This week’s newsletter is a response to another newsletter I saw—

Tony Robbins wrote this week that 2025 is all about knowing what season your business is in.

He equates growing a business to the phases of growing up. Including the prime of life and then decline and death.

As if you are your business. But you are not your business. You are the parent of your business.

I notice this all the time with my clients.

If they are in start up mode, they are just trying to get the kid fed and get enough sleep.

As their business grows and matures, their leadership has to grow and mature as well, or else, as one of my clients put it, “the business is running you rather than the other way around.”

There is a stage, (the pre-tween years?) where everything you do and say is revered.

And then suddenly you have to be very clear about the guidance you provide.

You can gently nudge but more and more your leaders have ideas of their own. (And some of them are better than yours!)

As the business gets more and more successful, you actually need to have less and less involvement. “Helicopter parenting” can frustrate your team and even backfire.

At some point, if you have done your job well, your business no longer needs you. (If you’ve really done well, it, or the proceeds from its sale, might even support you in your old age!)

Many parents get their identity from parenting and from their kids. And when the kids move out, they struggle. I’m going through a version of this right now with my youngest in Japan for a year. It’s been really hard figuring out who I am with no kids in the house.

The same can be true for founders.

What about you? What happens when the business starts to succeed without you? Or when you become a “business empty nester?”

Here’s the original Tony Robbins post—

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tony-robbins-2025-all-knowing-what-season-youre-tony-robbins-kcgjc/?trackingId=F%2FzRTjSPN38wkFoXIfgSXA%3D%3D

As I founder myself, I understand the value of feeling driven. It can help you produce much more than the people around me and much of the time that can be very helpful.

But sometimes I can’t turn it off. And I notice that I can’t actually say what’s driving me. It’s hidden. I’ll say it is for the sake of the business, or the mission, or the vision.

But is it?

Maybe what I really want is to be noticed. Or to be liked. Or to feel like I have enough, or AM enough.

We All Have Drives

Some of these drives we call addictions.

What’s the difference between a drive and an addiction? Simply put, I’d say that I have some level of control over my drives. They feel a bit more conscious, and a bit more in my power to honor or not, to employ or to take a break from.

My addictions feel more like they have me.

As an example, I did a video this week where I explored this in a bit more detail. I was walking uphill with a weighted backpack on a snowy road with my dog.

I’m huffing and puffing pretty hard. I’m unshaven and sweaty.

Why did I do that?

Because I get some of my best thinking when I am exercising. So I decided to pull out the phone and take a video in the midst of that thought. I didn’t want to miss it. It became the basis of this post.

Exercise, for me, is a tool. It clears my head and makes my body feel better in the process. I am driven to exercise but I am also in control of that drive and able to use it in a way that benefits me.

But I know people who are addicted to exercise. Especially in a mountain town in Colorado. Who use exercise almost like some people use alcohol or other drugs.

To avoid feeling things they don’t want to feel.

When A Drive Becomes A Ghost In The Machine

And that, to me, is where the line is. What do you avoid feeling, over and over again? And what is your strategy for avoiding it?

I had a client early in my coaching days who ran his own business. I asked him how much he wanted to make in his business and he could not identify a number.

As we talked about his childhood, he shared that for most of it his parents had struggled with money. That much of the time, his room had no heat in the winter.

His ghost was the drive for money. He had never had enough when growing up and even today, there is no amount that will make him feel safe.

What he longed for was to be ok with what he has, which by any reasonable measure is plenty.

For him, working more was his ghost. He could not stop. His fear would not let him.

There are addictions that everyone frowns on. Food, drugs, hoarding.

There are others though, like fitness and work, that are often celebrated in our culture, even though they can be just as destructive. (And are just as useful if the goal is to avoid feeling something.)

What is the fear that you don’t want to feel? What is the ghost that’s helping you to avoid it?

Going Deeper

Does that resonate?

If so, reach out to me and I will send you a special video that goes even deeper.

More and more founders like you are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, no matter where they are in their transformation.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

At this time of year I run into a lot of people who set goals without really thinking about it.

2024 should be 2023 plus ten percent.

That would be a great goal, right?

Just like it was last year.

But how are you going to get there? Are you going to DO ten percent more?

How long can you keep that up?

Your Success Strategy

Most people have a go-to strategy—a way that they have always fallen back on when they need to meet a goal.

—Working more hours

—Being more productive

—Connecting with more people

—Doing more training, adding more skills, making more calls, having more meetings

More, more, more of the same thing that got you here in the first place.

But every winning strategy has a limit to its effectiveness.

At some point, more of the same will not work.

It will not be enough.

Then what do you do? To succeed at the next level, you’re going to need to do things differently. And if you are like most people, you struggle to see what you could possibly be doing differently.

You will say things like, “I know I need to hire but there are no good people available.”

“I know I need to delegate but it’s faster to do it myself.”

“I know my team can handle this but I need to be here in case they need me.”

The issue is not with your team. It’s with you. It’s with your leadership. And until you lead differently, see different possibilities, you will continue to get the same results.

Your Fulfillment

Let’s go back to the “ten percent more” strategy.

If you get ten percent more results, and earn ten percent more money, will you be ten percent happier?

Most people say no. Yet they continue to chase more of the same rewards.

Money, promotions, company size, number of employees.

None of these mean anything other than what you say they mean. And none of them will make you happy.

To get a different result you need to look in a different direction. Not toward an outside goal, but toward what’s creating that goal in the first place, and the feelings you have around meeting or not meeting that goal.

You.

You are the one creating the game and then forgetting that you did it.

You create the goals (or agree to be bound by them) and you agree to feel good or bad based on the result.

But you are enough no matter what happens outside of you. After all, you are creating your entire experience. How could you possibly be lacking anything?

What would you create if you could see that you have always been complete?

Happiness is a place to come from, not get to.

Seeing that changes everything.

Going Deeper

Does that resonate?

If so, reach out to me and I will send you a special video that goes even deeper.

More and more corporate people are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, no matter where they are in their transformation.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

Seriously.

It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Take some time away.

Spend some time with your family.

If you’re in Colorado like me, get out and ski.

I’m writing this for me, too.

I’m writing this on December 21.

And yet I know that I am likely succumbing to the temptation to “catch up,” to send out a few emails, to see if I can catch someone in the office, to get a jump on 2024 planning.

I, too, fall for this need to be PRODUCTIVE ALL THE TIME.

And I know it costs me.

Let’s Agree To Talk Next Week

I would love to talk to you about this. About how we both can get better at this. At taking the time away that we need. That is good for us and our families.

I love helping people get to the point where they are both killing it at work AND they have plenty of time for their families.

But let’s agree to push it to next week, ok?

Enjoy your time.

And I hope for both our sakes that it is as far away from work as it can be.

How To Go Deeper

More and more corporate people are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, no matter where they are in their transformation.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.