack of ambition. Someone who does not experience desire for achievement or success may experience poor (academic) performance, boredom, and purposelessness. This last component is particularly damaging.
Feeling like life has no meaning or purpose is an extremely bleak thought; unlike our previous example where we weren’t moving towards our values because we were distracted by other goals, here we are not moving towards our values because we don’t know what they are. The same results can occur, however, including depression and anxiety.
Some people experience a lack of ambition due to previous negative experiences with failure or receiving poor social feedback or criticism. As a result of reduced self-esteem and reduced self-efficacy (belief that one is capable of achieving a goal) one might start to believe that there is no point in pursuing or aspiring to goals as one wouldn’t achieve them anyway or because the fear of failure is too overwhelming. In this case, a lack of ambition becomes a coping mechanism to avoid future scenarios that might make us vulnerable to experiencing those unpleasant feelings associated with failure or harsh criticism again.
A lack of ambition could also be a symptom of something else, like anxiety or depression itself. When you are too afraid to try something, you avoid it, and don’t allow yourself to pursue goals. Lack of ambition might resemble depressive symptoms, specifically anhedonia which is a loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities. Similarly, a person suffering from depression might feel so overwhelmed by a tiny task that they avoid and abandon any long-term goals. Diminished ambition could also be an indication that someone is struggling with burnout. Burnout is characterized by extreme and persistent physical and emotional exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment and detachment. Burnout can actually result from initially having too much ambition and overdoing it, but when people experience burnout they will lose any sense of ambition and drive they previously had, feeling lethargic and depleted. In severe cases, burnout can be associated with physical symptoms such as cardiovascular and gastrointestinal problems and psychological problems such as depression and insomnia (Salvagioni et al., 2017).
For expat children who’ve recently moved, you may notice they have no goals or ambitions they are working towards. If children are still in the grief stage after a move, it is important to recognize this and not put any pressure on the child to “get on with it.” Giving the child the time, space, and emotional support to process and grieve their losses is essential. If the child can engage in a natural and healthy grieving process, with time, their desires and ambitions will eventually start to resurface. Another important factor to consider for expat children is moves or transitions between school systems. If children have to adjust to a completely new and foreign school system, things might be feeling extra hard for them. For example, if a child suddenly has to attend maths classes in a new language or a language that is not their mother tongue, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that their performance may be a bit lower. It can be really discouraging for children to feel like all of a sudden they aren’t as good as they thought they were. They might feel like a failure and avoid trying to get better at maths altogether because it simply feels like too big of an ask to solve algebraic equations in a foreign language. In such instances, parental support and talking to the school about how to best support the child’s learning goals is recommended.
How to Strike a Healthy Balance
If you’re struggling to strike the right balance between too much and too little ambition, there are some things you can do to make sure you don’t fall to either extreme.
For one, it is important to set realistic and achievable goals, so that we don’t get discouraged. This does not mean abandon your hopes and dreams. Instead, break down how you could achieve your goals into smaller manageable intermediate steps. Having one big ultimate goal is a lot more overwhelming than having smaller intermediate goals whose purpose is to get you to your final goal. Moreover, it's important that we keep our goals just above the threshold of what we feel is comfortable or manageable. This means, that with a little extra effort, we will get there and typically experience personal growth and development. We manage to do something we may not previously have thought we were capable of! However, by setting goals that are unattainable and unrealistic, way past the threshold of what is within our capabilities, we might be doing more harm than good. When we don’t achieve our unrealistically ambitious goals, we end up feeling bad about ourselves and may become hypercritical. This can result in us feeling like we need to try even harder, by working more. This might look like negative self-talk and beating yourself up for not achieving your goal. This can lead to more isolation and neglecting other areas of our life (e.g., socializing) too. More seriously, we might end up in a vicious cycle of continuously setting unrealistically high goals, not achieving them, feeling like we need to try harder, and trying to meet our unattainable goal again. If you see yourself in this pattern, it might be time to ‘zoom out’ a bit and take a look at what goals you’re currently trying to achieve. Be honest with yourself about whether they’re a bit too unrealistic at the moment. If you find it hard to figure this out yourself, ask someone who knows you really well, like a friend or family member. They might have noticed something about your patterns that you are not yet aware of and can help you identify whether you need to adjust your goal-setting behaviors.
Secondly, figure out what the motivation is driving your goals. Trying not to be an over-achiever in today’s society is hard. Much of modern-day society ‘seeks’ out individuals who show personality traits that embody ambition. Obvious examples are in academic or work settings; typically, individuals who are perceived as ambitious and hard-working are regarded as more desirable candidates. In addition, social media platforms that only show people’s achievements or highlight reels reinforce this notion that we have to consistently be at the top of our game at all times, constantly trying to outperform our previous achievements. As a result, it can sometimes be difficult for an individual to reflect and differentiate: “How much of my ambition is driven by external forces vs. my intrinsic desires?” Intrinsic desires or intrinsic motivation refers to the desire to do something for its own sake and the inherent satisfaction derived from working towards a certain goal. It is the mission that generates a sense of fulfillment. Extrinsic desires or motivation refers to what we feel when we obtain external rewards as a consequence of doing a task well. Examples include higher pay, prizes, fame, etc. External rewards can be a great motivator, however, typically, studies find that we perform better and for longer periods of time when our motivation comes from an intrinsic drive and not external motivators. Admittedly, the lines between extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation can get very blurred, so it’s good to sometimes take a moment to step back, slow down, and ask oneself: “Why am I doing this and who am I doing it for?” Sometimes there will be overlap; we might have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators driving our behaviors and that’s totally fine. As long as you are aware of what is driving your behaviors, you can monitor yourself and identify when you might be ‘overdoing it’ (e.g., filling every spare moment you have with studying or work) and when you are working intentionally towards a goal for the inherent satisfaction it brings. Keep in mind also that your achievements and successes are not what defines you. These things are great, and they make us feel good about ourselves, but that feeling is usually pretty brief. You are so much more than your goals and achievements! Who you are as a person (e.g., generous, kind, fair, honest) is typically how people will remember you and something to be celebrated just as much as a new promotion or a fantastic grade!
Finally, it’s important to realize that striving for success or achievement can have very different meanings. For some people, an academic degree might be their personal desired achievement. Others might have ambitions related to athletic performance, growing a special plant in the garden, mastering a recipe for an exquisite dish, or having lasting relationships. With social media so present in our lives, we might feel pressure to seek out the same goals or lifestyles that others have. That doesn’t matter! Remind yourself that you’re not living your life for anyone else but yourself. You might as well live it doing what you want to do, and not doing what others expect you should do.
In summary, fostering a healthy amount of ambition is a balancing act. Too much can be harmful and detrimental to one’s health but so can too little. Nobody’s perfect and it will probably take some trial and error to figure out whether or not you’re maybe sacrificing a bit too much in pursuit of your goals, or whether your lack of goal-orientation comes from a fear of failure and feeling inadequate. If you want to learn more or would like to seek professional help EKC is here to help! Read more about our therapeutic process here.