Real Ambition. Magazine Psychologies

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      Real Ambition

      REAL AMBITION

      Quit dreaming and create success your way

      This edition first published 2016

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      ISBN 978-0-857-08663-1 (pbk)

      ISBN 978-0-857-08664-8 (ebk) ISBN 978-0-857-08665-5 (ebk)

      Cover design: Wiley

      FOREWORD

      by Suzy Greaves, Editor, Psychologies

      Our ethos at Psychologies magazine is ‘your life, your way.' This book is how to live that ethos. Real ambition is about defining success on your own terms. We are all unique and when we tune into what we really want versus the world's definition of success, it's the ultimate ticket to freedom. Why? Because then you can start to build a life around your values and what you love instead of wasting your energy comparing and competing for something you never really wanted in the first place.

      To discover your real ambition, you do need to spend some time working on your life versus being in it. This book invites you to dig deep and work out what really does inspire and fulfil you. It's a space to press pause while you complete the exercises and quizzes to discover what is your real ambition and then to create a new life plan from there – be it changing career, learning how to create your own business or writing a novel.

      Real Ambition will help you get clear about goals that make sense to you. But it's not just about doing, but being. It's an invitation to make a leap to be your best self, to create a life that inspires you versus just making do, to have the courage to learn something new, to risk failing so you can create a life that reflects your real values.

      When you have real ambition, life feels easier because you are comfortable in your own skin and living life authentically. You inspire, you lead and excel because you are living a successful life – defined by you.

      Are you ready? Let's make it happen.

Suzy Greaves, Editor, Psychologies

      INTRODUCTION

      We're so pleased you decided to buy this book about Real Ambition because at Psychologies magazine we believe that the link between ambition and success is the word real. And by real we mean what feels good for you. We want to kick off by telling you that your interest in real ambition indicates that your mind is tuned to the right wavelength for determining your success.

      At this point we know that you have established a need to find out how to achieve success. Perhaps you sense that you need to learn more about how ambition works and what steps you can take to harness your own ambition. You may have one particular ambition in your life, but maybe something makes you feel unsure about whether it's possible to achieve this. Or maybe ambition for you isn't based on a singular mission and instead is about figuring out how to be successful. Or you might be at a dead end and want to know how to get out of this and what else might be possible. You may even be doing perfectly OK, but don't want to live an OK life – you want to know if and how it's feasible to achieve an amazing life.

      So there are all sorts of reasons why you might have bought this book. At Psychologies magazine we know that the one thing our readers have in common is that they are striving for better lives all round. A better life for our readers isn't just about external and conventional marks of success. A better life is as much about inner wellbeing. We know from the therapists and life coaches who write for us, as well as those we interview every month for the magazine, that success is a huge preoccupation for their clients. People get caught up in feeling they haven't achieved ‘enough', or they beat themselves up because they feel they are inadequate.

      How to be successful has been a big question since the eighties. There are countless books about this. So what makes Real Ambition any different? We have for some time sensed both from the experts we have access to, the academic research we follow, and the feedback from our readers, that there is a major cultural shift in what constitutes success. We've had the ‘yuppies' (young upwardly mobile) of the eighties, the high-flyers of the nineties, and the mass consumerism of the noughties. In more recent years, success in our culture has come to be associated with how high-flying city figures and reality TV stars behave. But now that we're slowly exiting a recession in the UK, we believe that there's a strong sense of wanting to rewrite the meaning of ambition and success.

      Real Ambition aims to help you create your own meaning of success and to encourage you to create a model of ambition that suits you. This involves first understanding who you are at this point.

      We believe that ambition is that desire to make the inner leap to be your best self so that you can live your best life. Instead of ‘making do', it's all about the doing. And of course that comes down to courage. Our job is to help you find that courage, show you how to harness and maximize it so that you don't turn back, or give up. Right now it's like you're looking at a map, your eyes are on your destination, and you're questioning the transport. We want to encourage you to look further than your destination, to create a journey to that point that enriches your life from day one, a journey that's fascinating and opens up your mind constantly.

      If you have formed the belief that ambition is about being a certain personality type, and you think this book will be about becoming that personality – well, we don't believe this is the case. Ambition is not about those people you read about, or certain people you know. We won't be advocating that you must fake being