A Career Shaped by Life, Not Just Ambition

Rethinking ambition, advancement, and the lives we build along the way.

What if your career was never supposed to look like a ladder?

This is part of what we explore in today’s episode of Student Affairs NOW, “Mid-Level as a Final Destination”—and rewatching it preparing to post hit particularly close to home for me.

Early in my career, I made lateral moves because my partner’s career required us to relocate. Later came divorce, co-parenting, and raising kids who were rooted in their schools and community. At different points, geography, family, and circumstance shaped which opportunities I could—or wanted to—pursue.

For a long time, I think I absorbed the message that a successful career was supposed to have a certain trajectory: keep moving up. Take the bigger job. Chase the next title. Be willing to relocate. Demonstrate your ambition by always wanting more.

And when your career doesn’t follow that path, it can be easy to wonder if you’ve somehow fallen behind.

That’s why I resonated so deeply with this conversation.

In “Mid-Level as a Final Destination,” I had the privilege of talking with four members of ACPA’s Mid-Level Community of Practice and researcher Dr. Gudrun Nyunt about something we don’t say often enough in student affairs:

Moving up is not the only way to move forward.

Sometimes a lateral move is the right move. Sometimes staying is an intentional choice. Sometimes your life outside of work gets a vote. And sometimes success is finding work where you can contribute, lead, learn, and make a difference without constantly positioning yourself for the next rung on the ladder.

My own career has taught me that ambition and advancement are not the same thing.

I am ambitious about my impact.
I am ambitious about doing work that matters alongside passionate staff and students.
I am ambitious about being present for the people I love.
I am ambitious about building a life—and exploring opportunities that excite me (like hosting this podcast!)—not just building a résumé.

Perhaps one of the gifts of this stage of my career is that I’m much less interested in what my career is supposed to look like and much more interested in whether the work—and the life around it—feel aligned.

Just a little over a week ago, I moved my youngest child into his college residence hall. I did it alongside my ex-husband, his wife, and her kids. We all get along genuinely well, which has been one of the unexpected gifts of divorce: discovering that family can be reconfigured into something different than what you imagined and still be really good.

Moving him in was one of those moments that quietly marks the end of an era. With both of my kids now in college, I’ve been thinking about just how much my career decisions over the years have been intertwined with the realities of raising children—school districts, custody schedules, geography, and, most importantly, my desire to be present for the everyday moments of their lives as much as possible.

There’s another part of that geography, too. For the past seven years, I’ve been in an incredible relationship with a divorced dad who lives about 50 miles away and has been raising a child of his own, now a senior in high school. We’ve built a life together while also maintaining two homes, two communities, and the responsibilities that come with being parents first. It hasn’t always been easy. Fifty miles can feel like a lot farther when you’re navigating work schedules, school calendars, parenting responsibilities, and just the logistics of everyday life.

But we’ve made it work. And, in many ways, I think our relationship works because we understand this about each other. Neither of us sees the other person’s responsibilities, commitments, or relationships with our children as something standing in the way of the life we’re building. They are part of the life we’re building.

Maybe that’s shaped how I think about my career, too.

The people we love, the communities we belong to, and the lives we’ve worked hard to create aren’t distractions from our professional ambitions. They don’t sit on one side of a scale while our careers sit on the other. They are part of the calculus of what a “good” career—and a good life—look like.

And now, that calculus is changing again.

With both of my kids in college, I have more geographic freedom—and more choices—than I’ve had in a very long time. My partner still has a child at home, and the life we’ve built together matters deeply to me, so I’m certainly not untethered. But the constraints that shaped so many of my career decisions for so long are loosening. Theoretically, I could cast a wider net. I could pursue the bigger title, consider another campus, or make the kind of leap we so often associate with professional advancement.

And for years, I think some part of me assumed that when this stage of life finally arrived, that’s exactly what I would do.

But here’s what has surprised me: I’m not sure I want to.

For perhaps the first time in my career, I feel genuinely satisfied and fulfilled by the work I’m doing. I’ve turned down invitations to pursue positions on my own campus with higher titles because, when I really considered them, I realized I was more attracted to what the opportunity represented—advancement, recognition, the next rung—than I was to the actual work.

That realization has shifted something for me.

For much of my career, there were very practical reasons I couldn’t simply pick up and go wherever the next opportunity might take me. Now that some of those constraints are falling away, I’m realizing something I didn’t expect: just because I have more freedom to pursue what’s next doesn’t mean I’m obligated to want it.

Having the freedom to go doesn’t mean I have to leave. Having the qualifications to move up doesn’t mean moving up is the right choice. And being ambitious doesn’t require me to be perpetually dissatisfied with where I am.

There is something incredibly freeing about realizing that having more choices doesn’t mean you have to choose more.

I loved hosting this conversation, and I hope it gives others permission to reconsider the question we ask so often in our field.

Instead of always asking, “What’s next?”

Maybe we should ask, “What does success look like for you?”

🎧 Episode details: https://studentaffairsnow.com/mid-level-as-a-final-destination/

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