Perfectionism, people pleasing, and pretending you have it all together are often talked about as personality traits.

What if they're actually survival strategies?

In this conversation, I sit down with clinical psychologist and executive coach Dr. Anne Welsh to explore why so many ambitious women find themselves stuck in these patterns, even when they know they're no longer serving them.

We talk about the hidden cost of constantly performing, why success can still feel empty when you're disconnected from yourself, and how years of focusing on everyone else's needs can make it difficult to even know what you want anymore.

Dr. Anne shares why people pleasing isn't really about being nice, why perfectionism is often rooted in fear, and how self trust is built through small moments of choosing yourself rather than waiting until you're confident enough to do it.

We also explore the difference between fear based striving and healthy ambition, and why the goal isn't to become less ambitious but to become more aligned with what you're actually striving for.

This is a conversation about coming home to yourself while still creating the life, work, and impact that matter to you.

Resources Mentioned:

• Connect with Dr. Anne Welsh: Instagram | https://drannwelsh.com
• Ambitious Mothers book (pre-order, Release Day Aug 6)
• The Should Session: To Stop you from bringing work stress home! Find out exactly what belief is keeping you stuck in should energy. Only 5 spots available, expiring on 10/6/2026.

Work with me:

1. Breakthrough Intensive - You already know you should slow down, delegate more, stop overcommitting & be emotionally present. So why can't you? That's what we figure out in 90 minutes + integration call 1 week later. Book your Breakthrough
2. Exhale: Private Coaching - For women ready to do this work until it sticks and you can't revert back. 3 open spots: Work with me

Connect with Sam: Instagram | Facebook

Hello everyone, welcome to Beyond Awareness. Today we are talking about a topic that I love, almost I'd like love to hate, hate to love. It's perfectionism, people pleasing, pretending like you have it all together. And these P words, they're not personality, another P word. It's not a personality trait. They're really survival strategies is what I'm learning.

And if you are a woman who's been trying to be less of that thing, less of a perfectionist or less of a people pleaser, or maybe you're thinking of it as like someone who sets better boundaries and it's not working, there's a reason for that. And so I brought on the show today, Dr. Anne Welsh, and she is the pro in this field. She is a clinical psychologist and executive coach.

And she works with women who look successful on the outside, but internally they are performing. I feel like I'm so aware of all these P words. They're performing, they're people pleasers, they're perfectionists, they're all these things. And we're going beyond what the patterns are because we know what these are. We know how painful it is, how deeply we feel them into why they exist and what actually needs to shift. So welcome to the show and I'm so excited to have you here.

Thank you. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.

Me too, I've been looking forward to it ever since we first started chatting. I know that you work with high achieving women. I feel like it's high achieving women, those go-getters that often fall into these, I almost said personality traits, but know, these traits. And these types of women, I think you call them pretending. Is that the word that you use? ⁓

Yeah,

pretending is kind of part of the cluster, right? I think it's the one we don't talk about enough. And so, you know, I talk about ⁓ something that I call the ambition paradox, right? It's the sense of, for women, we're encouraged to be ambitious and capable and successful, and simultaneously, we're supposed to be selfless and agreeable and emotionally tuned to others, right? And it leaves us feeling really stuck. And it exists in this kind of nexus

Hmm.

point of the perfectionism and the people pleasing that you talked about, but also that pretending, right? And the pretending is to myself, I think, and to other people, I am trying to look like I have it all together. And it's damaging both to the people that are pretending because we don't get to be ourselves and truly feel our feelings or connect over those. And it's kind of damaging more broadly because everyone else looks at you and thinks you have it all together. I should have it all together, too. And it kind of sets off this

this whole space where every woman feels like she has to pretend that she's completely together. And really, most of us aren't all the time.

Yeah. So I'm curious, is this, are these traits that you ⁓

personally exhibit or exhibited or is this what you noticed in the clients that you worked with? Like what, did you gravitate towards working with these particular women and these particular traits?

I think it's a little bit of both and. I was someone that from a pretty early age recognized that I was a perfectionist. Although even then it took me a while, right? Because I didn't have to have an A plus, but I had to have the A and could maybe tolerate an A minus and really anything underneath that was a failure, right? So I didn't, it wasn't like I knew totally that I was a perfectionist, but I knew that I was

Thank

pretty achievement oriented and that that show would show up in different places. And, you know, it was interesting because it's something that I did a lot of work on in high school and then it resurfaced in a different way in college. And I thought I really put it to bed then. And I think I in graduate school in particular did a lot of kind of deep work healing that piece. And then lo and behold, I have children and guess what shows right back up again, because it's something that I cared so deeply about. So perfectionism, I was kind of well aware of ⁓ for a long period of time, but these other people

pieces, the people pleasing, I think I didn't really start to understand where that had showed up and played a role in my life in ways that I didn't expect ⁓ until I was a parent and kind of seeing all of the ways in which I was trying to make everybody else happy. And started to see it in so many of my clients, right? That almost everyone on some level was struggling with this idea of

I need to make myself small. I need to take up less space. I need to acquiesce to everybody else. I need to make sure everybody else has their needs met. And motherhood in particular really like kind of hits home on that, right? With the message of your kids come first, 100%. You should sacrifice everything for them and kind of erase yourself in the process. And then the pretending piece has been more about seeing this in my clients a lot, right? Where...

I have the kind of inside scoop, if you will, sitting with people all the time now for 20 years of hearing people who say the same thing. I feel like a hot mess or I'm miserable or I'm unhappy or something's going wrong or I'm anxious. And I look at them and I know what they look like to everybody else in the world. And I think social media in particular has really kind of amplified that, certainly in the past 10 or 15 years.

Yeah.

When you are sharing some of those examples, I'm immediately brought to my clients because it's literally what they say. It's down to like even your example of the A+. A lot of my clients for some reason are going back to school or in school they're going to get more degrees and they have that thing where they need to be an A student. Maybe not the A +, even though that's what they strive for, but they are happy with A's and it has to be an A. Or I have a client that

is not back in school, but she has to be this person at work who is viewed in a certain way based on her position. She's a COO. And so she has to be performing is the word that she used. She has to perform and answer in a certain way. And she kind of feels like a robot. She doesn't even know who she is anymore. so all of this is so resonating. And I'm wondering what you're seeing is the

cost of operating at that level, of staying stuck in people pleasing at the office and in parenting or even like personally.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's such a good question, right? Because one really kind of the first, I guess, cost that shows up is that disconnection you just mentioned, right? The more we keep our eyes on what other people want for us, the more we disconnect from what it is that we want or what we need. And that creates that feeling of numbness or of feeling really unhappy.

or a feeling unsure of yourself, right? When we're totally detached from our own kind of internal knowing and who we are, then we're not getting any positive feedback for that person. It starts to erode our confidence. And then we're sitting in this place of disconnection over time, and that leads to anxiety and burnout and all of those kind of bigger picture costs that we eventually see.

⁓ But more often than not, I think the things that kind of tip the scales under someone coming to my office is they feel really guilty. They feel constantly exhausted and maybe aren't even sure why. That's another common one. They feel numb or the last piece is ⁓ people who kind of come in and say, I have everything I thought I wanted and I'm not happy. There must be something really wrong with me. ⁓ So it kind of looks at the costs are different for different people, but it

Hmm.

it's hard,

it's all about that disconnection.

Yeah. You point out something that I think is really powerful because a lot of my listeners know what's wrong. Like you just mentioned, they know your clients too and patients know that they're exhausted. They know that they are people pleasers. They know that they're perfectionists. They know this. And they know that that is the reason that kind of like if we leap over, they know that that's the reason they're burnt out.

That's the reason that they feel disconnected, but they skip that middle piece. And I think that that's what you help them uncover is that that middle piece is, well, staying there is keeping them feeling guilty about everything. Like not dealing with people pleasing head on or perfectionism and staying in these cycles is also increasing their guilt and unsure and that numb feeling. Because I think if you don't...

bring awareness to that piece and really feel that, like that almost hits home more than the burnout because those are the things you don't want to keep feeling on repeat or trickle down into your kids. And something else you said is that something along the lines of like you don't get validation or reassurance or something. something that my therapist told me well after I was working through my people pleasing is that

when you are a people pleaser, you're so focused on performing for other people that you think that, you know, you're so nice to everybody else and reassuring to everybody else and validating, but also you aren't receiving love from other people because we're just not like receptive to it because we flip it and we're like, what do you need? What do you need? What do you need that we like, even when people show us love,

we don't interpret it as that, we flip it. And so that was just like so mind blowing for me of like, I'd never even thought that a people pleaser wouldn't feel that, you know?

Yeah, but ⁓ that's the whole heart of the paradox, right? Is that we're going after the thing we think that's going to make us happy, and then we aren't happy because it's not what we actually want, right? The love example is perfect, but we actually want what really feels true is love, is when someone says, see you. I see you for who you are, and I see your needs, and I can meet those needs, and I love you for that.

I love you because you're totally selfless and have never inconvenienced me ever in your life. That's not actually love. That doesn't fill the need that we have underneath.

Mm-hmm and that whole disconnection that's like what it all comes down to is feeling disconnected and All of this striving just kind of reiterates that and something that you talk a lot about I've seen you post about it on social media is the socialization of it all and you mentioned it earlier on is That women especially are socialized to seek approval. Can you speak to that?

Yeah, I mean, think that's the piece, another piece that we really need to be talking about when we're talking about people pleasing and perfectionism and pretending, right, is that these things are taught to us from the beginning. As women, you come out of the womb and you're basically told, don't have needs, take care of everybody else, that's your job. And it keeps us safe and it also works to an extent in terms of growing in our careers, right? Like we do get some degree of positive feedback.

for being the good girl, for being, I mean, I don't know how many of your listeners can relate. I was definitely the one that was like, Anne is a pleasure to have in class because I knew exactly what to say and exactly what to do and didn't ruffle feathers. you know, so it is rewarded. It helps us grow. And at the same time, we usually hit a place where all of a sudden this thing that felt adaptive is no longer adaptive. But I think along those lines, we also have to acknowledge that

Hahaha

women are punished more for their mistakes. Women are trying to walk this, thread this very narrow needle of being both assertive and palatable, especially at work. And it's a very different experience than men have of these things. And so I think you see women struggling with these things a lot more often, not that men can't be perfectionists. My father was a perfectionist too. It's just that there is very much this kind of cultural

socialization piece that's fueling it and so to step out of it is harder for us. ⁓ Right? If I, you know, with the data is pretty clear, if I mess up at work, that's going to be blamed on my character and ability. If a man messes up at work, it's often written off as a one-time blip. So there is a different set of consequences for our imperfections.

Hmm.

At the same time, that doesn't mean we can live as perfectionists because it's not sustainable either, right? So it's a both and, and I think we have to acknowledge the cultural piece to understand why it's harder to change and then make those changes anyway.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. One of my clients, she was a CFO, or is a CFO, and she was saying how she was trying to find the balance between being, I forget the initial word she used, but it was kind of like stern and just to the point direct when in reality she had so many emotions inside and it was building resentment and.

she wanted to share more of that, but she didn't want to be seen as her term a crybaby because she worked with a lot of men. And so when you say palatable, yeah, feel like women do feel like we have to water ourselves down or not be seen. Like say what we want to say, but not too much. I'm talking to you. keep thinking of the Barbie movie. Have you seen that? know, like that, that, yeah. ⁓

Yes.

Yeah, but that

resonates so much, right? Like I work with a lot of women who are kind of like your client, incredibly accomplished. And I see this, I will say even more so in women who are working in male dominated fields, but they'll say something similar. Like, I don't want to rock the boat or I don't want to be seen as difficult ⁓ or maybe more colorful language describing that same phenomenon. And when we slow it down, this has nothing to do with their confidence or even their competence. It's about that.

fear of social consequence, right? They learned really early on that ⁓ success without kind of social approval has a cost of being rejected or ridiculed or whatever, something negative. And it's like a battle with your nervous system. Your nervous system is trying to protect you from being exiled by like the tribe, if you will. And at the same time, you're trying to kind of make these important leaps at work. And it's a really difficult bind to find yourself in.

So what would you say is the first step towards feeling more comfortable with your needs? Actually, I don't even think that's the first step. It's like knowing your needs. I remember sitting down with my therapist when I was going through my divorce and she was like, what do you need right now? And I was literally a deer in headlights. I was like, need? even know the first time I thought of that.

So, thank you.

or last time I thought of that. what is the first step to knowing what you do need, especially when you either have been people pleasing or so focused on pretending that you are kind of like on autopilot, that you haven't been focused on yourself? What would you say is how do you help your clients through that?

Yeah, you know, I think one tool that I like to use is to talk about the breadcrumbs of joy, right? I think we get so disconnected that we can't even answer the question what we want to eat for dinner, let alone what we want to do with our lives, right? Because there's just been no space and it's kind of like an atrophied muscle. It's one that we haven't used. It's there. It's typically like a very small whisper in the background and we need to kind of learn to tune into it.

Yeah.

So it could be something as simple as like, what do you want to eat for dinner? And this is not what's the healthiest option on the menu. This is not what do my kids want to eat without complaining? This is not what does my spouse want to eat, right? Like, you know, Friday nights, we do pizza night in my house. I don't actually like pizza that much. And so I can also say, you know what? I'm going to order you guys a pizza and I'm making myself something that I want to eat that tastes better to me because that's okay.

you

And there may

be some rules that show up in the background for me of like, well, everyone's supposed to eat the same thing. And isn't family dinner mean my kids are supposed to eat the same food? Maybe, but also I just want this other food and I'm not a bad mom for serving my kids pizza and eating something else myself, right? Like kind of challenging those rules, but practicing in these like low stakes places, naming what I want and learning that it's safe, learning that I can get it. And you then kind of build up and I...

Yeah.

You know, dinner might seem like a small thing, ⁓ but it's incredible what happens when we follow those breadcrumbs, right? When just like one little want at a time, you build that muscle back up so that you can access it easier. You meet that need or that want, you build self-trust by doing that, and then you can do a bigger ask and a bigger ask and a bigger ask until you feel much more connected with your want.

over and above the noise of what everybody else tells you you are supposed to.

I love that. And I think this self-trust piece of that is really helpful and almost the goal of it all. Because as you were saying that, I'm thinking, say the whole pizza night example, everyone else gets pizza, but you want the chicken fingers from it, for some reason, not in my exact example in my head.

And so you get the chicken fingers. You don't really, that's an example where you don't need approval from other people. So say you get that and it, like you taste it you're like, I'm so glad that I actually got this. And it's an example where you did what you wanted to do. You didn't need that external approval. And the more you do that, the more you can practice externally and eventually at the office. And that external approval, you said something earlier where

success without that external, ⁓ was it approval or validation, is scary and threatening. And so you'll need that less when you have practiced with it.

Yeah.

Yes, exactly. When you can kind of say, I trust myself, I know what the right decision or the best decision I can make in this moment, whether it's for your kids or at home or for yourself or at work, then you can kind of hold steady in the face of questioning from others. And that's actually the thing that gets you promoted in the end. I think that's, in particular in this work context, we often think of like, if I just say yes to everybody,

I'll grow in my career. And it does kind of get you to a certain extent in your career. But at some point, the difference in kind of real leadership and people kind of stall out can often be an ability to have and hold an opinion that isn't maybe the popular.

So how do you help women hold steady with discomfort? Because I think for a lot of people pleasers and in that scenario where you're not saying yes to everything or maybe same same scenario where you do stand up for yourself or you do what you want, but there's that discomfort, especially if it's early on where it's not what everybody else wants. How do you help women?

who are internally freaking out.

I I think so the first thing I do is talk about the context and a little bit about the nervous system, right? And I kind of alluded to this earlier, but evolutionarily, we are a social species. The advice of who cares what everybody else thinks is bad advice because we are actually built to care about what everybody else thinks. That's like part of our biological makeup, right? So, you know, nice in theory, not in practice. You know, it was actually dangerous for us to be on our own. We needed our path.

haha

So we have to teach our nervous systems that it is in fact safe, that we will not be fully rejected if we voice a need or a different opinion. And I think there's really two ways that we can go about this. And one is similarly to the ones, is like practice disappointing people and proving to yourself that it's okay, right? ⁓ I can ask for something and get rejected and not die or.

Yeah.

I can voice an opinion and my boss can be like, I'm not so keen on that idea and I don't get fired, right? Like the little tiny things that kind of help my nervous system understand disagreement or not people pleasing essentially is safe. You can also totally dive in the deep end and that can be a great way to go too. And I share this example ⁓ from my own life.

was going to be a doctor when I was a little kid. My parents were both doctors. I had seen it modeled. I liked science. So, you know, my parents joked that I was born with a stethoscope in hand because I was like that certain as a little kid. But I think there was probably some socialization and and encouragement along the way. And I got all the way into medical school. And it was only then that I heard the very faint whisper of like, don't know. You do not want to do this.

I'm going to

And in that case, again, I jumped off the deep end. I kind of said, no, I'm not. I mean, I did say no, not kind of. I'm not going. I don't want to do this. I'm this is not for me. I don't know what I want to do, but it's just not this. And everyone thought I was crazy. It probably wasn't the smart decision from an objective lens. And yet at the same time, I knew it was the right decision for me. And that was like a whole bunch of proof.

Mm.

right? That like, I can do something really left of center here and make a very different decision. And A, I don't die. B, you know, my parents don't hate me forever. And C, after a year or two when I kind of found my footing, it actually worked out quite well. So you don't have to do it in the baby steps. There's some times in life where you just kind of rip the bandaid and do it, but they're both different approaches that are kind of courting the same idea of

You have to just do it on some level, little or big, and show yourself that you can. ⁓

Yeah, and find that proof. I love that, that you don't die, which sounds so big, but it's also true because that's what it boils down to.

That's what your body is telling you is gonna happen, right? That's why it feels so scary.

Yeah, yeah. So I know that something you talk about is fear-based striving and healthy striving. And I think that this, mean, women do one of two, one or two of these, right? You can't do, can you do both of them at the same time?

It'd be tricky, but I think what I so often see is that the message to women that are struggling with these things, with being ambitious, but maybe also struggling with perfectionism or people pleasing or just being overwhelmed and maybe it's not labeled in these spaces is to get smaller. Don't want so much. That's the problem. You're too ambitious. You're overwhelmed because you're doing too much. Slow down, step back. Okay, maybe there are times where that is

applicable advice, but I think that's not often the case. I think what's happening is that when we are overwhelmed in our ambition, it is being fueled sometimes by these other things, this people pleasing, this pretending, and essentially out of fear and perfectionism. I have to do this next thing. If I don't succeed, I will die, or it's a complete failure, right? It's very black and white thinking.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm doing all of the things I

do in my day out of fear of not getting them done, fear of making a mistake. And when I'm doing it out of fear, there's no permission to rest or to refuel. And it's certainly not enjoyable, right? So it's this very, you if you can imagine like literally running away from a monster, right? That sounds fairly unpleasant and you're gonna get real tired and burn out. And so what I encourage women to do or really anyone, this is not

Yeah.

gender specific necessarily is to not necessarily

question your ambition, but question what are you ambitious for? And when you are going after something because it is aligned, it is connected, it is something you actually want, right, to connect back to the work we've already talked about, you can do it in a healthy way because you're not proving yourself, you're just choosing this thing, right? You're not going after it with urgency, you're going after it with intention.

and you are going at it from a place of alignment rather than external ⁓ approval seeking, right? And when we make that shift from this unhealthy fear-driven striving to healthy striving, then we get to enjoy the process of getting there. We have space for rest because we know we want this to be kind of a lifetime sustainable journey. There's room for pauses and pivots and boundaries and

good enough in some spaces, and then we get to keep our ambition. We don't have to shrink it. We just have to make sure it's ambition for something that we actually want, right? ⁓ Healthy striving means I still want to do meaningful work, but my worth isn't on trial every time I try to do it.

Mm.

That feels like such a relief hearing you describe the healthy striving. It went from like shoulds and need to, and yeah, that fear and almost like in a race and collapsing at night to get it, you know, that whole thing of like you get to do these things and want to and like inspiration. ⁓

Yeah.

do you find that it's as easy as one day just writing down that switch of like, I want to do these things and maybe recalibrating your goals to see it in that light or does it take different like tools to get there?

I think it can be if the want is there. But I do think that, you know, that narrative of you don't have to, you get to, I think that can be really, really helpful in certain contexts. But we need to make sure that the get to is actually in service of the thing we actually want, otherwise it won't work. So if you don't, right, if you're not clear on those wants,

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

then just kind of saying, get to do this thing that I actually don't want to do that's unaligned, that's maybe terrifying or whatever, it's not going to help. yes, I think it can be a really helpful tool to kind of rewrite certain phrases, but it has to be done kind of in conjunction with making sure that the thing you're striving for is a thing you actually want on some level.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's a great question. Even like, do you get to do this? And then seeing your response, because I've definitely seen that quote and then had the internal response to be like, ⁓ no, I don't like you think I get to like, you're having this like, resentment almost of like, I do not get to do this, which then tells you that that's not aligned or it's not like, that's not my need or or

that is a need, like I need the opposite of that sort of thing. So that is really important to know, like your gut reaction of what is it that you're going for? Is it even what you want? Which that alone could be really scary to face of is what you've been pushing for so far. If that's not what you want, then what is it?

Yes, and I think back to your early question, why like naming the cost, I think sometimes why people stay stuck is that's too scary. It feels like if I actually address these things and actually name what I want, I'm gonna have to blow up my whole life. And while quite frankly, sometimes that does happen.

That's not always the case. A lot of times it's just a seed. It's a step over. It's not a total redesign. ⁓ It's just like a one degree shift in your compass point, ⁓ which over time will get you someplace drastically different.

I think that's why it's so important working with someone too, because when you're on your own, it does feel like you're about to blow up your life. But when you're working with someone, it's just helpful to talk it out and then to realize that it's just, yeah, these like tiny little things that feel small, but then it, the,

This is good.

Yeah.

internal shift feels so drastic, even though was that choice of what you wanted to eat for dinner, which was so tiny, but internally it felt like you made the biggest claim and self-love movement of your entire life.

Yes.

Yeah, and that's one of the things I love about running groups. I I work with people one on one too, but I think I love groups because women give each other permission for this and then they get to see, so and so, ⁓ great example. I had a client who in a group shared that she has started taking off a day, a quarter for herself with her child in childcare so that it is a quarterly day that is her day. And everyone else in the group was like, wow, I want that too. Am I allowed to want that? Is that okay?

Yes, right, you can want that too and you can also take it. And now we've got this kind of positive, you know, you've got actually that external validation that like, yes, that's a totally valid one. You can find a way to do this too, or maybe that's not the exact solution for you, but you're allowed to do something that is yours. And so we get that kind of brainstorming and validation and connection in all of this too, which is just like a lovely added.

Thank you.

Yeah, for sure. So how else do you support women right now in your work?

Yeah, well, so I have, like I said, I do this group program called the Ambitious Mother's Mastermind, and it's for women that are working in any sort of capacity, even an hour a week, or who are just looking to return to the workforce or thinking of stepping back. But ⁓ it is a six-month group coaching program where there's a lot of support, a lot of grappling with some of the questions we've talked about today. okay, I see these patterns now, how do I do it differently? ⁓ And getting at really what's underneath.

And so that the changes are things that stick and that are a lifetime process. But I also work with people individually, especially women in leadership and women who are in, as I mentioned, kind of male dominated spaces, women in STEM and healthcare and law and finance. ⁓ And then I also have a therapy practice for folks that are in Massachusetts at least, where we kind of do a different type of work around these issues.

Amazing. My last question for you is this is such deep work on so many different levels. How have you seen all of this kind of come together in terms of relating ambition and helping women understanding the new way of thinking about success and the

relating that to how fulfilled they are in their lives, whether that be in parenting and or in the workplace.

Yeah, that's a great question, right? I think ambition kind of became a dirty word for a little while for women. Like we weren't supposed to be ambitious or certainly not too ambitious. And I have really tried to reclaim that word and reframe it. And so I talk about shifting from a ladder-based model of ambition to one that is a web. And I share this in my book in a lot more depth.

But essentially, with the traditional view of ambition, we talk about climbing the ladder. And it's this like evenly spaced rungs. There's only one direction, that's up. The only thing you're kind of allowed to be ambitious for is money or maybe power or title. And there's very much a mentality of you're either climbing the ladder or you have fallen off and that's a failure. So back to that perfectionism in the black and white thinking, right? It's either success by getting the

There's only room for one person there, or the rest of us have now failed. I mean, talk about fueling the fear, right? And so I liked people to think about a web. I personally, I envision like those, one of those big climbing structures at a playground, because I've seen my kids climbing on them. But even if you think about like a spider web, it's expansive. It goes on in a million different directions. There's room to pivot.

Yeah, yeah.

to totally change direction, right? If you think about the playground example, there's usually kids like hanging by their knees, someone sitting in the corner eating a snack, you can rest on the web, right? You don't have to climb at every moment. There's room for lots of people on it. ⁓ And so when we start thinking about ambition more broadly and recognize that, yeah, sure, power, status, money, those can be things we're ambitious for, but so can connection, joy, ⁓ rest. ⁓

Thank

it could be for impact. So that's something I'm very ambitious for right now is impact on as many women as possible through my writing, right? You get to name all sorts of things you're ambitious for, and then there's a lot of different ways to be successful. And then when we have all of those choices, we're more able to access that healthy striving, right? Because we can be ambitious for all sorts of things that are actually aligned with what we want.

That again feels so refreshing and like a relief than that ladder that you're right you climb up it you're either on it or you're off and you're if you're on it it's for specific reasons and

Yeah, that web is just like, can create the type of web that you want and what you're striving for. And it could be a million, the webs are for, you know, there's a million different lines on it. could be for whatever you want. So I love that, that definition and how fulfilling it feels and how it's for every type of person, right? Like it's encompassing for everyone. I love that. That was beautiful.

Don't flip.

So

where can people find you if they want to hear more about your work or your group programs or your book?

Yeah, well, of course, usually you find me on a Zoom room with my clients, but ⁓ besides that, they can find me on my website, which is drannwalsh.com. ⁓ And I also mostly hang out on LinkedIn, which is Dr. Ann Welsh there too, posting kind of on a daily basis. And the book is also available already for pre-order and it is called Ambitious Mother, From Surviving to Thriving in Your Career and at Home. And you can find that one anywhere that bookstores or books are sold.

Amazing. Awesome. And I'll include all of that at the links in the show notes. And thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom with us today. And thank you everyone for tuning in and we'll see you next week.

Thanks so much for having me.