Leadership and legacy often are mentioned in the same breath.
Yet what is a legacy and how does one go about creating a legacy consciously?
Ross and Antoinette give us a perspective on this.
Legacy is a big word.
It’s not just about the workplace leadership role and work but about one's life.
Knowing one’s life purpose has a direct connection with the legacy that you create. It also connects directly to how your leadership behaviour is.
As a leader or one who is in a leadership role if one is unsure of one’s life purpose or has not yet quite been able to pin-point it then it will create a disconnect which leads to certain leadership behaviour issues cropping up. When one is unsure or unaware of one's life purpose it can create significant anxiety. Such anxiety does manifest in behaviour.
All leaders try and look at the big picture and frame necessary actions. These are always positive. After all no one goes around thinking negatively purposefully.
What differentiates great leaders from good one is that great leaders always have a conviction of purpose. This comes from within oneself. In order to be able to do that one needs to identify and be aware of one's life purpose. Its purpose that creates the drive.
Speaking of life purpose, and its impact on the legacy one creates, it's important to know that purpose actually changes and evolves as we age. For a 20- or 30-years old life's purpose is being successful and having a family; in one's 40's and 50's a different realization seeps in. At this age point an individual has identified key qualities, has had significant life experiences and has an overall perspective on life in general. All of this, as a whole, shape what purpose will be and leads to life purpose changing.
However, as we go through our life stages and our perspective changes, our inner self actually does not change.
The question is when do we connect with our inner self?
At a younger age that connection does not occur immediately for most. For some that have been able to identify their purpose at a young age it creates the much-needed drive to do what they truly like doing and being fulfilled through that.
As one goes through life a certain realization about purpose does come in. It takes courage to be able to do what your inner self is guiding you to do. Courage because you have to connect strongly with that purpose as a calling in life and go ahead to do it without bothering about what others have to say about it. More about courage and how to get it can be heard in the podcast on Brave Leadership with Kimberly Davis (include link here to Kimberly’s podcast).
Finding that courage is essential to be able to do what one wants to do. To be able to act from one’s purpose because it creates the inner energy and dictates to the environment instead of making one react.
Courageous leaders have this connection with their purpose. They lead from being centred and with the big picture always in mind. As a leader remembering the big picture and the legacy you want to leave helps to put in perspective the environment you are dealing with so that you don't get caught up in the weeds.
One part of legacy is understanding one’s purpose. The other part is understanding what legacy is.
It’s creating relationships that are meaningful and helpful for people to find the resources they need to become stronger and more resilient in order to move ahead and be successful.
In a leadership position one finds that the key qualities revolve around developing people. One way of identifying legacy development is to have executives recall back their experiences, with leaders, and create a list which they see every day and check if they are doing those behaviours.
Doing this creates a habit that starts to impact on one’s behaviour as one is conscious of it.
And this is...
