Turn the eight triggers of a business challenge to your benefit.

By Tony Robbins

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from operating dozens of companies, it’s this: Leaders anticipate change while the losers are left reacting to it.

Businesses today feel the pressure of the narrowing window between seismic changes in any industry and across cultures. That’s because the lifecycle of ideas and products has shrunk — as the timespan between the moment you come up with a breakthrough concept and the instant somebody else comes up with a better one has gone from decades to years, down to months. Artificial intelligence tools are only expected to speed this cycle even more. 

How do you gain control and turn crises into opportunities? You must discover the power of anticipation and how to master it, so you and your business are prepared for anything. And that begins by understanding that there are known triggers of crises. Eight to be exact.

Business Trigger #1: A Change in Technology

Remember when nobody took Amazon seriously? In business, the psychology of a leader who resists a coming trend in technology can destroy a $4-billion company — or in the case of Amazon, multiple ones. Conversely, if you become a leader who figures out how to use technology to fulfill needs and add value, you become the disrupter, not the disrupted.

AI represents both a crisis and an opportunity for businesses, depending on how leaders approach it. As a crisis, AI can disrupt traditional business models, leading to job displacement and ethical concerns regarding privacy, bias, and control. Those who fail to adapt to AI advancements may find themselves struggling to compete or even facing obsolescence.

At the same time, AI presents significant opportunities for businesses that embrace it. It can enhance efficiency, productivity, and decision-making processes, leading to cost savings and improved customer experiences. AI-powered technologies may unlock new revenue streams and facilitate innovation across various sectors.

Take a moment now to think: Are you stuck in your head and making yourself a potential target to the emerging competition relying on new AI and other cutting-edge technology? Ask yourself: How can AI change my business? What technology can we be the first in our industry to employ? How can I be the creator of change? 

Business Trigger #2: A Change in Your Competition

The next business trigger to be on the lookout for is competition by a would-be challenger who seeks to provide customers more value than you do. No one wants to become the Blockbuster video of their industry. What many people fail to remember is that Blockbuster thought they had the video rental market cornered. 

In 2023, Netflix brought in over $33.7 billion in global revenue. It’s easily one of the biggest streaming platforms in the world and paved the way for dozens of others. But in 2000, the young Netflix tried to sell itself to Blockbuster for a mere $50 million when the video rental company’s revenues were $4 billion annually. Netflix practically begged to become Blockbuster’s streaming service, but the company effectively scoffed and said, “What do we need this for?” They failed to recognize their competition as a business trigger and paid the price.

Blockbuster launched its streaming subscription service four years later, but it was too late, as Netflix already had 4.2 million subscribers. Sure, the stubborn storefront boasted 50 million members in its 2007 heyday, but Netflix announced its billionth DVD delivery that year. In 2010 when Blockbuster finally filed for bankruptcy, Netflix had achieved a worth of around $13 billion.

So note this lesson: Whether you’re a leader of a small business or a part of a billion-dollar behemoth, competition will create a crisis.

Business Trigger #3: A Change in the Economy

Were you in business in 2008–09? How did that economy during the global financial crisis affect your company? Did you anticipate or react to that crisis? Would you have done better, perhaps even thrived, if you anticipated how this financial crisis economy would impact your business and its operations?

How are you applying it to future economic winters? Now is the time to anticipate and implement what you need to be more efficient and effective and to get yourself ahead of the ever-ebbing and flowing economic tide. Winter is always around the corner. This means you need to be prepared.

Business Trigger #4: A Change in Government/Regulations

Your business could be out of business with one new law or regulation — literally overnight. Go back to early March 2020. At that time, most of the world, including business leaders, were trying to understand what COVID-19 was and how it was going to impact them. Boy, did we all learn. Arena events I planned for months were suddenly a no-go when federal, state, and local governments passed regulations that prohibited large gatherings.

If not arenas, why not smaller gatherings in movie theaters? Then the movie theaters were closed by regulation. Then why not use church spaces? Then the churches closed. I sensed a level of growing frustration in people who were on constant lockdown. I wanted to give people some answers, but how? I ate my own cooking and focused hard to find an innovative solution to this crisis.

Weeks after COVID-19 upended life as we knew it, I spoke with some of the brightest communications minds in the world, including Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan, the man behind the pandemic-era Zoom revolution. I needed to figure out how to get more than the allowed 1,000 people on Zoom all at once and make it have the emotion, energy, and real-time feedback of my live events.

By June 2020, my team and I were ready for a live virtual event with hundreds of thousands of participants from around the world. They were the first to experience a virtual 360-degree interactive experience in a new Florida studio, complete with 30-foot-high ceilings and 16-foot-high retina screens stretching 50 feet wide and wrapping around the room 180 degrees in front and back.

We continue to use the live virtual experience. Often more than 1 million people sign up and log in for these virtual events — that’s multiple times the number of attendees who got into our in-person arena events. 

Business Trigger #5: A Change in Your Customers’ Lives

The global pandemic changed the way we carried out our day-to-day lives. Circumstances and time play a part in triggering widespread customer behavioral change. Since the dawn of time, as people change, have children, and age, they make decisions differently, which applies to you, your customers, and your employees.

When large swaths of the economy are controlled by one or two demographic groups like Baby Boomers or Millennials — and they go into a different stage of life — it can affect your business, particularly if you have a targeted ideal customer base.

Always remember, the lives and needs of people are in constant motion depending on the moment. Are you prepared for this business crisis trigger? Have you anticipated what may happen, and how you will respond as a leader?

Business Trigger #6: A Change in Your Life Stage

There is no doubt that your own life looks drastically different today than it did 10 or 15 years ago. Don’t forget to look in the mirror and consider also what might trigger a business crisis: you. 

I’ve realized that many of the life changes we all go through are more predictable than we think. Maybe you need to be more present for your family. Perhaps you realize you’re a business operator, not a true owner. Or you hit a threshold and just had to do something that made you happy. Maybe there was a period when you burned out, fell in love, beat cancer, got married, had a baby, or went through some other event that upended your business. Many people also experienced a big life-stage shift during the pandemic when they reevaluated their priorities.

Business Trigger #7: A Change in Culture

How many people still visit a record store on a regular basis anymore? Not many. In 1999, the brick-and-mortar music business made $38.6 billion in sales. That same year, the illegal music file-sharing platform Napster arrived. From the peak of about $40 billion in 1999, the music industry plummeted 58% to $16 billion the following year. Think about that. That’s nearly a 60% drop in revenue practically overnight. 

All it took was a shift in consumer culture. However, as with any business trigger, you can make this one work for you instead of against you. 

Consider how Apple harnessed that changed culture. Apple founder Steve Jobs reasoned that while our culture balks at paying $15 for a new CD, people also don’t want to poke around the internet for hours and steal entire libraries on Napster. He had a crazy idea: Short attention spans might appreciate the simplicity of 99 cents per song. By 2007, the sale of those cheap little digital singles overtook CDs in a landslide, generating $819 million in sales.

When the culture demanded a cheap, easy, fast way to get music, Apple had the ingenuity to address this business trigger and become the No. 1 music retailer in the world — all because it monitored critical shifts in cultural behavior and added more value faster than anyone else.

Less than 10 years after Apple deployed its iTunes Music Store, it surpassed 25 billion songs sold. Apple triggered an industry crisis and changed how the world consumes music, books, and in-pocket entertainment. 

To stay ahead of this business crisis trigger, ask yourself: What behaviors are trending? What cultural shifts are afoot? What belief systems apply to those trends, and how can they affect our business? What cultural shifts can we use to our advantage today?

Business Trigger #8: A Change in Employees’ Lives

Many business owners have experienced a top employee or salesperson going through a life stage like the birth of a child or a divorce, and they ask for some time away. Suddenly, they aren’t around as much, and if they are, they’re less productive, which can be a real hit on your business.

Business Leaders Embrace Crises and Change

After more than four decades of studying the highest achievers in business and life, I know one thing for certain: People who succeed at the highest level are not lucky — they’re doing something differently than everyone else.

Don’t wait to react to a business crisis. You don’t need to operate in fear if you anticipate change and embrace the opportunity it brings. Analyze the landscape. Ask questions. Challenge yourself to anticipate how a business crisis might emerge. Examine how you and your team can attack potential challenges. Create a pre-crisis plan that takes advantage of crisis opportunities when they open up to you.

There is no time better than the present to be a leader, my friends.

Additional Resources

Subscribe to Robbins’ newsletter at core.tonyrobbins.com/event-calendar, and check out his new book in his financial freedom series: The Holy Grail of Investing: The World’s Greatest Investors Reveal Their Ultimate Strategies for Financial Freedom. The Tony Robbins 

Business Accelerator Program’s next virtual Business Mastery event is Aug. 14–18, 2024. Learn more at tonyrobbins.com.

The Secret to 21^st Century Leadership

By Karla Brandau

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”  – John C. Maxwell

Wake-Up Call

Great leaders do not sugarcoat the truth. When the past recession hit, one CEO of a large manufacturing company confronted the realities and knew something had to change for his company to survive. Peering over his reading glasses, he looked across the desk at one of his employees and said, “Nothing in this company is sacred. Everything will be evaluated and put on the chopping block in order to maintain profitability. This economy is but a wake-up call. We will survive.”

Leadership teams across the world hear the wake-up call whenever an economic recession hits, but the quickly changing landscape of the 21^st century requires continuous refocus to survive as an organization. The constant evaluation of organizational performance includes leadership practices.

The most recent worldwide economic downturn was not a mere fluctuation in the market, but was revolutionary, causing seismic shifts in business procedures and in organizational social structures that affect profitability, economic sustainability, and discretionary effort. The recession caused organizations to look at the principles that guide their leadership teams to enable them to better navigate the complexity of their workplace culture amid the uncertainties of the global economic environment.

Outdated People Practices

A current deterioration of business results may be attributed to changing market conditions or to the inability to compete with the improved products and services offered by competitors. These may be factors in such a complex issue as market success, but we maintain the real culprit is failure to create an environment where discretionary effort is freely given by every employee on a daily basis.

As your leadership team evaluates your people practices that discourage discretionary effort, you may observe that some practices are outdated because they were designed from the implicit social contracts of the 20^th century. While these people policies worked at one time, most of them are declining in their effectiveness, especially with the new workers entering the workforce.

One of the 20^th century declining people philosophies is “do more with less.” Companies under pressure to improve the bottom line try to improve revenues by letting people go and by putting extreme stress on machinery, supply chains, and workers to produce the maximum amount possible in the least amount of time with as few resources as possible. These strategies work for only a limited time.

The people practice of pushing people to work harder and to give more is a temporary solution that more than enough employees are willing to deliver when occasionally asked. However, if the organization asks for the same maximized effort every week, there are consequences. Workers become tired and make mistakes. Their home lives become unbalanced and employees’ families can experience resentment. Employees could be asked to temporarily overlook safety or quality procedures not overtly noticeable to a customer but compromises the integrity of the products. What if, however, while temporarily overlooking safety or quality, a severe problem surfaces with the product or an employee gets seriously hurt at work?

A problem with the do-more-with-less approach is that it assumes increased demand can be met simply by squeezing more out of the system. The hidden reality is that every system has built-in inefficiencies, and when leadership teams start looking for wastefulness and ineffectiveness, they set countless improvements in motion.  

21^st-Century People Practices

Simultaneously with the discovery and elimination of inefficiencies, leaders can start the process of establishing a culture that earns the gift of discretionary effort on a regular basis. Discretionary effort is the key to 21^st-century productivity, and economic sustainability. The gift of discretionary effort is built on valuing human dignity, creating safety and security, extending social acceptance, and rationally aligning each individual employee with company purposes.

What is discretionary effort? Cultivation of discretionary effort is both an individual and a collective process to improve the level of energy and innovation that flows within an organization. It is neither a quick fix nor an expensive and resource-depleting process, and when done in a measured and incremental way, discretionary effort is a breakthrough improvement.

Traditional literature defines discretionary effort as the difference between the level of effort a worker is capable of bringing to an activity or task and the minimum effort required to do the work and get a paycheck. This minimum level of effort can be made by employees who are competent at their jobs but who are relatively unengaged in the overall goals of the company.

For example, experienced and knowledgeable workers may only be giving the minimum level of effort as they do routine work required by their job description: processing invoices, making sales calls, writing proposals, and completing work of a supportive nature such as coordination, follow-up, rework, rewrites, and clarifications. How would the results of their work be different if they understood the goals of the company and were giving discretionary effort instead of the minimum required to get a pay check?

Giving discretionary effort is a voluntary act. When an employee gives the company discretionary effort, it is an intentional, free-will choice. Before discretionary effort contributions are observable, they exist as potential in the mind of every employee as ideas to improve what is happening. These ideas represent great power waiting to be tapped that increase resources and reduce costs as workers add value to the tasks they perform. Leadership teams often think doing more with less is about computers, technology, and waste reduction strategies. Doing more with less includes this hidden gem of teaching managers how to earn the gift of discretionary effort from employees as opposed to demanding or forcing extra effort and long hours.

What Does it Mean to Earn the Gift?

Every employee has gifts or talents that are not visible on a resume or in a hiring interview. Some of these are gifts of character such as determination, purpose, and resilience. Think of the talents of employees wrapped in beautiful boxes sitting around them on the floor and on their desks. With this analogy, your entire office building would be filled with impressively wrapped packages waiting to be unwrapped as if it were a birthday party where the “gifts” are regularly unwrapped. The workers give these packages to you and their coworkers as your leadership team works with the concepts in this book and implements the Discretionary Effort Leadership Model.

Earning the gift of discretionary effort from employees begins with the members of your leadership team living and breathing the five levels of the Discretionary Effort Leadership Model themselves. As the leaders practice integrity and unwrap their own gifts of discretionary effort, their direct reports will see the positive results and want to imitate the leaders’ examples. In an environment of mutual confidence and trust, managers are respected and are in a position to earn the gifts of discretionary effort from employees.  When discretionary effort is modeled by management and is engrained in the culture, workers freely unwrap their gifts of discretionary effort as needed because they feel safe, respected, and trusted. 

A man at one company where we consulted told us, “My company has had my hands for over 30 years. You know, they could have had my head as well.” This quote illustrates two things. First, some companies do not place appropriate value on the gifts of the individual employee. Second, most workers want to contribute at higher levels than their environments allow. Discretionary effort is earned by recognizing workers as resources that can bring value beyond the obvious academic discipline and skills for which they were hired.

The Ross Brandau Discretionary Effort Leadership Model helps leaders earn the gift of discretionary effort and the release of knowledge that resides in the brains of employees on a daily basis, both of which help the company move forward to increased economic sustainability.

Figure 1.The Five Leadership Levels

When implemented, the five leadership levels outlined in the model make it possible for leaders at all levels of the organization to earn the gift of discretionary effort from employees on a regular basis. Notice that a work environment of integrity and gratitude provides a solid foundation for the implementation of the five levels.

The five levels of Discretionary Effort Leadership are:

1.      Safety and Security. Leadership Level 1 provides a safe and secure working environment for employees. Rules are followed, validated, improved, refined, and recognized on a daily basis at an individual level throughout the organization. Employers place a high worth on the security of every worker. The focus on security provides an environment free from bodily harm. A safe and secure environment is essential in order for employees to concentrate on continuous improvement. Employees need to be free to work rather than worry about safety and security issues.

2.      Social Acceptance. Leadership Level 2 describes the cultural norms and behaviors that recognize the human dignity of all employees. Everyone is recognized as a value-added part of the whole, or part of the family. Employees want to feel they are part of the core group. The more they feel part of the whole team, the more success will develop as they voluntarily contribute their discretionary energy.

3.  Rational Alignment. Leadership Level 3 is critical to the functioning of the entire organization. It is here that values, vision, and mission statements flow into long-term objectives and deadlines. Employees logically align with the values, vision, and mission of the organization and then rationally make daily work plans to reflect their stewardship. The daily tasks must rationally align with work output needed to move projects from theory into reality.

At this point in the process, it is important to assess the company systems, policies, and procedures to ensure the first three levels are not being inadvertently sabotaged. If the company is structurally sound and the first three levels are carefully implemented, the fourth and fifth levels will happen naturally.

4.      Emotional Commitment. Leadership Level 4 describes the difference between engagement and emotional commitment. Manifestations of low emotional commitment hinder and impede the flow of discretionary effort individually and collectively. Modeling emotional commitment clears the way for objective, value-added solutions where employees collaborate to solve complex problems and communicate to overcome misunderstandings.

5.      Authentic Contribution. The entire organization will recognize a victory when employees move to Leadership Level 5. At this level all team members take ownership and treat the business as their own. Employees take on the feel of partners in the organization.

Understanding how these five levels work is the key to organizational profitability and economic sustainability. 

Self-leadership is part of the leadership landscape, and you can’t change your circumstances until you first change yourself.

By Stedman Graham

I often say in my speeches that there could not be a better time in the history of our world to be living because, through technology, we have access to a global village.

Just by using our mobile devices and electronics, we can learn, build, develop, and create opportunities. We have the ability to self-empower and have information relevant to our development, identity, and purpose in life — if we understand how to work on ourselves. 

If you’re looking for relevancy, resources, and opportunity, it must start with yourself. Knowing who you are is the first step to your future. This is the pre-work necessary for self-leadership.

Self-leadership is connected to self-discovery, which is connected to constant education. This type of learning about yourself — deep, rich self-experience — develops new learned behaviors that keep you on track for a better, more meaningful existence. It is the successes and failures of self-discovery that lead you forward. 

Often, these words can blur together: self-determination, self-direction, self-empowerment — all ways of saying the same thing: You cannot love anyone else until you first love yourself. This core principle of life is at the heart of self-leadership too. You cannot lead anyone else until you first lead yourself. 

Leadership skills are important at all levels of engagement. It is difficult to have strong leadership without purpose and direction, a process for thinking, improved performance, and continual growth.

The key to self-leadership today is that we should always be in a constant state of growth. Nobody is perfect, and no one is expected to do everything right, but most do not know that — if we can fall down, pick ourselves up, start over and over again, and learn from our failures — we have a chance to reach our potential. It took me years to understand that the process of success is the same for everyone. The difference is some people know it and some people don’t. Everything is a process. 

No matter if you are a CEO, business owner, executive employee, or volunteer worker, we all have the opportunity to improve our lives and build more value in our personal and professional development. The value we give to ourselves is the value the world gives us. The world sees us as we see ourselves. Again, going back to self — you cannot change your circumstances until you first change yourself. 

Self-leadership is part of the leadership landscape.

It sets the tone for strategies for overcoming roadblocks. It helps us become authentic in our journey for success and achievement. It helps us manage, learn from others, and unleash our talents, abilities, and potential. We can improve our lives because we are building from a solid foundation of passion, purpose, and intent. Self-leadership helps us value our time, work on things that matter and that are important to us, and eliminate time wasters. As we eventually learn orders at the highest level of development, our organizational skills increase because we focus on outcomes that make us feel good about ourselves. 

Setting goals based on our vision becomes a process for execution and making things happen that are fulfilling and rewarding. We get to define, plan, and prepare with direction — as opposed to being caught up with external environmental conditions that have little or no meaning, can easily disappear, and cannot be sustained because we are simply reacting. 

In today’s environment, it is so important to have a clear vision of who you want to be and where you want to go.

The next important question to ask yourself is: How are you going to gain enough of the necessary information and experience to achieve your vision? That is a lifelong journey. Clarity today is so important because we have so much information that it can be overwhelming to focus on how to prioritize and put things in sequence and alignment. 

We often have so many options that we cannot minimize distractions. Social media, external world affairs, and day-to-day family challenges all must get done as well as taking care of ourselves. I never thought of those as skills, but in our modern society, it requires a lot of new skill development to navigate everything in our lives. “A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others do.” — Leroy Eims 

Self-leadership makes you appreciate what you have because everything starts with you.

Happiness doesn’t come from big pieces of great success but from small daily achievements. Your opportunities to achieve what you want always come from small steps, one at a time. You work every day, piece by piece, layer by layer. “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” — Abraham Lincoln

The more we understand these principles, the more we can accomplish in our lives and the more we can help those around us. We can channel the best of who we are to achieve success for ourselves and those we can lead. “I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.” — Helen Keller 

Self-leadership, to be effective, must answer these questions: What do you enjoy doing most? What gives your life meaning? What gives you peace of mind? What do you look forward to doing more than anything else? What would you do with your life even if you didn’t get paid for it?

Adding a value system to those things most important to you creates more opportunities to go deeper in our development. Self-leadership can be a difficult process and journey because it requires us to look at the positive and negative in our lives. The continuous journey of self-actualization can become a never-ending development process. That’s why it is so important to build in time for ourselves to become more productive and contribute more to ourselves and others. 

Considering all these issues is important to realizing the process of self-leadership. Our ability to evolve will depend on us. It is an inside job.

We keep working on ourselves, we go deeper and deeper in our development, and it does pay off. “You are not your circumstances, but you are your possibilities.” — Pat Healey

By Tony Robbins

Great leaders are great decision-makers. Anyone can make easy decisions with obvious outcomes, but what makes somebody a really effective leader is their capacity to make tough decisions. You know what I’m talking about. The decisions where there is tremendous uncertainty; where you are trying to make the right choice, but you can’t know for sure what it is. Sometimes, it’s about making a choice so you can move the ball forward, find out whether it is the right choice or not, and adapt accordingly.

Life is filled with choices. Real leaders understand that to move things forward, they must make tough decisions. At times, the fear of making the wrong decisions grips us so tightly we opt for indecision, allowing the fear of failure to immobilize us and impede our progress. To break the cycle, leaders can adopt simple principles and processes that I — and many of the executives I coach — rely on. These tools are simple, but practical steps for making those necessary tough decisions. Let’s explore four of the simple principles I adhere to when making challenging decisions.

All decision-making should be done in writing.

If you attempt to do everything in your head, your brain will often end up looping over the same conflicting thoughts. Instead of getting resolved, every possible new idea can create more stress because your mind keeps comparing it back to the first thought. What can break this pattern is the use of a visual element. Remember the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Take a moment to jot down your thoughts about the decision you are grappling with, your desires, and your concerns. Frequently, what seems intricate in our minds becomes remarkably clear and more straightforward when on paper.

Be clear about what you want and/or what the organization wants and needs.

The foundation of exceptional decision-making lies in clarity. To make effective choices, you must first gain crystal-clear clarity about your and your organization’s goals, values, and priorities. Ask yourself: What is the ultimate outcome that I am after through this decision?

This will provide clarity. Clarity is power. When you know what you want (your outcome) and your why (your purpose), decision-making becomes simplified.

Decisions are made on probability.

No one has a crystal ball to tell them with 100% certainty they’ve made the right decisions. It’s about taking inventory of the information available and making the best choice possible. Again, leaders are decision-makers, and they will often have to step into their decisions without total certainty that it’s going to work out. This is what sets them apart from everyone else. They’re willing to take action when everyone else is paralyzed by uncertainty.

Often, tough decisions are less about making the “right” choice and more about making a choice that can move the ball forward and discovering if it’s right or not. With indecision, we will never know what is right. If you wait to have all the information necessary to make a decision, the opportunity that the decision offered is usually gone, and you are living life like the average person versus the leader you’re meant to be. If you make a decision that turns out to be wrong or not the best choice, you can change things. The important part is making a decision to start with.

All decision-making is a clarification of what you and your organization value most.

Each decision we make should point to our values. It can be a tough choice you’re making, but if it aligns with what matters most to you and the organization, you are propelling yourself in the right direction.

There’s nothing worse than making a decision based on fear rather than what feels right in your heart. When faced with tough decisions, don’t let your limiting beliefs trap you into fear-based decision-making. My core belief is that a decision made from fear is almost always the wrong decision. Thoughts like “I’m worried this won’t work out because …” or “I don’t want to try this because …” need to be confronted. The easiest way is by expanding your options and exploring alternative choices or paths.

Seek out diverse perspectives, gather information quickly, and challenge your assumptions. By doing this, you can open the door to innovative solutions and unforeseen opportunities. Once you have your mind in the right place and all the information gathered, you need a logical and repeatable process to get those decisions made and you need a deadline. Otherwise, you’ll get lost in paralysis by analysis.

By Julie Van Ness

Growing up, I used to hear the saying, “Choose your friends, choose your future,” and I often wonder what life would have been like if I had not followed that sage advice.

I firmly believe that in today’s world — even more than ever — the same mindset has tremendous value in the business world. Whom you align with — and whom you choose not to align with — are equally important decisions with game-changing outcomes that will create a ripple effect throughout your professional and personal life. The journey to find those who are mission-aligned with purpose-driven values, strong ethics, and character can be a daunting challenge.

But one thing is for certain: By uniting and acting together, we become an irresistible force for good.

Through the Real Leaders community, many people have found multiple ways of connecting to elevate their purpose, surrounded by supportive, creative, and dedicated peers. An outstanding example of this purposeful mindset was at the Real Leaders UNITE event in early February 2024. This annual gathering of award-winning impact leaders is one of the few opportunities for mission-aligned leaders to connect and collaborate.

Lessons were learned from highly respected leaders including Stedman Graham, who guided our understanding of identity leadership; Lisa Bodell regarding radical simplification; Shark Tank’s Daymond John on raising capital and the do’s and don’ts of investor pitches; Tamara Loehr discussing building your personal brand to drive growth and impact; Shadi Bakour on the power of collaboration; and Peggy Shell on cultivating impactful teams, among many more.

There were also global high-profile celebrities and business leaders who care about social entrepreneurship, such as Pharrell Williams, who by video shared his words of advice and the latest news about his phenomenal nonprofit organization Black Ambition, which is helping close the opportunity gap for entrepreneurs of color and was the cover story in our Real Leaders Spring 2024 edition.

“Each and every one of you has the power, the will, and the capacity to make a difference in the world in which you live in.”
— HARRY BELAFONTE

In a room filled with voluminous wisdom, everyone witnessed a collective spirit to leverage our business model and make the world a better place.

Every one of us has the choice of playing a small, medium, or tremendously large role in progress
— or doing absolutely nothing. I think singer Harry Belafonte nailed it before he passed away
in 2023 when he referred to “the power, will, and the capacity to make a difference,” which is why choosing whom you align with, what events you attend, and what you learn from those experiences truly matters.

Most of us see positive changes occurring within the business community, so let’s push those doors open even wider to include more newcomers, voices, choices, and solutions. There are no boundaries that we can’t collectively advance to create a far better future.

Julie Van Ness, Real Leaders CEO