I’m going to say something I spent years not saying out loud.
Being a mum wasn’t enough for me.
I loved my children. That was never in question. But motherhood on its own didn’t fill me up the way I’d somehow understood it was supposed to. I wanted to lead. I wanted to run things, make the decisions, get my teeth into a problem and see it through. I’d wanted that since I was 23, running a hotel and getting things done, long before I had anyone but myself to answer to.
And the wanting felt greedy.
That’s the part that’s hard to admit. Not that I was ambitious, plenty of people will happily tell you they’re ambitious. It was that I already had the thing women are told should be enough, the children, the family, and it wasn’t enough, and I wanted more on top of it. That felt like too much to ask for. Like I was being handed a full plate and saying, actually, could I have a second one.
The words I hid behind
So I did what I suspect you might be doing. I dressed it up. I talked about wanting to make a difference, about having more to offer, about the team, the students, the sector. All true, by the way. But underneath all of it was a plainer thing I wouldn’t say: I want to lead, I’m good at it, and I want it for me.
What took me years to see
Here’s what took me a long time to work out.
The guilt wasn’t a sign I’d got my priorities wrong. It was just there. It’s part of the deal for a lot of us, this deeper pull towards the children, this sense that we’re the one who holds it all, and it doesn’t switch off because you’ve decided to want a career as well. I couldn’t reason my way out of it. I couldn’t reframe it away. I tried. It didn’t go.
I’ll be honest with you, because I think you’ve had enough of people selling you the opposite. There is no magic bullet for this. I can’t tell you the guilt disappears once you understand it, because mine never fully did. What I can tell you is that it stopped being the thing that made my decisions for me.
The voice that sounds like caution
Because that’s what it was doing. Every time I got close to going for something, the guilt showed up as a voice, and the voice was very good at its job. It didn’t say “don’t be ambitious”. It was cleverer than that. It said “is now really the right time”, “what about the children”, “who do you think you are”, “maybe wait until they’re older”. It sounded like caution. It sounded like being a good mother. It was actually just fear wearing sensible clothes, and I gave it years of my energy, going round and round the same what-ifs, mistaking the rumination for responsibility.
What changed wasn’t that the voice went quiet on its own. It was that I learned to recognise it for what it was, and I learned I didn’t have to sit and argue with it every single time. I could hear it, notice it was the same old voice saying the same old things, and act anyway. Not because I’d silenced the guilt. Because I’d stopped letting it run the show.
That’s the bit I wish I’d known twenty years ago. Not how to stop feeling guilty. How to stop the guilt from eating so much of my time and my energy and my nerve.
If this is you
So if you’re sitting there wanting more than you feel allowed to want, feeling greedy for it, dressing it up in language about service and offering and the greater good so nobody hears the real thing underneath, I want to say the real thing back to you plainly.
You’re allowed to want to lead. Wanting it doesn’t make you a worse mother. And the guilt you feel about it isn’t evidence you’ve got it wrong. It’s just something a lot of us carry, and you can carry it and still move.
You don’t have to wait for the guilt to go before you act.
It might never go. Mine didn’t. I moved anyway.
That voice, the one that sounds like caution but is really fear, has a name and a pattern. There’s a short assessment that shows you which version of it is loudest in your head. It’s free and it takes about five minutes, and knowing what you’re actually dealing with is where this starts. Email me and I’ll set you up with an invite. One tip: give me a personal email rather than your work one. The invite comes from Positive Intelligence, and college firewalls have a habit of blocking it before it reaches you.
