Friday November 21 2008 – Air Canada Flight 847, somewhere between Munich and Toronto. 12pm EST

I’m into the seventh hour of a nine hour flight from Munich to Toronto.  I’ve just delivered a program to Deloitte, the global professional services firm, in Hamburg, Germany. My mission was to coach a group of managers and partners in the art of “Preeminent Conversation” – the kind of conversation that creates opportunities, inspires ideas and builds relationships.

It was a transformational experience – both for me and the group. For five hours, yesterday afternoon, we dialogued our way through the principles and insights that will expand our capacity to produce remarkable results with others. We began with a conversation around the global financial crisis. The same issues that haunt Canadians, haunt Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Poles and Rumanians, and all the other nationalities who were present. That’s the great thing about this global crisis – it’s utterly egalitarian. Everyone is being sucked into its downdraft. Whatever your pain, it’s being shared by about 6.5 billion other humans. The entire planet has become one big support group.

Frank Burkett, the Deloitte partner in charge of the event, was under pressure to cancel it to save costs. He refused. He knows that just one insight or distinction can make a huge difference. He understands that insane times demand Insanely Great performance. So what does “Insanely Great” look like for you? What would it take to make your customers, clients and colleagues recognize your contribution as “Insanely Great”? What are you doing to manifest “Insanely Great”?

You and I have a stark choice: we can choose to be cowed by the crisis. We can choose to constrain our “Personal Expenditure” in the face of the gathering storm. Or we can be wowed by the crisis. We can unleash our “Personal Expenditure”. What do I mean? I mean choose to bring out your best game for the biggest game you may ever get to play. This kind of perfect storm may only happen once in our lifetime. A Crisis this colossal is a terrible thing to waste. So don’t curse it. So don’t wish it away. It’s here and it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future.

The next few months will segment people into the new winners and losers. The winners will choose to find ways to be wowed by whatever happens around them. They will live in a state of opportunity consciousness. They will be scared but stimulated. They will reach out to others, and talk, and share, and listen, and give, and receive, and stretch, and imagine, and execute. They will do their best work ever. They will grow exponentially. They will develop the muscle to mojo their way through whatever is in their way.  The losers? Well, you know what they will do and you know where they will go.

For me, “Insanely Great” means making every seminar an experience that galvanizes my delegates into unprecedented action. It means pouring all of myself into every word in every conversation with every person. It means expanding the capacity of my clients and colleagues through powerful insights and perspective. It means being more physically, mentally and emotionally fit than I’ve ever been before. It means reading the news and reveling in it. It means reaching out to tens of prospects with ideas and invitations that whet their appetites and generate revenue. It means facing down my phantoms and savoring every private victory. It means scouting great talent and magnetizing it to me. It means motivating you to act now to be your own “Insanely Great”.

I have created a special program to help you be “Insanely Great”. Check it out on this site. It’s called “Reinvent Yourself For The Revolution”.

Finally, its appropriate that I’m writing this blog on my new MacBook Pro because it was Steve Jobs who coined the phrase “Insanely Great”. I’m going to do whatever it takes to live it. Join me…

Toronto, 4.55am, November 12 2008

I don’t sleep so well these days. Seven hours of high quality REM sleep are a distant memory. Now it’s 5-6 hours of fitful sleep, fragmented by night-time frights and bogeymen who feed on my post-meltdown angst.

On the other hand, I’ve never been more awake. I’ve never felt more plugged into the world. I’ve never been had so many opportunities to be brilliant. Every meeting and every conversation is a chance to make the difference that makes the difference. My capacity to mobilise others is expanding. And so is my feeling of well being and excitement.

It’s a weird combination. In the deep of night, my subconscious thrusts me into the Dark Zone where I’m at the mercy of creatures I cannot control. In the light of day, I control my own destiny. I can see what’s coming at me and I’m swinging for the fences.

It’s been a fascinating evolution. At the beginning of October, like everyone else, I was blindsided by the panic and intensity of the global economic maelstrom. I was perplexed and alarmed as my personal net worth plummeted with the Dow and the TSX. I resisted the truth: the bubble had burst. A new harder reality had emerged.

In my seminars I wrestled with my own inauthenticity: I was encouraging others but I wasn’t walking my own talk. So I began attending my own seminars. I began to accept the developments around me unquivocally. Then I went a step further: I embraced them. I saw them as invitations to action.

What better time to track exponential trends? What better time to motivate and coach? What better time to help others reinvent themselves? What better time to be the best me I can be? No better time. Now is the time to be preeminent – the benchmark by which all others are judged. That’s my goal today as I fly to Detroit to deliver a program: to be a model of what’s possible so that other are inspired to be the same. What’s yours?

Toronto, Tuesday., November 4, 6.10am

Last Saturday, I facilitated a full day program with 500 new, highly skilled  immigrants to Toronto. They came from all over the world. For many of them, English is their second language. Many of them also come from countries with very different cultures to Canada. For all of them, just being in the room was a monumental achievement. Now they have to find work and that was the objective of the session. Together with TRIEC, Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, we coached the group on the power of networking and self-marketing. Prospective employers like the government of Canada, Deloitte, State Farm Insurance, CGI and RBC also held workshops that informed immigrants of the opportunities available and how they could exploit them. See http://www.triec.ca/events/12

It was an electrifying day. From my first word to my final wrap up, the engagement was total. The listening was so intense, I was almost overwhelmed. EVERYTHING I shared with group was new for them. There was no “I’ve heard all of this before” because they hadn’t. There was just the silent appreciation and awe that comes with absorbing new concepts that could make a major difference in their lives. Irrespective of age, there was a hunger in the room for the insights that would empower them to grow their future and feed their families. I learnt as much from them as they did from me. Specifically, I left the session looking at everything through their eyes: the eyes of someone who is seeing it all for the first time.

And that’s the simple lesson of this blog: look at your world like you’ve just immigrated to it. You have. We’re all immigrants to the future. Just in the last three months, so much has changed so much that it’s all NEW. You may just not have realised it yet. To quote T.S. Eliot: We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

The immigrants to my program in Saturday have literally just arrived and they are beginning to know their new place. If you’ve been around for some time, it’s time to arrive at a new place. It’s time to see things from a new angle. It’s time to embrace new points of view. It’s time to talk to new people. It’s time to begin anew. And it’s time to take new immigrants along with you. Reach out and share. You’ll get far more than you could ever anticipate. I did.