I was on the floor.  My knees gave out.  My life had collapsed.  I came home from Hong Kong to an empty, dark house.  My life had become empty and dark at that moment when I turned on the lights, but the emptiness remained.  The bedroom was eerily empty.  Nothing on the dresser.  I pulled a drawer open.  Empty. I opened the closet. Empty.  A note.  Two lines.  “I met someone.  I’m leaving you.” Thirty-two years of past and a future full of plans gone in two lines.

The phone call was like a 9-1-1, but to a friend.  By grace, the friend said, “Paul, this is a defining moment.  What you decide to do with this moment will determine the rest of your life.  You must decide who you are and who you want to be.”  That grace touched the core of my being.  My core values.  I chose my attitude.  I chose to live out who I wanted to be rather than who I was expected to be.

The core values became the bedrock that sustained me.  I am a kind person.  Things and stuff and money can be replaced, relationships cannot.  I do not want to allow negative emotions to control me.  I want others to forgive her.  I don’t want to ever regret something that once made me smile.  I will model what I want from others.  I will let go of everything except for love.

Forgiveness is a value.  It is an act of love for oneself.  It is the most selfish thing one can do.  I didn’t set out to forgive.  Forgiveness was a grace that came to me.  Because I lived my values.  I modeled to others what I wanted to see in the mirror. Forgiveness is such a wonderful gift.  The negativity is gone and all that remains is love.  In its purest form.

Your core values are your core.  They will provide a solid foundation when life rocks you. We don’t get to choose the events life will bring.  We do get to choose our attitude about them.  We can learn to not take anything personally and not to make assumptions.  Reality can create enough drama.  We don’t need to add to it by thinking the world or others are acting against us personally or making assumptions on motives.  Life is reality and reality rules.  It’s a godlike property that we need to respect.  We can choose the God-like quality of creativity, of choosing to create joy, peace, satisfaction and a truly fulfilled life.

To flourish and remain relevant in this highly competitive and rapidly changing environment, you must be very clear about who you are, what you are and what you deliver in terms of value, meaning, leadership and professionalism.  This requires a consistent, integrated message and experience with your brand for your clients, your employees, your industry partners and the community you serve.

Clarity and Consistency.  You are called to be a leader.  Leadership demands clarity and consistency.  You need to demand NOT that you are consistently good.  You must be consistently “world class.”  You must consistently deliver great experiences.  You need to change the dynamic so that you are the standard that your competitors aspire to and not the other way around.

You Are the Brand.   You cannot be everything to everybody. You need to discover your purpose and live it.   It is your reality.  The reality of today’s economy demands that you react faster, deliver more consistently and never settle for “good enough.”  The standards keep getting tougher and you may either chase them or set them.  I challenge you to set them.  It’s going to require creativity, innovation, and a consistent push for higher standards.  You must work every moment of every day to make Brand You the standard of excellence.

New Thinking.  There are some very, very old standard operating procedures in every industry. You need to in the words of Steve Jobs, “put a dent in the universe.”  You need to get excited about innovating around the changes and challenges that are yours to conquer in today’s marketplace.

Leadership is not about being liked.  It’s about doing what’s right.  That means being visionary and looking beyond your corners of your world.  It means you must connect with all of the stakeholders in your universe and engage and interact. You must ruffle feathers or you’re probably not doing your job as a leader.  You were hired or started your business to lead — not to be a caretaker.  You need to have the courage to describe the current landscape and define the ways to strengthen your clients’ organizations in the context of today’s market realities.

Windows of Opportunity not only open and close, they get bricked over and disappear.  Your destiny will be shaped by how you respond to opportunity when it presents itself.  You cannot allow yourselves to be blinded by fear nor paralyzed by it.  And if you want to look for opportunity, you need look no further than your fears.  Usually, if you will just pick up your fears and turn them over, you will see the beautiful opportunity that it presents.  We are currently living in a time of the most opportunity that we will ever see in our lifetimes.  If you are in the business of solving problems and taking away pain, you are living in what should for you be – the best of times.

Commitment starts at 100%.  Leadership begins at the extra mile.  If you are to become the organization that your competitors will try to emulate rather than the other way around, you need to have skin in the game.  You cannot fear failure.  Tom Peters said, “Screw-ups are the mark of excellence”.  The most successful people on the planet have failed more than ordinary ones.  The only failure is the failure to try and dream and dare.   But not dreaming big, setting big hairy audacious goals (thanks, Jim Collins “Good to Great” http://tinyurl.com/cyjh7a), not setting new standards of excellence and possibility would be the greatest failure of all.  It is learning to be discerning enough to realize that when you say yes to something that is unimportant, that you have just said “no” to something that is.

Reinvent.  What would you do if your very survival were at stake?  What if you faced a challenge so enormous that immediate, drastic changes and shifts were needed and need now?  Pressure and challenge will make you bigger, stronger and more relevant.  It can be your catalyst to greatness.  But you cannot afford to wait.  The small, independent, mom and pop business landscape is littered with the corpses of those who failed to have a value proposition relevant to today’s world.  Office supplies.  Travel Agencies.  Book Stores.  The Internet demolished some.  Giant competitors crushed others.  Only a few who have differentiated themselves and created unique value have flourished.  It may be time to burn your boats, and move with courage to completely overhaul your structure, your message, and your ways of doing business so that you can be an example to your employees and your clients and inspire them.  (Recommend: http://tinyurl.com/aq8tl4)

Create To Be Great.  This is my theme and my passionate belief.  I do not believe that you can have relevance as a commodity business.  I do not believe that you can survive if you fall into the price trap.  That means you need to educate, motivate, inspire and to identify and increase the value that inspires loyalty and builds brands.  As a marketer, you need to create value for your clients.  You need to lead by adding value to your offerings in ways that amaze your clients and create unique experiences.  You will do that by being real, by touching them and allowing them to touch and move you.  Yes, this is touchy-feely stuff, but I fully believe it.  All business at its core is about love.  It is that emotional.  The CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, Kevin Roberts (http://tinyurl.com/bonnmr) said, “By touching emotion you get the best people to work with, the best clients to inspire you, the best partners and the most devoted customers.  The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.”  Wouldn’t be wonderful if you could instill a culture where every employee woke up every day and asked, “What can I do today to add value and solve problems for our clients?”

More opportunity exists today than you have ever seen in your lifetime.  This recession will end.  There will be winners and losers.  Which are you going to be?  How are you going to get there?  With a sense of urgency, with the knowledge that today is the day that you can end the bad times and start the good ones.  Go out there and Create To Be Great.  Create opportunity.  Create solutions.  Be the aspirin for the pain that your clients are facing.  Whose pain are you focused on?  If you’re focused on your own, you are not creating value.  If you’re focused on serving your clients and taking away their pain, everyone wins. You are a leader. You define leadership.  

Change. It can be frightening.  Change.  It can be exhilarating.  Change.  It can happen to us.  Change.  We can be the instigator.  We can ignite change or we can be extinguished by change.

This one thing is clear.  Change happens.  Like the current of a river, it flows — sometimes lazily, sometimes rapidly, and sometimes crazily.  We live in times of chaotic change and humans have always done, we must adapt with it.  We must flow with it.

To flow with the changes, we must know where we want the currents to take us.  This requires a vision.  There is a big difference between a vision and a view.  If we allow the currents of change to sweep us along, we will have a view along the way, but we won’t have a vision of where we want to go. 

Creating meaningful change requires that we live consciously and have a clear vision of what we want to experience along the way.  So many of us have experienced the negativity of knowing that what we have is not what we want.  Adding to the frustration is the unawareness of what it is that we want.  A life well lived is a life of intention and life of vision.  Clarify your vision of what you want in this life, in this moment.

Clarify your vision and you become the director of meaningful change in your life.  Take some time with yourself to explore deeply six areas of your life.  Be honest with yourself about where you are compared to where you want to be in these six areas of your life:

1)   Professional — this concerns your delivery of value to make yourself better, to make your world better, and to attract abundance and prosperity into your world.  Yes, that was a fancy way of saying this is your job.  I contend that if your job is just a job, you may need some help in this area.  What do you love doing?  What are you good at?  When you combine passion and skill, the world will find you.  When you can make a living and make a life, you never have to work another day in your life.

2)    Financial — what is your relationship with money and wealth?  Do you worry about money?  Are you living within your means?  Have you reached a place where the things you own no longer own you?  What is your vision for yourself if the financial aspects of your life were exactly where you wanted them?  Set SMART (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) goals around this area of your life and you’ll take the first step to reaching them.

3)   Spiritual — your religious beliefs or lack of them need to be a part of your vision.  Are you at peace with yourself and the source of your energy, your values, your purpose and sense of meaning?  This exploration is the deepest, most personal and in my view, most important.

4)   Emotional — how is your emotional state?  Are your thoughts controlling you?  All negative emotions are the result of believing untrue thoughts.  Have you explored where your emotions are coming from?  Do you have mechanisms in place to help you find emotional balance and inner peace?  Do you have a picture of where you would like to be?  This needs to be a part of your vision in order to create positive and meaningful change.

5)   Relationship — how are you doing with the important relationships in your life?  Are you still actively writing a love story with your significant other?  How’s the family?  Have you got a best friend?  Life is a more pleasant journey when we share it with those we love.  Loving those we want in our lives requires a vision as well.  They are experiencing this chaotic change as well.  You can enjoy the journey with those you love.

6)   Health and Wellness — your physical body is the vessel that you have to take you on this amazing trip called life.  Your body changes too.  You need to make wise choices every moment to care for your body and mind.  Choosing healthy foods in the right amounts.  Choosing to exercise the body to give you the strength and vitality you need to accomplish and experience your life goals.  Wise food choices and commitment to exercise will also relieve stress and create positive emotions that self-perpetuate good habits.

Clarify your vision for what you want your life to look like in these six areas and you will be well on your way to orchestrating positive and meaningful change in your life.  Be well, my friend.