What is the secret to recognizing and realizing your raison d’être? Stopping to ask yourself a single illuminating question will dramatically change your perspective and empower you to define your own powerful, personal philosophy. Mindfully shaking up how you think about your ambition and life purpose elicits inspired creativity, fresh energy, initiative, resilience, and prepares you to spot and passionately pursue your next great opportunity. Today’s show explores the easy-to-access foundation for success and happiness, including making the contribution you were born to make. Guest Bart O’Brien chats with me about hitting those points in our life when we realize, “I need a second act.” Bart, who defines himself in part as a “professional athlete in the sport of marketing,” pursued a career starting various companies, fielding start-up false starts and major financial setbacks before going back to high tech to co-found Calico Commerce. His first solo software startup, RSA Data Security, was acquired by Security Dynamics for $250 million. He sold most of the stock to finance his wedding, honeymoon, and the purchase of his and his wife, Barb’s, first house. Then Calico Commerce went public in 1999 at a valuation of $1.8 billion. Bart sold only a small portion of his stock before the high tech crash of 2000 and subsequent failure of Calico, but this was enough for him to heed his own “I need a next act” wake-up call by making a down payment to purchase a vineyard – now O’Brien Estate Winery – to make Barb’s “dream of owning land in Napa Valley” come true. Bart’s philosophy is that many people don’t think about how precious life is until it is too late. Today’s social milieu seduces many people into focusing on entertaining themselves and on immediate gratification. Instead of consciously and constantly assessing, “Where am I now? Where do I want to be? What’s working? What’s not?” we drift along. The consequence? The cumulative effect of seemingly insignificant decisions costs us big-time. We wake up in the middle part of our lives and realize, “Wow. I haven’t been working toward a really substantive goal. I’ve been spending my time just hanging out, mindlessly doing stuff. My life’s going to be over, and what have I done?” Rarely are we taught the power of sitting down and earnestly pretending that we are on our deathbed, looking back on our life, soul-searching when we’re out of time: “Gosh, if I were to fast-forward to my final days, what would I wish I would have done? Who would I wish I would have become?” True, once you are really at the end of your life, it is too late to do anything about those regrets. But today’s show reveals that by mindfully going back to the future now, whether you’re in your 20’s, or 25, or 30, or 40, or 50, you create a powerful new starting point – while you still have time to passionately create a successful and meaningful career and life trajectory.

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Are you scaring your people into mediocrity? All leaders want to outperform, outsell, and out-innovate the competition. And most teams are fully capable of doing so. The problem: we consistently say and do things that spark unconscious fears and keep our people stuck in their Critter State. Smart leaders have to get their people unstuck out of this this primitive fight, flight, or freeze mode and fully engaged, replacing their old limiting mental patterns with new patterns that foster optimal performance, engagement, and brilliance to leave competitors in the dust. Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author and applied neuroscience expert Christine Comaford, shares potent yet easy-to-learn neuroscience techniques from her new bestselling book, SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together, that quickly move people into the Smart State, where they have full access to their own creativity, innovation, higher consciousness, and emotional engagement. What results do you want? • Close sales up to 50% faster • Grow revenues and profits by up to 201% annually • Develop new products and services up to 48% faster • Increase individual performance by up to 50% annually and accountability by 100%. • You and your team spot changes in your market more quickly, then pounce on them to create the future you want. Today’s show offers a crash course in Comaford’s proven system that has already created hundreds of millions of dollars in new value for her clients. Comaford is a thought leader who helps midsized and Fortune 1000 companies navigate growth change, an expert in human behavior and applied neuroscience, and the bestselling author of Rules For Renegades. Bill Gates calls her “super high bandwidth.” Bill Clinton has thanked her for “fostering American entrepreneurship.” Newsweek says, “By reputation, Christine is the person you want to partner with.” During her diverse career, she has consulted to two White Houses, has built and sold five of her own businesses, and has helped more than fifty clients exit their businesses at record high valuations. She writes a leadership column for Forbes.com and is frequently quoted in the business and technology media. Tune in today to learn how you and your team can achieve SmartTribe brilliance, move your team forward and reach your next revenue inflection point. As a bonus, listeners can join Christine Comaford’s Tribe to get a free sample chapter of her book, plus free webinars, resources, and videos for building brilliant teams.

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How does someone who is obsessed live peacefully with others who are not? That question summarizes the quandary faced by company founders and their families. To answer it, today’s guest, Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, and I examine the impact—for better and for worse—of entrepreneurial businesses on families and relationships, and vice versa. Meg is the author of For Better or For Work, a vital guide to navigating the emotional and logistical terrain of business-building while simultaneously enjoying a fulfilling family life. For Better or For Work was Selected by Entrepreneur magazine as one of the best business books of the year. From the trials of co-habiting with a home-based business to the queasy necessity of borrowing money from family and friends to the complexities of intergenerational succession, no topic is taboo. Entrepreneurs, listen in on our conversation about how to build a successful business without sacrificing healthy family relationships to the financial and emotional rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship. No entrepreneurial family trudges the hard trail of company-building alone. If you have embarked on such an enterprise, you and your spouse or significant other will find comfort and guidance in the experiences of others like you. If you have not yet started a business, today’s show invites you to take a good hard look at your entrepreneurial calling before leaping. Meg Cadoux Hirshberg draws on the struggles and triumphs that she and her husband Gary experienced as he built Stonyfield Yogurt. She also shares powerful stories and insights from other families, gathered through hundreds of interviews for her book, as well as in her role as contributing editor and regular columnist for Inc. Magazine. Meg’s Inc. column, “Balancing Acts,” focuses on work/life balance issues in an entrepreneurial setting, Today’s show, For Better or For Work, will remind you that the long hours and late nights spent on the business or with the family are worth the effort, and will give you tools for making both endeavors successful.

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The late, existential psychologist Rollo May wrote, in The Courage To Create, “Courage is not the absence of periodic despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.” This is a particularly compelling notion today, when so many young people, who have recently graduated from college and are trying to craft a career, are having not only great difficulty finding a job, but are having great difficulty envisioning creating a meaningful, inspiring career, given what’s going on in today’s tough economic environment and brutal job market. The same struggle is occurring for many professionals who have lost their jobs, as well as for those who are employed but are dying to make a career transition. Periodic despair threatens to chip away at our optimism and test the courage it takes to stay true to our own ambitious visions. Rollo May also wrote, “Nor is the courage to create mere stubbornness. We shall surely have to create with others. But if you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.” My guest, Greg Cahill, explores with me the courage to create, including: What is the courage to create? How do we nurture it in ourselves and in our children? How do we use the courage to create to craft the career path of our dreams? How do young people keep creative courage in today’s environment? How do older professionals who are dying to make a career transition do that? How do people who have lost their jobs keep their courage to create a meaningful career? Greg Cahill certainly understands the courage to create. He is the editorial director of Strings Magazine, the only publication in the U.S. for violinists, violists, cellists, fiddlers and all bowed string instrument players. Greg Cahill is also a freelance journalist for The Absolute Sound and The Pacific Sun; he’s covered arts and entertainment for Gannett News Service; and he has worked extensively as an investigative reporter. Greg is also a film critic and has written program notes for the Mill Valley Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Festival. Finally, he is a musician in his right. Join us for a fascinating discussion about what is takes to have the courage to create today – and how to use that courage to create your own inspiring career path, find your own niche, build an enduring personal brand, listen to your own being — and make the contribution you were born to make. Having the courage to create means that we don’t have to be swept along by fate, the markets, our bosses, or our personal relationships because we always have our ambitious vision – and the courage to create and stay that true course.

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FINALLY you have that epiphany for a compelling new online business, a hot new product or service, or a brilliant new book idea. This is it! You’re so excited – at first. You bounce out of bed for a week, fired up with an enthusiasm and passion you thought you’d lost forever. And then, doubt overtakes joy. Instantly, you’re dragged down by the negative voices sounding off in your head: “What do I do first? Keyword research? Search engine optimization? What kind of blog? Design? Prototype? How much is this going to cost?” Your fresh idea gets buried with worry and confusion. And the most damning of the self-sabotaging messages rising up from the cacophony? “Who do I think I am? I’m a nobody.” Or, “There’s too much competition – and they’re better. Or, “Do I really have anything new to sell, anything of interest to offer, to add, to say? Hasn’t it been done already? Why would anyone want what I’m offering? The market is saturated. It’s too late.” Get ready to silence those doubts and to be inspired by my special guest today, Danny Iny, Founder of Firepole Marketing. In less than one year, Danny Iny went from being a nobody to: being showcased on 100+ prestigious, high-profile blogs; growing his own blog to from 140 to 14,000 monthly readers; co-authoring – with Guy Kawasaki, Brian Clark, Mitch Joel, and a lot of other people you’d probably recognize – the book called “Engagement From Scratch! How Super-Community Builders Create a Loyal Audience, and How You Can Do The Same!; and releasing the free “Naked Marketing Manifesto,” soon to be a full-fledged book. Listen in as we discuss Danny Iny’s elegant, uncluttered way of building an audience, a loyal following, that wants to hear from you – and is actively engaged in helping you deliver to them exactly the advice or product or service they’re dying to get from you. He knows how to get your writing and posts on major sites – and have those sites begging you to contribute again and again, thus building your presence and growing your following even more. Finally, Danny has a brand new, wholly original, inventive, outside the box way of writing a book – a way of serving up *exactly* what your audience wants – using his unique creative, strategic and super-streamlined process that is like nothing you’ve ever heard of before. Get ready to have your ambition fired up! Plus, because you’re going to want more after today’s show, as a special bonus to my AMBITION Radio Show listeners, Danny Iny and I will be serving up more gold-standard information on a Free Live Training: “More Traffic & Subscribers Via Fast, Easy Writing” on Thursday September 27 at 3 pm ET; Click here to register. All you need is a phone or a computer to listen in — and we’ll invite you to ask us your burning questions during this free live Webinar training. All you have to do is show up.

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I’ll bet when you see photos of Marilyn Monroe your first thoughts are, “Sexy, dumb-blond bombshell. I’ll bet what you DON’T think is, “Now THERE was a smart and complex woman of many parts: savvy business woman with a brilliant intellect; a genius at recruiting key mentors; a master at strategically achieving her ambitious goals even after countless failures, rejections, and firings. You don’t think, “She was a feminist, a progressive thinker.” Nor do you you think, “There was a woman with fierce anti-racist attitudes” – and you aren’t reminded of her radical politics throughout her career. Photos of her almost certainly don’t trigger thoughts of a woman with a deep and ongoing interest in spirituality. In the year that marks the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death comes a revelatory new biography by my guest on this week’s show, leading feminist historian Dr. Lois Banner, author of MARILYN: The Passion and the Paradox (Bloomsbury; August 1, 2012). Banner has written MARILYN to illuminate a new Marilyn. Dr. Banner believes that Marilyn was one of the great female figures of the twentieth century and that her life should stand as a beacon to women of the modern age. While most biographers have credited others for crafting Marilyn’s success, Banner proves that she did it mostly on her own, with a driving ambition; a savvy understanding of the importance of building a trusted advisory board by going to the top for mentors; a brilliant intellect coupled with a dedication to ongoing education and training; and a tenacious willingness to take risks, even after having been relentlessly kicked down again and again. Marilyn battled childhood stuttering, sexual abuse, and later, a sexist patriarchal Hollywood establishment – and triumphed over it in the end. Tune in to this week’s show for fresh, smart insights behind the dumb, bombshell victim persona—lessons that are relevant to ambitious women today, going for their dreams in a world that hasn’t changed all that much in the 50 years since Marilyn Monroe’s death.

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Whether you’re looking for the next step in your career and don’t know where to begin, or already have a good start on your job search but need a push to help you to stay laser-focused, get ready to be inspired. My guest, TheLadders Job Search Expert Amanda Augustine serves up fresh, practical advice to help speed your success. If you’re truly ready to start your search in earnest, dying to infuse it with fresh energy, willing to put in the required time, and prepared to do your part — including learning from experts who can fast-forward your objectives and help you avoid needless mistakes — this is the show for you. If you’re open to feedback and willing to try things TheLadders way, you CAN accelerate and hit your ambition target. Trust me. TheLadders has been working very hard at this for a long time and they know what they’re doing. Amanda Augustine joins me this week to help you get that dream job offer — after all, that’s TheLadders’ job! Get ready to dig deep and be relentlessly enthusiastic about your job search or career transition goals. Your right job at the right time is right around the corner.

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You CAN transform your relationship with money. There are 3 levels of Financial Development: Survival, Stability, and Affluence. Listen in as I chat with my back-by-popular-demand guest, the leading authority on women and money, Barbara Stanny, about how, for women, the journey from Stability to Affluence is a very different game from the one most successful men are playing. This new game, Sacred Success®, merges higher incomes with a higher calling. Sacred Success® means following your soul’s path, for your own bliss and the benefit of others, while being richly rewarded. Sacred Success® begins with a strong profit motive, and then requires that you give up profit as your primary goal. The Primary Goal for Sacred Success® is Achieving Greatness. Today’s show maps out how you can take your career and your income higher AND discover your soul’s purpose, based on your deepest truths. Learn the surprising 4-step process for achieving Sacred Success® Start right now on your own path to Greatness!

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There is nothing more galling than picking up a newspaper or business magazine and seeing a story that has your name written all over it – except that your competitors, not you, are quoted in the piece. You wonder, “How did THEY get noticed by journalists? Why is their expert advice being featured instead of mine?” Listen in as I chat with Forbes contributing writer, media consultant, and writing coach Brooke Axtell about how women can quickly get on journalists’ and radio and television producers’ radars to become THE go-to experts in their fields. Women make up just 19% of experts in the news media. In order to address this inequality – and get quoted in the mass media – women need to learn how to own their expertise. Sharing your expertise begins with the decision that your voice has value. Many women have internalized the message that self-expression is selfish and the pursuit of power is inherently harmful. We need to shift the way we think in order to create a compelling public image for career advancement. Today’s show serves up practical tips for embracing your worth, owning your expertise, and quickly becoming a stand-out media maven.

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Today’s guest, top LinkedIn expert Wayne Breithbarth, is back by popular demand. After Wayne’s first appearance on AMBITION radio, listeners flooded my inbox with “Encore!!” requests for more from the masterful and entertaining author of THE #1 selling LinkedIn book of all time, “The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success: Kick-start Your Business, Brand and Job Search.” As Wayne approaches his three-year anniversary of helping people use LinkedIn to turn their business and professional goals into results using this matchless search platform, he’s noticing a change. In the beginning, most of the people Wayne met really had no idea what they were supposed to do with their LinkedIn accounts — other than connect with people they knew and some they don’t knew. LinkedIn was viewed as just another pretty Face[book] and not worth the effort. Now he meets many businesspeople who have mastered beginning LinkedIn techniques and are ready to step it up and leverage the full power LinkedIn’s proprietary search algorithm has to offer to business people, companies, and organizations. Tune in as Wayne and I discuss ALL NEW secrets and super fast action steps he has shared with more than 10,000 attendees at his 250+ training classes and in his book. Log on to your LinkedIn account and have it in front of you during today’s show as you learn these winners’ secrets: When is a 100% complete LinkedIn profile NOT complete? Do you know about this brand new information section you must add in order for your profile to STILL be 100% complete (and why, if you’re not a 100%-er, you’re competitors will blow right by you)? How to optimize your profile for search results — you want to be at the top, don’t you? How to save three of your searches — it’s like having a 24/7 LinkedIn virtual assistant searching for potential prospects for you. How to join groups with lots of the right, targeted members so that you’re talking to the largest possible bull’s-eye audience. How to communicate powerfully with your network so that your voice is heard across multiple channels. Why and how to connect with the “most connected” — You want to be connected to the most connected people in your industry, region, specialty area, etc., don’t you? Plus, grab a pen as Wayne serves up six new whiplash-fast actions you can do in just 15 minutes a day (or save the up for a weekend morning) to power-up your presence on LinkedIn. Wayne Breithbarth inspires and quickly shows you exactly how to use this hot platform to get from where you are to where you want to be!

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