Self love has become a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, and somewhere along the way, it started sounding like something that involves scented candles and a very organised skincare routine.
In Own Your Ambition, Puja A Pandey pushes back on that idea entirely. Real self love, she argues, is much simpler than that, and much harder.
The Friend Who Stopped Showing Up
Puja often uses a small but striking comparison to explain what she means. Imagine a close friend came to you every single day with a plan they were excited about, and every single day you said, that sounds great, let’s do it tomorrow. After a while, that friend would stop coming to you with plans. They would stop sharing. They would quietly give up.
That, she writes, is exactly what happens inside a person when they keep putting themselves last. The ideas get quieter. The excitement fades. The ambition that was once alive and loud starts to dim, slowly, steadily, until it barely flickers.
starts to dim, slowly, steadily, until it barely flickers.
What Self Love Actually Looks Like, Day to Day
According to the book, real self love has very little to do with grand gestures. It is keeping the promise made to yourself on a Tuesday, even when Wednesday feels heavy. It is choosing to rest and actually resting, without spending the whole time mentally listing everything that should be getting done instead. It is deciding, consistently, that one’s own time, energy and peace of mind are worth protecting.
“Would ambition survive if it were treated the way we treat a friend we keep cancelling on?”
Puja’s answer, throughout the book, is a firm no. Choosing yourself, she writes, is what keeps that light on.
Why This Had to Be the Starting Point
This is precisely why Own Your Ambition opens where it does, not with a productivity system or a goal-setting framework, but with the far more basic question of whether a person actually treats themselves as someone worth showing up for. Every later chapter, the borrowed dreams, the family criticism, the switching trap, the systems and structure, rests on this same foundation.
A person who has not yet learned to keep promises to themselves, Puja suggests, will struggle to sustain any ambition for long, no matter how clear or exciting that ambition initially feels.
A Simple Practice Worth Starting Today
The book offers readers a small, honest exercise. Take ten quiet minutes with a notebook. Think back over the last week and count how many decisions were made for oneself versus around what someone else needed. Name one thing that has been waiting patiently to be gotten to, and how long it has actually been waiting.
The answers, Puja writes, tend to reveal exactly where a person needs to begin.
Own Your Ambition: Building a Life Beyond Borrowed Dreams by Puja A Pandey is published by Pen and Paper Publication.
#OwnYourAmbition #PujaAPandey #SelfLove #SelfWorth #PersonalGrowth #LifeCoach
Grab your copy now: https://amzn.in/d/0i5Wz8al
