A new year, a new beginning.  A time for contemplation.  What did you accomplish last year?  Did you evolve your business, your team, yourself?  Where did you miss the mark?  How can you improve this year?

Almost always, when I ask clients what they want to accomplish in the new year, the answer is more.  More sales, more customers, more product innovation, more profit, more capital – and the list goes on.  I understand in the game of business score is kept by dollars and equity value, but I wonder whether “more is better” is really the right goal-post?

My experience is the “wanting” behind “more” can never satisfied.  It just creates more wanting.  It’s truly insatiable.  I’m not saying more profit is wrong by any means.  I believe profit growth and a new form of capitalism can bring tremendous fulfillment and balance to the entire globe.  But I’ve also learned that an unconscious drive for more is destructive and can never fulfill.  So where is fulfillment then?

The greatest sense of fulfillment comes when we incorporate humanistic values into business, and seek to serve – to give to the flow of life, rather than take from the flow of life.  And when humanistic values are inculcated into corporate cultures, and stakeholder service business models replace stockholder biased models, profit and value creation well exceed the value realized by the stockholder biased, “more is better” models.  It’s already happening.  Take a look at the profit and market caps of values based companies like Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines, Google, IKEA, Zappos and Amazon.

The truth is fulfillment doesn’t come from the things we get – sales, profit, customers, it comes from the things we give – trust, compassion, generosity.  Interesting how Bill Gates and Warren Buffett now realize that allocation is a higher order than accumulation, as they continue to allocate their total wealth.  So what does winning at the game of business really mean?  Yes, smart business models and profit growth.  But holistic growth incorporating people, planet, and profit.  My experience has taught me that this is growth that fulfills, and doesn’t’ beget a restless yearning for more.

As we move toward an expanded definition of success, following are 6 ways you can support broader growth and fulfillment, and make 2012 a truly inspiring year.

1.  Serve your stakeholders

Take the opportunity this new year to shift your attitude from expecting, demanding, commanding, controlling (however your leadership shadow takes form) – to serving – your employees, your vendors, your investors, your community, in addition to your customers.  This creates a powerful shift in moving from a competitive adversarial paradigm – which just creates lack, to a prosperity based paradigm – which creates abundance.  When we serve we receive.  It’s natural law.

2.  Expand your balance sheet

We all know success comes from doing the right things, and greater success comes from leverage – empowering your people to do the right things.  Empowerment comes through connection, which comes from openness, authenticity and trust.  So when inventorying year end “material” assets and liabilities, consider inventorying year end “leadership” assets and liabilities – such as trust, authenticity, humility, courage, motivation, and come up with a plan to shore up your personal leadership balance sheet.  The net result will be a clearer path to greater satisfaction, and greater prosperity.

3.  Develop yourself

After you do your inventory – which can be done through a 360 degree survey to unconceal your blind spots, commit to changing one thing that will create the greatest leverage for yourself and your business over the coming year.  Then find someone, a coach, a colleague or a friend to hold you accountable.  Leadership development is personal development, increasing awareness from the inside out, and making positive changes within the expanding awareness.

4.  Cultivate gratitude.

What are you most grateful for in your business life?   Consider starting all meetings with a gratitude.  Consider creating an organizational gratitude journal on Google docs and keeping it alive and growing.  Make gratitude a core value, live that core value, bring it alive in your culture, and that in and of itself can enable you to overcome adversity and revitalize your entire organization.  Gratitude is the most powerful attractor of success and prosperity on the planet.  As Lynne Swift says in her book the Soul of Money, “what you appreciate, appreciates”.  Appreciate your business as a vehicle for contribution, collaboration, and livelihood and watch it appreciate.

5.  Positively acknowledge others.

Developing talent has to begin with first, holding people in their highest and believing in them, and then, supporting them with skills and training.  During the process, it’s vital to catch them doing right.  Consider making a commitment to acknowledge your team mates when they do things right.  So many of us are programmed to only see what’s wrong, find the mistakes and correct them.  Try shifting, and looking for what’s right and acknowledging that.

6.  Recommit to your purpose.

The greatest companies in the world, have great purposes.  Purpose is the heart and soul of your organization, and it gives meaning to everything you work toward.  Human beings crave connectivity and higher meaning.  Businesses that support that can achieve real, balanced, fulfilling success.  Businesses that don’t support connection to a greater purpose often become uni-dimensional and destructive leaving stakeholders uninspired and unfulfilled.

So as you embark on your new year, consider making resolutions to help you transform to a higher level of success.  Consider balancing the quest for “more” with resting in the exquisite distinction of sufficiency and amplitude that always exists in the present moment, outside of our stories.  And consider growing your contribution, through service, gratitude, acknowledgment, personal development and purpose – the vital and so often lacking arteries in corporate cultures across the globe.

Great leaders are powerful builders of enterprise.  They have a knack for creating a clear vision, believing in its fulfillment with every cell in their body, and inspiring others through heart-centered communication to share their vision and act toward its creation.  They can hold the vision in light, under all circumstances – especially during times of darkness, when it seems the world is against its fulfillment.

That was one of my abilities as a business leader, yet as I move on to my second act in the world of leadership development, I’m gathering a more refined level of awareness of the obstacles that get in the way of fulfilling your vision.

I’ve come to believe that the only obstacle to fulfilling your vision is you – self limiting beliefs linked to emotional reaction patterns throwing you off center.  The antidote is to see that these obstacles are merely unskillful thoughts we buy into, and know that once inner clarity is achieved, external clarity arises through new choices in the context of expanded possibility.

Below is a 4 step model to help you make more empowered decisions, and overcome obstacles between you and your vision.

1.  Cultivation of CLARITY

Clarity is 1) a calm mind, 2) an open heart, and 3) a fearless soul.  From this foundation you can solve any problem and achieve any goal.  And it begins with a mind that isn’t reactive to the barrage of diluting, diffusing, distracting energy throughout the day.  Invest in alone time, ideally in the morning and evening, and practice stilling your mind.  If it feels right, focus on your breath to ground yourself in the present.  From stillness of mind, clarity arises.

2.  Arising of INSIGHT

Have you ever had a flash of insight – where you suddenly realized a solution to a problem that had baffled you, or the resources to make something happen that you didn’t think existed?  With the cultivation of clarity, you’ll be in deeper

connection to your authentic core.  Those flashes of insight become foundations of wisdom, and you’ll release stress while garnering increased power in execution.

3.  Discipline of FOCUS

While we work and live in a crackberry culture, we subjugate ourselves to the tyranny of the urgent, constantly under siege by an incessant stream of bits and bytes compelling us to the next distracting fix.  In addition there are so many agendas competing for our attention – our supervisors, colleagues, reports, family, friends.  When you cultivate clarity and insight, focus can be attained with greater ease.  You’ll still need to exercise discernment and discipline to focus on what matters most, but from clarity and insight, focus will be more natural.

4.  Devotion to RIGHT ACTION

Diffused focus is a common obstacle preventing so many from experiencing the joy in achievement.  Yet, clarity can replace confusion, insight can replace analysis, and focus can replace complexity.  Then right action – the next best step – becomes clear not only in moving toward fulfilling your vision, but also in the context of serving the whole – the triple bottom line – people, planet as well as profit.

So as you move through daily life toward your vision, and obstacles arise, instead of resisting and fortifying the obstacle (what you resist persists), garner gratitude for the gift of the obstacle, since it is your teacher – the mirror to your inner world.  To then transcend it through the cultivation of wisdom and right action – that is the real game of business.

Last week, as pro bono service work, I gave a talk at a correctional institute to 75 residents on their last leg – about to be released – into freedom.  I often contemplate the nature of freedom, wondering how free any of us really are.

We all want more money, power and prestige because we think it holds the key to freedom.  But aren’t we really after inner freedom – not subject to any external measure?  A calm mind, an open heart and a fearless soul.  What I’ve learned is what keeps us from inner freedom are illusory prisons made of conditioned limiting beliefs and emotions.

And from there we try and lead others – but where are we leading, really, if we’re prisoners of a mind structure, a mental matrix if you will.  Until we begin to witness the matrix for what is, our ability to really lead others is limited.

The world needs awakened leaders – leaders that are committed and courageous enough to look inward, sort out fact from fiction, reality from the meaning we overlay on top of reality, and find true power and inner freedom to lead themselves first, and their followers after.  The Emotional Quotient was a great step forward from IQ in assessing and developing leadership effectiveness.  Perhaps the time has come for the next leap – the Consciousness Quotient.

With recession is in the air, the typical media flurry of doom and gloom is picking up momentum.  US unemployment is nearing double digits, US debt problems remain unsolved, the Eurozone debt crisis continues, and world stock markets are falling as confidence in the global economy sinks.

What is a Recession, Really?

While economists will tout that a recession is two consecutive negative quarters of a shrinking economy (as measured by consumer demand for products and services), underneath that, a recession is a crisis of confidence driven by fear.

Collectively in the past 75 years, we’ve devolved into a world of global consumers, where in the past we were a world of global citizens.  We’re up to our eyeballs in debt, connected to fiscally irresponsible governments with debt ridden balance sheets, causing nations in crises – all to support our collective desire to consume beyond our means.  The mantra across the globe is “more is better” a recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction.

Individually, many of us have beliefs that “I don’t have enough”, “there’s not enough out there for me”, and “I’m not enough” – so we engage in a voracious pursuit for “more” to both insulate us from our fear that we might not have enough to be safe, along with our primary drive toward temporal pleasure as a means to salvation.

A recession is just an external reflection of this collective inner crisis rooted in delusion, that spreads like a virus, and manifests as “an economy in turmoil”.  The root cause is simple:  it’s fear.  The paralyzing virus of fear.  It’s an unnecessary inner state, we attach to it – as we get bombarded by society with messages of doom and gloom, we feed it with our thoughts and emotions and it’s just not a skillful way to live.

5 Steps To Being Recession Proof

Once you understand what’s going on under the surface – the collective psychology at play, you can choose to stand outside the story, detach from the noise, and focus on your core purpose of serving your clients and customers.  Below is a five point road map to help you navigate the noise.

1.  Let go of the fear of scarcity.
Understanding the above “illusion” will give you the power to observe the story from a more objective place, and when you feel drawn to the drama, witness your mental-emotional reaction pattern rather than identify with the collective “story”.

2.  Be on purpose.
Get really clear on your purpose, the purpose of your business, and how that’s communicated to the group you want to serve (target market).  Your purpose is transcendent, it grounds you like a mountain, and keeps you from fluttering about like sand in the wind when outside forces invade.

3.  Understand the truth of brand.
Understand the true notion of differentiation – it’s you, being you, in your truest, most authentic, naked self – and expressing your story (the power of story is vital) in connection with the transformative benefits of your product or service.  Your unique ability expressed is the core of brand strategy and marketing strategy.

4.  Let go of the fear of competition.
Competition is a notion mired in a scarcity-adversarial mind-set.  There is truly enough business for everyone, and enough resources for everyone.  Abundance is.  The way to deal with competition is 1) know that it doesn’t exist outside your mind; and 2) get clearer on what makes you unique and how that gets expressed to the world.  Then proceed to step 5.

5.  Communicate vigorously, prolifically and shamelessly.
After getting clear on your authentic message, and how you will share that with the people who need your service, build a marketing strategy and plan that is grounded in action, and execute, execute, execute.

There is only one you.  There is only one “your company”.  There is only one “your team”.  And you were endowed with the power to create anything you desire.  We create our realities, and we’re always creating at every moment, exactly what we’re most committed to.

So I invite you to step outside the illusory “recession matrix”, or whatever story you live in – as uber-entrepreneur-CEO Steve Jobs says “don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice” – and choose to skillfully create the reality of your desire.

The Nature of Business

Since I’ve been working in the coaching industry, doing my own personal development work, and observing the Wall Street melt down and the resulting global recession, I see so much fear and scarcity thinking throughout business – people mired in a competitive, adversarial model of being, caught up in craving and wanting – yet never satisfied.  This paradigm is not just on Wall Street – I see it on Main Street with my clients as well, and I was certainly an extreme version of this earlier in my career.

On top of that, most leaders I work with struggle within a hyper-paced, intensely challenging business environment – increased complexity, compressed product life cycles, markets more competitive – all within the context of  increasing pressure to execute.

A New Leadership Paradigm

I believe a new type of leader is necessary – a more conscious, self aware, holistic leader.  A leader who is inspired to do the inner work required to steward a highly functioning team toward optimal performance – and not get caught up in ego and self-grasping.

So I created and now coach Conscious Leadership Development with my clients.  We look at the whole person vs. attempting to just create skills and behaviors aligned for a particular role.  It’s about discovering values and purpose – the core – and navigating from that core – from the inside out – in a way that’s aligned to overall organizational goals.  Conscious Leadership Development is human development.  It’s a discovery and cultivation of an authentic self  – the foundation of real power, performance and fulfillment.  I’ve found both on my own journey, and in working with my clients, that it’s from this centered base that the executive will experience both a new growth trajectory, and the ability to take actions that were previously unavailable.

The goal of Conscious Leadership is to turn the traditional hierarchy of modern corporate America on it’s head, with visionaries acting as  supporters, encouragers, stewards – “Servant Leaders”.  I’ve realized the most effective leaders are the ones that serve, rather than command and control; the ones who seek to understand rather than seeking to be understood; and the ones who give rather than take.  Heightened consciousness creates an understanding that abundance and possibility lie in service, while fear and scarcity lie in wanting and taking.  And I’ve found that this service oriented consciousness drives performance, productivity and corporate well being better than anything else.

The conscious leader commits to a lifetime of developing self awareness, and commits resources to supporting the people in her company and their pursuit of human development – expanding self awareness.  The net result is increased performance and productivity – but also, a conscious company – purposeful in it’s pursuit of the “triple bottom line” – serving people, the planet and profit.