This article addresses the personal negotiations that lead individuals to pursue adult education. Analysing this process determines ambitions pursued, and thus makes it possible to identify how the individuals involved perceive their desired future as an improvement. This study found that ambitions were negotiated in order to make them acceptable to the individuals themselves, but that their negotiation also involved others; at the same time, it examined the aims and constraints implied by the process. This negotiation process draws on norms and rules related to the search for a better work-life balance. Three types of ambition were identified as models for negotiating the social organisation of time. The paper concludes with the benefits of studying ambition for the field of adult education, and on the potential contribution that can be made by considering these programmes as a support in the construction of identities, even though this aspect tends to be diminished by neoliberal hegemony regarding adult training programmes.