I had an interesting discussion today with someone about my coaching work. She was a friend and business owner I know, but we hadn’t talked in year – and caught up through Facebook. That’s great fun – amid the folks friending me I sometimes can’t fully remember, every now and then you stumble on someone you really DO want to connect with.
Anyway, prior to our actual chat, after FB and then email exchanges, we had both had the opportunity to visit each others’ websites and catch up on each other’s work. She started at my old, original site, www.AllThrive.com, which was built to describe the focus of my practice back in the late 1990’s and crossing the ‘threshold into the new millenium’ — remember Y2K? (I was studying strategic marketing design then with a company that at the time was called Y2Marketing – Y2M, for short – so I remember it vividly because people kept referring to the company as Y2K … they’ve since changed focus and names, but I did get great training from them in how to do direct marketing).
I really do need to get that old site updated, but it gave me the chance to explain a bit more about Creating Legacy – and how developing it has been a journey that my clients started me on.
Creating Legacy and this blog/network site were built as a result of so many of my clients saying they wanted to transition out of what they had been doing, to do something that really makes a difference and feels significant to them in terms of making a positive contribution. Many of them came to me initially to help them build or develop a business. The evolution came when, business operating smoothly with them at the helm (rather than the business running them …), they discovered they wanted to exit from it and had 20, 30 even 40 more years of life to do something with.
That something might involve different work or starting a new business – but the difference this go around is that they want it to be on their terms, meaningful, fulfilling, fun-even, and have some significance. If they’re going to work diligently (some even more so than in prior careers) they want it to be good work, even great work – not just hard work. Yes, productive; yes, profitable – they’d been around the block enough times to know that anything not run in a business-like fashion doesn’t run for too long. And maybe even pay them a salary if need be – but whether a for profit structure or a nonprofit structure, it needed to be a social enterprise. Something that made sense and not just money.
Somehow they find even more life energy to bring to the project that way. From a coaching perspective, it always seemed to me that’s how one’s work in the world really should be. So my clients sort of led me toward the concepts behind Creating Legacy. In a way, with and because of them I’ve been developing it all from there. It’s not about what you leave at the end of life, it’s what you consciously build during it …
As I told her, I still do the business development/succession planning/exit planning and career transition work, too – depending on where the person is when they come to me. But so often that has led into an “and what I really want to do is …” conversation. That can go in so many different directions about what they decide to do or build next, or they choose to add on to an existing business from a social responsibility perspective, before they step away.
It’s been really fun and fulfilling work for me, I think that with our generation, there is so much more of that coming. Not to mention from Gen X and Gen Y – who already have the concepts of working with the world’s ecosystems and making thing sustainable well ingrained in their thinking.
Which is good – the world needs more of it! And I’m just happy as can be working with people to help them build it.