Here at Creating Legacy we know that great legacies are inspired, thoughtful, heart-filled, beneficial, touching and meaningful.  They tap into the powerful human attributes every one of us possesses – of being generous, wise and creative.  So we also know they are not limited to the rich and powerful (both relative terms anyway …), they are the province of anyone who chooses to create something that others will benefit from, and remember for having been bettered somehow.  Which is a very satisfying thing to do. Thus we know that great legacies are pursued mainly by those ready to create memories from joy.

And how they deliver those memories is through the development of powerful, positive, and beneficial results to the world through a design that makes them workable, systematic, and enduring.  That’s all the “how to” we cover in our 7 Steps To Creating Your Legacy program, after we help you get in touch with your passion, desire and vision for doing so.    

But why even go there?  Because there are benefits of a great legacy – for both giver and receiver.

GREAT LEGACIES ARE MEMORABLE.  A great legacy, or its impact, is remembered.  Certainly it is remembered by whoever benefits from the project or contribution. 

You may create significant impacts everyday just by virtue of consciously choosing who you want to be and how you want to you approach others or your work – you put in a little more effort than required, you leave something a little better than you found it, you choose to pay a particular kindness to someone even if just in passing.  It truly is a conscious mindset – instead of just stepping over the piece of glass on the path, you choose to pick it up so no one else will injure themselves. 

It is from this same legacy level way of being and doing that much larger legacies are built. They are an expression of your personal values.  People notice that sort of positive or constructive action, and they remember you for it – fondly. 

Actively choosing to create a project or enterprise that similarly impacts a chosen environment or community you care about will also be remembered in an even more significant way.  What you create may affect people immediately close to you, like actual or chosen family, or even members of distant global communities, depending on the type and scope of your legacy.  Some of them you may never actually know, but they will know of you, through your legacy … and kind contribution.  And because your impact is so memorable, others may want to participate or even replicate your efforts. 

No matter what, the process of building and watching your legacy grow is something that you will remember for sure – and be glad of.  Creating your legacy, contributing the benefits only you can while you can, will prevent that sense of regret later on of the things you could have done, but didn’t – like smelling more roses or eating more ice cream, but on a grander scale.

GREAT LEGACIES ARE JOYFUL.  Legacies consciously designed to create sustainable positive benefits encompass a true sense of delight both for you, and for those who benefit. For you, that may take the form of amusement in playing with the original idea, a sense of pride for the cheer or comfort delivered to others in the process, gratitude for seeing the end result play out and the impact your work has – or all three and many others.  For the recipients of your contribution, joy may be expressed through a sense of delight, great relief, or deep appreciation for the benefit or experience they may not have otherwise had. 

Developing a legacy project can provide a true sense of awe and wonder about how the process of creation works.  The experience of being a part of something that grows and morphs into a real contribution and that attracts the attention and involvement of others, can also provide a sense of real connection with the Divine or ‘oneness with the universe,’ however you define that.  During the process, people and resources just seem to show up, experiences just seem to happen effortlessly, and you may have other special experiences that seem to tap into the greater good. 

These are special brands of happiness and well-being that are profound elements of true joy – that you can choose to cultivate.  How would you like to be remembered, or for what? Look first for those things that bring you the most joy when you think about that as your contribution.  The pride you’ll feel for actually having done it – knowing it will live on an benefit folks who may never actually know you - will far outweigh anything fame has to offer.

The elements of great legacies can be grasped and mastered by anyone, and developed in your own unique way.  What are the sparks that inspire you – that stir inside you when you take the time to entertain them? What are your good ideas, the ones you consider sharing with others – but might be a bit shy to admit? 

Yes, those.  Right there.  The ones you might be reluctant about.  They seem like really are good ideas that mean something to you, and would mean something to others, but you may question your own ability to create them.  Well grab hold of your thoughts, and at least write them down somewhere to give them their first bit of “mass.” 

You’ll be on your way to making something from nothing – exercising that innate creative ability with which all
humans are endowed. 

Great legacies don’t happen overnight.  But once you get started, you might be surprised how, stepwise, you can systematically develop your good ideas, find needed support to nurture and grow them – and how they can turn into enduring, beneficial solutions that are both memorable and exceedingly satisfying to see working in the world. 

What are you waiting for, you creative being? 

Want to know more?

• To learn more about legacy development from inception to completion and all the different ways to create one, check out our 7 Steps to Creating Your Legacy program and join us the next time we offer it!
• Sign up for our Creating Legacy Kit and we’ll send you our complete 14 Elements of Great Legacies complimentary e-course – and you’ll get our twice monthly Legacy Journal and updates on upcoming programs and other offerings.

Legacy is all about powerful, positive leadership.  It is about looking forward, thinking long-term, and creating something sustainable – not just focused on current income, but on long term value. 

I found a quote recently that aptly addresses all these considerations.  As a lawyer, I found the source to be quite remarkable, though not surprising.  While coming from an entirely different ethnic background and part of the planet, I share many Native American philosophies on living and working in harmony with our planet Earth – and in tune with what they call Great Spirit.

So what is this legacy wisdom – this significant piece of enlightened leadership?  It’s this:

“In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions
on the next seven generations.”
(From the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy)

How would your life and your work be different if this was your decision-making focus?  What would you be doing differently? How quickly can you shift to that mindset and make the changes you need to make? 

The world is waiting for your own exercise of real power – the power to do good while doing well, and the power to positively impact the people around you and those who follow (and who follow them, and follow them, and follow them …).  Are you up for that challenge? 

Our 7 Steps To Creating Your Legacy program has been a joy to deliver – and to watch what participants develop from there.  Keep an eye on the site to get details on how you can do something different in your work and life to incorporate this wisdom and make a positive impact on your partcular corner of this world!  Sign up for the Creating Legacy Kit (top right) and we’ll keep you posted on upcoming events.

Here’s to a better planet 7 generations from now – heck, hopefully yet during this generation!  Cheers, Dolly

Memorial Day in the U.S. is upon us again. Thought of as the holiday that ushers in the end of school and the beginning of summer, it is so much more than that. Memorial Day is also a very special day in my family.

The holiday, originally May 30 of each year, was set aside as a day of remembrance for those who have died in the service of our country and its ideals of freedom. Congress passed the National Holiday Act of 1971, which moved the holiday to the last Monday in May and created the three-day weekend form of the holiday.  That simple change in structure caused it to shift from a day of remembrance to the official first weekend of summer fun. Some feel that diluted the focus of Memorial Day, and in their own form of legacy are making efforts to restore it to its original date.

Another Memorial Day related legacy resulted from the effort of Moina Michael. In 1915, she was inspired by a poem, and conceived the idea to wear red poppies on Memorial day in honor of those who died serving the nation during war. She wore the very first one and raised money selling poppies to benefit servicemen in need. The tradition spread with the simple creation of a simple artifact – artificial red poppies – sold to support war orphaned children and widows in France and Belgium. Later, just before Memorial Day in 1922 the Veterans of Foreign Wars began selling the artificial poppies nationally. Two years later this developed into a program to sell artificial poppies made by disabled veterans, an effort that continues today in VA Hospitals.

In another form of legacy, an organization called No Greater Love began a campaign in 1997 to create the National Moment of Remembrance. It encourages Americans to take a few brief moments from sale shopping, barbecue gatherings, and other festivities at 3 pm local time, to focus gratitude toward the patriots honored, and remember the real meaning of the holiday. These efforts by the NGL organization – formed as a nonprofit in 1971 to provide annual programs of friendship and care for those who lost a loved one in service to our country – resulted in a Congressional resolution passed in 2000.

You can support and participate in these legacies through buying and wearing a poppy, and stopping for a moment of silent thanks each Memorial Day. Work something into the plans you are making now. 

My family’s remembrance always includes an outdoor barbecue with friends, as it was the first U.S. holiday my parents celebrated after their post-WWII immigration from Eastern Europe to seek citizenship here. The bravery of those who helped them make their way through war-torn Poland and Lithuania, slave labor in Germany, and work in the resettlement camps there before reaching the freedom to live and work here, is something we always remember … and celebrate gratefully. Each person’s brave acts of contribution toward that end is a legacy in itself – allowing me to be here writing this today, and to experience of working with you.

Great legacies are often born from needs first identified through challenges and difficulties – sometimes even a mistake. An effort to make something better turns into an expanded mission and some sort of business-like structure to carry it forward.

What do you see that needs doing? How would you go about starting? Who else would you involve and what structure might it take? And, as you contemplate Memorial Day, how will you make an impact in this world in an enduring way … so it is memorable and positively affects many? 

These are all questions we can help you answer, and with those answers help you create something beneficial for which you can feel personally proud and satisfied.  And we’d love to do that!

A great legacy has been born, and I’m proud to be able to announce it!  J. Kim Wright’s book “Lawyers As Peacemakers” has been published by the American Bar Association and is now available.  We also did a fabulous Creating Legacy Studio interview with Kim, about her legacy journey to this point – “A Legal Rebel’s Legacy Story” – and a recording of it is available for download on The Studio program site.

I’ve been on this journey with Kim since just after the turn of the new millenium (can you say Y2K?) – actually a lot longer than that, only I didn’t know her.  We were both restless and somewhat disillusioned with the legal profession.  Okay, not so much the profession, or even lawyers themselves, but the system within which we all had to practice.  We (and it turns out a number of others) felt there had to be a better way to use the law to serve clients and help make their lives and businesses better.  So we started making stuff up, borrowing from other traditions and professions, and fitting these new approaches into the structure of the law.

Yeah, they were teaching negotiation techniques when I went through law school.  And mediation – facilitated negotiation providing parties assistance to resolve their own disputes without a third party making the decision for them – was coming on the scene.  (This dates me, I know, since most post- college age people have at least heard of mediation and have some sense for what it is – thank God.)

But many of us longed for more civility and more constructive … yes, well, healing, approaches to legal problems.  Why should the health care and spiritual professions be the only ones to heal with their work? 

The information age being what it was back when Y2K posed what turned out to be not so much threat and disaster as hype (oh and the media has gotten better with the latter since then hasn’t it?  But I digress …), the powers that be put me together with Kim Wright and it’s been a totally kindred legal experience ever since.  I was retiring from law practice then, to pursue the more developmental and creative sides of what I did with clients - help them prevent legal intrusions, have successful businesses and happy lives, and even make things better in the world.  And Kim was, dare I say, hell-bent on improving the way law is practiced: the entire profession.

As a legacy story, this book publication has all the great elements:  Kim discovered her passion and interests, knew who she wanted to serve and benefit, figured out a structure that worked for her and has now created a number of artifacts that will persist in producing social good – this book being one of many others and no doubt some to come.  And she did it all on a shoe-string with her guts and grit and determination and heart.  For her efforts she has already been recognized as one of the ABA’s Legal Rebels for 2009.

Who says a great legacy requires a large financial estate? Even with that, it still takes the underlying guts and grit and determination and heart first – to persist and pursue and bring something beneficial to life.

In the 528 pages of  “Lawyers as Peacemakers” Kim provides the reader with the first comprehensive look at the myriad approaches talented and caring lawyers have developed to do just what we were dreaming about when we met.  If she hasn’t personally met and interviewed all the pioneers in this movement to tell the stories of how they work together, heal and bring peace to conflict and discord, she knows 99% of them.  And she is their — our — champion. Heck, she’s a champion for the entire legal profession and the people it serves – with her help in a more therapeutic way. It is my fervent hope that her impact is huge – even while I recognize how hard it is to turn a ship as large as an entire profession.  Even a few degrees on the trim tab, like Kim has made, can make a big difference.

Kim tells me that while writing the book she gathered enough additional information to write a follow up companion to it and not repeat anything she talks about in Lawyers As Peacemakers.  I hope it will soon follow her magnificaent first book! 

May the positive change continue as others get on board.  Cheers, Dolly

PBS has amazing programs!  We all really need to watch that channel more often!

In celebration of being on the air 30 years, PBS through its Nightly Business Report (NBR) program,  collaborated (one of my favorite words!) with the Wharton School of business at University of Pennsylvania and its Knowledge@Wharton website on innovation and entrepreneurship.  Their goal: to identify the 30 innovations that have changed life most dramatically during the past 30 years.

The resulting program, the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years, is also featured on both the Wharton and PBS websites.   NBR program viewers in over 250 markets across the U.S. and Knowledge@Wharton readers from around the world submitted some 1200 suggestions for the best innovations they thought had shaped the world in that time.  A panel of eight judges from Wharton selected the top 30.  A fascinating list to check out — true legacies all.

This got me to thinking about my favorite teacher R. Buckminster Fuller, the man who coined the term “Spaceship Earth” and the phrase ”doing more with less.”  He encouraged people to create artifacts – very much a personal legacy concept.

Bucky’s stated intention – as a lifelong experiment with his own life, made as a conscious decision in his early 30′s - was “to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone.”

He answered the question of why there were humans in the universe, with the notion that we are basically local information gatherers and problem solvers.  While we are more complex than that, it is an accurate observation.

Bucky focused his life on solving complex problems through an approach he called “comprehensive anticipatory design science.” The approach emphasized individual initiative and integrity, whole systems thinking, scientific rigor and faithful reliance on nature’s underlying principles.

He thought it was not helpful to try to change people, but rather important to change the context in which they operate, by providing innovative solutions to the problems they face.  That way, ultimately no one would have to work to ‘earn a living’ (we are, after all, already alive), but we would each contribute what we’re good at to positively impact the world around us: gathering information about and solving the problems that presented themselves uniquely to us.

What if we did more of that?  What if you took a look at what you do well and easily and even take joy in doing, and looked around to see who you could assist by creating something that would benefit them in some way?

If your brain is already spinning with ideas, you are developing a legacy consciousness.  Building anything from that thinking would make the planet a bit better place.

If what you build happens to answer Bucky’s urgent call for a design science revolution to make the world work for all.  If it:

• “emphasizes a new design, material, process, service, tool, technology, or any combination”
• “is part of an integrated strategy dealing with key social, economic, environmental, and cultural issues”
• “present[s] a bold, visionary, tangible initiative that is focused on a well-defined need of critical importance [and is]
• regionally specific yet globally applicable, and backed up by a solid plan and the capability to move the solution forward”

Then you might even win the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, as stated on the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s (bfi.org) website.

My ultimate joy at Creating Legacy would be to work side by side with you in helping you do just that, or even some fraction of that, which, in your own unique way “makes a difference now that lasts for generations.”

I’d love to hear your ideas.

Two fascinating bits of news I ran across today:

As reported in Solar Nation, 68% of people in this country believe that passing strong clean, renewable energy legislation to address climate change will result in new jobs (as opposed to job loss).  And why would investing in creating and developing new green technologies not result in new jobs?! 

This is great news because the Senate is currently deliberating the Waxman Markey climate change legislation that came out of the House of Representatives a couple months ago.  If you want to let your Senators know how you feel about the U.S. taking a global lead in reducing the use of fossil fuels and addressing climate change, you can easily find and contact them here.

The second piece of good news is of the we have the technology variety.  Well, so many of them, but this one is amazing.  This isn’t some pie in the sky notion – creating these new clean technologies.  We now have the Algeaus: the first car with a gasoline engine (as opposed to diesel engine as in bio-diesel), to cross the United States powered by fuel derived from algae.  This story is being told in a film called The Fuel Film a winner in the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.  And what a legacy story that is!! World changing in a big, positive way.  Take that big oil!

Remember photosynthesis?  The process by which plants take up carbon dioxide and, using sunlight, produce oxygen? Well algae can do it and produce fuel – more fuel than any crop based ethanol or other biofuel.  Take that big agriculture!!

More about the film and the car:

 
But there is more to know and do, so oh!, now maybe we can move some of our tax dollars being devoted to oil and corn subsidies and pass them along to the production of clean, renewable energy sources?! As a consistent form of support they can count on so the needed business infrastructures can be built around them?  The kind of leadership being shown by the developers of this news and these technologies is the kind we need in our government representatives – focused on a more positive future for us all and following generations.

That would be a significant impact and a great thing.

My friend and fellow blogger Jeannette recently lost her beloved husband.  Having been married only a few months now myself, but to someone who is the-love-of-my-life-like-I-had-no-idea-could-be, I can empathize with the depth of the void that loss must be. 

A consumate writer, Jeannette wrote in her Write Speak Sell blog, a tribute to her husband describing what he left in the minds and hearts, not to mention lives of others — his legacy.  It reminded me that we all have a legacy, however conscious we are of creating it, and others will be impacted by it.  And they are most profoundly impacted by the things that we do, that we do well and happily because we are most passionate about them.  Read Jeannette’s beautiful tribute here.  It’s a legacy in itself, a legacy of tribute tangibly preserved and offered to the world in a way that will benefit many who read it.

She also included a lovely blog post from Seth Godin about decision making, concluding that recognizing and exercising our power to make decisions allows us to make a bigger difference.  Very nicely stated. 

When you let the notion of legacy develop in your own consciousness, what bubbles up about it?  What does your life mean to others?  What would you like it to mean?  How might you get into action to create something tangible around your passions that will benefit others?  The world needs more of that …

My new program, 7 Steps to Creating Your Legacy, debuts today! I can’t wait to see what the participants do with the materials – what they consciously choose to create in the world, how they decide what they want their impact to be and in what manner they’ll carry it out.

Watching all that unfold will be magical!

And the program itself is brand new, so it will be a creation unfolding as well – with the added energies of the group members.  Beginning any new process always carries with it excitment “with an edge …”  That’s how it is with the process of creation, and we’ll all be in that together adding the potential for the experience of some great synergy.  This pioneering group of leaders will be taking action that makes changes in the world – we will have our own “butterfly effect” (maybe many of them).  So exciting to see what that will be.

Right foot, left foot, one at a time begins the “journey of a thousand steps” that any significant project includes.  Will keep you posted on how it all unfolds.  If you want more information, please feel free to contact me!  Here we go …