In its most simple definition, ambition is the desire to achieve something. We think of it most often in the context of our careers, but it informs all parts of our lives. It’s the fire that burns in our belly and keeps us working hard. It pushes us outside of our comfort zone. It helps us road map. Dream of a bigger and better life. And it helps us stay focused. But Brooke Le Poer Trench asks, what happens when we loose that focus?

I have a few friends in London, where I lived until September 2019, who I speak to as regularly as I can. But since we came home to Sydney, while I’ve been adjusting to my new lifestyle, they have been home for a year with their children, partners and pets. And of course our conversations have changed as they struggle through this exceedingly tough time. It’s to be expected their enthusiasm for the future has diminished. I used to to sign off text messages with: “I can’t wait for you to visit.” Maybe I’d send a photo of the beach where we would swim together. But after a while, it felt wrong. Even now, with vaccine appointments in their diaries, I know they’re not in the mood to get excited about anything, right now. 

My friend tried to explain it recently: “I’m not all that stressed and I’m not burnt out… because I’m basically at home so how can I be? It’s just a feeling of… I just don’t get that excited about what’s happening tomorrow or next week. And I’m not unhappy, but I’m not all that happy.” A few days later, she sent me link to an article written by Adam Grant in the NY Times. She attached a message: “I’m languishing!” I could almost hear the relief in her text. 

I clicked through with interest, as I had just started listening to the author’s TED podcast, WorkLife. Adam Grant is an organisational psychologist at Wharton and author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know… and as far as summing up how my friend was feeling, he’d nailed it. The term languishing, he says, was coined by a sociologist named Corey Keyes, who noticed that many people who weren’t depressed also weren’t thriving. And he noted it as a risk-factor for depression, anxiety and other mental-health issues down the line.   

A friend in New York described the shift to me: “It’s like we were really anxious watching this thing unfold from our sofas… but then it just kept going, and in the meantime we had to get on with school and work and buying the groceries and doing the laundry… and at some point last year I went from this heightened-sense of concern, to coasting. I no longer had the energy to keep caring as much. And the weird thing is I didn’t even notice it was happening.”

This is precisely the issue with a state of languishing, or the draining of any ambition. You don’t always notice the slide towards feeling less… partly because it’s slow, and partly because it feels better than that acute fear, anxiety or concern that preceded it. 

So what do we do when that mental fuel that gives us focus and drive goes missing? When our sense of purpose and meaning goes from technicolour to sepia? When you’re getting everything done, but at the same time, you’re not functioning at full capacity? 

Every psychologist I have ever interviewed about coping with big emotions (including Grant) has said something along the same lines: the first thing to do after you’ve noticed a feeling is to name it. Then you are able to see your brain fog more clearly… and observe the fact that you don’t seem to care about work as much. This is often the very beginning of moving through the feeling. 

Grant goes on to talk about some of the ways to deal with languishing, which in a small straw poll among my friends, reflects some of the ways they are also yielding small sparks of joy. There’s a concept he calls “flow,” which is anything you do that gives you a temporary feeling of being absorbed in something meaningful or that momentarily bonds you to a task. One friend has been doing one the Yoga With Adrienne program on YouTube, and has found this to be true. “During that time of the morning, when everyone else is asleep and it’s just me on my mat going through the poses, I feel less up-in-the-air. It connects me to something,” she agrees. Another finds playing sodoku on her phone gives her a sense of purpose. “In that moment, I really really want to finish the grid. It wakes up my brain a little.” For others, Grant says, it could be getting caught up in a show during a late-night Netflix binge (that would be me). In a nutshell: Do anything that transports you, just for a moment, away from your feeling of “meh.”