Creating Memories From Joy

July 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Blog, Designing Your Legacy, Meaning, Purpose Tagged With: 7 Steps To Creating Your Legacy, Impact, Joy, Legacy, memorable

Advancing A Legacy of Patient Care and Comfort Through Coaching

August 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Sharon Conley, MD was a practicing medical oncologist at Halifax Medical Center in Daytona Beach, FL in need of a change. She had a successful clinical practice that included directing the transplant program in her hospital and conducting clinical research trials. But she was tired, a bit weary of the health care delivery system, and frustrated that she could not do more for the cancer patients she treated.

Dr. Conley envisioned work on a larger scale to comfort and improve the experience of hospitalized patients. Hers had often complained that they could not directly access their prescribed pain medications in enough time to alleviate their often excruciating pain. In her numerous years of medical practice, Dr. Conley developed many ideas of ways to improve the bedside care of hospital patients – to make their experience safer and more satisfying. To address this particular concern, she designed and secured a provisional patent on a device she called the MOD®, short for “Medication on Demand,” to allow hospital patients the ability to self-administer their own pain medications instead of having to call already too-busy nurses to have each dose delivered.

She dreamed of seeing her medical device, the first-ever oral PCA (patient controlled analgesia) device, serving patients in hospitals all over the world.

A physician colleague recommended that Dr. Conley talk to a Professional Coach with whom she herself had been working. So, not sure what would happen, she contacted Dolly Garlo, a former nurse and attorney, now a trained International Coach Federation certified coach, with a business called Thrive!! (www.allthrive.com). Together they began to explore the possibilities of accomplishing the seemingly insurmountable task of bringing the MOD® device to market. “Persistence and consistency, Sharon,” she would hear repeatedly. “Just put one foot in front of the other and let’s see where you go next.”

Since that start, Dr. Conley figured a way, one step at a time, to close her medical practice and leave her physician partnership, while finishing the patent for her device and exploring the world of business – which she discovered happily, was not the mystery she thought it was.

She took business seminars specifically devoted to topics like raising venture capital, working through the maze of medical device manufacturing and mastering applicable government regulations. She created bridges to stay connected to her former medical colleagues, took on clinical research consulting projects to maintain interim financial income while restructuring her finances, and learned to network with anyone having a focus related to the MOD®. She produced a prototype device and was granted a National Institutes of Health grant to pursue a clinical trial of the MOD® at Halifax Medical Center, successfully completed in 2006.

In the clinical trial of Dr. Conley’s MOD® device, 95% of patients reported satisfaction with pain management and ease of use and 84% of nurses reported saving valuable nursing time. Impressive initial results called for a coach-encouraged celebration to maintain momentum with an increasingly busy to-do list. And there have been many such celebrations with each milestone she completed.

Dr. Conley used her great skills at sizing up people and working with multi-disciplinary professionals to assemble a crackerjack business team – a COO with significant business start up experience and a fabulous CFO, not to mention teams of legal, accounting, design and software engineering, nursing, pharmacy and other healthcare professionals – always including her trusted coach to help keep her moving forward. As a result, her company, AVANCEN, LLC: Improving Patient Care at the Bedside (www.avancen.com) was born.

And after developing a sound working business plan and raising close to $3 million of private funds the first MOD® devices rolled off the manufacturing line. An ever-evolving business and marketing campaign is being systematically implemented to bring them to hospitals throughout the US, and ultimately the EU, Asia and even Saudi Arabia.  Non-exclusive distribution agreements have been put in place with other vendors who serve the healthcare market from a different perspective.

As she was making this uncharted journey, Dr. Conley was encouraged to stay in touch with the “heart” of her activities — the reasons she was making these big changes. So she went to clown camp to perfect her Dr. FeelGood character – a sort of Groucho Marx in a white lab coat with a magic wand and jelly beans in a jar as feel good pills – her own Patch Adams approach to medical practice. Dr. FeelGood, certainly her alter ego, is one with whom she is encouraged to stay in touch, along with the pursuit of rigorous self-care to maintain the energy for her ambitious projects.

While attending a magic show as chosen way to fulfill that coaching request, Dr. Conley met Gerry, her “Irish Angel,” who has become one of her many mentors. Gerry is also an entrepreneur, with considerable business success and he has introduced her to others in Ireland who may someday play a role in AVANCEN’s mission.  There have been many more  such “chance” meetings of the right people in all areas of her projects, just as she needed them.

Magic indeed. These are but examples of the series of serendipitous events that have occurred since Dr. Conley committed to work with a coach to bring her large dream to life – a dream that will leave an incredible legacy in the medical world.

“One of the wonderful benefits of coaching,” adds Dr. Conley, “is the ability to have somebody to talk to on a regular basis who can help you reflect and discover what your your real talents and passions are all about. Then your coach can help you find the courage and patience within yourself to develop those dreams into reality so you can live life to its fullest.”

Written by: Dolly M. Garlo, RN, JD, PCC & Sharon Conley, PhD, MD

Filed Under: Blog, Coaching Tagged With: Career Transition, Coaching, Joy, Leadership, Physician

An Environmental Tipping Point

June 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Are you a leader, at least in your own sphere of influence, who cares about the environment? One of my favorite places is where I live in in the Florida Keys. When traveling for work, it’s hard to leave and is always a great place to come home to. But I’ve made it a point, no matter where I’ve lived, to find the best of the natural environment to immerse myself in – my cathedrals and places for spiritual connection (and fun – I believe joy to be a crucial component of spirituality).

The Keys, surrounded by ocean as they are, are causing me more concern lately. The more I learn about the environment and ecosystems, the more I realize that the Keys – like other places in the equatorial / tropical / subtropical belt around the planet, and the polar caps for that matter – are currently our “coal mine;” and here, the canaries are our coral reefs. Corals are little living animals, and those canaries are gasping – with some species of corals having been reduced to 6% of their former cover.

If you consider yourself a leader, or would like to, who cares about the environment, I wonder if you’ve seen this video, Wake Up Freak Out, from many months ago?  More about the illustrator and film’s background can be found at http://wakeupfreakout.org.  Where is that environmental tipping point anyway? When considering our coral reefs, all I can say is, it must be around here somewhere …

In my work, I am coming into contact with more and more individuals from Generation X (which encompasses the 44 to 50 million Americans born between 1965 and 1980, largely in their 30’s and early 40’s and on the whole, more ethnically diverse and better educated than the Baby Boomers – over 60% of Generation X attended college) and particularly Generation Y (also known as the “Millenials,” born in the mid-1980’s and later, these folks are in their 20s with numbers estimated as high as 70 million and include the fastest growing segment of today’s workforce). Do you know them?

I’m going to guess that Leo Murray, the illustrator of this film, is a Millenial.  Here’s an interview with him.   And another.  He’s smart, informed, talented … and very concerned.  And yet still seems lighthearted.  He may well still distrust anyone over 30 – if that sounds familiar to you.  In that, he may remind you of folks you know who used to feel that way (and who may still).  I, for one, find myself totally alarmed on some days about what’s happening environmentally. I have to actively look for places to find hope for the future, which I have not abandoned – mainly because of this generation (of voters, I might add).

Hmmm. Ready to up the ante on that reduce-reuse-recycle-and-rot effort, carry your own cloth grocery bags (or take your groceries to the car in your cart and pack them there if you forget?), drive less, unplug an appliance or two when not in use or write a few more letters to your representatives?

No need to reply to me, but feel free to talk to a few more Millenials and other folks who run things (leaders) … or pass this along.  Your planet, and my spiritual sanctuaries, thank you (as do I).

Filed Under: Blog, Enlightened Leadership, Personal Legacy Tagged With: Change, Coral Reef, Environment, Generation X, Generation Y, Hope, Joy, Leadership, Spirituality, Tipping Point

Deliberately Seeking Assistance

June 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Asking and actually being able to receive help, and an ability to share credit with the person providing it are three criteria that allow you to maximize power of working with a coach.

“We all need someone who can help us do what we already can.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are all in this together.  Working together we can create more through the power of synergy.  A coach holds you accountable so you get more done, but also supports your dreams and your work and helps you expand them.  That way the power of one is multiplied.

None of us are indispensible, which is a relief.  That realization allows us to make mistakes – which are simply learning experiences – and let go of some things altogether.  If you don’t do it, someone else will – if it needs to be done at all.  That’s not to say shirk your responsibilities.  But it’s okay to bow out of commitments you have made in a responsible way, too - and best to do so before you let them overwhelm you.

And not one of us is running the universe, which is a good thing.  The universe will continue to expand infinitely in accordance with the grand plan and design behind it.  You need only go with the flow of it, doing what comes most joyfully to you, seeking to feel better about each step you take as you take it.  That’s where your best efforts and creations come from.  Do you even know what they are?  A coach can help mirror your enthusiasm back to you, and help you recognize it and pursue more of what brings you joy.  The world needs whatever that is, and you definitely don’t need to be slogging through life experiencing anything less.

Filed Under: Blog, Coaching Tagged With: Asking, Coaching, Joy, Synergy