Amina Altai has always been an overachiever.
Growing up as the child of immigrants, she told CNBC Make It that she was told to “keep your head down, work hard, and you’ll get everything you want.”
Her early career was “great on paper,” she says. Altai founded his own marketing agency in his late 20s and says he has “achieved all the milestones” of success.
At the same time, she says, she overworked herself until she became ill. One day, as I was driving to a client meeting, I got a call from my doctor.
“The doctor called me and said that if I don’t go to work and go to the hospital right away, I will suffer multiple organ failure in a few days,” Altai said.
In hindsight, that moment was “a eye-opening moment,” she says. However, instead of going straight to the hospital, Altai attended a meeting with a client first.
She was later diagnosed with celiac disease and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, both of which she said were made worse by fatigue.
“My workaholic tendencies and painful relationship with success were quite literally killing me,” Altai, now 41, writes in her recent book, “The Trap of Ambition: How to Stop Chasing and Start Living.”
Today, Altai is a leadership coach who teaches clients how to protect their health and practice healthy ambition.
“Many of us push ourselves into pain and suffering,” she says, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s her advice for developing a healthy mindset about ambition:
“Painful” and “purposeful” ambitions
Altai’s unhealthy relationship with ambition caused her to “crash and burn out,” but she says that doesn’t mean being driven is inherently bad.
“I think ambition is neutral and natural,” she says. She defines it as “simply a desire for more life, a desire to grow, a desire to unfold.”
In Altai’s view, people tend to experience ambition in two ways, she says: “painful” ambition and “purposeful” ambition.
Painful ambition, which Altai defines as “an insatiable desire to advance at all costs,” stems from a sense of “not being enough,” she writes in The Trap of Ambition. From a psychological perspective, she says, painful ambition is based on emotional “core wounds” such as rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, and injustice.
“If you build your ambitions on this, it will be like a mansion on the sand,” Altai said. “Because we’re always looking for an external salve for an internal wound, and it never works.”
Purposeful ambition, on the other hand, “comes from a place of wholeness,” she says. People who practice purposeful ambition are driven by a desire to make a positive impact, Altai says. They are good at working with others, protecting their own needs, and dealing with mistakes with a growth mindset.
According to Altai, self-awareness is the key to turning painful ambition into purposeful ambition. She encourages her clients to journal about their thought patterns without self-judgment, and to note when they slip into unhealthy ways of thinking.
Habits for healthy ambition
One essential habit for maintaining healthy ambition is to “honor your energy,” says Altai. That means making time to take care of yourself, whether it’s through nutrition, exercise, or spending time with loved ones.
If you don’t take care of yourself, “it’s really hard to fully show up,” Altai says.
From a career perspective, taking care of your energy means structuring your work week around your most productive times, taking walks between meetings, and blocking out specific times on your calendar to keep you focused.
Another important habit, she says, is to “celebrate your wins.”
As a leadership coach, Altai has noticed a pattern in many of her “really ambitious” clients. They are “always moving the goalposts,” she says.
Instead of taking time to enjoy their success, her clients immediately started working on their next goal. Altai said that kind of mindset makes it “very difficult” to be satisfied with one’s accomplishments.
At Altai, we encourage you to take a good rest after reaching a major milestone.
“In those quiet moments, take inventory, see what worked, what you liked, what you didn’t like, what you would do differently, and then pick yourself up again,” she says.
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