About Ambitions
Ambitions is an initiative for women. We want to provide you with the support and tools you need to maintain, reach for and achieve your ambitions.
Ambitions works both with women in the course of their career, professionals, and with students* because we believe that business culture should be made familiar to women as early as possible.
Ambitions is a project of Donatienne Brasseur's Brucelle Consulting.
Ambitions!
Donatienne (donna-see-enn) Brasseur launched Ambitions early 2014 to host all the projects she had in mind around gender equality. Middle and long-term project aim at making the shift toward gender equality and target mixed groups, politics and public opinion. Short-term projects, in a time where our culture still does not provide a women-friendly environment, aim at helping women maintain, reach for and achieve their ambitions.
The name Ambitions was chosen exactly because ambitions is still such a difficult word for women to own and to brandish.
The most visible Ambitions project is training* and coaching. Ambitions' pedagogy is essentially behavioural. The programes are designed to enable empowerment, self-confidence and leadership towards realising your ambitions. Get to know yourself, your strengths, your drivers but also your barriers, your fears. A lot of practice is build into the courses, exercises designed to create awareness, to practice new behaviours and to learn how to gather new resources. We also want you to learn about society and business immediately when you need it, not after 10-15-20 years like so many of us did. This transfer of knowledge is done by the trainer but also by role models. Several experienced women come and spend a few hours and share and answer any question you may have.
Other Ambitions projects involve policy making, strategy, think tanking and the public visualisation of gender equality.
*: This course is currently offered to Master students at HEC-ULG (Liège)
Here's what participants had to say about the course :
- "I was impressed by learning how I could feel and seem more powerful just by my attitude."
- "Every session taught me a lot of things, but the main point would be maybe the self-confidence that this course gave me."
- "I learned about the importance of asking for what I need."
- "It probably was the importance to invest in my network, to build it and learn to use it. It’s not always easy to ask for help; I don't like doing it (yet) but will have to learn by making good use of all the tips and tricks you gave :-)"
- "Young women need to learn about negotiation. They need to learn to negotiate their first salary, their benefits and better conditions."
- "I wish young women would all learn to be self-confident and to trust that they are able to achieve their goals and their dreams."
Origins
Donatienne is a behavioral and organisational expert. Over the course of her 20-years career, she has developed great experience working with women and knowledge on gender diversity, learning a lot of it the hard way herself or from her clients' and colleagues' experience. For many years one big question kept troubling her: "why is there so much I am learning about just now when I should have heard about it from the start?" An issue also facing most women she met. She started finding workable answers in recent research such as the McKinsey Women Matter and the Bain reports and works by Linda Babcock&Sara Laschever, Sheryl Sandberg and her team, Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Johnson, Susan Colantuono, Malene Rix. Workable answers for designing workable tools and solutions.
An important driver for launching Ambitions has been to observe the economical aberration our current cultural system is creating. A logical response to today's crisis would seem to be to make full, or at least better use of available resources. Women represent 50% of any population and are the largest "minority" in our economy. Feminine leadership has proven its worth and too much of it is going to waste.