How to Manage Conflict in Your Family Business: Building Empathy

Conflict is a natural and inevitable part of family businesses. It is a top reason that families come to me looking for help. Conflict can arise due to disagreements about business decisions, unresolved tensions and dysfunctions between family members. Sometimes it is simply because the close quarters of a family business can be breeding grounds for conflict. People in conflict tend to lock themselves into their own position.  They repeat pattens and are unwilling to compromise. However, if not managed effectively, conflict can cause serious damage to the business and relationships within it. In this blog post, we will discuss how to build empathy in order to manage conflict more effectively in your family business. What is true empathy? We …

The Big Illusion: Things Will Work Out on Their Own. How to Break the Habit of Procrastination and Make Critical Decisions

In our work at The Center for Conscious Living and Fulfillment, clients often come to us after months or years of putting off critical decisions. Many of them are now standing right in the middle of a crossroads and need to make a decision about their business and their life– and fast. Some of these decisions may be about transferring and/or exiting their business, letting a long-time leader go, having a difficult conversation with a family member in the business, working on succession and estate planning, etc. All these things that get labeled as “important but not urgent” but have been put off for so long, that the consequences of putting them off have started to show. They may be …

A True Compass: How to Navigate Life’s Crossroads

We all come to crossroads in our lives. Consequential life decisions that– no matter their size– always have the potential to have long-term impact on our personal life, professional life, and even our family life. Many people try to navigate these crossroads without a true compass, without a true sense of purpose. We would never try to navigate a new city without knowing where we were going or which direction we were heading, yet when it comes to something as important as the precious time we have left in our lives, we can go in circles. In our work at The Center for Conscious Living and Fulfillment TM, we realized that most of the people we helped came to us …

Succession: How to Exit Your Own Business Successfully by Creating Continual Purpose

Without question, one of the biggest challenges that brings family business clients to us is the difficulty that owners- and founders especially- have in exiting the business. Though as an owner, you are not always immediately conscious of this. When your identity has been so deeply tied into the business you may feel purposeless without it. As a result, this subconscious grip you have on the business leads to many of the roadblocks that come up during a succession process. As a martial artist, I have always had an interest in Japanese culture and way of life. The book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life dives into bringing joy and meaning into your life every single …

Business and Spiritual Life: Building an Aligned and Approachable Practice

Few people seek us out to work on their spirituality, yet we often end up going there at some point. The fact of the matter is we are all mortal. This life will pass. How you define yourself and your experience living this life are both keys to much of how you will navigate your life. The way you feel about spirituality will inarguably affect every aspect of your life–from your business, to how you raise your children, to how you treat yourself and what you believe about the world. Believing in something greater and beyond ourselves is a choice. Spirituality is one of the foundational building blocks of the method that we use in our work, because we all …