But if they do without us doing something different on a mass level, things could get quite uncomfortable for our future generations.

Four Years – it’s long enough for us to make a difference and too short for us to lose focus.

Do you believe we can do it?

I do.  It starts with you. And me.  All of us.

Watch this video made by a group called “Four Years. Go.”  They are enlisting the support of people like you and me who are committed to addressing the most serious problems we face.

Then, share it liberally. You can refer people to this YouTube link, or share a link to this post. Just do something.

Check out FourYearsGo.org to learn more about the group of people, just like you and me, who are making this happen.  And join the movement.

Commit to doing something specific over the next four years.  Be part of the solution.

Begin by helping to spread the word about this campaign.  I am.

And, then, I’m going to develop a sustainable farm in my community.  I’ll keep ya posted on that one.

For the 2nd time, I am three years into a million dollar business venture of my own creation and I am beginning to see a pattern.  I am committed to living beyond patterns and conditioning, so now that the pattern has been noticed, I am committed to doing something different.

What did Einstein say?  “Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.”

So here I am.

Exactly where I was just a couple of years ago in so many respects.

And yet so far away.

The difference this time is that I seem to be willing to let go in the right places, even though it’s really hard.

I kept my law firm operating too long because I couldn’t let go.  I told myself it was because I had to take care of all the people who worked for me.  I was doing it for them.

A part of me was.  But, another part of me simply couldn’t let go.  Of them.  Of the clients.  Of the reputation.  Of the identity.

By the time I did, it was too late.

And I’m still dealing with the fall out from it.

I won’t do the same thing again.  And, yet, here I am.  Making the conscious decision to break free of conditioning and patterned responses is difficult.

I’ve done what I do and built something that’s making a huge difference.  But, it’s time for its next evolution.

And I’m committed to allowing that evolution to happen in a way that’s best for the organization as a whole.  The work is too important.

I won’t make the same mistake.  Maybe a different one, but not the same one.

So, I’m letting go.  But instead of letting go into the hands of someone who has never run a million dollar company before and doesn’t have a proven track record (which is what I did last time), I’ve decided to create a whole new paradigm of business operation.

This will either be the greatest experiment in letting go ever and I’ll go on to write a 4-Hour Work Week-like book about it and make it to the NYT bestseller list or I’ll be just be another schmo who runs businesses into the ground.

That’s my fear of course.

One failure is acceptable and even seen as a positive in some circles.

But, two?  That begins to look like a pattern.

That’s what my mind tells me at least.

Of course, lots of people tell me that my law firm was a huge success, not a failure.  And then I tell myself that too as reinforcement.  Because it was – if I had wanted to be a lawyer.  I’d be rolling in the dough now.  A pillar of my community.  Living the American Dream.

It sounds great and I know I SHOULD have wanted it.  It just wasn’t my path.

So I sold it and had what I have now discovered is an all too common post-sale experience.  Within 6 months, the guy I sold it to stopped paying me, stopped paying the bills and was not servicing the clients as I would have.

Since I’ve started talking about this, I’ve begun to hear from other business owners that this is a quite common situation.  A company is sold to the wrong person or people and in anywhere from 6 months to 2 years, the company is out of business.  Each one left with a varying degree of debt and/or liability.

I don’t want that to happen again.

The work I have created is transformational.  I know how much it’s impacting lawyers and the clients they serve on a deep level.

I can’t make the same mistake again.

So, I’m doing something different.  Very different.

Yesterday, I announced to my Personal Family Lawyers that now that the company is three years old and has a solid foundation – solid recurring revenue, systems that are proven to work not just by me, but now by additional law firms implementing the systems as well, documented financials and projections – it’s time to evolve to the next level.

I consider all different possibilities and ultimately thanks to the purpose work I’m doing with Tim Kelley, I have determined that the most purposeful thing I can do is let go with purpose.

Letting go with purpose for me means looking at what would be most purposeful for me individually, the company as a whole and ultimately the world.  Discovering that option, becoming aware of it, then trusting and letting go.

It’s scary as shit.

So yesterday, I sent the PFLs a letter letting them know that I am going to model the new paradigm of collaborative operations within the PFL program.

Over the next few weeks, I will be inviting Personal Family Lawyers who meet certain criteria to be on the Senior Counsel of the organization. They will pay a membership fee to participate (so they have skin in the game) and receive my personal coaching on their business (people pay $3,000/mo. for this) in exchange for their membership on the Counsel.

Those are the last decisions I will make alone and the group can choose to change them as part of the collaborative process, which takes into account the perspectives of all stakeholders.

This group will be trained in the Collaborative Operating System model and we will document that as best as possible to share with other organizations in the future in case this works.

Within some period of time (once the training is complete), I intend that the Senior Counsel (of which I will be a member) redesign every aspect of the program so that the work thrives if the community wants it to thrive.

That means, the Counsel will make all decisions, including the extent of my continued involvement, how  much I’ll be paid if I do continue to be involved, how much I’ll be paid if I don’t continue to be involved, what I do on behalf of the organization, etc.

This is a grand experiment. I will chronicle it here, even when it’s scary.  Especially when it’s scary.

A model of the new paradigm.

How can I talk to you about how it should be, if I’m not blazing the trail?

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Please let me know that this is impactful for you.  Hearing that will give me the fuel I need to keep going down this path (as if I could stop it now?!?) – I’m really scared and the fact that it inspires you, inspires me to keep going.

My life is turning upside down.  I’m on the razor’s edge of exhilarated and scared to death. And I freakin’ love it.  Why would I love to live on the razor’s edge?  Because …

We are here to feel.

Ten years ago I stopped feeling in the name of security and comfort. Once I woke up from the numbness, I swore I’d never be okay with that again.

I made a promise to myself. Numb will not be my way of being even when it feels like the safest way to be.

I  insist on feeling no matter what and will not settle for any situation that requires me to hold myself in or shut down.

Being conscious requires feeling.  It requires connection to and awareness of self.   When I’m numb, I’m lost.

Can you feel it?

What brings me that feeling of aliveness is transformation. Change.

And I’m in the midst of it now.

Six weeks ago, I moved from Los Angeles to Colorado.

In just a few days, my online home will be moved as well. The Intrepid Mompreneur blog will transform into a new blog … Life, Business & The Pursuit of Truth.

Here’s a picture of the IM blog in its current state as I write this so when you are reading this post a few weeks from now, you’ll have a point of comparison.

The nature of my relationship with Dave is changing.

My business is transforming.

Everything. Is. Changing.

Friday night at the mastermind Dave and I were leading, I had a session with Tim Kelley, one of my coaches. (If you get a chance to work with Tim, take it – his process is amazing.)

Afterward, I felt this tingling aliveness (and also quite a bit of fear) as I saw that within 6 months every single thing in my life could be 180 degrees different.

I want to talk about all of it here, publicly, for all of you to read and see.

But before I do, Dave reminds me to examine that desire. Is it from a place of truth or conditioning?  What is the motivation behind it?

Do you share all your stuff publicly as it’s happening? Or do you wait until it’s complete?  If you do, do you know what your motivation is? Does it matter?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

You know how it is when you see someone every day and they look the same to you from one day to the next, but then you are apart for a week and suddenly the next time you see them, you notice they’ve grown or aged or lost weight or gained weight?

We are a lot like that with ourselves.  It’s hard to tell from one day or month or year to the next how much progress we are making.  And most of us are so focused on how far we have to go that we completely lose sight of how far we’ve come.

One of the best parts about blogging is being able to look back and become aware of the evolution.

Tonight, as I write this blog post on the eve of Thanksgiving, I’ve done just that.  I vaguely recalled being in a different emotional space last Thanksgiving, but couldn’t remember exactly what that space was.  Looking back to my blog post from last Thanksgiving, the emotions of where I was then have come flooding back in.

And along with them the awareness that a major shift has happened in my own consciousness regarding gratitude.  A shift that you can make here and now without waiting another year.

Last year, I didn’t know how to be grateful for EVERYthing.  My gratitude was conditional on the “good” things.  I even shared a gratitude exercise that helped me connect with all the good things happening in my life.

Here’s the big, exciting shift … you can be in extreme, deep gratitude even (especially) for the experiences you are having in your life that no one would call good.  And that’s something huge to realize as we move through a global shift that is impacting the economy, our weather patterns, and our old traditions.

With this shift is coming a lot of experiences that no one would call good – economic collapse of families, increase in bankruptcies, foreclosures, divorces, and a loss of jobs across the board.

What I’ve discovered is that it’s possible to find gratitude, even in these things.  And that’s where the real power is in your business and your life.

When you can find the gratitude even in the tragedy,  the heartache, and the pain, you have freedom.

So many of us claim freedom as one of our highest values and yet we are seeking it through on the exact things that will keep us in bondage.  More money, more time, more, more, more …

More is not where freedom comes from at all.  Freedom has nothing to do with the external circumstances of time, money or our work.

Freedom comes when you can be truly, deeply grateful for whatever is happening in your life right now.  Whatever is happening.  All. of. it.

To show you how serious I am about this.  Here are a few things I’m grateful for this year that I might not have been before I understand that gratitude for EVERYthing is the secret to true freedom.

The summer before last, my ex-husband got a DUI.  With our kids in the car.  You would think I’d be pissed, right?  Actually, I was grateful. GRATEFUL?!?  What?  You might be thinking (or even saying right now).

But, really I was.

For the 6 months before the DUI happened, I had been wondering fairly consistently “should I try to take full custody of the kids?” I really, really, really didn’t want to have to go there.  I knew it could mean a protracted court battle and I wasn’t willing to subject my kids to that. Plus, I wanted them to have a relationship with their dad.  And, frankly, I was working a lot and having them with him half the time worked for me from a business perspective. (It’s hard to admit that last part, but it is true).

I had been in Orlando teaching Personal Family Lawyers for a few days and flew to Virginia to speak to another group of lawyers about building a law business on a new model.  When I landed that morning, there was a message from my sister-in-law telling me everything was okay, but to call her as soon as possible.

That’s never a good sign.

When I called, she let me know that she had my kids.  My ex-husband (her brother) had been arrested for DUI with the kids in the car.

After I got over the initial shock, I felt an odd sense of calm.  My question had been answered.  I would have full custody of the kids and there would be no custody fight.  I didn’t know what else would happen.  But, I did know that.  And I was grateful.

As a result of my gratitude, I was able to respond to the situation in a way that resulted in the near complete healing of my relationship with my ex-husband.

Had I not been able to see the blessing in the situation, I would have been outraged, enraged, and in rage.  The ramifications of that would have been enormous for my family.  Perhaps my children would have been alienated from their dad.  Maybe he would have made it difficult for me to obtain custody of the kids.  Whatever it would have been, it would have been painful.

But, it wasn’t painful. Well, it’s been painful for my ex-husband.  He lost his license and his house and has been staying in a room above my garage while he gets back on his feet.  Even in that though, there’s freedom.

He’s finally found his passion and begun pursuing it.  He no longer feels as if he can’t be truthful or hide what he really wants.  We can have the hard conversations without too much drama.  And, of course, the kids absolutely love having him around.

So, that’s one thing.

Another thing like that is the circumstances that led to me closing my law firm.  My firm generated more than a million bucks in 2006 and 2007.  In 2008, I sold the firm to another lawyer so I could focus my attention on helping more people.

I sold it with the belief that he would take great care of my clients at the standards I had created and continue to build upon the foundation I had laid.

That’s not what happened though.

Within a few months, I began to see signs that he wasn’t handling things the way I did or would have.  I tried to ignore them and pretend it would get better.  It didn’t.  Within 6 months, he had stopped paying the bills.

It had been nearly a year since I’d seen new private clients, the firm had brought in nearly $700,000 for the year anyway, and I had to decide whether to come back in and take the reins at the firm again or close it down.

I decided to close it down and arrange for the Los Angeles area Personal Family Lawyers to service the ongoing needs of my clients.   An extremely painful, difficult decision to make.

That firm was my baby.  I had painstakingly designed the office.  Invested my heart and soul into it.  And it was still making great money.

But, I couldn’t trust that it would be run to the standards I set and so I had to let it go.  It cost me nearly three hundred thousand dollars to do it, not even counting the lost income I would have made if I would have kept the firm in the first place or kept it going.

What’s to be grateful for in that?

So much, it turns out.

As a result of my own experiences with building my law firm, selling it, and then closing it down, I learned a tremendous amount about the right way to set up a business and the wrong way, I got to see what it is that actually puts businesses out of business, and I gained confidence by seeing how hard it actually is to get to the point where a business cannot continue.

I also learned firsthand how important it is for entrepreneurs (especially those of us who identify as creative entrepreneurs) to understand legal, insurance, financial and tax issues.

It’s more than a little embarrassing that I had so many problems in these areas considering I’m a lawyer and I felt as if these were things I “should” have known about.

But I didn’t.  And my lack of knowledge cost me dearly.

And yet, I’m tremendously grateful for it because as a result I decided to learn everything I possibly could about legal, insurance, financial and tax and put all of that knowledge into a system for other entrepreneurs who, like me, are not good at those sorts of things.

This January, after nearly 9 months of intense effort, we will finally launch my LIFT Foundation System for business owners who are tired of wondering whether they have a solid foundation under their business, want to be able to count on their business surviving for the long haul no matter what happens, and are ready to cut through all the legal mumbo jumbo, hard pressure insurance and financial sales and want the straight truth on what is really needed to build a business the right way.

I never would have put this together had I not experienced a lawsuit myself without the proper insurance in place to cover it or made the mistakes I did when I sold my business.  Sure, I could beat myself up for those errors.   That would be normal, right?

But, I choose to be abnormal.  Instead, I’m grateful for these hard knocks.  Yes, they cost me a lot of money, but they taught me far more.  And now I get to teach it to you.

And to me, that’s what life’s all about folks.

This Thanksgiving season, do everything you can to find the blessing in each and everyone of the hardships you’ve experienced this year, this decade or this lifetime.

Write em’ down, thank God for them, and ask yourself how you can share the gift you’ve received from that challenging time in your life to make the world a better place.

Namaste.

This past weekend at Ali’s SHINE event, I sat on stage as part of Ali’s diamond success panel and couldn’t stop the tears from flowing as I thought about the past year and how happy I was to be sitting there as a symbol of hope for the hundreds of women in the audience.

Only a year ago, I was so confused about my identity.  Mommy blogger?  Lawyer?  TV personality?  Author?  CEO? Something else entirely that I couldn’t even see yet?

Today, I realize my identity is not what matters at all. (Anne McKevitt, Ali’s mentor, would surely disagree.  But, that’s a whole ‘nother long blog post.)

What matters is who and how I serve.

Here are a few more of the big awarenesses I’ve gained over the past year:

• For the first time in ten years, I have discovered that first and foremost, I want to be with my kids a whole lot more.  I realize that in many ways I’ve used my work as a way to escape from the pressures of motherhood. Today, I’m a homeschooling mom and I want to be the one to teach my children how to be in the world.
• Over the past year, I’ve discovered how to relax into my feminine energy much more deeply.  I can finally stop trying to make things happen and allow.
• I’ve learned to say no to myself and others.  My value no longer comes from all of the things I can do.  It comes from saying yes to what I love to do and letting go of everything else.  Even when that’s scarier than heck.
• I’ve learned to set boundaries with an open heart.  At our first diamond meeting in Phoenix last year, I was in the process of closing my law firm after having sold it to a man who ultimately could not fulfill on the commitments he had made.  The diamonds helped me to see that what I was experiencing was a reflection of my lack of clear boundaries.  And that boundaries didn’t have to mean what I thought they did.  I could set boundaries and keep my heart open at the same time.  What a revelation!
• I discovered that often the path to playing big requires me to think a whole lot smaller than I’m used to, at least temporarily.  That’s a whole blog post in itself to explain.
• I’ve learned to stop doing so much.  Looking back at what I was letting go of last year, I did it – I let go of so much:

1. I stopped trying to fit myself into a box;
2. I unfollowed everyone I was following on Twitter and now only follow people I want to connect with regularly;
3. I turned my email inbox over to my amazing assistant Michelle;
4. I no longer spend anytime on facebook looking up old highschool peeps;
5. The lawsuit has been long settled and the law firm itself has been closed for several months.

• And I recognize that I’m still doing too much.

Did I have to invest $100,000 to have these discoveries?  Apparently, I did.

Many people have asked me if the investment was worth it.  Before I answer the question, I’ll ask you.  Especially if you saw me at SHINE this weekend.

Does it seem like it was worth it?

Photo courtesy of Flickr