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?