How Solitude Is Becoming A Tool For Bigger Ambitions 

What if getting closer to your goals sometimes requires doing less with everyone else and more by yourself? 

Ambitious women with goals can start to become so busy that the present moment of going after their dreams begins to seem like a chore. Your every action can become predicated on the next idea or trend you’re trying to develop. Or simply getting validation or other people’s opinions on your craft. That can make you susceptible to outside feedback. But as you continue to build, it can be valuable to step away from the noise. 

Some women can easily mistake solitude for loneliness. And once you understand the difference, you’ll come to realize that solitude is an intentional tool. 

Solitude isn’t about doing everything alone. It’s about deliberately creating space for the parts of pursuing a goal that require you to be alone: figuring out what you want, doing the work, evaluating your progress, and resetting when necessary. 

In today’s society, we’ve become so accustomed to sharing our plans and ideas with others. We start seeking out their opinions before we’ve fully formulated our own. Instead of having an idea or goal in mind and doing what you know to achieve it, we fill our heads with questions: Would people actually (like, buy, or support) this? Does this make sense? Is anybody else doing something similar to this? These questions can then cloud your judgment, spark doubt in you, or make you question if you’re on the right path or not. 

This is why solitude is so important. You need to sit with your own thoughts and ideas before sharing with someone else. This can mean brainstorming on your own. You don’t always need a brainstorm session or a co-working day with your bestie. Also, write down your ideas to think them through before heading to social media to see if what you’re doing will align with what the masses are doing. 

The point isn’t to be open to feedback or automatically reject feedback; it’s to let your own perspective develop first. 

Solitude isn’t just for when you’re formulating your ideas and thoughts. But it’s also for when it’s time to do the work. Many women currently work a 9-5 job (and probably one that’s not in their desired field), while having a side business and being entrepreneurs. That means your day might be filled with Teams meetings, several notifications popping up, many assigned tasks to accomplish by the end of the day, and countless emails you have to respond to. In the midst of that, your personal goals can be pushed off, and you don’t have time or energy to work on your own things. 

It’s easy to consume the rest of your free time with doomscrolling through TikTok and other distractions. But solitude can also be a tool to create moments of undisturbed time to focus your attention on your goals. That can look like finally creating your business plan, finishing a task without taking a social media break to scroll endlessly, or mapping out blocked time on your schedule to make real progress on something you need to execute. 

Women can get so caught up in their goals that they don’t take time to think about the goal itself. You should do a temperature check on your ambitions. Maybe you’ve been so laser-focused on your goals but not making real progress. Everything may have seemed to be going according to plan, but your priorities have shifted. Or simply you let other people’s thoughts direct your next steps but it might not be the next logical step. Solitude gives you the tool to figure out what’s working and what’s not. You can actually take a step back to assess not just your next steps, but the best next steps to take. This isn’t to say that you need to make a pivot. However, this temperature check will make sure that your actions align with your ambitions. And you need quiet time in order to do that.