#10: Why Ambition Is Burning You Out (And What to Do About It)

Ambition is supposed to be the thing that gets you to the life you want. So why does it feel like it's destroying you?

In this episode, I get personal about my own relationship with ambition — from a kid with no direction, to a Marine who learned to grind through anything, to a high achiever running on fear, shame, and anger until the whole thing collapsed. If you've built real success but it doesn't feel the way you thought it would, this episode is going to name exactly what's missing.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why ambition alone is a one-way road to burnout and what has to be paired with it to make success sustainable
• The difference between ambition and alignment, and why you need both at the same time
• What toxic fuel is and how fear, shame, and anger can drive real success before they quietly destroy you
• Why high achievers often swing from grinding nonstop to doing nothing at all and how to find the balance between the two
• How to tell if the goal you're chasing is something you actually want or something you've been conditioned to want
• The one question to ask yourself when ambition stops working

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Transcript

hy Ambition Starts For Him

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Whole Man. And today we're going to be talking about why ambition alone is burning us out. Ambition to me means the drive to accomplish things. And for me, I didn't have a ton of ambition growing up. Ambition for me was very fleeting because I was very much so a go with the flow kind of kid. I was a kid who loved theater, I loved music, I loved singing, I loved dancing. And I was actually really good naturally at just enjoying life and not forcing myself to do things that I didn't want to do. And like everything, there's a light and a shadow side to it. And so the light side of when I was younger was I tended to be more carefree, had a little bit more internal peace, and felt really good a lot of the time. But the shadow side to it was I wasn't really able to follow through with things. I didn't have a lot of discipline. I didn't really know what it felt like to set goals and accomplish them. And so for me, I didn't really start developing ambition until I got sick with my tumor and until I joined the Marine Corps. So for me, the Marine Corps was very much so the catalyst of ambition for me. I went from this kid who had a lot of anxiety issues and depression issues to being this kid who got diagnosed with a rare tumor at 15, ended up being addicted to pain medication, went to the hospital for it, went to rehab for it. If you guys haven't heard my whole story, I recommend watching the first episode of this podcast if you want to learn more about my journey. And what happened after that is I went to rehab for 90 days, and then I'd made a decision that I wanted to be more successful. And that led me to joining the Marine Corps when I was 19. And for me, the Marine Corps was a crash course in discipline and ambition. And so I learned how to show up and do stuff when I didn't feel like it. And that's a powerful skill. That's something that I feel like everybody needs to learn how to do. However, just like anything, just one dimension isn't enough. So ambition for me initially was the catalyst to my success because my ambition is what allowed me to drive a ton of sales and the company that I used to work for. It's what allowed me to show up to the gym and work out when I didn't feel like it. It's what allowed me to lead teams and hit goals. And all of that was great, except that there wasn't any fuel to make my ambition sustainable. I was just focused on the external side of things. So I went from being solely focused on my internal state, meaning how joyous I felt, how at peace I was. I very much so lived in my own little world when I was a kid. I went from that dimension, which is very much so basking in my feminine energy. And feminine energy is non-gender specific, it just means the energy of introspection, joy, creativity, kind of go with the flow energy. So I went from that extreme to then being a Marine, which was the extreme of masculine energy. So drive, structure, ambition, external world focused. And my whole life I've struggled with toggling back and forth between these two extremes. And what I'm learning to do now is learning how to hold both at the same time and use those energies in a way that's beneficial to me. So why ambition alone burns us out is because when you take just when you just worry about taking action without worrying about what that action is doing to you internally, then it's really easy for us to bypass our emotions, bypass the way that our nervous system feels, to bypass our intuition, our inner knowing in our body, and just predominantly use our head to drive decisions. So practical example of this was when I first started working for this company I used to work for, where I became very successful very fast, it was driven by the pursuit of success. So I knew logically what I needed to do in order to generate certain results. And because I was conditioned from the Marine Corps to do whatever it takes to be successful, I very much so sacrificed my personal health, well-being, and relationships and the pursuit of success. So I ignored how I felt and I just leaned into what was necessary and what had to be done. And at first that worked fine. And then over time I started to experience burnout from it because it was more so, it wasn't aligned action, meaning it wasn't necessarily action that energized me or lit me up. It was just action. And because of that, a lot of the things that I was doing in my life was draining me. I call this soulless action. So I was taking action and I was ambitious, but it wasn't rooted in a place of alignment. It wasn't rooted in my value system, it wasn't rooted in my intuition, it wasn't, it wasn't heart-led action. So what happened is I didn't get the joy and the fulfillment and the energy that I would have gotten if I was taking action more in alignment with my true value system. So I bypassed all that. I relied just on willpower in order to force results to happen in my reality. And that that works to a point for me that ran out. And a lot of times why this happens is because essentially we overvalue the actions that we take and we undervalue the drive behind those actions. So it's not just about what actions I'm taking, it's also about what is driving me to take those actions. And what I didn't know at the time was the thing that was fueling my ambition wasn't self-love. It wasn't working towards something. It wasn't because the thing that I was doing genuinely lit me up. What drove me was fear. Fear of not being good enough, fear that I'm not worthy of the things that I want, fear that if I don't create a ton of success in my life, then I'm a failure. Anger at myself and my past and my parents, anger at the kids at school who bullied me, shame for the things I did when I was addicted to drugs. So my ambition was fueled by things that eventually started to destroy me. So those fuel sources that maybe initially help us create success can become the very thing that destroys us later on. And that's what happened to me. So my burnout came from I was driven to be successful and ambitious through fear, anger, shame, and guilt. And this was unconscious. I wasn't aware of this at the time. It was very much so success that was rooted from proving myself. And then what happened is that fuel started to run out. And I didn't know what to do because that was my main motivator in life, was my trauma, was my hardship. And so when I stopped being able to use that fuel to drive my actions, I didn't know what to do. So I did what anybody who was a prior drug addict would have done. And then I started to take stimulants. I took Adderall and Vivants again to keep making my ambition stronger. It's to keep trying to use that fuel as much as I possibly could. Essentially, I was doing everything I could to bypass what my body and my spirit was telling me. And then eventually, even that stopped working. So that's where my burnout came from was the fuel that I was using was toxic and it ended up destroying me. And that's what happens to people who create lives that are not sustainable. You can, you can force whatever you, you can basically force whatever you want into existence, but you can't necessarily sustain it. So for me, I very much so forced my success through willpower and ambition. However, I couldn't sustain it because it didn't come from a place of truth, of wholeness. And so what I'm learning right now is how do you balance both ambition, which is masculine energy dominant, which is structure and discipline, and doing the stuff that's required to be successful, along with alignment, which is doing things from a place of self-love, making sure the fuel that I'm using is passion for my work. It's coming from a place of service, it's coming from a place of wanting to make an impact, and it's coming from a place of excitement. And that's the piece where I see a lot of high achievers not being good at it. Uh, so a lot of the people that I help, for example, in my business, are the people who have created a ton of external success. However, their fuel has started to run out. So they're burning out, they're unfulfilled, and they feel trapped in their own success. And they're feeling this calling to learn how to prioritize their emotional fulfillment. And in order to prioritize your emotional fulfillment, you have to start doing the inner work. Ambition is very much so just outer work, meaning that I'm focusing on the things that I'm doing in my external reality. And again, that's valuable. But if you don't do the inner work as well, then you're gonna burn out from it and it's not gonna be sustainable. So I help a lot of people with the inner work. How do I go within and confront the parts of myself that are driven from places of falseness, meaning they're driven from a place of fear, shame, guilt, and anger. How do I go in, figure out what parts of me are not in wholeness? And then how do I confront those parts? How do I change those parts? How do I integrate those parts so that I can not only be ambitious and successful on the outside, but also have fulfillment on the inside? And this is where I see a lot of people make mistakes. I used to really have a problem with this, and something I still sometimes struggle with is overcorrecting. So if you're ambitious and you have been burning yourself out to be successful, the tendency is people take themselves so far to that extreme that something terrible in their life happens and they're forced to stop, and then they go the complete opposite end of the pendulum. Meaning now they're not driven or ambitious at all. They just sit there in their house and meditate all day. They just trust that God or the universe will just bring clients to them or just make things happen for them. And I say this being this person because I was so exhausted from willpowering and wide-knuckling my way through life that I just said, fuck it. And I ended up going broke, had negative$200 in my bank account because I didn't have any energy to do anything in my world. And so, yeah, I was all about the joy and the feeling good, but I no longer took action. And so instead of going to one extreme or the other, we have to learn how to integrate both. And so that's what really this episode is about is how do we integrate ambition and alignment? How do we find the balance of joy, excitement, and energy while also having discipline, structure, and consistency? And maybe this will help you with figuring out how to really balance these two worlds together. So if you have a goal that you're working toward, if you consider yourself an ambitious person and you have a goal that you're working towards, but maybe you have a feeling deep down that you're being burned out. Maybe you're feeling like the way that you're getting to that goal is not sustainable. So there's one of two things going on. If you have a goal that your brain is telling you you want to accomplish, yet you're feeling burned out and stuck and like you're not able to accomplish it, one of two things is going on. One, it's either one, the thing that you're pursuing is not the thing that you truly want, or two, the way that you're doing it is not in alignment with your value system, with the way that you're designed to operate. So if you're somebody who, example, you want to build a cleaning business. I don't know, this is just a scenario. Your goal is to build a cleaning business. That's your goal. If you find yourself having a really hard time taking the steps to do that, it's either because that's not actually something you want, that's something that you've been conditioned to think that you want. So that's a should desire. So that means that it's not something you truly want. It's something your parents told you you should do, it's something your friends told you you should do, it's it's something that your people in your environment told you you should do, and you took it on as your own goal. However, let's say, let's assume it is something that you want. Well, the way that you're getting there is probably not in alignment with the way that you want to move in the world. So, for example, for me, I'm not a big cold caller. I'm not somebody who sends a hundred emails out a day to try to get people to work with me. I've tried doing that, and it just wasn't in alignment with my energy. So instead of doing that, I started to focus more on getting in front of people and doing talks because that's something that energizes me. It's something that makes me feel like I'm not pitching myself or my services necessarily or really pushing to get business, it's more so of inviting people into my space and helping people identify themselves in my story and giving people the option to work deeper with me if that's what they want. So, yeah, if you're somebody who's ambitious, you feel like you're burning out, um, if you love the thing that you do, then the question you need to ask yourself is, how can I do this in a way that's more enjoyable? Or if you're not really even sure that the thing that you're doing is something that you want to do, then ask yourself the question, what do I really want to do that I'm not giving my per self permission to want? So it's one of my what would I do if I wasn't scared that I was gonna fail? So there's some tips for you. Hope this episode was helpful for you guys. Uh, please subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube. Uh follow along if you're listening to this. And yeah, let me know if you have any other topics or episode ideas that you want to run by me. I'd be happy to hear them. Thanks, y'all.