About
Introducing Sustainable Ambition™.
Sustainable Ambition is about crafting a fulfilling career to support your life from decade to decade. It is centered around articulating your personal definition of success and achieving that without burnout while honoring your personal aspirations and ambitions as they ebb and flow over time. The end game—more fulfillment and ease in your professional and personal life, while still being ambitious.
Achieving Sustainable Ambition requires that we not completely separate work life from personal life—one has to look at life holistically to really make it work. This is especially true for women who juggle a lot and continue to be hounded by persistent expectations to do it all.
In today’s business and economic climate, having a career and being secure in it from decade to decade has never been more challenging. Layer on the fact that we, especially women, naturally need to consider the ebbs and flows of ambition across life stages. Many evidence points of these complexities exist:
Today’s economic environment demands that we take on different roles across our career lifespan, and that is likely to increase as technological changes and innovations continue to accelerate.
Both women and men need more flexibility in their work to accommodate all the demands on their time, yet government and the business sector aren’t changing enough to accommodate this need.
Women often leave the workforce due to the lack of flexibility when they could be taking on more powerful roles or contributing in some capacity.
There is little insight available on how to manage one’s career from decade to decade and to make one feel comfortable and powerful in doing so. People often get into crisis situations where they feel it’s too late to address dissatisfaction.
Here at Sustainable Ambition we provide guidance and a community to support the changes we’ll need to make to continue to be successful and to guide our own paths based on our personal definitions of success. This is a no judgment zone, a space for support and affirmation of the path you want to forge. It’s for you to decide how you want to achieve Sustainable Ambition and have it work for you. We offer tips and inspiration, advice on career management over the decades, guides on key topics of interest, and coverage of tools and inspiration.
Most importantly, we encourage you to find Sustainable Ambition that makes life work for you.
MEET KATHY
Kathy Oneto is an executive and leadership coach and career strategist, as well as a strategy and marketing professional.
She helps leaders and professionals find purpose and clarity to move them forward into action. Her mission is to help them get in touch with their personal aspirations and ambitions, define their own success, and find more ease so they can make an impact and realize their full potential.
Her strength is working with ambitious individuals who want both fulfilling professional and personal lives and helping them be great leaders, work with Sustainable Ambition, and identify what might be next.
Kathy Oneto is also the Founder & Chief Strategist at The Agency Oneto.
She has an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a B.S. in Commerce from the University of Virginia’s McIntire School. Kathy is certified in the Co-Active Coaching Model and by the International Coaching Federation.
Find Kathy on The Sustainable Ambition Podcast and as a podcast guest here.
What brought me to launch Sustainable Ambition™?
Sustainable Ambition has been a passion project for me for over 5 years.
It’s taken on different forms—first offering quick insights as I was experiencing my own career transition, then emerging as an online magazine with online content, tools, and resources, to now launching as Sustainable Ambition supported with coaching and workshops.
Why has this topic filled my mind over time?
Well, I’ll call myself a career and work/life fulfillment explorer and enthusiast. I’ve been thinking about careers since I was 15 when I started to think about colleges to attend and majors to select. I’ve learned that I use the question, “Where should I take my career next?,” as a touchstone each time I feel a transition coming. It kickstarts the process of exploration that guides me to the next stage in my career and on my life journey.
I’ve asked myself that question many times, and through my own career adventures over the years, I’ve worked with several leadership coaches and career strategists, participated in career planning sessions (even created and hosted my own while in business school), have taken multiple assessments, have read extensively on the topic, interviewed and counseled friends on their own path, conducted research with mid-career changers, and so on. I finally took the plunge and got trained as a Co-Active Coach to complement my other work experience as a brand marketer and strategist with over 20 years of experience working for consumer and retail brands on both the client and agency sides.
As I pause to now look back, I realize I’ve been practicing some form of Sustainable Ambition throughout my career.
When I left college and moved to New York City, I chose a job that wouldn’t expect me to work 60-80 hours per week. I wanted to be able to train for triathlons and enjoy the city fully. Who does that at 21? In some respects smart, in other ways it may have hampered some of my career ambitions. I then chose a business school, UC Berkeley | Haas, because it aligned with my values and the type of environment I wanted to be in. I realize now that the school has defined its values clearly that I appreciated being around other professionals who worked with “Confidence without Attitude.” I then landed at Clorox in Brand Management, drawn towards the company’s values, especially “Do the Right Thing” and “Work Together to Win.” I was pulled to a start-up where I wanted to work on a product that aligned with a purpose I believed in, healthy food. And so on… you get the idea. At one point in 2017, I took the ultimate plunge for Sustainable Ambition—my husband and I finally took a sabbatical after longing for one for years. Now, I’m finding my way as a solopreneur. It’s been a journey of balancing my aspirations and ambitions over the decades, finding my own definition of success, and figuring out how to work with the right effort. Admittedly, I’m still working the most on that last pillar. As an overly committed professional who’s a night owl and loves to cross tasks off her list, cutting myself off is a constant practice.
In the end, Sustainable Ambition and what I hope to provide here is a way of me finding my purpose and fulfillment in helping others find theirs for their lives and careers.
I hope you’ll join me! And let me contribute to you finding your fulfillment.