Probably like many people, during most of my life I thought my lasting legacy would be held within the lives and memories of family — with my children, grandchildren and perhaps great-grandchildren. I cherish family and have wanted to enrich them through wellness, education, self-responsibility and service. These are the values I wove into my career, but there was more to come …
As I look at it now, my own legacy story probably started thirty years ago when I was working in private practice as a physical therapist and began pursuing my values of collaboration, pro-active service and working with people across the life span. I thought then our multi-specialized healthcare system was fragmented and often ineffectual. I was frustrated with complex time-consuming systems, focused on medical specialties requiring people to run around to several doctors. While it was relatively easy for the sick or injured to get care, if you were healthy or wanted whole family or wellness care, that was tough.
I wanted to be part of a solution for cohesive, comprehensive well-care. So I enrolled in Stanford’s Primary Care Associate program to study medicine and become a physician assistant. I worked in a variety typical medical settings including outpatient clinics, hospital acute care and emergency rooms, and started teaching community wellness with people who wanted to stay healthy. Then I took a turn into academic medicine. Despite my work with the brilliant, compassionate Dr. Doug Harryman, my healthcare system frustration rose again. So in the late 1990s, I discovered professional coaching, began my coach training and met Dolly Garlo who would become one of my dearest and wisest friends.
As I learned and practiced coaching skills, I taught them to Doug and he embraced them — he was truly gifted, naturally curious and really wanted his patient’s hearts and souls included in their care. Together we helped patients think beyond the existing injury or medical problem, taught and coached resident physicians to advocate for patients and encourage them to actively participate in their care.
My life was full of twists and turns during that same decade — with many family changes including the loss of grandparents, my dad, my husband’s dad and critical illnesses for both our mothers. Our two oldest daughters had large weddings, we remodeled our home and then the unthinkable: Doug was diagnosed with bone cancer. We continued our work through his rounds of chemotherapy and too many surgeries to count. He was a model of dignity, elegance, grace, intelligence and respect with everyone he encountered. In 1999, it became time for us to close the practice and share whatever we could … mostly the sweetness of life, our families, hearing each others’ voices and laughter … until Doug died on December 24th, 1999.
Our work together was the pinnacle of collaborative vision, trust and care in action. I doubted I could ever recreate it in healthcare, but was convinced all of this could be applied to another career. Through this unexpected transition, during which I often felt confused and lost, I came to realize I was fortunate to have extra time for myself and with my teenage daughter. I gradually renewed my commitment to personal growth, to teens and young adults, to community development and finished my coach education.
I reconnected to my community through service with Rotary, professional coach association activities, and intermittent volunteer projects in local schools. Discovering there were no community based teen mentoring programs, I began interviewing teen girls and learned that they really wanted to talk with an adult who would meet with them consistently, listen to them with respect, ask questions and gently challenge them to expand their thinking and problem solving skills — which all sounded like the coaching approach. I then interviewed adult women in the community about their experiences as teenagers, and what mentoring might mean to them.
So I pursued what I thought was a wild notion of combining coaching with mentoring, engaging adult women who had the desire to ‘give forward’ with teen girls. Over the next two and half years I trained and supported 40 community volunteers to mentor girls as listening partners and success coaches. We launched the community Coach-Mentor pilot program in one of the high schools where a modified version of the original program continues today.
The collaborative partnership I experienced with Doug built a bridge to my legacy work with teens, young adults and community leaders based on my most deeply held values. It allowed me to weave together the common threads of service, connection, and community building and develop the coach-mentoring program to build trust, strengthen relationships and nourish both the common good and common wealth for generations to come.
Creating Legacy is now a framework for me to expand that experience to help clients with their own creativity, design and personal legacy implementation!