Happy new year! 2019 is a breakout year. Who you are becoming is a bigger idea than any habit you want to change or strategy you want to implement. In the face of a very different and challenging world taking shape around us, what new version of you will you bring out on stage to meet it?

January 1st. Today, most of us are thinking about the new year with some combination of trepidation and conscientious optimism. The time-honored tradition of the New Year's resolution, spoken through the stupor of champagne-infused enthusiasm will fade soon enough with the wilting of willpower (about January 18th for most people). And then we will all face the reality of having to do something more interesting, more valuable and more inspired. Something different.

Today is a good day to resolve to change. Given the social, political, environmental and economic climate and the challenges we all face this coming year, the costs of doing business and life as usual are rising and the cost of doing something innovative is dropping.

But if it's not will power that fuels lasting change, what does?

I recently got around to watching the J.K. Rowlings follow up to her enormously successful Harry Potter series. Newcomer Alison Sudol plays a character in Fantastic Beasts called Queenie. In every frame and every scene, her performance is lovely and brilliant. Mesmerizing actually. I suspect that she is on the path of a very successful career in film. She has clearly broken out.

While watching her perform, there was something weirdly familiar about the actress and I discovered she is also one of my favorite singers. I had already purchased everything she has published years ago and I am such a huge fan of her band A Fine Frenzy that I was willing to travel anywhere to see them; but even at their peak they hadn't developed a strong enough following to get on a tour anywhere I could find. She hadn't broken out as a singer-songwriter, despite amazing talent. I'm certain her new profile as an actress will expose a larger audience to her music.

Take a listen...

Singer-songwriter and actress are different cultural roles in the world. Even though the same creative spirit shines through both, for Alison, the latter is culturally more substantial.

A larger cultural role expands the scope of contribution.

A cultural role is a way for you and your audience to think about who you are and how you contribute. For me, as a young person, I started out as an artist. This morphed into a successful industrial design practice after I graduated from design school. After a decade of design consulting I further morphed into a successful executive and team coach. My scope and scale of value-creation increased exponentially with each shift.

Each growth stage is a hybrid of the stages that went before.

I am excited to announce that I am launching StepUp Partners. This past year I put together an amazing team of design and coaching professionals and together we are taking on a new cultural role. The Chief Talent Office. This includes a new enterprise platform called LEaP. Our Leadership, Engagement and Performance platform is a new suite of software-enabled services that accelerates the personal, social and economic value of impact ventures. The chief talent officer is a relatively new cultural role that deals with all aspects of human capital and the talent cycle.

We are still committed to changing the lives of the people changing the world. For me and the team, this shift in practice is the natural hybrid of our coaching and design capabilities and our response to what is going on in the world around us.

We hope your team has a great year. We are here to support the shift, however that looks. Watch for our new website coming soon.