006 | Momentum: What Is Your Source of Ambition?

Leadership Impact

In this episode, Kari and Paul delve into how to cultivate new moods to maintain our most cherished ambitions. Paul uses the story of the Sirens’ Songs in Homer’s Odyssey to make the point that our attention can (and often does) get captured by tangential possibilities, causing us to stray from what we care about most.

Kari shares her own Sirens’ Song, which manifested itself in the form of a pursuit of higher revenue targets to keep pace with her growing company. Because this accomplishment wasn’t connected to the core reason she chose to expand her company, she found herself in a mood of resentment. Kari deconstructs how this mood had a debilitating effect on her ambition. However, using the strategy of cultivating a mood of acceptance, Kari was able to shift from resignation to a new space for her own ambition to flourish.

Kari and Paul reveal how cultivating a mood of acceptance opens a new horizon of possibility. This gives us the context to be able to reinvent a new future based on our ambitions. Finally, Paul challenges the audience to observe how moods affect the ambition of those surrounding them at work and at home in order to connect with our own ambition and think differently about what is possible.