Posted on

Souls on Deck: My Call to Action to You, Conscious Leader

I’ve just come home from one of the intense little globe-trots that have become so important to my life and my joy and my growth over the past few years. Started in Oslo, spent a week in Croatia, a week in Belgium, and then a day each in Amsterdam, Copenhagen and New York en route to Austin. I’ll tell you all about it in a bit, as I wave a few “it’s about to get real up in here” flags.

For now, the key kernel is that I spent the last few days at the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, in the woods outside of Austin. This was no ordinary conference. For me, it was one of those times in life where you magnetically attract into your life exactly the teachers and experiences you need at exactly the moment you need them. My deepest work lately has been around vulnerability, revealing myself, peeling back the layers of decades-old polish and soul protections to be fully who I am in every single area of my life, including work, which is challenging for me. #understatement

The whole time I was traveling, my Morning and Evening Pages had been processing this vulnerability issue, using the actual word “vulnerability”. I make sense of the world through pattern-spotting, and I’d processed some life lessons down into the a-ha that my deepest connections and most meaningful moments were forged in the fire of realness and openness. When I’m the most vulnerable with people is when I connect with them the most. And it was also dawning on me how my struggles being vulnerable in certain relationships and contexts has been the source of some of my most painful patterns, feelings of being misunderstood, and a sense of disconnection and isolation.

So, then I walked into the Summit with that emotional backdrop. And it turned out that the first session was a four-hour workshop with the world’s leading vulnerability researcher and teacher, Brené Brown. No joke.  There are only 225 attendees, btw, so four hours with Brené Brown blew my wig entirely back. (To be crystal clear, I don’t wear a wig, I just mean to say it was mind-blowing.)

We broke down into groups of 5 and started doing this work, this work of learning to value vulnerability. The work of identifying stories we tell ourselves that have created disconnection and disturbance, and the work of retelling those stories. And, heyI’ve done a lot of work with others around retelling their stories. But I have mostly done that work around how to tell the most powerful story, how to retell your fail points and messy moments as preludes to triumph ad victory.

This is something many people who get stuck in the mess need to be able to do, for themselves and for their careers. As someone once said at church, the Psalm says “Yea, though I go through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Through. It doesn’t say to pitch a tent and set up camp in the Valley. But that’s what a lot of leaders I’ve worked with do, when it comes to telling their own story, because we humans have a negativity bias that causes our brains to alert to and fixate on and enlarge our failures and painful events. So, I’ll often ask someone to tell me their life story and all I hear about is the one time they got fired, versus all the opportunities that opened up once they did, and versus all the brilliant business they led before and after the fail-ey fact.

People come to me for this, because I’m very good at helping people retell the story from a power perspective. With a tone of victory. You want a Hero’s Journey? Give me your story, and I’ll give you back a Hero’s Journey, with you as the Hero.

But Brené (note that we’re on a first name basis in my mind) took this retell-your-life-story thing to new levels of depth. In the process, she triggered two big shifts in my thoughts and feelings on the matter. 

1. Left to their own devices, our brains will oversimplify our story. When we look back on a moment in our lives or careers when we fell flat on our faces, we tend to tell that story to ourselves as: “I fucked up.” “I was lame.” “I failed.” “It was all his fault.” Etc. and so forth.

Even if we are able to tell about how we stuck the landing and recovered beautifully, we generally tell the fail-ey parts of our stories in very black and white terms, because our brains like it simple. I belief that for executive thought leaders, this can occasionally be appropriate. But when we’re taking a hard look at how we’re telling these stories to ourselves and our loved ones (including our families, colleagues, teams and sometimes even our customers), this sanitized, fast-forward past the failure version of the story also fast-forwards past the substance.

2. The messy Act 2 of the Hero’s Journey is the good part. As a marketer, I’ve studied and taught extensively about the Hero’s Journey story archetype that is so core to the human experience: Act 1 is a call to adventure, Act 2 is the part where the Hero fights the good fight, and Act 3 is the bit where Hero comes home, changed, victorious and with a bounty for her loved ones. (This is a vast oversimplification, fyi.) In fact, my new book is built on this narrative arc, so when Brené brought it up, I was 100000% sure I’d be the teacher’s pet on this point.

But she took this in a very different direction than I’d expected her to. She said that the whole part that’s the most interesting to our brains and spirits about the Hero’s Journey is Act 2, while I’ve always focused getting to Act 3. She said the messiness of the Act 2, the valiant efforts and battles and failures, the part where it looks like the Hero might not make it, that’s the good stuff. That’s the part where, if we can dive deep and understand it with nuance and complexity, and then share that nuance and complexity with wisdom and boundaries, that’s the part where a vulnerable, conscious leader integrates lessons learned and creates connection and confidence with the people he or she leads.

Alors. This was a lot of a shift for me, and it was not easy to begin doing in the workshop. But it resonated. I could feel a little space open up in my chest, and I knew this was right. I knew it was right from thinking about my own journey, my own stories.

I knew what I’d learned at the moments when the struggle was really real, and I had this insight of realizing this was why I must practice vulnerability. It’s bigger than just expressing myself or “personal branding.” It’s about fully integrating the lessons I’ve fought for and learned, not just for my own path so that I can present myself to my teams and clients as a perfectly honed and ready-for-action leader. But it’s about fully integrating the lessons I’ve had to learn, the nuance and complex ones, into my community, from my teammates and colleagues, to my partners and vendors, to my clients and even, in some cases, through to their customers.

And outside of work, it’s about showing my soul, which is deep and rich and imperfect, as an invitation for deep and rich and imperfect love and connection.

Conscious leadership is no joke. You’ve got to cultivate personal and life practices to stay grounded in the face of all the things that other leaders do, so you can show up in every hard conversation, make every hard decision, with grace and using a much more complex rubric for decision-making than profit-first. Conscious leaders expose their insides, reveal their deepest visions for the world, and risk ridicule, in a system that doesn’t always value their soul-level motivations for participating in it.

But we, we conscious leaders, are so needed. So necessary. Humanity needs us. To heal the world and the workplace, and to create the visions that were put in our spirits. To build the edifices of (to steal Charles Eisenstein’s phrasing) the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

So, consider this a call to action, a call to adventure. I’m issuing you a challenge to do the deep, personal work it takes to put your soul on deck and living into your boldest, most vulnerable, fullest capacity as a conscious leader. To get concrete, you can start by joining my 30 Day Writing Challenge. It will cost you nothing but a little time and care. A little exposure of the ‘ole soul.

But I’ve found that the biggest shifts it takes to go down this path are not shifts of strategy, or even shifts of story. They are shifts of state, of spirit, of mindset. It’s like in yoga or cycling or bowling (don’t hate – I’m a fantastic bowler, quiet as it’s kept!): where your eyes go, your body, or the ball, will follow. Same with your mindset and spirit and state: where they go, the rest of your life and your leadership will follow.

So, in the interest of igniting a deep spark in your spirit, creating a crack in your current state, I’ll close here with an quote from a piece by Clarissa Pinkola Estés that is intensely influential in my current daily journey, in life and as a leader:

“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. A soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.“

 

Posted on

Decathexis: How to Stop Procrastinating and Find the Energy to Fuel Your Goals

When I reflect on 2016 thus far, I get a great deal of satisfaction out of what I’ve gotten done. I’ve had a lot of fun, launched a new business and experienced some major personal growth revelations, but I also wrote a book I’ve been thinking about and dreaming about writing since around 2012.

Today is National Fight Procrastination Day, which feels like the perfect occasion to share another recent revelation I’ve had. It’s not so much about how I stopped procrastinating on the book itself; I’ve already written about that some, about how I got on purpose, decided to make myself available and went into Monk Mode to focus and get that done.

The revelation I think you’ll find helpful at fighting your own procrastination is something that came up when I finished the book and transitioned out of Monk Mode. When I came out of Monk Mode and knew the book was fully buttoned up and something I was proud to have spent nine months working on, something I would be proud to spend 2017 promoting, something intense happened. Something called decathexis.

Cathexis is something psychologists talk about as the energy you put into a project, relationship or area of endeavor. Freud defined cathexis as being part electricity and part occupation. I think of it similarly, as the time, energy, creativity, soul and any and every other resource, including money, you invest into a priority person, project or experience.

It follows that decathexis occurs when those resources return back to you when you complete a project, de-prioritize an endeavor or end or shift your focus from a relationship.

When I finished the book, I spent maybe a week or two recovering, but almost immediately noticed an incoming woosh of fresh, creative energy and time that I was no longer spending on the book. I have been redirecting that woosh toward other projects, electing with intentionto make the most of this decathexis, aiming it at other things that are now moving up my priority ladder. (Note that some of those things are other writing and business projects, and a couple are around cultivating key business relationships, but some are also fun, like the Pretty Dress Club my friends and I have started to ensure nothing beautiful but “impractical” wastes away at the back of the closet.)

One of the most common reasons people procrastinate is that we think we lack something we need to move forward on our biggest, boldest goals and dreams. There’s just no time. We’re exhausted at the end of the workday, or after the kids get to bed. No energy. If we had the cash to take some time off, to hire a coach or to take the course, we would, but there’s never enough. Never enough. Never enough.

But I’ve realized that decathexis is an always-accessible strategy we can use to tap into the resources we do have so we can aim them at the things we care about the most. There is enough. There is plenty. The challenge is this: we’re not always seeing how we’re currently investing the resources we have. And we’re not always aware of how much control we have to reallocate those investments. We run on autopilot.

The decathexis I experienced when the book was done was crystal clear, because of the nature of the project and the intentional investment of time I’d put into it. But the truth is that I’ve experienced decathexis probably hundreds of times in my life, and know that it can and should be wielded intentionally, too. You don’t have to complete a major life project or check something off your bucket list to tap into your inner wells of creativity and energy and time and money via decathexis. You don’t have to leave your energy to chance or accident.

There are only two things you do have to do to harness decathexis: stop doing things that are not truly important, and shift that cathexis, that investment, to things that are:

  • Stop doing things that are a time suck, but not bearing fruit.
  • Stop doing things that make you feel de-energized.
  • Stop doing things because you think you should or because someone told you-you should, 30 years ago.
  • Stop investing your money into things, things and more things, unless they truly delight you or expand your capacity to create or experience life.
  • Stop spending time trying to change other people or investing all your focus into relationships where you feel like you’re butting your head against a wall (Note: this doesn’t necessarily mean to get divorced, fire everyone or stop speaking to your mother, though it might. It means to put an end to dysfunctional relationship patterns, not necessarily to discard people.)

Here’s the hardest one: stop injecting your resources into patterns and projects that are kind of half-working or hobbling along, just because you’ve always done so. Actually, even harder: stop doing things that are awesome, but are clearly not aligned with who you want to be or furthering what you want to create in your life.

Catch this principle: every relationship, every project, every exercise into which you invest fifteen minutes here or two hours there, represents an investment of your time, your energy, your soul, your love, your money, your resources. You have the power to decide where you aim those resources, and in fact, you are making that decision, more or less intentionally, all day, everyday.

If you never feel you have what you need to move your dreams and goals forward, and you want today to be your own personal Fight Procrastination Day, get real about what you can stop investing your precious personal resources into. When you intentionally withdraw and redirect those resources, you’ll find a secret portal to a near-limitless internal source of energy, enthusiasm and time for creating the things, developing the capacities and cultivating the human connections that truly matter the most.

Posted on

Business and Marketing Case Study: Acorns Removes the Financial Frictions of Millennial Transformational Consumers

I’ve been asked several times recently: What are the demographics of the average Transformational Consumer?

Business and Marketing Case Study: Acorns Removes the Financial Frictions of Millennial Transformational Consumers

My answer is this: your customers’ aspirations to live healthier, wealthier, wiser lives is a much more powerful lens for understanding what they will want, click on and buy than their age or ethnicity will ever be.

In terms of my purchase decisions and the content I engage with online, I am more like a 60-year-old white man who lives in NYC and also spins 6 times a week, eats a Paleo diet, owns his own business and travels internationally 5 times a year than I am the other 40-year-old Black women who live right here in Oakland and don’t possess the same Transformational Consumer aspirations or pursue them in the same ways.

In other words,

aspirations > demographics
That said, there are Transformational Consumers in every age bracket and every demographic segment. And occasionally, there is value to looking at the spots where your audience’s healthy/wealthy/wise aspirations intersect with the common life events of a particular life stage.

Case in point: Millennials and Graduation.

There’s a reason they call the ceremony marking the end of your formal education Commencement. Graduation season is one of the most whole-life transforming times most of us ever experience. Think about all of the new everyday activities you started doing and old things you stopped within a month of the time you graduated from high school or college. Most likely, you changed:

  • the place you live
  • the people you spend most of your time with
  • how you spend your time all day, including a new job
  • opening new bank and investment accounts
  • how much money you earn, save, spend and invest.

Even the things we put in, on and around our bodies change when we graduate, as we join snack-laden offices or finally have a real kitchen in which to cook. And certainly many of us get much more or much less exercise than we did. Think: desk job. Also think: can finally afford fitness studio classes.

After graduation, Millennial Transformational Consumers are out there looking for things (read: products, services, content) that can help them make these changes in a direction that results in a net healthier, wealthier and wiser life.

If your brand wants to engage Millennial graduates, there are two Transformational Truths to keep in mind. The first applies to all Transformational Consumers: the love a Transformational Consumer has for a brand is directly proportional to how much easier, less friction-ey, more beautiful or more joyous that brand makes their journey toward healthy, wealthy and wise.

The second applies specifically to Millennial Transformational Consumers: their friction detector is strong, and their tolerance for friction is low – lower than any other demographic segment.
Most Personal Disruption Campaigns or goal journeys on the way to healthy, wealthy and wise are full of sticking points and frustrations, even for a less friction-sensitive age group.

But 18-34 year-old Transformational Consumers have grown up in an era where virtually every desire can be fulfilled, in a couple of keystrokes, on demand, from their phones. In some ways, this makes the Personal Disruption Conundrum, the life limiting factor of hard-to-make behavior changes, even harder for this group.

Within this challenge lies a grand opportunity for brands to serve and engage this group by removing those frictions, sweepingly. Surgically. If you can deliver friction-removing products and content that change Millennial Transformational Consumers’ behavior for the healthier, wealthier or wiser? It will likely work for everyone: for consumers of every age bracket, and for consumers of every degree of transformational inclination.

Take Acorns. Acorns is a mobile investment app that has driven remarkable adoption among the most “unbanked” generation of our time. Fortune wrote: “Over the past year and a half, Acorns has opened 850,000 investment accounts, 75% of which were created by savers under 35 years of age.”

These numbers are impressive when you think of the desireablility of the 18 to 34 segment to every industry. But they are extraordinary in the context of the unprecedentedly troubled relationship between this generation and personal finance:

  • All 4 of the leading Banks are among the ten least loved brands by Millennials.
  • 71% would rather go to the dentist than listen to what banks are saying.
  • 1 in 3 are open to switching banks in the next 90 days.

Source: Millennial Disruption Index

On Acorns, young people open their phones, open an account, enter their credit card information: all things they are well accustomed to doing. Then, on every purchase, Acorns rounds up the purchase amount and invests the difference in the user’s choice of a set of diversified Vanguard portfolios. Users can start investing with as little as $5. The company charges a small monthly fee on active accounts.

CEO Noah Kerner told TechCrunch that with Acorns, “young people can keep growing their account in small amounts through lots of different sources,” adding that “with micro-investing, anyone can start growing wealth.”

BudgetsAreSexy gave Acorns a rave review, citing the fun of seeing those loose change investments add up, the beauty of the automatic/effortless extra investment and pointing out that “[i]t’s also the very first app to let you create an investment account straight off your phone too. Not that we’re *that* lazy that it’s necessary, haha, but still.”

If reaching and engaging Transformational Consumers in the Millennial age range is a priority for your company, your teams should be asking these questions:

  • What is your Millennial Transformational Consumer’s Journey look like? The journey of solving the transformation problem your company exists to solve?
  • Where are their sticking points, quit points and frictions?
  • What can you do remove those frictions, with products, services, features or content?

Sustainatopia

Date: May 7, 2017—May 10, 2017
Event: Sustainatopia
Location: San Francisco, CA
Registration: Click here to register.
More Info: Click here for more information.

Why I Quit The Best Job I Ever Had: How to Ignite, Engage and Retain Great People As You Scale

Any business will thrive if it can consistently engage its employees over and over again. Yet over 70% of employees in the US rate themselves as somewhere between bored/meh and actively, toxically hateful about their employer and their work. The companies that engage employees are Transformational Businesses; companies that operate on a different set of principles than the tired, old fixation on growth above everything and profit-first. Learn how to create a culture that keeps employees engaged and excited at near-irrational levels by unlocking their highest and best selves and unleashing their best work on problems they care about.

Date: April 1, 2017
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Event: Culture Conference
Topic: Why I Quit The Best Job I Ever Had: How to Ignite, Engage and Retain Great People As You Scale
Location: Santa Clara, CA
Registration: Click here to register.
More Info: Click here for more information.

Healthy,Wealthy,Wise:The Transformational Consumer

60% of customers view life as a continuous series of behavior change projects. They are on a never-ending hero’s journey toward better versions of themselves. They spend over $4T/year on products that help them get healthier, wealthier and wiser. They are Transformational Consumers. Their real-world behavior change journey is riddled with insights for innovation, brand, digital and content strategies that create lifelong love affairs with the companies that serve these people. Nelson, author of The Transformational Consumer, will share actionable digital trends, product and marketing insights from this very human, very heroic journey.

Date: March 11, 2017
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Event: SXSW
Topic: Healthy,Wealthy,Wise:The Transformational Consumer
Location: Austin, Texas
Public: Public
Registration: Click here to register.
More Info: Click here for more information.

Spark Roadshow

Date: September 15, 2016
Event: Spark Roadshow

Pre-Summit Workshop: The Transformational Consumer: How to Use Human Insight, Good Data, Digital and Content to Drive Lifelong Customer Loyalty and Engagement

Date: September 27, 2016
Time: 9:00am
Event: Marketing Conference and Expo
Topic: Pre-Summit Workshop: The Transformational Consumer: How to Use Human Insight, Good Data, Digital and Content to Drive Lifelong Customer Loyalty and Engagement
Location: San Francisco, CA
Registration: Click here to register.
More Info: Click here for more information.
Posted on

Vote For You: A Commencement Address for Graduating to the Next Level of Your Work and Life

Last week, I had the great honor of delivering the Commencement Address at one of my alma maters: California State University Bakersfield, where I did my undergrad and master’s degrees, before getting my law degree from UC Berkeley. I’ve shared the speech script privately, and those who have seen it have urged me to share it publicly. Enjoy.

You might have heard that this is an election year. Ok – I’m seeing fear on your faces. Don’t be afraid! I’m not going to name any names or tell you who I think you should vote for.  But there is one vote that you will make this year, this month and possibly even this week that will have a much greater impact on your life than who you vote for for President. And I am going to campaign for you to make that vote in a very particular direction, for a very particular candidate.

If you leave here today remembering nothing else, remember that I told you to vote for you. Vote for you.

Let’s talk about:

  • why I want you to vote for you
  • how you can do that
  • what it will take to consistently vote for yourself going forward, and
  • what will happen in your life when you start consistently voting for yourself.

Why Vote for You

The word vote comes from the Latin votum and vovere, which mean vow, to promise or wish. What I love about vow and promises and wishes is that they all imply future. They imply a commitment to or a hope for the future. And they all imply transformation. They all suggest the belief that there will come a time when things will be different and better than they are right now.

That is inherently optimistic and energizing. That is WHY you should vote for you.

How to Vote for You

But you’re probably wondering HOW you can vote for you, or what I mean by “vote for you”.

There are two different things you’ll need to do, over and over again, to vote for yourself in life:

  1.  You will need to pick yourself at times when no one else would or no one else will or no one else has yet
  2.  Voting for you also includes choosing situations that are beneficial for yourself and your long term ability to live into your dream for the future. Even when it’s really hard, make the choices, small and large, that create conditions conducive to your long term growth and your ability to do what you were put here on this planet to do.

You just heard about the most recent high points of my journey, but it wasn’t always like that. I met a professor here at CSUB named Dr. Beth Rienzi, who became my mentor. The day I met her, when I was 16 and very pregnant, she said: “It’s clear to me that you’ll be going to grad school.” And she started doing things then to prepare me for that, and did in fact involve me in doctoral level research and publishing, expose me to academic conferences and generally groom me for a bigger universe of possibility than I could have even imagined at the time.

She voted for me. And from then on, I made it my own job to vote for myself, to pick myself, to insert myself and say yes to opportunities and situations where no one else would. At some point, the rest of the world caught on, and started voting for me, too.

When you leave here and enter the workplace, you might see an opportunity or role or future that you would love to have, but don’t think you’re ready for. Maybe no one in your family has ever done anything like that before. Or maybe you just don’t know how to do the thing you’d love to do.

Let me let you in on a secret. NO ONE really knows how to do big things before they do them! Really, no one. I’ve worked with some of the best and brightest CEOs in the world, and I’ll tell you: they’re all guessing. They study and build skills and recruit really smart teams and get wise counsel and then they guess.

This is the definition of an executive decision: to be willing to guess, wisely, but make the decision when others would freeze up in fear or dither in uncertainty.

The takeaway is that If you have a dream in your heart, a spirit of excellence, a commitment to always learning and the opportunity arises, the only question you need to ask is “why not me?”

That doesn’t mean you say yes to everything. But it does mean you do things you’re not yet ready for, things you’re not yet qualified for, and things you haven’t done before. And it does mean that when you’re starting something big and new for you, and you feel really uncomfortable, or like you’re afraid of exposing yourself or being rejected,  or like you’re an imposter, you resist the urge to turn back. You resist the urge to crawl back into your comfort zone. And instead, you tell yourself that this imposter feeling—this freak-out moment—is a sign.

It’s a sign that life is about to get really interesting.

It’s a sign that you’re onto something good: something that will grow and develop you.

So, vote for you.

Vote for you when you face new opportunities, or the opportunity to create a new opportunity

Vote for you when you pick mates

Vote for you when you interview bosses (that’s how I think about taking jobs)

Vote for you by taking care of yourself, and not overextending yourself

Vote for you by building good habits around your health and your finances

Vote for you by building the habit of ruthless prioritization. Understand that that means you will say no to lots of things that are amazing, in order so you can say yes to things that really matter.

What it takes to VFY

Now. There are a couple of things you’ll need to be able to consistently vote for yourself:

1. First, know what you believe in. That’s how we pick the people we vote for, right? They give us these manifestos, and that helps us have clarity that they want and will work for the same future we want. Well, you need to cultivate that level of clarity about what you believe in, what you stand for, what future you want to create and WHY in order to consistently vote for yourself.

You don’t have to sit in a room and wrack your brain to think up a clear vision or get clarity on your purpose. Cultivate clarity about what you stand for and believe in through activity. Be out there, doing and trying lots of things.

Remember the miracles of biology, chemistry, cell replication and divine creative power that got you here, and take seriously the idea that you are here for a reason. Over time, you will learn what kinds of things you don’t want to work on, people you won’t work for, things you won’t do, not because you don’t like them, but because it pulls you out of your purpose

2. The second thing you need to vote for yourself is this: the power to vote.

In politics, the power to vote is called “enfranchisement”. Franchise is from the french word for “freedom”.

You might not always feel like it, but you have SO much freedom. You get to pick anything you want to do with your life, with your time, and you get to pick it every single day – even if you have been told you couldn’t, or your family has never done that before, or whatever – those limits only have the level of power you give them.

If you want to live a life of engagement, be on fire about your life, and be a person of growth and impact, I’ll give you one rule of thumb for how to choose what you do with that freedom: look for the problems, the frictions, and the sticking points in the world. And devote your time to eliminating them.

Look for the problems in your own life, your limiting factors, and focus your energy on eliminating them.

Look for problems in the world that make you angry or things you wish were different, and focus on making them different.

At work, look for the frictions in your company or in your customers lives—then get good at spotting and removing those frictions.

Then, team up with other people who are focused on looking for the problems in the world and who are on fire about getting rid of them.

I believe this is the single most powerful way to become a person of service, influence and impact.

3. The third thing you need to vote for yourself is to stop being your own opposition.

We’ve all heard negativity and critique and internalized that over the years. In order to consistently vote for you, you’ll need to rewire the way you talk to yourself. Learn how to bless yourself and your vision with your words, and slowly you’ll find yourself extinguishing your limiting beliefs

  • You vote for yourself every time you reject mediocrity, even your own.
  • You vote for you every time you refuse to settle for less, from the world or from yourself.
  • You vote for yourself when you master your habits. Stop letting bad habits create emergencies in your health and your finances that pull you out of your power and your purpose.
  • Vote for yourself by surrounding yourself with people who are for you, who will champion you, and will say so, about you and to you.

What happens when You Consistently Vote For You

Think about what happens when we vote a politician in. That night, they have a victory party. They express gratitude to everyone who helped them get there. That’s like today for you.

But what happens next? They stop campaigning and start using the powers of their new office, their new capabilities, to take on the future that they envisioned when they first asked for the vote.

Just like a newly elected politician, you are just getting started on your most powerful days, your most prosperous season. You can leave here and take your new capabilities out into the world and start consistently voting for yourself, every day, to take on your new future.

So do me a favor, when you have to choose between one thing or another, don’t play small or give into the urge to stay in what’s comfortable. When you have to cast a ballot for where to work, what to do, who to work with, whether to start a business or write a book or put yourself out there in a way that is vulnerable or scary, remember that you are here to bring something to this world that nobody else could bring, and vote for yourself. I’ll be voting for you, too.