Episode 207: Let Your Ambition Fly with Monique Allen
Ambition isn’t a dirty word. It’s not about greed or want – it’s about richness. It’s about wanting to understand. Today’s guest, Monique Allen, couples ambition with curiosity. She is not looking for a recipe or a blueprint for how to find success – she’s someone who looks at convention and asks, is there more?
Monique is the Founder and Creative Director of The Garden Continuum. She uses her knowledge as a lifelong gardener, business developer, and educator to bridge the gap between landscaping and business building. She launched her coaching career with the Life-Scape Method, a strategy developed to guide people toward improving their land, lives, and professional satisfaction.
Meeting motherhood with ambition
Monique started in her industry at 17. She says she never thought she would be married or have children, but when that happened, she wasn’t ready to drop her career or be any less ambitious.
“I approached motherhood with ambition,” says Monique. “And when I use the term ambition, I mean that I am not looking for a recipe or a blueprint for how one does it.”
She referred to the book “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” noting it’s great information and a baseline convention for first-time parents.
“I'm someone who's going to look at convention and say, okay, this is the most easily accepted map for what I'm doing, but is there more?”
For her, ambition is coupled with curiosity. Yes, she wants to grow, and achieve financial security and success, but she's also hungry for expansion and knowledge.
The benefit of seeking ambition through curiosity is that when you’re able to bring out the best experience, you can shift that satisfaction to the people you serve.
Abundance and ambition
Listening to Monique talk about ambition through curiosity, made me realize that I use abundance and ambition almost interchangeably. When I talk about abundance, it’s that there isn’t just one way to do something.
We get myopic and we home in on that one thing because it’s what everyone else is doing. But there are an infinite number of possibilities and ways to go through life and experience things.
Monique says when we ask, “is there more?” It's asking if you can access something that's deeper or richer -- not I want more stuff. People can sometimes confuse abundance as wanting to make a lot of money and have a lot of stuff.
Instead, it’s abundance of satisfaction, abundance of health, abundance of connection, abundance of resilience. It’s taking all of these “softer terms” that are about being able to have access through awareness, and that abundance and ambition through curiosity.
Entrepreneur journey and ambition
It’s also about recognizing we have an abundance of options. We're here to live a life of freedom, joy, and experiences. It's very difficult to do that if we think there's only one way to do things.
Monique notes that people aren’t really taught how to make choices through abundance; we’re taught through a binary. This is right. This is wrong. This is black. This is white. She finds in her practice people will stall out and abundance seems to be a hurdle rising from people’s pasts.
It’s scarcity that’s built into the binary. If we think there is only one right way to do it, people spin out trying to find that path. It’s not about getting as much as you can as fast as you can. Scarcity is fear that you’re going to get it wrong.
That’s a myth. You can’t get it wrong. Everything you’re attempting is adding to who you are and it’s adding to your experience. When we face the fear of “too much” it’s really just the flip side of “not enough”.
What we have to do – as entrepreneurs and as people – is right in front of us right now. What we have is what feels the most congruent in that moment that we've explored -- and anything else we'll add on later once we get it down.
One of Monique’s first coaches was a concert pianist. She would sit down and play a two-hour piece. She told me she worked on a measure at a time. One measure is four counts. She would work on that one piece until it became a part of her, and she could add another.
Monique says when we think about entrepreneurship, people think of the get-rich-quick schemes. But we build our skills as an entrepreneur one measure at a time, one sale at a time, one contract at a time. We get better and better. If we look at it that way, then we can have patience with ourselves.
Listen: How Long-Term Fear Affects Your Brain
Monique's books
Monique’s first book is called “Stop Landscaping, Start Life Scaping.” The book follows Monique’s journey about taking a dream to reality through three tenets tied to landscaping – being organized, healthy, and having a wow factor.
A landscape is something you look at. A life scape is something you actually live in, so it's transformative, it's grounding, and it's connected.
Monique is currently working on her second book, The Embodied Entrepreneur From Rage to Realization, which studies how many trauma survivors pursue entrepreneurship and move through the cycle of healing. It asks if we're healing or are we masking the things we need to heal?
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