Balancing Your Ambitions
Balancing your life is about claiming the space to want both a bigger professional life and a richer personal one, without apologizing for either. Your ambition at work doesn’t have to dim when life gets louder, and your personal goals don’t need to wait in a side room while your career talks. We shouldn’t need to ask permission to lead, learn, reinvent, build platforms, raise families, book flights, or chase the long-shot ideas we care about. Both ambitions deserve room, and you don’t owe anyone a quieter version of wanting more out of your life.
Professional ambition can look like becoming the person people trust in your industry, saying yes to roles that stretch you, learning out loud, climbing ladders, and staying at the front of innovation. That is about more than titles. It’s about shaping conversations, showing up curious every damn week, and working on the things that help other people do their jobs better.
Personal ambition can look like building a family, buying a home, traveling farther than your zip code, trying a skill you’ve never tried, or doing the thing you always said you would when time felt slower. It might mean signing a mortgage, booking a trip, having a baby, or taking a leap toward something new without needing anyone else to explain the next step.
The tension begins between the 2 when you feel like one should speak quieter while the other speaks louder. The real lesson is learning they can exist in the same life, the same rooms, the same seasons, and sometimes even the same day.
This episode of Coffey Talk showcased someone who lives that truth in real time. Brittany Burke grew her career from an unexpected start in Accounts Receivable into MVP rooms, self-teaching technical language and translating it into solutions that worked for real humans behind real desks. She told the story of pushing her baby stroller across the expo floor at Community Summit while her kid pointed proudly at her name on the MVP wall. Her story reminded me that balance isn’t about halves, it’s about wholeness.
What struck me most wasn’t just what she built in her career, but how she built it: by asking the questions most of us are scared to ask, by bridging business and tech without ego, by leaning on community instead of faking polish, and by modeling success for her children in a way that felt normal, messy, and deeply real.
She talks about empowerment like it’s a ripple that doesn’t require approval, and she shows her kids that success doesn’t belong only in the office or only at home. Success lives in both when you don’t shrink one side of yourself to make the other fit into someone else’s expectations. 👏🏻
The real proof? She doesn’t split her ambitions. She invests in both. She shows them to her kids not to impress them, but to show them that building a big career doesn’t mean you build a small life.
Something to Sip On:
What would change if you let both sides of your ambition speak at volume this year?
