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How to Have a Post-Traumatic Breakthrough

There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who have been through a life-changing traumatic experience, and those who will go through one in the future. If you are a living, human being, you will experience sickness, deaths of loved ones, accidents, and all manner of ups and downs someday.

Mark Epstein calls this The Trauma of Everyday Life.

Ask the happiest, most well-adjusted, most successful or most alive person you know—that friend or mentor who seems to have it all together, who seems to sail through life.

Ask them if they’ve ever had a traumatic experience.

You might be surprised. You’ll hear stories of being orphaned, diseases, divorces, bankruptcies, car accidents and natural disasters. You might even hear stories far beyond the “everyday” traumas we all experience: stories of child abuse, violence, war and genocide.

Of course, if you ask the most dysfunctional, disgruntled, misanthropic person you know about their experience of trauma earlier in life, they’ll have similar stories.

So what makes the difference? How can you experience post-traumatic breakthroughs instead of hardening your heart, spirit and life around your traumas?

Some say the key is to experiencing post-traumatic growth is to tell a new story about your trauma. I agree that this is the first step of the process, but I believe it’s only the first step.

I’ve learned that post-traumatic breakthroughs happen when we allow the experience to make us into something new, something different than we were before. Something much less perfect, much more real, more nuanced, stronger and more sensitive. Something which has new capabilities and beauty, less fear and frivolity.

There is tons of precedent for this trauma-sparked transformation in art and in science:

  • There’s the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pieces of pottery are rejoined with gold, creating in pieces more cherished than the originals ever were.
  • There are self-healed quartz crystals. After being damaged in the ground, these gems grow hundreds of new crystals over the damaged area, creating wild new inner landscapes, complexity and brilliance.
  • Then there’s David Bowie, whose magically wonky eyes were not actually different in color. His pal George Underwood punched him in the eye when they were teens. From that day forward, Bowie’s right pupil was paralyzed in the open condition, making it look like one eye was blue, and the other black. Early on, Bowie later recounted, he felt embarrassed at the imperfection. But later in life, he thanked his childhood friend and lifelong collaborator for the injury and the career-enhancing “mystique” his imperfect, asymmetrical look created.

I’ve found three common threads in basically every post-traumatic breakthrough story I’ve heard (or lived). For good measure, I’ll phrase them in terms of what you must do if you want to engineer your own post-traumatic breakthrough.

1. Reframe the situation, and tell a new story. I recently read a blog post where the writer took great issue with the sentiment that things happen for a reason. He railed at this concept, on grounds that it makes the victims of life’s terrible, traumatic events feel guilty or somehow at fault when they can’t find that meaning.

And he’s right: really bad things happen to good people all the time. It’s not their fault if they can’t find any meaning to make out of it. But there’s nothing wrong with seeking meaning or perspective out of bad things that happen in your life. Why limit your life to just having bad things happen and feeling terrible about it, if you are open to finding inner development or new perspectives instead?

Martha Beck has an exercise where she asks readers to think of their most cherished experiences or favorite things in life, and then reflect back on how they came to have them – including at least one “bad” thing that happened along the journey.

This “reframing” is a skill we can cultivate and use anytime we want, after any trauma, small scale or large.

Two of my dear friends lost their parents – one her mother, the other her father – in very traumatic early-life experiences. They are two of the best wives and mothers I know, and I know their families agree with that.

Coincidental? Maybe. But I know that my friends cherish their children and relish the moments of their lives with a lighthearted, reverent gusto I’ve rarely seen, even among other great parents I know. They live their lives along a narrative of joy, delight and engagement with their children. This, in the wake of circumstances that could easily and justifiably have cemented around mourning and devastation.

I’m not suggesting that every trauma is just as easy to recover from as every other trauma, or that if someone doesn’t have a breakthrough that’s their fault or they’re doing it wrong. Everyone has a path and a process, and sometimes it’s not pretty – sometimes it never gets pretty. But if you are open to – or committed to – finding or creating a post-traumatic breakthrough, you must search for new meaning in the old trauma story.

2. Be transformed. I watched a film recently in which someone who had witnessed a friend’s murder expressed what many of us feel after even much “lesser” traumas, wondering aloud if she would ever be the same person she was before.

The answer is no. Experiencing the end of the world as you know it equals experiencing the end of the you you once were.

When it comes to finding or creating post-traumatic breakthroughs, the single most important element of the new story you seek to live out is the character you cast for yourself in in that story. Specifically: will your role be defined as the person to whom this terrible thing happened? e.g.,: Orphan. Sick. Loser of jobs. Loser – period. Bankrupt. Divorced.

Or, in this new story, will the traumatic experience be a factual circumstance, a contextual element, that is helpful in understanding the character you have become, will become, are becoming, are now?

e.g.,: Mom of the Year, influenced by having lost her mother early on. Visionary leader of your own company or life, after recovering from years of victimization, losing jobs or co-dependency. Lover of life and of people, powered by compassion, after deep healing from a childhood of disconnection and abuse. Responsible money manager, lessons learned from the recession and subsequent fallout.

To get to your post-traumatic breakthrough, you must pick a path: who do you want to be?

3. Practice your new identity. This is not magical thinking. Okay, maybe a little bit – there is some willful magic in deciding you will not be defined by something that could very well have been the end of you, literally or otherwise. After the magic, though, comes the work. Whether the trauma you’re healing from is a life disaster you had a hand in creating, or some heinous act of humanity, going from trauma to breakthrough requires work.

The power of surrendering to the transformational power of trauma, and naming your new character in the new, breakthrough story of your life, is that implicit in this story is clear guidance and direction as to what you need to do. Character and story necessarily imply context, landscape, ability. What skills and capabilities will you need to become this character? What resources and relationships will you need?

That work could be internal: therapy, meditation, belief rehabilitation, and the like. It could be developing interpersonal skills to manage your grief, overcome your struggles with confidence or survive broken family dynamics. It could be external: a change of place, learning how to do something new professionally, creating powerful, healthy relationships with mentors or supportive friends.

The real power of claiming a new character in your new, post-traumatic story is that it points you to the who/what/where/why of your breakthrough, so that you can begin to create the capabilities and context for it to come to life.

Closing Caveats.

My final caveat is that you might find this identity shift to be very hard, or very scary. This is normal – it takes courage to release elements of the way you’ve always seen or described yourself, even though they may be dysfunctional or limiting. When you pick an identity different from what you’re currently living into, you will be forced to take some behaviors and even conversations that you have engaged with for decades off the table.

No matter how justified your grievance may be, if you keep telling that old story, you’ll block your breakthrough.

In no way does it diminish or minimize the traumas of your life to seek meaning. Neither does it disrespect what you’ve been through to recast your traumas as circumstances—context that adds layers of beauty, nuance, sadness and strength to your fully glorious, fully powerful being.

This is true whether your personal trauma is a lifetime of criticism from the people you love, or a wartime experience of death and destruction.

One of our most powerful capabilities as humans is that we can search the darkest nooks and crannies somehow extract something good, something useful, something meaningful or beautiful. Practice conducting this search in the wake of your own traumas, and what you’ll find one day is a new version of your beautifully broken self.

I’m thrilled to deliver the opening keynote for Social Media Strategies Summit in Chicago on Wednesday April 27. I’ll be talking about how to use insight, content and digital to activate, engage and transform your audiences.
Date: April 27, 2016
Time: 9:15 a.m.
Event: Social Media Strategies Summit in Chicago
Topic: How to use insight, content and digital to activate, engage and transform your audiences.
Venue: Wyndham Grand Chicago Riverfront
312.346.7100
Location: 71 E Upper Wacker Dr.
Chicago, IL 60601
USA
Public: Public
Registration: Click here to register.
More Info: Click here for more information.
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3 Things That Happen to Your Life When You Stop Taking Things Personally

I have a deep relationship with Serena Williams. The fact that this relationship exists entirely in my head is neither here nor there. One time, I watched a video of her working out right before I went to a high intensity interval training session. Watching myself in the mirror the whole class, I couldn’t help but feel like my workout looked just like her workout. I ended up so sore I couldn’t parallel park for a week.

source: si.com

With that context, it should come as no surprise that I’m a little obsessed with the Sports Illustrated cover that recently came out commemorating Serena’s selection as the 2015 Sportsperson of the Year. Beyond the fact that it’s gorgeous and that I have a full-time seat on Team Serena, there’s something I love about her declaration of victory after a playing season that, by all accounts, was mixed. So much success, mashed up with injury, media tomfoolery and that painful loss.

Life is always, only that: wins and losses, mixed together. Interpretation, the way we choose to reverse engineer our personal stories, is everything. I recently produced a retreat attended by successful professional women, all of whom hold enviable job titles. When I asked them to tell me their career stories, many of them chose to retell their timelines in a way that disproportionately emphasized their losses, spinning their stories through the lens of personal failures, emotional wounds, bad breaks and times they made bad decisions.

Not only did my retreat friends recall negative events much more intensely, they also tended to take “bad” things and losses very personally. Seeing so much of this style of interpretation come up at the retreat inspired me to share The Four Agreements – four beliefs author Don Miguel Ruiz suggests we adopt to release an enormous amount of suffering and live happier, bolder, more grounded lives.

While all four agreements are worthy of attention, the Second Agreement is a big one: Don’t take anything personally.

Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally… Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

This brings us back to Ms. Williams. You can argue about whether she is the Greatest Athlete of All Time, if you’d like, but one thing you can’t dispute is that she is a stellar model for what happens to your life when you stop taking things personally.

Practicing not taking things personally is a challenge, but the upside of rewiring the way you see almost everything others do as being about them (vs. you) is enormous. Let’s use Serena’s recent life and interviews as Exhibit A. Here are just a few of the changes you can expect to see in your life when you stop taking things personally:

1. You become the ruler of your own belief system. See, when you take the things other people say personally, you hand over control of the steering wheel of your emotions and your life to another person: another person who is human, flawed, and dealing with their own emotional wounds and flawed belief systems.

When she announced her return to the Indian Wells tournament, after 15 years of boycotting the event where she and her sister were the victim of racial insults as teens, she wrote in an essay in Time: “There are some who say I should never go back. There are others who say I should’ve returned years ago. I’m just following my heart on this one.”

And when journalists asked her about the pressure to win Slam after Slam, she replied with a clear, internal compass, respectfully declining to take that pressure on as her own. The New Yorker quoted her before the Open as saying, “That’s the beauty of my career. I don’t need to do anything at all. Everything I do from this day forward is a bonus. Actually, from yesterday. It doesn’t matter. Everything for me is just extra.”

When you stop taking things personally, you become the sovereign ruler of your emotions and your actions – regardless of what others think or expect of you. If you can take it to expert level, you can be the boss of yourself and your life – regardless of external pressures or circumstances.

2. You learn who you really are, and what you’re really about. When you don’t take other people’s opinions, actions and words about you personally, you will slowly but surely learn what you really care about, what you want to do, what makes you happy and unhappy, and what your own vision for your life is. You give up the outdated storylines from your family, friends, coworkers, even your childhood that explain why you are a certain way or have never been able to overcome a certain thing, and those limitations disappear. You develop an independent moral compass and vision for your life, and your decisions become clearer, faster. You’ll live more boldly, and make moves that work for you and your personal value system, with much less regret.

Serena is clear on why she does what she does:

She plays for the love of the game: “I’m fortunate to be at a point in my career where I have nothing to prove. I’m still as driven as ever, but the ride is a little easier. I play for the love of the game.”

She plays for the next generation: ‘‘‘I play for me,’’ Serena told me, ‘‘but I also play and represent something much greater than me. I embrace that. I love that. I want that.’’’

She returned to Indian Wells driven by faith and forgiveness: “I was brought up to forgive people,” Serena says, “and I felt that I wasn’t doing what I was taught.”

And she’s equally clear on what she’s not motivated by, even though everyone around her might expect her to be. ‘‘You don’t understand me,’’ Serena responded to a New York Times reporter’s inquiry about how badly she wanted the 22 Grand Slam milestone. ‘‘I’m just about winning. It’s not about getting 22 Grand Slams.”

When you stop taking things personally, you get to write your own story. If someone else wants to tell a story about you, you either correct them or let them have their own story about you. But you don’t internalize it or take it on – you become impervious to their story, their poison, their issues.

3. You connect MORE deeply with others, not less. When I shared the Second Agreement with my friends at the retreat, one woman raised her hand and asked a fair question: “What about the good things? When people say nice, loving things to me, if I don’t take those things personally, won’t it impair my relationships?”

I believe it’s almost more important that you don’t take the positive things people say and do to you personally than the critical things they send your way. Why? Because the positive things other people say still come from a place of their dreams, beliefs, goals and agreements. Allowing them to be in control of your emotions, even your positive emotions, is still putting your emotional state into someone else’s hands.

When you practice understanding that nothing anyone else says or does is actually about you, you begin to have more compassion for the wounds that people who say or do unkind things toward you are experiencing. You become more able to connect with people from a place of mutual love, respect and a commitment to engaging in relationships that reflect the friend, lover, family member and professional you want to be in this life vs. coming from a place of quid pro quo, caretaking, obligation and name-calling. Relationships built on that foundation are deep, strong and healthy.

In talking about her relationship with one-time #1 rival and bff Serena Williams, Caroline Wozniacki told Vogue that following her broken engagement, “She wasn’t pitying me, like a lot of people were. I mean, it’s not like anyone died. I was in shock, but she was really helpful because she had been through it before. She didn’t sugarcoat it, and she didn’t look down on me. She was really there for me when I needed her the most, and that’s why I think our friendship is so strong now.”

Taking things personally is a massive limitation. It gradually erodes at your clarity and your boldness until you force your life into this little shape that no one else will find objectionable. Release the tendency to take things personally. Doing so is transformative, and will put you back on the throne of your emotions and your actions. Ask Queen Serena.

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15 Things I Did at 35 to be Unstoppable at 40

Today is my 40th birthday. I am informed and aware that this occasion causes no shortage of wailing and gnashing of teeth for some. I, however, am delighted, ecstatic, expansive, grateful, excited.

It helps that I’m writing this from Maui.

But it also helps that I’ve been desperate to be a 40-year-old woman since I was nine years old.

When I was nine, my family owned a racquet club, where I would hang out and help out in the summertime. Watching those 40-year-old women Jane Fonda-it-up in the dance aerobics classes, decked in thong leotards, leg warmers and white high-top Reeboks was everything to me. It, as they say, gave me life.

That my social calendar now consists largely of dance classes and brunches, spin classes and dinners (which my friend Rebecca and I do so regularly we have given it a name: spinner) and lululemon-clad global adventures with my fitness pals wherein we cycle, row, swim and shop – this feels like a mission: accomplished kind of life.

So much of my life right now reflects the best parts of what I’d dreamed, but is more beautiful than I ever legitimately hoped for. At 40, I have the groundedness, humility and good sense to sit in and appreciate these moments, even as I gear up for transitions and new seasons. I have a beautiful home, friends and community like I’d never known were even possible, a career that allows me to be creative, true to myself and flex my smarts, and the truest type of prosperity. Beyond just the financial, I live an abundant, healthy life I love to look at – and love to live.

Is life perfect? Definitely not. But it is beautiful. And it was hard won, by the grace of the Good Lord, the sweat of my brow and the constant inner inspiration and willingness to push beyond what was comfortable. Twenty years back I was a very young Mom, trying to get my education and raise my son and his brother the best I could. New friends might never know it, but my last couple of decades included two divorces, near bankruptcy in the Not-So-Great-Recession and a custody drama.

They included trying to consciously parent a very troubled teen, the heartbreak of my brother going to prison, and a series of multi-generational health scares, from my son’s congenital glaucoma to my mother’s stroke after stroke after stroke. The last decade also included a weird and wondrous journey of serial career transitions and reinventions, spiritual and emotional healing, financial recovery (and then some) and the restoration of many of the broken areas of my life.

So at 40, I sit at a place of calm, sweet, surrender to this journey. I am intense, intent and intentional, and I am a woman of great energy, power and activity. But I allow now, in a way I couldn’t even conceive at 20. I still have another 80 or so years to live, conservatively, and I can already see how the dots have connected, taking even the most traumatic of experiences which could have harmed me – the very things which I thought would do me in – and turning them, ultimately to my great advantage.

Those traumas are often the little kernels of miracle at the core of my superpowers, I’ve learned. I’ve learned that so many of the things I forced to happen, historically, were a mess, and that so many of the things I allowed to happen turned out to be the best things ever. Now, I allow.

I am, by nature, a contrarian. I have cultivated an uncanny ability to rethink and reframe a painful or stressful belief into new beliefs that work better for me. So, a few years back, when my friends started to turn 40, I noticed how many were having a hard time with it. To be clear, I believe that experience is valid, especially here in the US. Our cultural narrative about aging is jacked, and people – men and women alike – struggle mightily to escape it’s maw.

But, maybe because of my Jane Fonda-esque childhood models, maybe because of my contrarian nature, I had hit 35 and decided that 40 and beyond was going to be stellar, not in some weird chasing youth kind of way, but in the way of depth, maturity, energy, wellness and grounded calm. And also in the way of no longer being so focused on everyday dramas and emergencies as I was in my 20s.

Starting right around the time I turned 35, watching people turn 40 with stress and angst inspired me, as did the realization that time flies, and I’d be hitting the milestone myself before long. I recall very clearly thinking: they’re not doing it right. And I recall asking myself the next natural question: what would turning 40 “right” look like?

So, I got still and quiet and took stock. I realized that a lot was wonderful about my life, and the person who I was, but also that the greatness I could have and be and live was being limited by a few bad habits, limiting beliefs, dysfunctional patterns, and toxic relationships. I stopped distracting myself from looking deep at my past and my present, and made a conscious decision to press pause, do some deep cleaning and healing of my life, and do whatever it took to release the self-critique and anxiety that had been an ever-present backdrop to my existence up till that time. I agreed with myself to then do the work it’d take to stop creating and re-creating the same dramas and tired, old, played-out broken life storylines again and again.

I went to therapy, and participated in treatment for post-traumatic stresses I didn’t know were called that. I read so many self-help books, and practiced what I learned. I got grounded and comfortable with the discomfort of exploring myself and getting real about my messes. I learned that neurons that fire together wire together, and began the process of rewiring some old emotions and behaviors.

My therapist told me that it was never too late to have a wonderful childhood, so I took up the challenge of injecting a sense of light, play, joy and wonder into my daily life, all the while cultivating the skill of putting an end to relationships and patterns that no longer served me.

I realized that I’d really never – not even as a kid – had legitimate birthday celebrations, and that I’d have to make up for lost time with my 40th. Ultimately, I engineered the birthday celebration I’m in the midst of right now: an 18-month birthday, the cornerstone of which would be a series of 9 trips to places around the world I’d never seen before. I’d have to start at age 39 and end at age 41, but I was up for the challenge.

So, in June I went to Paris and Copenhagen, in September to Italy and Croatia. I’m spending my actual birthday with friends in Maui, and have another half dozen trips plotted to take place between New Year’s and 2016.

But back to 35. I started doing the work, and ultimately made a series of changes to my life that systematically, fundamentally changed everything. I got divorced. I changed jobs a couple of times. My relationship with my parents shifted and evolved to a new stage of maturity and health. I got out of debt and my finances flourished. I made besties with my body, which I’d struggled with for decades, and it responded with a next-level state of energy and health.

I started walking the way of integrity, recognizing the sense of tightness and constriction that nearly always signals that I’m acting or living or speaking something different than what i truly feel. I learned how to align and realign my words and deeds with truth. I did that over and over again, with less and less effort required each time.

I unrepressed myself, rewiring what I believe about the world, and about myself, to align with what God says about me: that I am His child, that my whole job here is to let my light shine and to love Him, others and myself. In the process, under my touchiness and (then) easy-to-pull triggers, I found a deep reservoir of love, enthusiasm and near boundless energy for life.

My son recently showed me a picture of myself from college, and I had the crazy realization that at 40, I look and feel so much better, so much more joyful, and even so much more physically well than I did then. While I appreciate those who joke about my looking like I’m my son’s sister, the work of getting to this state of life was so healing and so formative to who I am, that I actually have been shouting my age from the rooftops this last few months.

In fact, when people suggest I look 21 what I think is this: thanks, but you could not pay me to be 21 again. You could’nt pay me to go back to the self-consciousness and angst I had before I learned to trust myself, before I starting unfolding into the full glory of being me, flaws and all. No, thank you. And come on, if you’re 30, 40, 50 or even 70 – admit it: we all know we’re glad to be done with that nonsense. Seriously, if you’ve been gifted with great health and you make a practice of cultivating that with a healthy lifestyle, you can be beautiful in a new and different way, and active at a new level by the time you’re 40. I’m pleased as punch that I can wear all the activewear I want, and do whatever activities I want, without worrying about whether I look weird in dance class or whether I can afford the yoga workshop or cycling adventure. This, I could not do at 21.

Over 40, if you do it right (and you can), new possibilities open up. You know how to work your body. You know what to eat to feel good, and what doesn’t work for you. You can be more beautiful and vibrant and fit than ever, and understand that that beauty includes your body’s little endurance trophies, like stretch marks, foot pain and surgery scars. You have some money, and hopefully little or no debt. You have clarity on what you’re great at, or at least know that you can do something to get it. You know what clothes look great on you, and can afford them. You know that life is beautiful, and that every beautiful moment will pass. But so will the tough stuff.

You no longer feel so entitled to smooth sailing through life, so you’re less outraged and resistant to the reality that sad, hard things happen. You’re more confident in your ability to handle what comes your way, and you are no longer so quick to see things as “bad” or “good”. Rather you see events as just life and people as wounded, beautiful children of God. You stop taking things personally. No, really – even the most personally directed assaults.

You realize that life is precious, and that people matter. You can get out of your head, and into the game of living your life

Well, that’s what 40 represents for me.

I’m inspired today by something President Obama said in an interview I read a few months back, while I was on the first leg of my birthday trip, somewhere in France. In the aftermath of the Charleston shootings, he was talking about American race relations as an ongoing social evolution. He said that, as President, you can never really solve an entire social issue of that scale – just imagine: we live nearly 200 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and are still wrestling with these same issues. As he sees it, Obama said, his job isn’t to write the whole book of history on any given issue. All he gets is one paragraph in the book. And all he can do is everything possible to get his paragraph right.

I can think of no better perspective to take, as I commemorate moving into my fourth decade on this earth, than this. The last three decades were focused on growing into myself, understanding myself, my power, other people and the world, healing from the inevitable wounds of life and building the capacity and resources to live a life of joy, love, power and integrity.

It’s become clear to me that the next eight decades, give or take, will be focused on boldly doing what it takes to get my paragraph right, in terms of how I impact and experience the people in my life, in my communities and in the world. I hope you’ll come along for the adventure.

So much love + onward + upward,

T

This post originally appeared on Tara’s blog at taranicholle.com – sign up here for her newsletter. Follow Tara on Facebook and on Twitter @taranicholle.

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Why I Just Quit the Best Job I Ever Had

The day we announced that MyFitnessPal had been acquired by Under Armour was the day the headhunters started calling. “We’re looking for a CMO who loves dogs,” the first recruiter said, “and your name came up.” After expressing how impressed I was with her bizarrely specific (and accurate) database fields, I turned her away – and have politely declined the advances of dozens of her colleagues since.

Truth is, I was not then and am not now in the market for a new job. But I wasn’t in the market for a job when I took the role of VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal, either. I somehow ended up with the Actual Best Job in the World anyway.

And last week was my last week in it.

About two weeks ago, I sent out a note to all hands announcing that I had decided to leave my job as the VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal and Under Armour Connected Fitness. I’ve spent most of the time since processing the event with people, sharing some insights into my decision process when asked. Many were fascinated by my decision. I, in turn, was fascinated by the recurring themes I spotted in their reactions.

Early on, it became clear that these conversations would be a Rorschach test of sorts, surfacing how the other party thinks and feels about work and career. One person began celebrating what he called my “retirement.” Another said, “I was able to quit a job I hated once, and it was awesome.” (Fantastic, I said, but that wasn’t my situation.) Yet another person clapped me on the back and proclaimed my “freedom” from a bondage which was a part of her conception of work, but not mine.

The conception of work as bondage actually came up a lot Some of the wealthiest people I know, people who can never even spend all the money they have, confessed to being desperately jealous of my move and “wishing” they could do the same. They shared how trapped they felt by what it would look like if they made a move, or by old, outdated pinkie swears to stay in situations that no longer serve them. It was a little tragic.

But that was their story. Not mine.

The Actual Best Job Ever. My job was delightful and liberating, the vast majority of the time. I was able to build a marketing team and programs from scratch where none had existed before, hiring some of my best friends to create what I believe is one of the smartest, leanest, most creative and most productive marketing teams in tech. We were able to collaborate deeply across the company, with Product, Engineering, Biz Dev, International, even Operations, to do amazing feats like:

  • growing from 45 million users to over 100 million in 18 months
  • growing a blog from launch to over 10 million uniques a month, and
  • driving a 22% increase in user engagement just from content marketing (with a heavy dollop of product and engineering).

In less than two years, we went from an $18 million first round of funding to being acquired for a smidge under half a billion dollars. Bringing 100% of myself to work was valued, requested and honored, from both above and below on the org chart. I evolved as a leader, as an executive, as a marketer and as a thinker. My job sent me to beautiful places to learn and contribute to deeply engaging projects: New York, Copenhagen, and the South of France – twice. We had a deep allowance for monthly fitness classes, which I still somehow exceeded every month. We had beautiful, beautiful catered lunches every day in a lovely San Francisco office nine miles from my home.

My team sent me pug gifs regularly. Pug gifs, ya’ll.

pugs-kissing

Exhibit A.

Post-MyFitnessPal, my belief in the goodness of people is deeper and more unshakable than before. I witnessed  an amazing team of people who could work anywhere in Silicon Valley coalesce around a singular mission to make it easier to live a healthy life. And I was able to participate at the earliest stages of forming executive team, designing a company culture, and scaling a business strategy that is both successful and transformational in its beneficial impact on humanity.

So what happened?

What happened was exactly what was supposed to happen. Seasons change. Startups exit. (If they’re doing it right.) The organization and its culture have continued to evolve. The brief – the problems the business exists to solve – is evolving.

As they do. As they should.

The Power of Purpose. When I took this job, I had my own business. I loved my business, and my clients – in fact, MyFitnessPal was one of them. I ultimately made the decision to shutter my business and take this job because I was crystal clear on my purpose in the world, which is to use business a force for healing, expanding and driving transformation in the lives of as many people as possible. This job allowed me to live and work “on purpose” in a big way, for a season, and taking it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

But as formative and definitive a role as this one was in my life, my career, my head and my heart, my career and work identity is tied to my purpose, not to any given job or project or company. Having a clear understanding of my purpose has given me a detection system that alerts me to when a given season of my career is complete, and a divining rod that points with clarity to what steps to take, what opportunities to explore, what projects to work on and what people to work with next. My original plan was to stay at MyFitnessPal until we had an exit – IPO or acquisition – and that has happened. My job here is done, and my purpose detection system is pointing me in a different direction. It might sound reductive, but it’s really as simple as that.

My career-long commitment to staying clear on my purpose and staying committed to doing work that is “on purpose” has helped me navigate with confidence and flow through a series of career moves that seemed bizarre to other people, but felt like the just-right thing to do at the time. And each of the moves I’ve made since getting and staying on purpose has proved to be consistently onward and upward in terms of impact, prosperity and success – by nearly all reasonable objective and personal metrics.

(Don’t take my word for it – take a look at my story in this Huffington Post piece, and see for yourself.)

Making Myself Available for More Miracles. If you clicked through, you know what I know, which is that my career – my whole life, really – has been a series of miracles. I’ve built businesses and brands and teams with and for the best of them. The actual best. For that journey, for those blessed, miraculous opportunities and for the internal and external resources that came together for me to be able to live them out, I am deeply grateful.

But I’m also reminded of the Bible story where Jesus turned water into wine. The very first thing he did was demand that someone bring him empty vessels, because the miraculous can’t be done where there’s no room for it.

My personal career pattern has been to start working to build out my own vision, then  consistently get distracted and derailed by these beautiful, blessed opportunities to work on other people’s dreams. Now that my “brief” at MyFitnessPal is complete, my purpose navigation system has alerted me that it’s time to build out my own vision – my own dream. It’s time to become an available vessel. So that’s what I’m doing.

As always happens, making myself available has already opened up literally dozens of “on purpose” possibilities. I’m writing a book. I’m developing a think tank and consortium of businesses, entrepreneurs and marketers who serve The Transformational Consumer, across verticals and industries, so we can innovate and collaborate more powerfully and more profitably. I’m producing a series of transformational workshops, conferences, retreats and experiences. More to come – on all of that.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the one theme almost every person I discussed this move with brought up: fear. “Aren’t you afraid of – fill in the blank with [leaving money on the table] [missing out on the next phase] [not taking another job while the offers are flooding in], etc. and so forth?” Money is an important instrument for making things happen in this world. But money is one of those things that is a fantastic servant, and a terrible master. It’s dangerous to climb into the bottomless pit of “never enough”. Using money as the primary driver for your career moves, vs. purpose or impact or even team, is a path down which many unfulfilled folks have walked. I reject that path.

There’s always some fear and some nervousness that comes with taking a bold new path or “daring greatly,” as Brene Brown might call it. But I’ve had a lot of experiences, at this point in my life where I stepped out there, took a very well-calculated risk, and it worked out exceedingly beyond what I might ever have imagined.  My experience has been that the more I’ve closed the gap between my work and my purpose, the more successful my endeavors have been – financially and in every other way.

In Liz Gilbert’s latest book, Big Magic, she recalls having the realization that fear and creativity tend to show up hand in hand. Gilbert shares a note she wrote to fear, informing the emotion that it is allowed to come on this adventure of a creative life journey that she’s embarking upon. But then she quickly puts fear on notice that it never gets to read the roadmap, never gets to navigate, never gets to make a decision about where to go or what to do – it just gets to come along for the ride.

For me, purpose is the driving force behind the courage to step out and do what I believe I’m here for, and the force that sweetly, but firmly, sets fear in the way back seat on my life’s adventure. Steven Covey said it well: “You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically—to say ‘no’ to other things. And the way to do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.”

NOTE: Want to stay up on what I’m working on? Join my mailing list at www.taranicholle.com – just enter your name and email into the signup form at the top of this page!

NOTE #2: My next adventure is the Strategic Sabbatical, November 3rd through 7th in Napa Valley. I regularly follow this week-long retreat strategy to ground myself and create flow when I’m in transition or kicking off new business or creative projects.

lt will de-chaos your nervous system, induce clarity as as to your purpose and plan, and trigger breakthroughs, action and momentum on the career transitions or business projects you care about the most. Interested? Come with: http://strategicsabbatical.com/

One of the best motivation science books of the last decade was Carol Dweck’s Mindset: the New Psychology of Success. In the book she divides people into having either growth or fixed mindsets.

In this episode of Business Class BiblioTherapy, author, speaker and transformation consultant Tara-Nicholle Nelson helps leaders and managers learn why it’s critical to cultivate a growth mindset in the people you manage. Tara gives 3 pieces of actionable, transformational management advice for how to foster a growth mindset in your employees.

1. Foster the belief that skills and abilities are buildable.
2. Praise effort, not just results.
3. Avoid labeling people or projects.

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What Leaders Can Learn From Black Churches About Keeping Team Members Engaged

I grew up attending all-Black, Baptist churches. But 10 years ago I found myself visiting a nearly all-White Presbyterian church in downtown Berkeley. It was a large congregation, hundreds in attendance, with a woman minister I greatly enjoyed. But it was so quiet in there, compared with my rollicking regular church experience. When prayer ended and I said “Amen” out loud, heads turned. Many heads turned.

After church, a number of people spotted me as a visitor and stopped by to shake my hand, say hello and deliver various other warm welcomes. I mentioned my voluble Amen-faux-pas to one woman and she said: “I know – it’s so quiet in here that my kids call us ‘the frozen chosen’.”

This incident came to mind a few weeks ago, when I was at a marketing industry leadership roundtable. There were maybe 15 of us in the room, all CMO types, mostly from Fortune 50 companies. People shared how hard it is to get employees to engage with company leaders and with each other: to share their thoughts, questions, ideas, concerns, successes and failures with the rest of the company. One exec mentioned how afraid employees are to speak up, for fear of being criticized, singled out or shamed. Several others said they have the same issue. Then people started trading notes on the various internal social media tools, like Yammer and Slack, that hold the space for internal conversations.

What I thought but didn’t say that day is that the problem these teams have is not a  technological problem. It’s a cultural problem. If people are afraid, it’s because they have reason to be. If people don’t share their lessons learned for fear of being singled out as having failed, chances are good that, well, they’ve seen someone be singled out for having failed.

And apparently this cultural problem is pervasive. I mentioned it to a close friend who has worked for a series of very large companies. I was  and she said: “Oh yeah, you don’t speak up or challenge leadership. I did that on my first job and was pulled aside and told that was a CLM.” “A what?” I asked. “A Career Limiting Move.”

Employees who are so repressed that they think asking a question of their manager is a CLM are the “frozen chosen” of their companies. Chosen because they brought some valuable knowledge, or expertise to the company in the first place. Now frozen because, like the parishioners at church that day, they are part of an organization where simply saying a thing, asking a question, pushing back on a planned initiative, turns heads. It raises alarm. It has an acronym. CLM.

This is cultural. Black churches have their own set of issues, to be sure. But one thing many of them do well is foster a culture of conversation. Here’s an anthropological experiment for you: if you’ve never attended a Black church, take 2 hours this Sunday and do so. You’ll learn, quick-like, that a Black church service is not a spectator sport. Black pastors are notorious for engaging their audiences in a two-way conversation. They look for, expect and sometimes flat out demand audience participation from the first note of the first song to the closing benediction.

It’s not for nothing that the saying “Can I get an Amen?” has penetrated the larger lexicon.

But it’s not just an “Amen” most Black church pastors want these days. Things I have actually heard Black pastors ask their audiences to do include: repeat after them, punch your neighbor, tell your neighbor how great they look today, touch your forehead, do a two-step, do the Electric Slide, rap along to an old Slick Rick song, and fill in the blanks of a not-so-old song by a guy the Pastor described as the “dysfunctional poet savant Lil’ Wayne”. Not to be outdone, my current pastor (who is white, but pastors a very diverse congregation) recently did a cooking demo onstage and had a few of the thousand people in the sanctuary come up to get their piece of the hero sandwich he’d constructed.

Good pastors – and great leaders – foster conversation because conversation fosters engagement. And engagement fosters excellence, joy, creative problem solving and innovation in our work. But here’s the rub: I’ll bet that, if you asked them, the execs in the room at that roundtable would say they do everything they can to encourage conversation. You can’t get people to engage in an ongoing, company-wide culture of conversation just by telling them to do so, if the rest of your organization’s culture has a chilling effect. Companies that understand how mission-critical conversation is to the health of their teams must normalize it and enculturate conversation, deeply, with their actions.

Normalize real talk. You could have put Martin Luther King, Jr. himself in that

Presbyterian church on that one day, and it would have turned the pin-drop hush into a momentary mutter, at most, because feedback was simply not a cultural norm in that church. Normalizing real, frank, two-way conversations takes intentional effort, modeling and the creation of spaces that prove, over time, to be safe harbors for free expression – and I mean safe occupationally and emotionally.

You go first. And second. And fifth, if need be. Leaders should be the first to call themselves and their challenges out, conduct public post-mortems and review the lessons they’ve learned, and not fake ones – they should take real failures or projects that didn’t quite go as planned, and say so, then work through what they might do differently in the future. When you put an idea out there, ask for pushback – literally invite people to show you where you’re missing something or thinking about it wrong.

Ask people for their thinking. For their trouble-shooting. Make – then honor – the rule that the best idea wins, no matter whose idea it is. Let employees see when the Project Manager’s idea gets roadmapped instead of the CEOs. When employees formerly known as frozen begin to thaw and share their thinking or ideas, expressly reward the sharing and the thinking, even when you have to course correct their concept to get it closer to something actionable.

Consistently demonstrate a high value on free thinking, questioning authority, pushback and post-mortems. Once people share their thinking, consistently show them that you honor it, and them for taking the risk to be vulnerable and express themselves. Allow employee’s free thinking and concepts to infiltrate your company’s language, culture, product roadmap and editorial calendar. Learn to ask more beautiful questions, in response to employees’ thoughts and ideas. Then ask them. Then do it all over again. Regularly.

“Can I get an Amen?” is anything but a rhetorical question at many a Black church. It’s a cultural reality. If your business depends on the engagement, creativity and free thinking of your teams, creating a culture of conversation must move from abstract ideal to a cultural reality in your organization, as well.

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How to Be Ridiculously in Charge* of Your Life

Beatrix Kiddo

 

I was talking with a relative recently, and the conversation took a turn to this laundry list of things that make her crazy. The list ranged from traffic to bar soap, to lines at the market, to public restrooms. It included rain and hot weather, hotels, all children under 8 and the times when the slats of one window shutter might are open at a different width than the slats of the neighboring shutter. People who move to or from her town were on the list. Making a lunch date and later calling to change plans? No. Unacceptable.

I pointed out that some of these items seem so likely to happen in everyday life that it might be worth reexamining her stance. But she said she was committed to her positions because she likes to do things “on my own terms.” Then she started telling me about the strategies she has devised for avoiding all of these things and many others. What she painted was the portrait of a very constricted – and constricting – lifestyle built entirely around avoiding what I saw as minor discomforts. Her efforts to avoid them have been mostly unsuccessful, I might add.

What she does succeed at avoiding, though, is joy.

Our conversation reminded me of this blog post I’d just read called 46 Reasons Why My Three-Year-Old Might Be Freaking Out, which included line items like:

  • His lip is salty
  • His brother is looking at him
  • His brother is not looking at him
  • His hair is heavy
  • The inside of his cheek feels rough (and my personal favorite)
  • His sleeve is touching his thumb.

This is amusing behavior when we see it in someone who has been on the planet less time than the shoes I’m wearing. It is more concerning in what I’ll call a seasoned adult.

My relative is an extreme case. But how different is her list of “issues” than what you or I do when we get all twitterpated in reaction to the various unchangeable realities, uncontrollable tragedies and relatively minor irritations of life?

We perseverate on whether we sounded stupid or whiny in that meeting last week at work, or whether we should have sent that email. Argh why did we send that email??!! We fixate on how our 15-year-old’s grades could ruin Her Whole Entire Life. We ruminate on the things other people said about us, did to us, might be saying, might be doing, how we might feel if they do or say that and what we can try to make them stop doing or saying future offenses. We go down internet rabbit holes about ISIS, sex trafficking, the drought, micro-bubbles, and the vaccination controversy, and we experience serious distress about what is happening to the world.

We hear about a friend’s nephew who has a condition and read everything we can about what causes it. We click on the “skin conditions” images button on WebMD, which we should know by now to never ever ever ever do.

Then we start fixing the world – or at least our world: we go organic, eliminate plastics, and start stockpiling provisions for when the big one hits. We hire tutors, enroll our kids in private schools, engage therapists and try to get even more parenting tips from Tiger Moms and Black Moms and French Moms.

Maybe fixing is not your thing. But you worry and process and project, as though if you can touch a possibility with your mind or make sure you have explored it in conversations with your friends, you can prevent it from happening – or at least not be surprised if it does.

But then one day, many of us have an experience that calls all that fixing and processing and projecting into question: something bad happens, despite our very best efforts to everything-proof our lives. Maybe something really bad happens. Your mother gets a bad medical report. You have an accident. The real estate market crashes. You go broke. Your troubled teen goes all the way off the rails. Your brother goes to prison. Your marriage falls apart.

Maybe two of those things happen in rapid succession. Or, if you’re blessed to be anything like me a few years back, maybe all of these things happen at roughly the same time.

But then another thing happens. You survive. Maybe you actually spot some patterns in all these catastrophes. And you see what’s not working in your life – even if you’re always the “righteous” one. (Especially if you’re always the righteous one.) Then, if you’re like me, it’s entirely possible that within the things you thought you couldn’t stand to have happen – the very things you thought would do you in – you find the clues to your very deepest emotional wounds and the unresolved issues that once had you so fearful, anxious or easily triggered by Every Freaking Person Place and Thing, like my relative.

If you’re really blessed, you might take this opportunity to detect just how delusional and draining, though well-intentioned, your efforts to avoid everything “bad” that might ever happen were in the first place. You might even see how some of the worst things that could ever happen to you, when they actually happen, turn out to be the best things that could ever happen to you. You still manage your life, take care of yourself, and address issues when they come up. You just release the expectation to somehow be immune from the human condition because of all your work.

When you start healing and dealing with all the stuff that these difficult events have brought up, what you might find underneath all the resistance and fear and deep-seated grievance is that intensely pure soul of yours, unbreakable and free. When you surrender your triggers and stop trying to dictate all the details of how the world happens to you, you might find a reservoir of infinite love and wonder, the infinite capacity to heal, the boundless power to feel and generate joy and energy. Down there, you’ll find the ability to respond effectively and from a place of stability and calm, no matter what is happening in your life at any given moment.

So then, maybe, you learn gradually learn how to thrive and love your life and to do your best and receive the best life has to offer in every situation. Even when things are hard, or you don’t know exactly what to do, or when there’s a sub-8-year-old kid around, or your car gets scratched, or your neighbor’s cooking smells gross you out, or your wife leaves you, or your new boss turns out to be Voldemort’s twin brother. Even when you break your foot or your glasses or your heart. Even if Something Really Bad happens.

Constantly declaring what we can’t or couldn’t stand, or obsessing about the state of the world in no way prevents bad things from happening. All we do when we list off things we don’t like or couldn’t bear is place limitation after limitation on our own happiness. When we do this, we are literally carving out the conditions under which we are willing to be happy and the conditions we are going to allow to make us unhappy.

As a bizarre result, we spend much of the best times of our lives, the times when things are going great, trying to brace ourselves against the waves of life, holding our breaths in anticipation of the tragedies that might happen, imagining how we would deal with them, and cooking up strategies to try to avoid them. In this way, we expressly deprive ourselves of the ability to be happy if bad things happen and if and if they don’t.

This state of constant emotional high alert and vigilance against the inevitable realities of life, the small stuff and the life events that help us grow is also known as generalized anxiety. This is well-documented. But this state also has three other very common, but slightly less obvious, side effects:

  1. It takes a vast amount of mental energy, time and even money to brace against the waves of life, fight the waves when they come, and to persist in the delusion of trying to construct a wave-free life. This is precisely the energy you need to live our your dreams and fulfill your purpose on this planet.
  2. I recently saw a question on Quora in which the parent of an 8-month-old asked how to make crystal clear to the baby that no nighttime crying or waking would be tolerated under any circumstances. Denying reality in this way, fighting the uncomfortable truths of how the world actually works and flailing away at issues that are either unimportant or unsolvable is a super fast path to being sad and depressed all the time.
  3. Every moment you spend perseverating on the past, present and future violations of the way you would do things if you ruled the world is a moment you are distracted from the actual, massive power you have to positively impact your world, the people in your life, and humanity.

There’s a fine line between being ridiculously in charge of your life and resisting reality to your own depleting, depressing, distracting detriment. This fine line can be found right smack within whatever it is you’re trying to change, control or impact. The dysfunction that is resisting reality commonly occurs when we try to change or prevent the fundamentally unchangeable realities of life:

  • We can’t, for example, change other people’s behavior, although in a strange twist of reality, this seems to be the thing most people spend their time flailing away at.
  • We can’t stop every person from ever saying or doing things that we don’t like.
  • We can’t make everyone like us.
  • We can’t perfect our way out of ever disappointing or being criticized by someone, because other people’s feelings are not within our control.
  • We can’t stop the truths that people die, you-know-what happens, poverty and injustice exist, and truffle fries do not the basis for a happy healthy body make – as much as we want to look for silver bullets to escape these realities, bemoan them or even rage against them.

Being ridiculously in charge of your life includes owning any of the following things we do actually have the power to change:

  • We can control and change our own behavior. (Though that seems to be the thing people feel the least power over.)
  • We can 100% choose which people to be in relationships with, and how much to give or take in those relationships.
  • We can show up with a spirit of excellence in everything we do.
  • We can be kind, loving, wise and discerning.
  • There are times when, as part of responsibly wielding this power we have over our own behavior, we can do things that impact various situations we’re in for the better. We can evaluate, strategize, action plan and execute on those plans.
  • We can support people and participate in movements that are fighting the good fight against injustice, poverty and the like.
  • We can change our emotional states, reactions and responses to things that happen and things people do in our lives.

To do these things is the definition of being a person of action and impact. Resisting reality is like saying we can’t stand it when the sun shines. This last bullet point represents the saner and easier approach: deciding to start standing it and to stop trying to dim the sun. Mastery of our emotional and behavioral responses to the things that happen in our lives is a lifelong path, but it is also, actually, a superpower. It unlocks untold energy and calm that cannot be disturbed by any fact or circumstance.

Mastering our emotional and behavioral responses to the things that happen in our lives is a lifelong path, but it is also, actually, a superpower. It unlocks a limitless source of energy and calm that cannot be disturbed by any fact, threat or circumstance.

Here’s an example. A friend of mine was recently getting ready for a beach vacation. She explained that she was working out super hard to get ready, because “I’d just love to be able to wear a bikini with nothing on top of it and feel super comfortable for the first time ever.” I said, “Look, sweets. There are two levers you can pull here. You can try to change all these things about your body in the next two weeks. Or you can decide to get comfortable wearing whatever you want. And that you can do right now. Like before we’re done with brunch.”

Being ridiculously in charge of your own life doesn’t mean trying to control the uncontrollable, or trying to “manage” every element of your life. And it doesn’t mean never feeling bad or being upset. It means having the integrity to recognize what is real, releasing the human tendency to resist reality when it’s uncomfortable, and developing mastery over yourself and only yourself. This superpower creates the freedom to enjoy your life, every day, at any time, regardless of what happens to you.

*H/t to Henry Cloud, from whom I borrowed the phrase “ridiculously in charge”.

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The Transformational Consumer: The $300 Billion-plus Opportunity Most Entrepreneurs Have Never Heard Of

Change is the new black.

And the data shows that everyday people, now more than ever, are actually acting on their internal imperative to change themselves and their lives – in a way that is gaining momentum against the age-old, utterly human tendency to crave change, yet stay inert:

  • We’re rethinking work: For three months running, the government-reported rates of people quitting their jobs has outpaced the rate of those getting laid off, a sky-high “Shove-it Indicator” rate for a job market still plagued by high unemployment . This baffles analysts who expected this to be a one-time anomaly when it first happened in February of this year. The days of the 30-year job are gone, and over a third of the workforce is comprised of freelancers, part-timers, consultants and contractors.
  • We’re rethinking home: Home ownership rates are at a 15 year low, despite the fact that home values seem to be recovering and mortgage rates are at rock-bottom lows. And home ownership rates are down 12.5 percent in Americans under 35 – more than in any other age group – which doesn’t overlap with those who lost homes to foreclosure. Those who can afford to buy remember the recent foreclosure fallout and are cautious with their timing and spending, if and when they do get off the fence.
  • We’re rethinking health: Consumers are taking their health into their own hands. PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that at today’s pace, consumers will spend $14 billion on mobile health apps, video games and resources that rate medical care providers in 2014. To boot, health and fitness measures that were once perceived as extreme have gone mainstream: 13 million Americans completed road races (5Ks, 10Ks, Half-Marathons and Marathons) in 2010 – an all-time record, and a 10% increase over the previous year.

In past generations, aspirations were largely out-of-reach, largely material dreams: A sum certain in the bank. A house in that neighborhood. To hit that particular number on the scale. Many people held the same exact aspirations, in fact, to wit: The American Dream. These were one-and-done dreams, bucket list dreams: you could reach them, check them off, retire and die.

But Boomers’ children? There’s a large segment of us who identify ourselves as life hackers, wellness-and-wealth tinkerers, lifestyle design enthusiasts by nature. The craving for transformation is constant, or at least recurring: it is a way of life. We want to experience and be, versus get: we want to be marathoners and yoginis, be entrepreneurs and be world travelers – not just take a trip around the world.

And – here’s the rub for entrepreneurs and businesses – we fall in love with the brands and technologies and gadgets and personalities (often CEOs, innovators and self-taught experts) that put a stake in the ground and deliver ongoing resources that:

  • power our aspirations
  • help us reach our goals and change our habits, and
  • fuel the ongoing transformations we want in our lives, our careers, our health and our finances –
  • and help us do all of the above more efficiently, stylishly, enjoyably, effectively (or with less friction, backsliding and pain) than we could otherwise or with previous generations of products or services.

We don’t just try or buy these brands, products and services. We fall deeply in love with them – having an emotional relationship with them that far exceeds what makes sense based strictly on the utility of the product to our lives.

  • We buy them over and over again, in large quantities.
  • We Tweet @ and about them, we ridicule our Facebook friends who aren’t using them, we blog or post links about them, and we ‘share’ their product page links with our social networks.
  • We read their blogs, wait for their newsletters, watch their videos and comment – we go practice yoga in the streets with them and put our names in lotteries to score tickets to their events.

Non-conformity does not equal anti-consumerism.

I submit that this change-craving segment of the marketplace is a legitimate consumer group: the Transformational Consumer. I also submit that understanding users through the lens of their change-based aspirations equips businesses to better engage and serve them. So maybe the best starting point for exploring this Transformational Consumer group is through the pattern of these aspirations, the common interests and ‘investments’ they are making in improving themselves and their lives:

  • Health, Fitness and Mind-Body Wellness. This include health clubs and foods (quinoa, anyone?), supplements and recreational sports/wellness activities like, yoga, running, Crossfit, TRX and all the gear that goes along with them. It also includes things like digital health and wellness apps and games, spas, weight management programs, and infomercial fitness videos.
  • Personal Finance. This includes money education and apps, personal finance software, financial and estate planning services – possibly even some real estate, mortgage, banking and investment transactions.
    • Self Management and Behavior Change. This includes all the efforts and investments involved in changing our habits and behaviors, setting and further goals, recovery and reinvention, and managing our own emotions and mindsets, as through therapies and some self-help type books.
      • Personal and Professional Development. Coaching, books, seminars, online educational courses and other workshops for skill-building and upleveling our performance or enjoyment of life – especially in the realm of ‘how-to’ materials, career development and entrepreneurship.
      • Natural and High-Performance Living. Investments in what is put in, on and around their bodies (and those of their kids and pets) – as well as the actual physical spaces in which they live. This includes organic and whole foods, but also spends for green home remodels, natural home and body products and both high- and low-tech organizational and personal electronics for home and lifestyle.

In my quest to build this new way of understanding consumers via the lens of their craving to create change in their own lives and to understand where the edges of this Transformational Consumer group start and end or overlap with other consumer groups, I recently attended the LOHAS Forum, an annual meeting of companies that have long served the ‘Deep Green’ consumer, those engaged in what they call Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability.

It struck me that virtually all LOHAS consumers are Transformational Consumers – but not all Transformational Consumers are LOHAS consumers.  (Transformational Consumers are probably a much lighter, somewhat less altruistic shade of green.) But get this: the Natural Marketing Institute tallies the LOHAS marketplace as covering $290 Billion in annual spending on personal health, natural lifestyles, green building, eco-tourism and alternative modes of energy and transportation, and estimates that this number has a 10-15 percent annual growth rate.

This dollar amount, then, would seem like just the starting point for quantifying the spending power and market opportunity presented by the Transformational Consumer sector.

Transformational Consumers vote for lifestyle design with their dollars. They may eschew overly ostentatious consumer luxury goods, but will actually overspend on high-end, high-performance natural cosmetic, food, sports, autos and tech products – for themselves, their homes, their children and even their pets.  They will spend more on wearable fitness trackers and online entrepreneurship courses than on a logo handbag – unless, that is, the logo is lululemon’s.

I’m not saying that these values are good or bad, or that they are better or worse than the priorities of any other consumer group or generation. Rather, I am pointing out that there is an unrecognized consumer segment – the Transformational Consumer – that industries and innovators can better understand and engage via their singular desire to constantly uplevel and create change in their lives, careers, health and personal finances, rather than by their demographics or even other sophisticated psychographic segmentation approaches, e.g., Alpha Moms, Succeeders, etc.

I’m also pointing out that this is a consumer segment with billions in spending power and evangelistic largesse to deploy with the brands that authentically connect with them around these aspirations.

The rethink is on. And the Transformational Consumer revolution will be televised. But it will also be experienced, streamed, time-shifted, watched and researched on 3 or 4 screens at a time, worn, tasted, smelled, blogged about, tracked, quantified, liked, shared, tweeted, rated, ranted about and reviewed.

So, Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Marketers: what, if anything, are you doing for the Transformational Consumer? And perhaps more importantly, is your company a Transformational Business?

This article was written by Tara-Nicholle Nelson and originally appeared on Forbes on 7/9/2012

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The Conscious Approach to Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking

People could choose to be anywhere.

But these people you’re going to talk to? They’ve chosen to be in a room with you.

In 2014, if you’re teaching a workshop, leading a conference or speaking at a seminar – they know exactly who you are, what your qualifications are, and what you’re supposed to be speaking about, and they still chose to be in a room with you.

They could have been watching the game. Reading MindBodyGreen. Walking their dog. Opening all those unanswered emails.

And they still chose to be in a room with you.