Is That All There Is? Cultivating Contentment as an Ambitious Woman

It was one of those fall days when the nip hasn’t set in yet and the air still feels velvety. I was driving my daughter home from gymnastics with the windows down. I suspected she was asleep in her car seat (far too late for a nap, but the silence was irresistible). I prefer taking local roads home from the tumbling gym, winding through the zip code of my childhood. It’s a special neighborhood, underappreciated by most residents of the city. One stretch of the drive lets you see both horizons: the apricots and violets of the sunset over the Olympic Mountains to the west, and the blues and silvers of evening slipping over Lake Washington and the Cascades to the east. I usually drive a little too slowly down this road, catching glimpses of the views between the craftsman homes that line the street.

We were heading back to our new-ish rental. When I first walked in, it had the same smell as other houses in this neighborhood. Hardwood, damp, mothballs? I loved it. The owners had loved it too and outfitted it with little luxuries (central air in Seattle? Jackpot!). My husband and son were home, preparing for dinner. The next day I would wake up and go to work at my own therapy and coaching practice. Talk with (maybe help?) people I adore and have known for years, spend a few hours at the gym, sit at my sewing machine making a dinosaur costume, walk to my son’s school to pick him up at 4pm.

I felt like a failure.

Something in my gut would not – could not – acknowledge the abundance in my life. Every blessing was internally countered with a “—but!” But I need more clients, but I’m not enjoying my kids as much as I should, but I’m not reaching my potential, but I couldn’t hack it in New York City and now I’m back in my hometown. I failed.

Parking the car and slinging my daughter over a shoulder, I understood, in my logical brain, that this was a distortion: the kind fo all-or-nothing arithmetic that I help clients dismantle every day. By almost no measure of life had I failed (perhaps one could argue that I’m a failed jazz singer, but I digress). Yet knowing that didn’t make me immune to this feeling of anxious ennui.

The Achievement Treadmill

Any ambitious person knows how it feels to look around and see that you have everything you were dreaming of a few years prior. In the place where gratitude should be, there’s a tapping toe and an impatient voice saying, “Okay, what now?”

“What now” is a very old problem. Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation. We adjust rapidly to good circumstances, and the glow of a new normal fades into, well, normal. Researchers invoke this adjustment to explain why gains in wealth don’t reliably translate into lasting gains in well-being. How completely we adapt is still debated, but the lived experience is near-universal: the shiny, new thing becomes dull and old.

American culture is characterized by a lot of things – country music, Marvel movies, peanut butter – but nothing is more American than the idea that more achievement equals more happiness. To some degree, that’s true. Accolades bring admiration, and admiration is social approval. Financial success brings money, and money makes life easier in many ways. But anyone who has hit every goal knows that the baseline resets and the horizon feels as far away as ever.

What many of us are missing - and what I was missing in that driveway - was the ability to take in what I already had. To sink into the feeling of enough. In other words, contentment.

But WAIT! 

Aren’t ambitious people ambitious because something nags at them? If I let myself feel that what I have is enough, why would I build anything else? It’s another very American sentiment that most of us take for granted as truth. But it’s kind of insulting when you really think about it, right? The only reason we strive, learn, grow, and change is because we’re unhappy? Certainly, discomfort can start or even hasten things, but that’s distinct from the idea that discomfort is the only engine capable of driving growth.

Decades of work in self-determination theory link chosen, self-owned motivation to higher-quality performance, greater persistence, and higher well-being than motivation that feels controlled or compelled. In other words, the people who stick with hard things tend to be the people who want to be there, not the ones running from a feeling of inadequacy.

In fact, researchers who reviewed cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental evidence argue that well-being often comes before career success rather than only following it. The satisfaction of working toward something, building it, and growing in the process can matter as much as the satisfaction of reaching a goal. But why, then, does the feeling of satisfaction so often escape us?

Perfectionism & Self-Criticism

Let’s look back at the “buts” in the driveway (heehee). If a friend, patient, or client told me she had a thriving business, a home she loved, and two healthy kids, and still felt like a failure, I would hear the distortion instantly. The asymmetry of compassion that I see in my work shows up in the research, too: women, on average, report somewhat lower compassion toward themselves and somewhat higher compassion toward others. In my patients and clients, I notice another layer: high-achieving women often pair that lower self-compassion with high levels of perfectionism.

Perfectionism is maddening because it trails both achievement and misery in its wake. Perfectionistic concerns are made up largely of self-critical evaluation, while perfectionistic striving is about standards, and the research finds these relate to different outcomes. In a series of five studies, researchers found that self-criticism was consistently linked to slower progress on real goals. But once self-criticism was accounted for, high personal standards were linked to better progress. A more recent meta-analysis of workplace studies found something similar: striving for high standards and worrying over mistakes both predicted longer working hours, but only the striving was tied to better performance. Counter to what many perfectionists believe, it is the act of striving for excellence - not the self-criticism around falling short - that makes one excellent.

I can already hear the project-manager brains reading this: Easy fix – keep the striving, silence the critic, solved! But the research suggests the fix may be even gentler than that. A 2024 study tracking people through positive psychology exercises found that being hard on oneself related to depressive affect, while being kind related to compassionate affect, and that each followed its own track. Self-kindness uniquely predicted increases in compassionate and positive affect six months later, over and above levels of self-criticism. Turns out, we don’t have to eliminate the critic to cultivate contentment.

Okay, so how do we do it? 

“Contentment” sounds like something only old people in rocking chairs feel, but it’s really a skill that can be practiced and honed. Here are my three favorite strategies:

1) Savor the little moments. In that driveway I was noticing, but I wasn’t really savoring. I take that road slowly on purpose, but the view went in one ear and out the other, probably because I was thinking about how to use it for content (I know, I know). Savoring is the small act of pulling your busy mind back into the moment and lingering long enough to appreciate it. A 2026 meta-analysis pooled 20 randomized trials with nearly 5,000 participants and found consistent benefits for well-being and emotional symptoms across different populations and delivery formats. Savoring often goes hand in hand with awe, another valuable tool for cultivating contentment.

2) Add a compassionate voice instead of berating the perfectionist. So often, in the process of dismantling perfectionism, people begin to criticize themselves for not perfectly quitting perfectionism. A supervisor of mine used to call this “the thing about the thing.” The goal is not to eliminate the inner critic but to build the other voice. When the “but!” shows up, we find a voice that can answer: “Wow, that sounds hard. You’re doing great, though.” Reviews of the self-compassion evidence find that it doesn’t undermine motivation, which is exactly the fear I notice keeps many ambitious women in a cycle of self-criticism.

3) Give the “but!” a container. (May I say, again: heehee.) When you are evaluating, you cannot also be experiencing. This is the same advice I give for to-do list items and for thoughts you want to hang onto. Set aside a time in your week – Mondays from 10am to noon, for example – to strive, to worry, to mull. I call this “Container Time.” You’re keeping a promise to yourself to be strategic and evaluative, while preventing those self-led demands from creeping into the parts of life you want to experience with full presence.

We don’t have to pack away our ambition to enjoy what we’ve built. We also don’t have to duct-tape the mouth of our inner Pollyanna to summit the mountains we admire. We can, in truth, invite our ambition and our contentment to the table – just maybe for different meals.