We’ve got 43 days left in this calendar year. I just counted.

As I write this blog post, I’m sipping on chocolate marshmallow-flavored coffee (it’s roasted into the bean) and reflecting on where this year, 2012, has taken me and my clients. I’m also thinking about the 43 days left in this calendar year (as of the day I’m writing this post) and what advice I’d like to give you as you go forth.

Many of the business owners I know have experienced unprecedented growth this year, despite what headlines from the world’s economy would suggest is our fate. We’re taking off the training wheels and getting ready to ride with the big boys now. Others of us have seen long-loved businesses stall out or curl themselves into a necessary end. Nearly all of us are looking ahead to what’s next for us and our work in the world, saying to ourselves, Okay. This is a new year, a new quarter, a new market, a new world. How do I do it better this time?

One thing I know for sure: our best is yet to come.

But first, the prelude to what comes next: giving ourselves permission to do what we need to do and be what we need to be to allow our most excellent work to show up.

Here are 10 permissions — with a few nuanced interpretations — for you and your brand as you make the leap from this year into all that is to come.

As you know, often the best wisdom is two-sided. So some of these permissions are binary: you can interpret them in whatever way serves you best. Take what you need, and ignore the rest.

YES. You officially and certainly have permission to . . .

1. Embrace your current brand identity crisis. And be willing to depart from a brand identity that no longer serves you and your Right People.

• Completely change your brand’s visual identity that no longer does the job, even though you get lots of compliments on your typography, color palette, and graphics. (Compliments do not equal money.) Ditch the business name or tagline that feels clunky, two-steps-off-kilter, or passé.

• Keep the best elements of what still works and update the rest, or redesign your brand with a nod to your last great iteration, while bringing the rest up to current code.

2. Have the website you want.

• Work with a new web designer. Yes, even after all this time.  Or . . .

• Stick with your tried and true web designer, but tell him you desperately need to flip your brand’s visual script this time around.

3. Get the copy written the way you want it this time.

• Hire a professional copywriter to take care of the main pages of your site. Or even ghostwrite your blog posts from a list of notes you provide. So you can get on with doing your best work. Or . . .

• Write your own damn copy. (We’re making guides for that, you know.)

4. Be you in your brand by building your conversation around your hardwired-in Voice Values.

• Drop all your misconceptions about what it means to have — and use — a ‘brand voice.’

• Drop the pretense, the swagger, the bravado, and the ego. Strip it down, wipe it clean, undress it. Or get lusher. Enrich it, embolden it, pop it out, primp it up. It’s your voice. Use it the way you most powerfully do. (Want to discover your Voice Values? Subscribe below for access to our complementary Discover Your Voice Values self-assessment.)

5. Make sure the brand whose name you envision in lights is linked to a business model that can propel it and sustain it.

• Admit, if you need to, that the business you have, however beautiful it may be, is not the best container for the work you feel called to do.

• Let your ‘sweet spot’ evolve.

6. Work with your Right People, all of the time.

• Refer your Not Quite Right People on to other businesses who can serve them better than you can (or want to). Why? Because when you work with your Not Quite Right People, they pass your name along to other Not Quite Right People, and pretty soon you’ve got a brand built around . . . your Not Quite Right People.

• Write the story of your Right People, just the way they occur to you when you meet them, ready and revved up and resourceful. If you don’t know them up-close-and-personal, how will they know you’re talking to them? We’ve got a great experience in the works for you that takes you through this process.

7. Take off your rose colored glasses — or your ugly goggles.

• Stop idealizing your Right Person and thinking she can solve all of her problems without you. Yes, she may be smart, capable, and self-aware — but she hasn’t seen down the road you live on and she hasn’t come into contact with your solution yet, the way you and your brand deliver it. If you’re intimidated by your Right Person, you won’t be able to serve her from a place of clarity, calm, and strength.

• On the flipside, stop assuming your Right Person has to be a dripping mess of a puddle on the kitchen floor in her life or business before she’s ready to work with you. Do you really want to work with a client who’s feeling that unresourceful? People don’t have to be — and shouldn’t be — on their knees crying mercy before they’ll buy from you.

8. Filter your incoming. Hone in on the voices that work for you today.

• Unsubscribe from and unfollow brand voices that don’t serve you in this season of your business, or who leave you feeling perpetually frustrated, blocked, or irritated. It’s okay to separate the person and their brand voice. You can like one but not be able to take any more of the other.

• Stop retweeting and sharing content from anyone or any site with which you don’t truly feel aligned. If you aren’t convinced that someone’s content serves your audience, their needs, and their desires — just. stop. sharing. Attention is precious. Be someone trustworthy and share only that which you trust.

9. Put your competition and your industry peers in their rightful place — which is not front and center in your mind on a daily or weekly basis.

• Look away from your competition. There’s only one you anyway, and yours is the only brand with which you need to be concerned.

• Be collegial with talented colleagues who are serving the same market as you. Adroitly do your own thing, but plan thrice-yearly check-ins with your similar-niche peers to share wildly adaptable ideas, discuss what’s not working industry-wide, and point out what you see the others doing well. It’s good for everybody, including your clients.

And finally — the best piece of advice I could possibly offer you . . .

10. When in doubt, ignore everybody else’s advice — including mine — and go with your gut. It always knows best.

In the comments, we’d love to hear:

Which piece of permission from this list most resonates with you and why? And what piece of permission would you like to add to this list? We’ll see you in the Comments.