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Legacy. What we create. And what we leave behind. Usually when we think of the word Legacy, we think of something big. Moneyed families with wings of universities named after them, things like that. But the definition of legacy is simply, “the long-lasting impact of particular events, actions, etc. that took place in the past, or of a person’s life.” In short, the stuff you do and the stuff that happens to you makes an impact. Nowhere is this more true than in the dynamics of family. To be sure, we all are the legacies of our parents’ parenting, and if you have children, they will be the legacy of yours.
One of my original Whys is the desire to make families work. Mine didn't. Period. On so very many levels. The emotional set point of my house growing up was anything but peaceful or joyful. It's not to say there weren't good memories and meaningful moments, and I wholeheartedly believe that my parents were doing their best with what they had at the time...but it wasn't a breeding ground for love-based states or a belief that the world was my oyster. And as I started serving people, working one-on-one, I saw first hand the pivotal role families play in creating happy, inspired, productive adults. Or not. Through all our training but in particular through our Mastery Track, Evolution, I see the lasting impact of childhood, and how in the course of 3 days and an evening, people redefine their past and in so doing, completely reinvent their future.
Family is the impact of origin for most people today; few things have as universal and profound an effect on people. And it begins as far back as when we’re still floating in the primordial goo of our mother’s womb. Even while we’re still cooking in there, we’re absorbing the environment around us. If mom is feeling stress, or anxiety, or anger, we’re exposed to the chemicals and hormones that accompany those feelings. Likewise, when mom is in states of love and peace and harmony, we get a good dose of all those happy feels too. And so by the time we actually make our entrance onto the stage, our nervous system has already been downloaded with the first layer of software.
From the time we’re born until around four or five years old, all of the key programming, the stuff that really sticks, is put into place. The chief software designers are our parents because, well, they’re our parents. For the first several years of our lives, our parents may as well be gods, right? I mean, from our perspective, they know everything, are capable of anything, and quite literally hold our lives in their hands. Then, depending on the makeup of your family, there’s a whole team of software engineers that add their own tweaks to the program. Grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. And there’s no rhyme or reason to who might have an impact or how powerful that impact may be. Even though our parents have the greatest influence, it’s not unusual (in fact, pretty common, I find) that a single comment from second cousin Shirley during a backyard barbecue when you were six years old has haunted you ever since.
For the first ten or twelve years, our identity is completely connected to and intertwined with our family. It’s during adolescence that we start to wake up, so to speak, when we raise our heads to look around and say, “Oh, I’m a person.” As a teen we start to exert that independence, pushing the boundaries, testing the limits. We begin to build the foundation for the adults we are going to become. But what most people don’t understand is they’re not building that foundation using their own set of tools, they’re using tools that have been handed down from their family. And for a lot of people, those tools are pretty darned good ones. But hey, even the greatest carpenter in the world has a couple tools that need some attention.
So we set out into the world, nineteen or twenty maybe, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with no idea that every action we take is informed by the unique experience of being a part of our particular family. This is so true across the board that it becomes predictable. For example, you come to me and say, “Joey, I just can’t get my financial house in order.” With just a handful of questions, I could probably paint a picture of your childhood financial situation with such accuracy you would think I was psychic. I’m not psychic. I know patterns. I’ve been studying them for just over two decades.
Maybe you grew up with an older brother who was a star athlete. You had some serious skills yourself, but for most of your childhood everything was in Kirk’s shadow. You hit a three-run dinger to win the game! Awesome! High fives all around! Remember that time Kirk hit a grand slam? Now you’re out in the world, building a career, and maybe you find yourself being a little aggressively competitive. A need to be recognized as the best that borders on being obsessive. To the point that you become the guy that no one wants to work with. Or, going another direction, maybe you’re beat down, resigned to always coming in second. You can’t light that fire of inspiration because, what’s the point? Someone else can do it better, I’ll just stay right here in the middle.
Look, I could go on and on with examples like these, but the truth is that the specific events and experiences from our childhood don’t really matter. We can certainly look at them, try to understand them and make connections to our emotional patterns, but at the end of the day, there’s nothing we can do about them. We can’t go back in time to change what happened and erase the patterns from our lives. What we can do is rewire them. Not only can we evolve the patterns that were programmed during childhood, we can also train new patterns that are aligned with the results we want to create.
Making families work continues to fuel my purpose today because I have a front row seat to what it can mean for generations to come. Who we are, who we become, and the impact we have over the course of our lives matters. And that brings us back to Legacy. Part of the Legacy I want to leave is to eliminate suffering as efficiently as possible, and give people access to lives better than they imagined possible. That's our Vision here at IMS, in fact. I want to create this impact on a global scale, and create a system that trains people to carry it forward after I'm gone. I guess you could simplify it by saying I want to leave it better than I found it...and with a set of legs that can run with it!
One of the places we talk about Legacy is Elite Cohort. Elite Cohort is an invitation-only, year-long training curriculum limited to 20 people. We dive into the inner workings of what drives success and outcomes, and we explore concepts and frameworks like principles, key influencers, and legacy. If you play your cards intentionally, legacy isn't simply what people say or think about you when you're gone. Rather, it's something you design and strive to embody and live up to while you're alive so that it’s how you're remembered. So I ask you this question: What is the Legacy you want to leave? If you're looking for a place to start, the Power Series is a great bet. If you're already inside our foundational training, check out Evolution or learn more about Elite Cohort. It’s never too late to start building Legacy, in all areas of your life, so let’s get to it!
