Don’t let someone else burn your toast
Emma Grede likes her toast burnt. Cool. I don't.
Emma Grede (co-founder of Good American and one of the founding partners of SKIMS) just released a book, and the internet and I have thoughts. In an interview with Elle, she said she wanted her book to be a wake-up call, and went on to say:
"And my intention was to, I don't want to say 'upset people', but it was to have this realisation that so much of what's out there for women feels to me so performative; this idea of soft ambition, you know, vision boards and manifestation… that's just not my experience, it's bullshit."
Ok. Fair enough. I respect the conviction.
But here's my issue: her experience is one data point. ONE. (Also, I love a vision board!!!) And using one person's experience as the reason to write off an entire approach to ambition is the same thing we do when we say "well, I know a woman who screamed at her team and still got promoted, so toxic leadership works."
One story proves nothing.
And yes, sometimes you have to grind. I'm not out here telling you success comes with zero friction. Or that if you want your life to be all grind, all day, that there's anything wrong with that.
But most women I know (myself included) don't want to live our lives like a piece of bread we left in the toaster and forgot about — the kind that crumbles in your hand when you finally excavate it. We want to be the perfectly toasted slice. Golden from the glow of success, love, family, a little too much rosé on the patio, and at least one beach day.
My clients want to be the golden slice. I want to be the golden slice.
Ok wait, but wait. What even is soft ambition?
I totally had to google it, so here you go.
Soft ambition is the idea that you can pursue meaningful success without making yourself miserable in the process. It's ambition that treats your career as part of your life, not the whole of it. You want to make money, build something, grow and you also want to feel something when it happens. It's about doing great work while protecting your time, your energy, and the things that make life worth living.
That doesn't sound so bad, does it?
And guess what. Research supports that this “soft ambition” can lead to success when the system supports you. A BCG study of 200,000 leaders found that women in supportive organizational cultures stayed just as ambitious over time as their male counterparts. The places that couldn't keep women's ambition alive had something in common, and it wasn't the women. They didn't have the support they needed to navigate the minefield of gender bias in and outside of work that creates extra steps to career success, extra responsibilities in the home, and the invisible tax of having to prove, over and over again, that they belonged there in the first place.
Which brings me to my 100-millionth reason why your leadership development needs to be grounded in science, not one person's story.
Because with all due respect to Emma Grede, her experience is bullshit to me.
And mine might be bullshit to her.
And both of those things are fine, as long as we stop using individual stories as prescriptions for everyone.
Trash TV MBA: The Pitt
(ok it won an Emmy, but Secret Lives of Mormon Wives was also nominated for an Emmy, so let's not get too precious about it)
If you've been watching The Pitt, you already know. And if you haven't, charge nurse Dana Evans (pictured above) is a 30-year ER veteran who runs one of the most chaotic departments on television with total command AND a heart the size of Pittsburgh.
Just in season 2's Fourth of July shift alone: she takes a brand-new nurse, Emma, under her wing and teaches her how to actually show up for patients with dignity and care. She manages the chaos when the neighboring hospital shuts down and starts diverting patients mid-shift. She conducts a forensic sexual assault exam for a survivor with the kind of precision and gentleness that is genuinely hard to watch without crying. And when a colleague returns from rehab, she's the one quietly nudging others toward grace instead of judgment.
Decisive as hell. Leading with radical empathy.
At the same time!!!!!
We have this idea that empathy and decisiveness are somehow incompatible. That if you're soft enough to care, you must be too soft to act.
That's the same logic people use when they say women aren't suited for leadership. Too emotional. Too relationship-focused. Not tough enough. (BIG F*CKING EYE ROLL)
Dana is a walking, talking, chest-tube-ordering refutation of that.
And here's what the science actually says. Catalyst has been tracking empathic leadership for years and the findings keep pointing in the same direction — more empathy, better outcomes. More engaged teams. More creative teams. People who actually want to stay.
If you want to see what this actually looks like IRL (aka not on a scripted tv show) and how you build both in yourself, how you show up as someone who can hold space AND hold the room, I talk about in my book: Painted Wolves: A New Model of Leadership from Powerful Women.
Let's go girls.
xoxo
Kelsey
This Week's Thing:
Take 10 minutes and answer two questions.
1. What has success always looked like in your head and where did that picture actually come from?
2. What would a genuinely good life feel like, on your own terms?
The space between those two answers is where the most interesting work happens.
A Girl's Gotta Cite Her Sources:
Abouzahr, Katie, Matt Krentz, Frances Taplett, Claire Tracey, and Miki Tsusaka. 2017. "Dispelling the Myths of the Gender 'Ambition Gap.'" BCG Perspectives. http://www.yasargil.co.uk/public/upload/ckeditor/files/bcg-dispelling.pdf.
Van Bommel, T. (2021). "The Power of Empathy in Times of Crisis and Beyond." Catalyst. https://www.catalyst.org/insights/2025/empathy-work-strategy-crisis