Everyone wants long term success. But it is elusive for most.

Long term success is dependent on knowing where you are now and where you are headed. Then closing the gap. Frequently. Continuously.  Whether it’s your business, your career or your life at home., it’s easy to get off track, lose touch or get buried under. Without a true sense of where you are in the moment, it is impossible to realize your dreams or be a leader in your field.

Re-calibrate your profound knowledge

The only way we can take 100% responsibility for sustaining our success is to keep re-calibrating-in every aspect of our lives and organizations.

Key to successful recalibration is to acquire what my dear departed mentor, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, coined as Profound Knowledge. This umbrella phrase emphasizes understanding change and how to measure it, being aware of emerging trends and shifts, and learning how to apply this knowledge to leading and sustaining long term success.

Bottom line: If we don’t acquire Profound Knowledge we cannot know how to prepare for and leverage coming change, thus how to sustain our success long term.

Understanding change means understanding shifts in our personal world as well as tracking trends that capsize us, overtake us, or cause us to flounder.

Learning the Hard Way

Unfortunately one of my Gen X male clients learned this the hard way. A rising star in his field and recently married, he was planning far a great future for his kids, tons of time for fun and all the trappings of success. As if out of the blue, the rug got pulled out from under him. His “Happy Homemaker” wife fled, saying I’m out of here!

Somewhere along the way there was a breakdown or perhaps many small fissures below the surface. Had they been recalibrating an checking in with each other, communicating the truth of what was so for each of them…perhaps they could have saved their marriage…or at least ended it with love, grace, and forgiveness.

Even in the most secure relationships, unexpected change happens to ruffle our plans. A recently returned to work mother of teenage kids reported that her new career is now going gangbusters and she no longer worries about the empty-nest . But, the new ripple in her life is that her once very successful husband, in his late 40’s, now faces an unknown future. Surprised by the shifts in his industry, “suddenly” he and his business partner are facing the probability of closing their doors. What once appeared to be the sure path to their dreams, is no crumbling beneath them.

Change is inevitable. If you can learn what Profound Knowledge is and apply it you can avoid these same pitfalls and NOT LEARN THE HARD WAY!

What steps are you going to take to future cast your long term success?

Perhaps we should drop the label “senior” or redefine it. Clearly this term has helped to embed ageist stereotypes into our societal psyche. It used to be, as David Wolfe, author of the pioneering books Serving the Ageless Market (1990) and Ageless Marketing (2003), wrote,

“Senior is not an inherently negative term…Being a senior used to connote a superior standing in every context but aging.”

Sure, many don’t mind enjoying the “senior” discounts. And for those who do retire—fully or partially—the advantages of having more free time, fewer demands, and less stress overall are additional perks.

But of course we don’t have to wait until we retire to create this kind of lifestyle. We don’t have to retire at all.

In fact, many characteristics of the stereotypical senior citizen don’t really have much to do with age at all. Or at least they don’t have to be related to age, even if we as a society have somewhat arbitrarily decided they

One of the most important tasks we have together, all generations, is to change the story we tell one another and ourselves about aging.

These characteristics can include retirement, volunteer work, adapting our lifestyle to physical changes, having more control over our time and environment. All of these are choices we might make at any age.

So if we strip away other people’s definitions of what it means to age, what it means to be over 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100…where does that leave us? How do we define ourselves as protagonists in our own aging story?

We all have different comfort levels with various terms. Some shy away from “elderly” but don’t mind being seen as an “Elder.” Some don’t mind being called “older” but feel uncomfortable being called simply “old.” Yet another person might get fed up with euphemisms and actually demand to be called “old,” dammit!

I’ve always relished the term “Crone,” the idea of taking back its original meaning of wise old woman. Some, including those who have chosen not to have children, prefer to be seen as grandmother. In ancient times, the Crone was valued and revered as a wise and prophetic goddess in her own right. Traced back to pre-history, societies that are thought to have been the first “partnerships” between women and men lasted for about 20,000 years. Then as Riane Eisler describes in her underground classic, The Chalice and the Blade (1988), these early societies “veered off on ‘a bloody 5,000-year detour’ of male domination.” Along with these partnership societies, the Crone and all images of the positive feminine were devalued, leaving only the Divine Feminine (e.g., Mother Mary) as the preferred universal Mother image to survive intact into our modern day.

Fortunately, today’s twenty-first century women are resuscitating the whole panoply of feminine archetypal goddesses, like those we have buried way below our consciousness carrying the powerful energy of the Black Madonna, the flip side of Mother Mary (e.g., Mary Magdalene, Sophia, Kali Ma, Kuan Yin, and more), so that we can reclaim our fullness by embodying the whole range of our womanhood.

I’ll tell you a secret. Every time I write—for my blog, for a workshop or keynote, for a book or article—I have to stop yet again and consider this issue: What do we call ourselves? Elders? Do I avoid the word “old” or use it unabashedly? Do I refer to us as aging or stick to euphemisms or numbers, like post-50? Maybe the over-sixties? But what about including 40-plus? Boomers…and older? Matures? How do we distinguish between the early and late Boomers, who are as different as the Brat Pack is from the Beatles? At what point do generational labels lose their usefulness?

Amazon #1 Best Seller Author of 11 books including The Ageless Way, Gray is the New Green, Visionaries Have Wrinkles, The Greatness Challenge and more.

However, from the vibrating heart of our dissipating structures comes the promise of our true greatness: a greatness of awareness and action that will change the world. From the midst of the evolving Great Transition, we leave the Great Recession and the uplifting Obama era behind us as we enter an unknown, unchartered new cycle of populism and extreme radicalism ripping our valued democratic tenets to shreds and putting each of us on the line.  This Great Shift demands that we each unlock our potential for greatness which lives in each of us, and we are being called to make a difference. That is the premise of The Greatness Challenge, in which I offer a template for embracing and embodying our unique Signature Greatness DNA^SM to unleash our personal and collective greatness.

The Greatness Challenge is a manifesto for the growing wave of us who want to add value in all we do and who are being called to personal and collective evolution—from dentists to doctors, executives to engineers, artists to teachers and visionary leaders and futurists who are looking to redesign their lives so that every moment counts . . . for those of you who seek work that not only fills your bank accounts but your “values” bank as you yearn to do well doing good . . . for leaders who seek a pathway to visionary leadership, so the impact you have is of the greatest benefit for all.

To be one of the first to hear about The Greatness Challenge when it releases join us in the Secret Facebook Group here.

By-Pass the System

 Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Muriel Strode

When you look back at your life, will you be able to say that you lived in your groove, working and loving to the fullest degree possible?

Those who lead great lives have learned to bypass the system. That is, they are not afraid to go outside of whatever system they are in to effect change for the good of all. They have one foot in, and one foot out, living inside and outside of the box.

Look at politics, and you will see that Barak Obama worked the system but also worked outside of it to win the election.  He could bring a new visionary approach to campaigning while also playing the game.  He painted inside AND outside of the political lines.

One of my most successful clients is seeing the results that comes from bypassing the system. When he first started coaching with me, he was trying too hard to fit into the corporate culture where he worked.

But in a brief time, we got him on track by looking at what mattered to him and the ways in which his corporation did not support his most profound values—such as high integrity when doing sales. In a few months, he decided to walk his talk and be completely honest with clients, not compromising any of his convictions.

Guess what? His income nearly doubled from 180K to 350K in one year. He still enjoys playing the game, but he has fought for changes in the rules. And he is now seen as a leader and a winner…not a whiner. It’s all about bypassing the status quo, going beyond the rules of the system.

 If you want to live your groove more fully,

take these steps to BYPASS THE SYSTEM:

• Get clear about what you value and what your truth is.
• Compare your beliefs with those of the system in which you are working.
• Evaluate how you currently show up in YOUR way within the system. How can you be even truer to yourself?
• Start taking steps to live your truth and bypass the rules of the game, whenever it’s necessary, so you are bringing your great values and leadership to what you do.

If your organization will not tolerate your way of doing things, it is time to think about how you might bypass that system for good by creating your own business or finding a position with another company in greater harmony with your values.

Email me with the results. Are you creating your greater future today? How is greatness working in your life? What are you doing to make your future rock?

Amazon #1 Best Seller Author of 11 books including The Ageless Way, Gray is the New Green, Visionaries Have Wrinkles, The Greatness Challenge and more.

What most businesses know about marketing was learned when youth dominated the marketplace. The worldviews, motivations and needs satisfaction approaches of the young are quite different from those in the second half of life. Because most adults are now over the age of 50, much of what once worked in marketing no longer does.
The demographic and financial realities of an aging society suggest that if companies were rational in their decision making processes, most would have shifted their focus to examining the behavior of people in the second half of life who now comprise the majority and represent more than two-thirds of the nation’s spending power.
Sadly, today’s companies largely ignore the largest and richest customer group in history for three reasons:

• 1. They believe stereotypes of older customers as resistant to change, so why bother.
• 2. There is a widespread uneasiness about how to market to older customers, and fear failure if embracing new paradigms.
• 3. A key factor is that a majority of the people creating the ads, marketing materials and strategies are under age 40 and relate most comfortably to customers their own age or younger.

For the next two decades, a king’s ransom will be made in 50-plus markets. To take advantage of the potential of those markets, it is time for marketers, advertising executives and business leaders to learn how the rules of marketing are quite different for older customers.