Author Chat: Sustainable Ambition by Kathy Oneto

In a world where striving for success often leads to overwhelm, Kathy Oneto offers a refreshing new approach. Sustainable Ambition redefines how we think about work and life—not as a balancing act, but as an opportunity to align our goals with what truly matters.

In this edition of Author Chat, Disrupt Your Career speaks with Kathy Oneto about her book, Sustainable Ambition: How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work (Greenleaf Book Group, June 2025). Kathy introduces a practical framework—Right Ambition, Right Time, and Right Effort—to help individuals pursue meaningful goals with clarity and ease, without sacrificing their well-being.

Why did you write the book? What need were you addressing as you decided to write it? 

Well, I wrote the book for people who really are ambitious, both in their professional and their personal lives, and they’re trying to figure out how to prioritize and pursue all they want, but in a more sustainable way. They may be finding themselves feeling unfulfilled at times, like they’re not able to put time in energy into what truly matters to them despite doing a lot across both their life and their work. Oftentimes, people think the problem is they go to that term that we all use, which is work-life balance. But I really believe that’s an elusive goal. It really sets unrealistic expectations. What we’re really trying to resolve, what we’re really struggling with when we use that term is, well, how do we navigate the conflicts around everything we want and must do given our finite time and energy, and how do we pursue our goals in a way that is sustainable rather than getting overly stretched to the point of severe exhaustion. That’s what I’m trying to address in the book, is to help people navigate these conflicts. The book offers both a mindset and a method that people come back to again and again and practice. I use that term practice to really help us with these conflicts. The book offers practical tools for helping people define goals at any life stage, prioritize across life and work, and hopefully achieve that success with more resilience. 

What was your process for writing the book? 

I’ve been researching this over decades, and we say we write the books that we need ourselves as well. My own experience certainly has drawn me to do research over the course of my adult life. But then I’ve really been researching it that much more diligently over the last five years. Certainly, I have a podcast as well. My podcast interviews have informed what’s in the book. I held workshops to test my concepts and my content and the tools, and as well as have used them with coaching clients, and then have written the book really with more diligence over the last two or more years. As you know, it is a marathon to write a book, and I joke now, even with the book coming out, I’m at, I think, Mile 18.

What are the key concepts and messages from the book?

Well, where I start with people is really on challenging what we’ve been taught to believe about success and ambition. I really champion that we reclaim personal success and ambition as our own because I believe sustainable success is defined on our own terms. That’s one place I start. But I also start with relooking at ambition and letting people know ambition isn’t bad. It gets a bad rap. People think it is really a negative concept. Even when you look at the definitions of ambition, it really has these negative connotations. But ambition actually is natural for us humans. We set goals. In fact, ambition is good, but I believe it needs to be sustainable. If we don’t have enough ambition, if it’s too low, we can be stagnant. If it gets too high in our ambition, I say we go into the severe zone where we can overextend ourselves and be in a danger zone around constant striving. We really want it to be sustainable. I believe we make ambition sustainable by directing our life and work ambitions wisely. I talk about the sustainable ambition method as being about aligning the right ambitions at the right time with the right effort.

The method really helps you redefine and reclaim ambitions by making them your own, then prioritizing and pacing your pursuits, and then being really discerning about your effort in building resilience. It supports sustainability by motivating our effort, focusing our effort, and then managing our effort wisely.

Can you share how the idea of sustainable ambition shows up in real life, either through personal examples, coaching stories, or people featured in your book?

I do want to, before I dig into this, just react to what you said, because you said, then real life hits, right? There is some benefit to having a simple method. It is something that you can go back to again and again and re-anchor on. What I talk about is how sustainable ambition really is a practice. It is a dance that requires this constant attentiveness and adaptability. It’s a practice that requires that we go back and reflect and recalibrate as we move forward because things change on us. That’s why I don’t like the term work-life balance. We think, “Oh, we’re just going to figure it out and stay in equilibrium”. That’s why we constantly get frustrated, as opposed to knowing that we need to come back to things and reassess. 

But let me come back now to your case study question, and I’ll go through each of the pillars of this and just share a couple of ideas from the book. One is around Right Ambition, one of the people that I reference in the book is a woman, Eva Dienel. At the time that I interviewed her, she restructured her life in a way, and she was a freelance journalist at the time. When I interviewed her, she’d like to be ambitious until she says “I’m now ambitious until three o’clock”. She had redefined her life and what ambition meant to her. She also shared what her own success metrics were. She had said when she recrafted this life, I want to run as many miles a week as I work, and I want to camp a certain number of nights a year. She was redefining success on her own terms, reclaiming her ambition and how she wanted to define that for herself. That was how she reclaimed success on her own terms. With a coaching client, I did a similar thing with her in terms of redefining how she was going to look at success. In doing that was really able to help her come to some peace with her shifting ambitions in terms of still wanting to be ambitious about her career, but allowing herself to not push so hard on herself and allowing space for making time for her family at this life stage. Because sometimes what we’re struggling with, it’s a mindset game. It’s can we allow ourselves to come to peace with some of the choices that we’re making in terms of where we’re putting our time and attention and how we’re managing our energy.

That’s a great example of redefining success. What about the role of timing—how do people figure out when to pursue certain ambitions or make big decisions in their lives?

Around Right time, one of the examples in the book as well is Dr. Sahar Yousef, and she is a cognitive neuroscientist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. When I interviewed her, she talked about how she makes decisions, both about over the course of her life around her career, but also in her day-to-day life as well. She still uses this future self orientation to help her make decisions about when she is going to what in her life. She asked herself when she was making choices about her career early on, “Well, what will my future self thank me for?” She made some choices around, and that’s a key word there, she made some choices around, “I am going to go ahead and pursue my PhD at this time, because I don’t see people in their 40s doing that. But I do see people launching business in their 40s doing that. I’m going to pace what my ambitions are and what I’m going to do at what time.” She even thought about that in terms of things like, “When am I going to start a family?” Or, she really had ambitions to travel when she was young as well. But making these strategic choices around “When do I pursue what ambitions at what time?” is what she was looking at. 

To bring this to life, when I worked with some workshop participants on this, I have an exercise where people do a horizon map, and they’re planning things out over time. What helps in people doing this and putting it on paper and putting it in front of themselves is that they can get more awareness. I had one of my participants who said, “Wow, my one-lane roadmap turned into a four-lane highway.” They started to see, “Oh, my gosh, I am trying to do way too much.” With some sadness, almost said, “I have to put some of my goals for this year on the back burner. I have to put those aside.” 

A final one that I’ll just share in this context is around Right Effort. I like to reference Doris Kearns-Goodwin as a celebrated US presidential biographer. In her master class, she says, “The most underappreciated leadership strength is the ability to relax and replenish energy.” She goes on to share how the presidents she studied all had practices around how they restore themselves so that they could do the tasks that were in front of them, those big jobs that they were facing.

One of the things that I work on with people is, what is your sustaining plan? Are you being conscious about how you’re going to sustain your energy, how you’re going to restore it, protect it, and support it over time. One of my coaching clients, in particular, really has focused on this as she has stepped back into a really big significant role. She’s been really conscious, and we’ve come back to like, “Hey, what is my sustaining plan for now? How do I remain committed to this? How do I integrate this into my life? So it, too, is sustainable.”

Pre-order Kathy’s book Sustainable Ambition: How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work

Kathy’s LinkedIn profile

Sustainable Ambition website

To listen to this Author Chat podcast episode