I’m in the throes of the Small Biz Super Summit, along with a new client project, and preparing for the launch of a new division of my business.

And I get an email from a client, angry with me for “violating her privacy”.

The claim was unfounded, and after resolving the misunderstanding, I finally decided to let her go.

Yes, I fired my client.

You are FIRED!

See, there comes a time in your business life where enduring the stress and strain of some clients isn’t worth ANY sum of money. Some of you have heard me say this before, but I wanted to let you know that I still face this issue from time to time – despite my well-crafted Perfect-Fit Customer Profiles.

Not only did this client email me with false accusations, she also launched into a tirade in a group forum of her company, where other people could hear her rant (and later report back to me), but I could not offer the slightest commentary on the situation.

Instead of coming directly to the source of the issue (presumably me), she chose to make a spectacle of herself in front of other potential clients.

Let’s be clear: I have a loyalty to my clients. I also have a loyalty to my family. If you try to prevent me from earning a living to feed my family, my loyalty dries up like so much old paint.

There are a number of lessons from this event, which I’ll save for another post. But then, I had to fire a colleague.

At one time, this person and I traveled in relatively similar circles. I shared my book with her, and invited her into my community to share her wisdom. Over time, our paths diverged in the wilderness, but I still kept some contact with her and thought of her as a colleague I would refer business to.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

She “wrote” a post on her blog, and tweeted out the link. Because the title was a direct quote of something I say ALL the time, I thought it was worth checking out, and possibly sharing with my own audience.  It was a great post. She had pulled much of the content straight out of my book – with a few additions (presumably of her own) to make it her own.

I was shocked. Firstly because I knew this thief. Secondly, because I really didn’t think that much of myself that someone would want to steal my stuff (that’s another post all unto itself).

There are stories like this all over the place. The first one that comes to mind is Jeff Slutsky’s story about Office Depot using his “six dollar haircut” story in an ad that ran last year. Slutsky, however, had a happier ending than I believe I will.

Not only did this “colleague” plagiarize my work, but when I commented on her blog with a “great post” kind of remark, it was deleted.

So not only did she steal my stuff, she KNEW she was stealing it and, frankly, didn’t seem to care.

At first, I tried to relax and ignore it. But this nagging feeling wouldn’t go away. Especially since this same person had publicly remarked at an earlier point in our business lives that she felt that at some point everything she ever learned became “hers” to teach as her own.

I consulted my amazingly grounded and insightful coach, @SarahRobinson, who indicated that while she was not surprised at the person in question, that it was mostly sapping my energy in a way that wouldn’t give me resolution.

So I fired my “colleague”. Putting more distance between us, and spending as little energy as possible on the situation.

Tip: Nobody “just knows” everything. We all learn from someone. Give credit where credit is due, folks.

Thinking I was finished with all the firing for a single week, I then had to fire a friend.

This person was fairly close to me, and sadly, known to be a bit out of control emotionally. Their behavior could get pretty outrageous at times, and if alcohol was involved, well, let’s just say only the sober people in the room would remember what happened.

This person is an incredibly smart, insightful, enjoyable person, with an enormous heart and fiercely loyal – until their emotional issues rear their ugly head(s). It gets so bad that they start to believe their own lies as truths. It’s been going on for years – longer than I’ve even known them.

Well, the lies finally caught up this week. And I couldn’t be there to help fix the problem. The problem was really beyond fixing. All enabling had to stop, and the truth had to be revealed.

I had entrusted this friend with a special task, and that task remains undone. The good news is that I wasn’t counting on them to complete the task, and had a back-up plan in place. The bad news is that I wasn’t counting on this friend to complete the task, and had a back-up plan in place.

So when word got around that they were playing around doing other things instead of focusing on the task they committed to, I fired the friend.

Well, a temporary lay-off, anyway.

We can be as well-meaning as we want to be, but when you make a commitment, in my mind, you stick to it. Come Hell or high water.

And lest you see this as an incredibly downer post, I want to assure you that I firmly believe that God is nudging me to create space to accommodate newer, better, more constructive relationships in my life and work.

I can already see it happening. With the awesome help of my coach (did you see her Relationships project?), and the internal journey I’m travelling, there are new friends on the horizon, new clients on the books, and better colleagues to forge ahead with (ending a sentence with a preposition, ACK!).

Bring. It. On.

“True faith is never found alone; it is accompanied by expectation.” – C. S. Lewis

My assistant likes to forward me pertinent posts that she gets from a daily inspirational email list she’s on. Today, I found this one sitting in my inbox.

Lewis was known as a Christian apologist, but that’s not where I’m going today. Today, I want to talk about the “expectation” part of the quote. Because as I sat there reading it, I realized how much of what we get out of life is dependent upon what we’re expecting.

I like to tell my coaching clients they need to “expect more to get more.” Expect better to get better. Believe you deserve something greater than your current circumstance and your brain (specifically the RAS) will force you to take action to change your situation.

Where are your expectations?

The key to this seemingly simple concept is the power of belief. When you believe something, it’s a deep, inner knowing. You just KNOW that something is going to happen, something is going to change, the hero will beat the bad guy. You just know. You believe it. You just know.

What is it that you know – you absolutely believe – about yourself, your life, your business? That’s the foundation to everything you’re building in this world.

If you truly believe your business and your life are amazing and life-giving, they are.

If you truly believe you’re a screw up, you are.

As Napoleon Hill said “Whatever the mind can conceive, and believe, the mind can achieve.”

This isn’t about mystical “Law of Attraction” woo-woo stuff. This is about getting your mind and your goals in alignment. I don’t want you sitting there day after day saying “I am rich and powerful” when you’ve got thirteen cents in the bank. I want you to be honest about where you’re at so you can start adjusting your course to where you truly want to be in your life.

Expect better to get better. Expect more to get more.

The problem with belief is that we can’t get there without faith. Faith in something. It’s the reason you’re so nervous when you first started driving lessons: you had no faith in your abilities. You believed that you could learn how to drive, and you probably also believed that you didn’t know what to expect when you started driving.

So, in a controlled environment, you began to learn how to do drive, acting in faith that eventually you would increase your skill and confidence to the point that you would one day be driving with your knees while you’re talking on your hands free cell and applying lipstick.

Faith made it possible.

You expected that you could learn and that eventually there’d be evidence of your competence.

It’s also why we don’t drive in a world full of auto-accidents. We genuinely believe that the drive coming at us will stay on his side of the road. Why? Because we’ve had enough evidence over the years to validate that belief.

Belief comes after validation. Faith is the seed that must be planted to take the first steps toward new beliefs.

Look at what you truly believe. Look at what you WANT to believe. Notice the gap and start looking for ways to provide your brain with evidence to close the gap. That’s the only way to create a new belief that sticks.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say you want to make a million dollars, but you’ve never even earned $50,000 in a single year. Don’t shoot for the million unless you KNOW it’s possible. Shoot for $50,000 first. That’s more possible in your mind. It’s more believeable. You’ve got a foundation behind you that says you’re more likely to achieve that anyway. Make that your goal, and as you get closer to it, inch up your goal.

Today, $50,000. Tomorrow, $75k. Next month, $150k.

Remember when you finally got that driver’s license? You thought you could take on the world, right? Autobahn here we come!

That’s what happens when your mind is in sync with your beliefs. You feel invincible, and you’re ready for a bigger goal.

Stop short changing what I call “pit stop goals”. You need them to build confidence and ultimately provide enough evidence in your mind that you CAN accomplish whatever you desire. Sometimes it pays to dream SMALL instead of thinking BIG all the time.

I learned this the hard way… but that’s another story for another day.

Scientists do this all the time. They create a hypothesis to test and then act in faith to test that hypothesis. If the evidence from the tests proves positive, they’ve got a new belief. If it doesn’t, they’ve disproven their hypothesis.

You can do this, too. Repeat after me:

“I think that I would like to (accomplish/have/be) ______. In order to do that, I would need _________. So I’m going to start collecting what I need to test my hypothesis, and track the results.”

Expect that there will be an outcome, but don’t make an emotional investment just yet in what the outcome might be. Emotional investments trap us in vicious spirals of doubt, anxiety, and fear. Just test it and see what happens. If it doesn’t work, then you know you need to try things differently.

Oh, and don’t start big. Start very, very small. The smallest next step you can think of. What is the very next step to achieving that $50,000? Maybe it’s making $100 this week (or $10 tomorrow). Start there. Start as small as you can to see what evidence results. Then keep testing as you go along. Keep the stakes low until you’ve built up a solid case of evidence in favor of your new belief. Then, momentum kind of has a way of rolling things along from there.

Questions? Think I’m up in the night on this? Share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think!

I saw it in a book I picked up the other day, and I cringed.

“God (or universe, or spirit, or whatever)“

Right there in black and white, the author was apologizing for believing in God. He didn’t outright say it, but I see it more and more as we strive for “correctness” and “tolerance” we’re watering down our own faith stance to accommodate others.

In fact, I’ve side-stepped it myself. Couching God in safe, generic terms like “universe” or “spirit” or something equally mundane.

Thus, the guilt.

Godly enough, I got my first pimp-slap of the year today from my new friend, Leesa Barnes. Her evolutionary post about ‘breaking a hinge‘ ends with a quote from the first book of Kings.

Yes, from the Bible.

It was not an intentional slap, I know, because we’ve talked recently about this almost unspoken undercurrent of unrest in the marketplace. In our conversations, we shared scriptures, ideas, rantings, complaints, and even some of our more personal beliefs about things like God. I shared my recent discovery of Bruce Barton and his writings about Jesus as one of the most accomplished businessmen in the world.

You can call God whatever you like, but for me, I specifically choose God, so please don’t ask me to use something else.

Reading that scripture was a holy awakening to me, and a reminder of our recent conversation.

Well-meaning colleagues and friends have strongly encouraged me to keep my faith to myself or at the very least “tone it down” for general consumption.

God isn’t for general consumption.

Not everyone can handle His message. Not everyone wants to hear that message. I get that.

For as many times as I’ve said “your business is an extension of who you are” it’s even more imperative that I vocalize that my faith is also an extension, if not the very definition, of who I am.

I’m not claiming perfection or blamelessness here, and I think anyone that knows me, knows this to be true.

I screw up a LOT.

I’m also open to God’s direction. Often doing things that don’t seem to make sense to other people because I feel called to serve in a particular capacity.

And I’m not the only one.

There’s a revolution happening. I hesitate to say “behind the scenes” because it’s not so behind the scenes lately. They’re coming out of the woodwork. Business owners tired of the lies, the fakery, the illusions of success gilt to a thin veneer – that crumble all too easily.

They’re tired of having to tip-toe around anyone not of their faith so as not to be seen as a Bible-thumping, teetotaling puritan in conservative clothing.

That ain’t me. I don’t force-feed anyone my truth. You have the option to bail any time you like.

But you DON’T have that option if I’ve never given it to you. So I’m extending it now.

My 60-day journey ends soon. Signs of land are approaching, and all the details are coming soon, I promise. Some things have been tortuous; others, miraculous. All of them necessary to pave the way for the big things God has planned for me in 2011.

And I’m not the only one. The revolutionaries are all around you. You may even be one of them. Trying to figure out how to cross the chasm between God and your message in the marketplace. Trying to figure out where to tread so that you tread lightly enough to not set off a few land mines along the way. I’m meeting more and more people with that same sticking point.

Screw it.

Stop “tippin on cotton” and lay it out there. That was the message I got today, so I lay it before you now. You’re going to make mistakes, people aren’t going to understand, and yes, a few people will probably even call you names.

Jesus had it a LOT worse than that, didn’t he?

As an intuitive coach (and that’s the first time I’ve publicly said that), I pray before every coaching session and ask God to guide me so that I can provide the best possible help to my clients when I am working with them. I don’t ask “universe” or “spirit” to channel through me, I ask for God’s help.

Why should I hide that from my clients? Kind of a pertinent detail, don’t you think?

Likewise, when I screw up, it’s God that I turn to for help, guidance, forgiveness and direction. And many of my clients do as well. Instead of it being a bone of contention, it actually becomes an endearing quality to those that work most closely with me. Why should I deny it?

There are those who have said to me that I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face – essentially eliminating a portion of my “target market” by making a public declaration of my faith.

Isn’t that the point of target marketing? If people don’t want to work with me as I am, then they’re NOT my target market, correct?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying God is a marketing ploy, a strategy, or a tactic to be “used” to grow my business.

I’m talking about transparency, ethics, and the truth that my clients deserve.

Maybe you don’t want to work with a coach that prays for you. You have a right to know that. Maybe you don’t want to hear stories of “divine downloads” or how putting God at the center of everything in my life (including my business) is radically changing everything in my world.

You have a right to know, before you invest your dollars with me, how I do what I do – and WHY I do what I do.

You don’t have to believe it, but if you don’t even know what it is in the first place, you have no idea what you’re paying for.

So tonight, as I lay my head down and wrap the first day of this new year, I’ll be offering up prayers, re-dedicating everything to God for 2011, and beyond.

Prayers that this year will be infinitely better than last year.

Prayers that abundance is something you truly feel, not just a buzz word that people banter around.

Prayers that your life will be enriched in more ways than you can count on all your phalanges.

Prayers to bless all the other revolutionaries making their leap across the chasm this year.

Prayers for my life, my faith, my business, clients, family, friends… and YOU.