Society still doesn’t welcome career-minded women with open arms; our culture views ambitious men as “go getters”; ambitious women are “the B-word”. Women absorb society’s negative attitude, turn it against ourselves, and struggle with a socially sanctioned failure to embrace our own ambition. High-achieving women all have a pernicious audio loop playing between our ears:

“Will being as ambitious as I really want to be make me less of a woman? Will it cost me my personal life? Will I make enemies? Will it make those I care about suffer? Am I charging too much? Am I giving my employer and clients their money’s worth? Who do I think I am calling myself an expert? Do I really know what I’m doing or am I in over my head? Does sticking up for myself and taking credit mean I’m arrogant, greedy? Am I worthy of going after my biggest, most precious career dreams? Am I deserving of power and recognition? Is it impossible to be ambitious and happy?”

We owe it to ourselves to honor our ambition every bit as much as our other sacrosanct priorities. I want readers to take away a clear, nuts and bolts awareness of precisely how to have a great, rewarding, fulfilling professional life and a rich, happy personal life. We needn’t choose between the two.

What do you want readers to take away with them after reading the book?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could be audaciously ambitious and happy at the same time? You can, and you will.

Ambition is a virtue. Ambition is the best of who we are.

The real way to have a great life is to see ambition as a part of your value system that you must give equal attention to along with other priorities you hold dear, including your spouse, your children, and your friends. Readers of Ambition Is Not A Dirty Word will take away fresh, powerful tools for reclaiming their dreams. Dr. Debra Condren’s 8 Ambitious Rules—illustrated with stories of real women (Debra interviewed 500 women for the book) provide concrete, innovative solutions to the everyday struggles we as women face, like taking credit, deflecting detractors, and handling confrontation, so that you can become more powerful and fulfilled at work and more satisfied at home. You can redefine your ambition in the face of social sanctions and unapologetically go after your dreams without sacrificing the rest of your life.

In this book, I’ll work with you to help you get a handle on the overt messages we have been taught about being ambitious women, the covert messages that have filtered in unconsciously, and the self-sabotaging behaviors they cause. I’ll provide self-assessment quizzes, checklists, and exercises so you can quickly and easily assess if you’re prone to selling yourself short where your ambitchous goals are concerned. Then I’ll offer proven, fresh solutions—the same ones I use with my executive coaching clients—to help you overcome these internalized barriers. By the way: none of these strategies will ask you simply to think more like a man. My solutions will help you draw effective boundaries around your positive qualities so they won’t work against you. Once you learn to do this, you’ll be free. You can dare to be truly great on your own terms. You’ll be able to redefine the meaning of ambition and embrace the value of unleashing your sacrosanct career dreams on your own terms."

You owe it to yourself and the world to make the contribution you were born to make. Ambition Is Not A Dirty Word will show you how to do it.

As the ambitious woman you are—and are entitled to be—Debra encourages readers to answer for themselves, every day, a question posed in Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day”:

“Tell me, What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE AMBITION IS NOT A DIRTY WORD?

Why Did I Write This Book? And Why Should You Trust Me?

"Who is this ambitious woman," you may be asking. "Why should I trust her?"

I’m a business psychologist, executive coach, and career advisor who has spent more than fifteen years helping women embrace their ambition and achieve their career goals. As the founder and president of Manhattan Business Coaching, a professional development firm based in New York City and San Francisco, I’ve worked with thousands of clients throughout the United States and the world. I served as an Advisory Member to an American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force for empowering adolescent girls. I lead dozens of workshops every year and lecture frequently on women’s need to embrace their ambition. In 1995, I founded and am the executive director of the Women’s Business Alliance, an organization that has served as a motivational think tank for more than 2,500 women over eleven years. I founded the WBA specifically to help women overcome the barriers that keep them from reaching the top in their chosen fields. The U.S. Small Business Administration recognized my work with a "Women In Business Advocate of the Year 2000" award.

I’ve worked with women of every stripe, from students and recent graduates embarking on their brand new career path, to successful women in the corporate, non-profit, and government sectors. I’ve met with small business owners, heads of fast-growing start-ups, consultants, physicians, attorneys, investment bankers, architects, and executives and professionals in a wide array of fields. I’ve advised young women as young as 17 to women in their early sixties. Wherever they’ve been on their professional path, my mission has been to increase women’s business acumen by teaching them strategies for identifying meaningful, challenging work; increasing profitability; building and keeping wealth; competing with power and confidence in traditional and male-dominated corporate sectors; establishing themselves as experts; and tapping their competitive advantage.

As I spoke to and coached thousands of women, however, I began to detect a striking pattern: Even self-professed successful women were hitting walls, unable to achieve the next level in their professional lives—and they didn’t know why. Certainly they were well aware of the external barriers to their success—the famed glass ceiling, lack of support for those who choose to juggle work and family. However, they had no idea that the greatest factor holding them back was a barrier they themselves had created and internalized.

Based on my conversations with so many women, I suspected I knew exactly what mistaken belief was holding them back. Seven years ago, I began a systematic investigation of professional women’s attitudes toward ambition. I interviewed more than 500 women from every corner of the country and between the ages of 19 and 65.

These were all women who regarded themselves as high-achieving. Many were rookies with brand new, promising careers in front of them. Many were already quite successful. Many had established impressive track records of in-the-trenches professional experience,had broken through at least some gender barriers to become established in their fields, made comfortable-to-sizable incomes, and either had the title and position they wanted or were drawing a bead on the prize. I asked these women their definitions of success and ambition, how they saw themselves, how they visualized an ambitious woman, and what held them back from achieving even greater success.

I made a fascinating discovery. High-achieving women all harbor the same dirty little secret, no matter what our backgrounds: We all struggle with socially sanctioned failure to embrace our ambition.

Ambition isn’t a dirty word, but as far as many women are concerned, it might as well be. It doesn’t matter where we grew up, went to school, or go to work. It’s the same whether we’re in our twenties and new to our careers, or in our fifties and sixties and among the most highly-regarded professionals in our industries. Today, the greatest barrier to earning more money, getting the power and recognition we deserve, and feeling entitled to stay the course comes from inside of ourselves. We agonize over whether or not we deserve to be ambitious—and about what it will cost us.

I looked for books to recommend to supplement my own findings and recommendations. I found most that proposed to teach women how to succeed on their own terms, with a huge emphasis on mastering the life-in-balance issue. None of them challenged the notion that the accepted definition of success might actually be holding women back because it is couched in such a positive way: "You don’t have to be unabashedly ambitious. You’re above all that. You are sophisticated enough to realize that ambition isn’t as important as getting the life-balance equation right." Or, "You don’t have to be ambitious the way a man is. You’ve come around to realize that success is a different, and better, goal than ambition. You can win with empathy, cooperation and being generous. You don’t have to give up being a woman to get ahead."

I count it as a Pyrrhic victory that our modern, progressive culture is no longer pushing the idea that women cannot have it all. The message these books and popular media were transmitting is: We can have it all—so long as we’re willing to redefine what "it" is. Now it’s not the killer job and the great home life; it’s balancing the two, which, practically speaking, means less of each: women should be just thrilled to have a not-ideal job and a not-ideal life as long as they feel the two are balanced.

How can we take seriously the necessary soul-searching required to discover what we were meant to do professionally when our pure, unadulterated ambition is never discussed explicitly—only game plays and hardball techniques, softened for the female player?

I decided to write this book to address the great hunger on the part of high-aiming women for advice that speaks to our discontent—and to our ambition to be freely ambitious."