We have a perception problem. Knowledge is not a prerequisite for success. Some of the most knowledgeable people on the planet are unhappy, unhealthy, financially destitute and struggle to have meaningful connections with other people.

Success is a consequence of wisdom, and wisdom is knowledge applied through experience. And even that isn’t the full story, because we don’t really learn from our experiences, if we did, we wouldn’t keep on doing the things that no longer serve us in relation to our expansion and success. We learn from evaluated experience. So our true learning and the foundation for greater success in life comes from knowledge applied through an evaluated experience, the outcome of which is wisdom.

Interestingly, we rarely choose to learn from success either. It often takes failure for our eyes to open (although many people fail to learn from failure too). I’ve seen many leaders in business carry out a detailed post mortem on a failed contract opportunity, which is a very useful exercise, yet rarely have I seen them do the same on a successful one. If you aren’t willing to also learn from your successes then how on Earth can you expect to replicate them in the future?

Once again, it’s a perception problem, and it’s not the only one. Failure has become a dirty word for many people, yet failure is a necessary component of success. You need to experience what’s not right in order to understand what is.

That’s why the journey of successful entrepreneurs is littered with failures, some of them catastrophic by many people’s standards. And yet what differentiated those successful few was that they understood the process, dusted themselves down, assessed where it went wrong, adjusted their though processes and behaviors, and got on with it. They understood that success is not a consequence of what you have but who you are, the purpose of failure is to help you grow in order to become the person worthy of the success you intend for your life. It’s a truth that applies to every aspect of life, from boardroom negotiations to personal relationships.

Failure is the most potent form of learning there is. Sadly, most people attempt to avoid it by not making decisions, scared of the risk. Growth cannot occur in the absence of risk. Ironically, by avoiding failure, they’re already experiencing it, they’re just not aware of the fact and consequently, not learning in the process. Failure is not in the falling down; it’s in the staying down. That is why I say in the interest of your success, I hope you fail.

Every individual has been gifted with unique abilities in which to draw that unlimited potential into performance. Sadly, so very few of us choose to do so. It’s been said that many people possess a hundred acres of possibilities but keep only one acre under cultivation. Why? The primary reason is most people are unwilling to take what they perceive to be risks.

Taking risks is essential for success. It provides the birthing process for unexpressed potential. Success is a consequence of growth and growth is a consequence of risk. All growth occurs from the willingness to take risks, and yet, for most people, risk is something that is simply unpalatable.

It’s not as if I’m referring to the kind of risk that puts everything on the line (and that’s what the most highly successful people are willing to do by the way). I’m referring to how many people consider it a risk to do anything outside of the routine of mediocrity that is often referred to as a “comfort zone”, living out the same old daily/weekly/monthly activities, rarely, if ever, willing to even contemplate doing anything outside of that routine in order to help them achieve more in their personal and professional lives.

It’s the default setting of the masses, and there is nothing more limiting and detrimental to success in life.

It’s no exaggeration that most people tip-toe their way through life hoping to make it safely to death. In a recent study, fifty people over the age of ninety-five where asked “if you could live your life over again, what would you do differently?” The most common answer was “if I had the chance to do it all again, I would risk more”.

Risk and growth are the fast lanes on the highway leading to success. What evidence exists right now in your personal and professional life that indicates you are willing to take risks?

This short-lived reflective period is unquestionably fed by cultural tradition, New Years Resolution, a societal imprint that bizarrely maintains its popularity despite the overwhelming evidence of its failure.

There is a significant difference between a wish and an intention. Human intention changes everything, it inspires the movement of the creative process by changing the thought processes that induces the critical emotional involvement in the outcome, which in turn births the modified behavior that ultimately manifests the change in results.

That isn’t the process that most follow. The New Year resolution is, for most people, doomed to failure because it constitutes nothing more than an idle wish. The error isn’t in the resolution itself, it’s in the process adopted by the creator. Of course the person has every intention at a conscious level to achieve the change, however, that’s as far as it goes, and without emotional involvement the changes in behaviour that are necessary to achieve the outcome are never going to happen.

Knowing and doing are poles apart, and few people have the awareness in which to bridge the gap. That is why such a small percentage of people who truly intend for the change in their lives are willing to make the necessary and essential investment in working with a coach or participating in a self-leadership learning technology like the Science of Success (www.thescienceofsuccessprorgam.com). They understand that they are the common denominator in every result they get in life, and therefore to improve results they invest in themselves. It’s the foundation of true leadership.

So what is your intention for 2010? By December 31^st 2010, what would you like to look back on with a sense of achievement? And what are the implications to you of not seriously considering these questions or investing in the primary source of your success?

Two weeks later I found myself in Snowdonia, North Wales, climbing the UK’s most dangerous peak. So, there I am, a man who’s climbing experience hadn’t advanced further than taking the stairs in a typical corporate office, navigating my way up the treacherous rise of Crib Goch, a notorious approach to Snowdon, standing just under 1000 meters in height and infamous for it’s fatalities.

The approach was a mass of wet, slippery, vertical rock and the peak is half a mile of long thin, jagged rock, with sheer drops of 900+ meters on either side. One slip, as unfortunately many have found, and it’s over.

For my virgin climb, I was in at the deep end.

I have never felt fear like it. As we got ever closer to the peak, ever cell in my body screamed at me to go back. It isn’t possible because the ascendency to the peak of Crib is so vertical that once you’ve scaled it there isn’t any going back, not for a novice like me, and anyway, going back is not a choice I’ve ever made in my life, so whether it was courage or plain stupidity, I had to go on.

It’s in the experiences of our lives that we truly evolve, and there were many profound lessons on this 8-hour jaunt. The most profound of all was how we allow our current perception, which is always based upon the boundaries of our existing comfort zone, to feed the fear within us that we then allow to prevent us from becoming more that we currently are.

It struck me, as I clung to the rock with the wind howling through my hair, how many of us live our lives imprisoned by our false perception of the feeling of fear.

Of course, there are times when fear is there to protect us, and it’s motives are not entirely unreasonable when scaling dangerous heights, however, the same emotion applies whenever we attempt to do something different in our lives. It’s our perception of fear that defeats us. We perceive it’s telling us we can’t or shouldn’t do something, when in fact, in the vast majority of experiences in life, it’s simply telling us that we’re about to grow, about to do something we haven’t done before.

It’s with increased awareness and understanding that we can distinguish between the fear that is preventing us taking measures that risks our lives, and those which alert us to our growth. It’s the latter that we misinterpret, and that’s why Zig Ziglar described fear as False Evidence Appearing Real.

Companies often get berated for the lack of investment made in the development of employees, and whilst it’s an accurate observation in many situations, just how much responsibility are employees taking for developing themselves?

The answer is very few. In the main, corporate employees still behave as if their employer is responsible for their personal development. That is not the case.

A company’s responsibility is to train people to ensure they are competent at the job/function they are responsible for. It’s then a matter of employing leaders (not managers) with the specific responsibility and capability to continually improve performance by drawing untapped potential into performance.

But what about the employee’s responsibility to develop themselves? The vast majority of people employed by a company still abscond the responsibility of making any kind of investment in their own personal development, and yet many are the first to criticize their company for not nurturing their talent.

This kind of limited thinking is the consequence of cultural imprinting. It was the default mentality of the working masses in the industrial age, a throw back to when people often worked for a single employer for decades, if not their entire working life.

The job for life is confined to the museum of employment history. Employees can expect to have, on average, 6 to 8 employers in their careers, and whilst the changing dynamic of business life is something to be celebrated as it offers more choice and diversity, it brings with it greater responsibility to both employees and employers.

In the pursuit of greater career success and fulfillment, individuals need to be willing to contribute at least 10% of their income to their own personal development, that is, improving their self-awareness, developing their emotional and spiritual intelligence, creating a clear vision for personal success and underpinning that vision with meaningful, personal goals (not simply working to the numerical target given by their employer).

For companies, it is time to get beyond the conventional approach of sponsoring leadership talent onto MBA’s, we are in a new age and it requires a radical rethink of how to nurture talent in the pursuit of performance.

Self-leadership is essential for success and should be encouraged at every level by offering employees access to professional coaching and personal development programs that individuals choose to invest in. Many companies shy away from this approach, fearing employees will frown upon having to invest in themselves. It’s incredible short-sighted and constrains performance.

Developing a culture of self-leadership is a win-win situation. Employees grow, stretch, become more creative, effective and resourceful, performance improves, retention increases, and the next generation of leaders emerge. It also offers any company a clear insight into who the real leaders are, for those willing to improve themselves become increasingly skilled at doing the same for others.

Our pursuit for improved results is greatly undermined by our cultural imprinting. Doing things how we’ve always done them is hardly the foundation for improvement in any area. We have a traditional education system that rewards us for what we know, not what we do, yet life and our business world is constructed to reward people for what they do, not what they know.

What’s makes this even more concerning is that the predominant learning model for our adult education system, including organizational development, remains largely based upon traditional educational strategies, immersing people in information in the blind hope that it sticks and can be regurgitated when required.

The performance gap in life is between what we know and what we do. Most people know how to do a better job, yet few of them are. Why is that? Because no amount of knowledge will help a person perform better unless that knowledge is applied, and that is not as simple as it might sound.

Any sustainable change in performance can only result from a change in behavior, and that takes more than just an intellectual understanding. Ask any smoker, they know what they are doing is killing them, and yet they still do smoke. Ask any overweight person, they know they need to exercise and reduce calorie intake, and yet the vast majority fail to so.

The part of the human personality where all learning takes place happens also to be where all behavior is originated. It is not the intellectual mind. That’s why Einstein said “we should be careful not to make the intellect our God, it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality”.

An evolution needs to take place in our thinking. In the pursuit of performance there needs to be a shift from focusing on performance (effect) to potential (cause). Only then can a sustainable improvement in  performance be accomplished. This is one of the primary differences between a manager and a leader, the former measures performance, the latter nurtures potential.

There’s a common misunderstanding that undermines our ability to improve results and draw out potential into performance. The mistake is made in thinking visioning is exclusively the domain of senior leaders.

Very few people have a personal and professional vision. The absence of a clear and precise image of the success you desire nullifies the very creative abilities that are central to all human achievement, hence the wisdom found in Proverbs “where there is no vision the people perish”.

This goes far deeper than most people know. If you can’t define in your own mind what success looks like for you, it will never materialize in your physical reality. The root cause of all anxiety, fear and worry is the absence of understanding who you really are and what it is that you truly want.

Just as it is with organizations, a clear vision provides clarity and momentum. Even some of the most senior leaders who are charged with creating a vision for the corporations they represent fail to create a personal vision that is linked to their professional objectives. The implication is a growing sense of dissatisfaction, a “selling out” in a career spent filling the bank account and emptying the soul.

Chasing financial reward alone to the detriment of all other aspects of success is a recipe for disaster. There can be nothing worse than reaching the end of your working life and observing decades of delivering in the pursuit of organizational growth targets, decades of life shaped by the objectives of others in the pursuit of being financially “comfortable”.

Think this through deeply. Beyond primary education we are not taught and raised to work with our imagination to create a vision of success for ourselves, so many of us end up in careers by default,  ones that are often meaningless to us, pursuing promotions for no other reason than being seen to get up the ladder and the trimmings that go with it, all the while the sand is pouring through the sand timer…. the only thing we spend and cannot earn is slipping away. It’s the proverbial hamster on a wheel scenario, trading a life hoping to make it safely to just a few years of comfortable retirement and death.

If you are one of the visionless generation, ask yourself: What are the implications of continuing as you are? Without a personal vision of what you want to achieve in your life, where are you likely to be in 3, 5, 10 years time? What do you want to observe about this life when it is coming to an end?

It’s your life and your career, to live both outside of your own terms is a criminal waste of your potential. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

In these times of economic turbulence it’s astounding to witness those occupying senior leadership positions following the tried (and flawed) methods of their 20^th century counterparts. What has become a default decision in times of recession to divert or cut people development budgets is nothing more than a reaction as opposed to a well-thought out response. It’s more lazy management than leadership.

A re-action is exactly what the word describes, an action that has been undertaken before. There isn’t much qualitative thought required for a reaction, and as always, the universal principle of cause and effect will deliver the implications in results. In the very different dynamics of the modern economy, those implications are likely to be much more severe than in the past.

Back in the industrial age, when manual work was prevalent and talent was predominantly assessed by physical attributes, the employee required for more brawn than brains tended not to need much development in order to achieve what the business required to prosper. In the service-base economy of the 21^st century, where differentiation in product and proposition is sustainable for a matter of days at the most, it’s the mind, the creative faculties of human potential and how well they are utlized that decrees the fine line between commercial success and failure. Thought is the new currency.

The strategy that kills the goose that lays the golden egg is the strategy of lazy corporate incompetents. It doesn’t take a genius to know that when you effectively liquidate an organizations primary asset, it’s people, for the purpose of an immediate relief on the balance sheet, the medium to long term implication on performance is likely to be disasterous.

Benjamin Franklin once said that the very definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. At least that accusation can’t be thrown at those modern senior leaders who, in sheep-like fashion, divert people development budgets elsewhere to make their balance sheets look prettier. In todays fast-paced economy with its workplace of predominantly Generation Y talent, the implications of not developing people will most certainly differ in severity from those of previous periods of recession.

There’s only one thing worse than in investing in people and seeing them leave, that’s not investing in them and seeing them stay. Archaic leadership habits die hard, performance, however, is much more obliging.

Letting people go has to be one of the most difficult responsibilities of leadership. It’s often forgotten by those affected by redundancy that it isn’t about personalities. No one responsible for performance through people gets up in the morning excited at the prospect of people losing their jobs. It’s the role that is surplus to requirements, not the person.

Challenging times demand the best from leaders. Many corporations fail to recognize the fragility of morale and performance as a consequence of headcount reduction exercises. What has become known as “survivor syndrome” has significant potential to drag any unsuspecting business back in the mire it has attempted to clear itself of in the first place.

This is where leaders earn their crust. “Survivor syndrome” can be catastrophic to performance. It’s natural for those escaping this round of redundancies to be nervous about what comes next. They’ve witnessed colleagues leave, some unwillingly, and working friendships and relationships of reasonable longevity have been severed.

Employees who remain in situ after the process often suffer mixed emotions, grateful to have survived, yet struggling to feel as loyal and committed to an organization that they now perceive to be heartless. The commercial realities matter little to the employee who has fallen out of love with the company they once felt so proud to be associated with. It’s little wonder survivors often become dysfunctional in their performance.

A leader’s responsibility is to help survivors understand the commercial reasons for the process, and subtly reignite their commitment and passion. It’s where the true leader demonstrates the essential arts of empathy and coaching, seeking first to understand before being understood, and, by listening deeply, help each individual reconnect to their desire for success.

So the question to ask is: how much time are you spending with your people? And, most importantly of all, what are you doing with that time? Are you genuinely coaching for performance, or are you telling them what needs to be done? Are you leading or managing? Think deeply about your approach to those you lead, never more than now has it been so important to get it right.

It’s inevitable in difficult economic conditions that corporations shed jobs in order to survive. A business is like a ship, when facing trouble it has to discard everything that isn’t absolutely essential to it’s core operation and cast it “over-board’. No leader worth their salt enjoys laying people off, however, survival must be the priority in difficult times for the good of all stakeholders from investors to current and future employees.

Like everything in life, it isn’t so much about what you do but how you do it. Many corporations apply little intelligence or sensitivity to the process, it’s often conducted as a numbers game, with the inevitable loss of key talent. In the creative economy business ignores talent at a cost.

Sadly, when headcount reductions are poorly handled, talent walks. That creates medium to long-term pain in terms of increased cost and poor performance. Replacing talent with many years of experience and intellectual property is a number few organizations are willing to measure. It doesn’t take much to work out why. Then there is the inevitable impact on the performance of those surviving the process. Unfortunately, it’s a significant threat that few organizations appear to be taking seriously.