Stop Apologizing for Being Ambitious
I grew up in a town of 800 people in Iowa.
Nobody told me I couldn't have big dreams. They didn't have to. There was simply no visual evidence that a woman could. You married. You raised a family. You built a life inside those boundaries and you found meaning there — and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just all I could see. And it's hard to imagine a life you've never witnessed.
So I didn't. Not for a long time.
When I finally started building a career and discovering what I was capable of, something lit up in me that I didn't have a name for yet. I was thriving. Growing. Getting bigger in the best possible way.
And then I noticed what it was doing to the people closest to me.
My first husband was a wonderful man. Traditional, steady, good. But as I got bigger, he felt smaller. I watched it happen and I did what a lot of ambitious women do — I hesitated. I dimmed. I tried to take up less space so he could take up more.
It didn't work. We wanted different things. We divorced.
So I tried again. This time I thought I'd gotten it right — a strong, ambitious man who was proud of my career. He married me the year I got my first president role. Finally, I thought. Someone who can hold all of me.
And then things shifted. Slowly, then completely. Depression. Withdrawal. The quiet, grinding undermining that doesn't leave marks but costs everything. Once again I had chosen someone who needed me smaller to feel okay about himself.
Two marriages. The same lesson.
For years I worked long hours to avoid the emptiness at home. I never felt comfortable in my own skin. I was successful by every external measure and quietly hollowed out on the inside. It cost me years of joy. Years of authenticity. Years of being fully, freely me.
Here's what I know now that I didn't know then:
Ambition wasn't my problem.
It was my signal. The thing pointing me toward the life I was actually built for — if I could just stop apologizing for it long enough to follow it.
The world has a long and well-practiced habit of making ambitious women feel like they're too much. Too driven. Too focused. Too bright. And enough voices saying that — in your marriage, in your culture, in the silence of a town where you never saw a different kind of life — and you start to believe it. You start shrinking on purpose. You call it compromise. You call it love. Sometimes you call it wisdom.
But sometimes it's just fear dressed up as virtue.
I'm three years into a marriage that I was told didn't exist.
People used to tell me the kind of love I wanted was a fairy tale. A partner who was genuinely proud of me. Who celebrated my success instead of being diminished by it. Who looked at everything I'd built and felt awe instead of threat.
I have that now. I have to pinch myself sometimes to confirm it's real.
I have the career. I have the partnership. I have a full life — at work and at home — that finally matches the one I could see so clearly inside me but couldn't find a single model for in that Iowa town.
It wasn't a fairy tale.
It was just waiting for me to stop apologizing for wanting it.
So if you've been making yourself smaller — in your career, in your relationships, in the quiet of your own ambitions — I want to say something clearly:
That's not humility.
That's a habit. And habits can change.
Your ambition doesn't need an apology. It needs room.
And the life on the other side of that decision?
It's more real than you think.
Nancy Girres is an executive coach and Vistage Chair based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She stopped apologizing for her ambition. The life she has now is everything she once thought was a fairy tale.