I have attended a lot of funerals over the years and the one common denominator is in every service someone is trying to communicate the legacy of the person who has died.  There are some patterns I have noticed when people have lived their lives in such a way that truly leaves a mark on the world. 

Begin With End In Mind-All of the people that really made a difference took the long look about life and determined what they wanted the top priorities to be in their lives when it was over.  When a person values friendships then you can see a pattern from there earliest years all throughout their lives where other people came first.  If you want to be known for something later then you need to live it now. 

Leave Something Better Than Found It- This is the type of person that is always trying to help others be successful and is not consumed about themselves.  If they are a leader in the corporate world they are not looking out for number one they want the department or the corporation to be better when they leave than when they came.  The true test of someone’s leadership is not when he or she is there but what happens when they are gone. 

Gave Away More Than They Took-  In the end people are either more consumers or contributors.  They see other people as a means to their end or they see other people as the target of their generous spirit.  These are the people that are always adding value to whatever they do from community involvement, relationships, work and faith.  They simply love to give more than they take and people are moved by their humility and servant heart. 

It is never to late to work on your legacy.  The really important thing is taking the time to decide what you want it to be and then when the time comes other people will gladly step up and write your eulogy for you.

If you need help in making some major decisions in your life coaching may be exactly what you need.  There are many types of coaches available from executive, life, fitness and even spiritual.

The one major thing you need to understand about coaching is that it is not counseling or therapy.  The major focus will not be your past and the things that have gone wrong but the future and how you want it to look.

Great coaches don’t have the answers to all your questions.  Their role is to help you by knowing how to ask the right questions so you can see why you may be stuck and what your options are as you move forward.

A coach might ask, What is the one major area in your life you would like to change that would improve your life?  Then, What do you want that area to look like six months from now?  Finally, What do you need to do this week to start closing that gap?

Another important aspect of coaching is accountability.  It really helps when you have someone who is on your side and offers the necessary what do you want to accomplish before our next time together type questions.

With this accountability comes encouragement that reminds you of what you said you wanted to do to change your life and gives you the confidence that you can make it happen.

My experience in using a coach was incredible.  So what are you waiting for give them a no charge to you first call and see if it feels like a good fit.

In a day when our calendars are beyond full and yet our lives seem to be empty something has gone wrong.  We in many cases have assumed because we are busy the things we are doing must be important.

We clearly have shifted the focus from being as a person to doing and what we are able to accomplish.  Technology has helped us in many cases simply to do the wrong things faster.

The great paradoxes of our time have been summed up well by the Dalai Lama:

“We have more conveniences, but less time.

We have more degrees, but less sense…more knowledge but less judgment.

More experts, but more problems.

More medicines, but less healthiness.

We have been all the way to the moon and back but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.

We build more computers to hold more information that produce more copies than ever before, but have less communication.

We have become long on quantity, but short on quality.

These are the times of fast foods but weak digestion.

It is a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room.”

For many of us we have been living the script for our lives that were given to us by someone else; parents, peers, friends or the culture we live in.  The time has come for us to have the courage to say no and the passion to write our own.

Welcome to the latest new term to describe the tension that exist between life and work balance.  According to Dalton Conley a New York University sociologist, “increasingly it’s not clear what constitutes work and what constitutes fun time.”  You can read the entire article on CNN.com/living.

More and more people are using their smart phones and other technology to keep up with their 24-7 lifestyle that keeps them in almost constant contact with others.  At one minute we may be quote at work and receive a text message about last night’s game and then later while at quote home get an important email on major project.

It’s one thing to watch a fellow employee scroll through email during a meeting you are attending but now to see the same thing happening during the evening meal is a little harder to swallow.

Apple is probably not going to come up with an app that will schedule time everyday to unplug from all the information that is available to spend time with people who really matter in your life.  We are going to have to discipline ourselves to set some boundaries so that we can have the time we need to wind down and even quietly think without interruption.

Technology can be an incredibly good thing if we use it as a tool to improve our lives.  If we let it though it can easily change from a means to the end into the end itself and when it does that we all lose.

A simple definition of margin is the space between our load and our limits.  It is the opposite of overload because you will have something in reserve for a time when you will need it.

Richard Swenson wrote an incredible book entitled Margin to help us learn how to restore emotional, physical, financial and time reserves to our overscheduled lives.  Of all these important areas he believes everything must start with our emotional energy.

Every day we only have so much emotional energy to give to our family, work, friends and other people.  Most of these people are making withdrawals from our emotional bank accounts and if we are not careful we become overdrawn with nothing left to give.

We must start each day knowing our emotional balance and then set limits on those people and things that will tend to drain us to the point of experiencing the pain of being overwhelmed.  He lists several things that can restore your emotional energy:

1.       Cultivate Social Supports

2.      Reconcile Relationships

3.      Serve One Another

4.      Rest

5.      Laugh

6.      Offer Thanks

7.      Grant Grace

8.      Be Rich in Faith

9.      Hold Fast Hope

10.  Envision a Better Future

Some of the emotional drainers in life cannot be avoided but when you build in things that make deposits then you can routinely within your day monitor your balance and make the necessary adjustments to maintain margin.

We must find ways in this wired world we live in to have peace of mind so that we have something left to give to the people that matter the most.

Several years ago Stephen Covey wrote one of the all time best selling leadership books The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It is a book that I have read several times and refer to often.

The first habit in the book is to be proactive and take responsibility for leading our own lives.  He writes, “It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives.  Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.  We can subordinate feelings to values.”

One of the most practical tips for doing this on a daily basis is what he calls the circle of concern in our lives vs. the circle of influence.  The circle of concern represents all the things we really care about but have no control over to change the outcome.  If we are not careful we can spend most of our day here with nothing to show for all the emotional effort.

The circle of influence though contains all the things that are important to us as well but we do have the ability to control the outcome.  When we focus on what we cannot control during the day that just means there were many things that should and could be done that were not.

The amazing thing about this principle is that the more you prioritize the things you can do and start accomplishing them the things you cannot control proportionally diminish in their importance. 

When we are doing the things we know we should do it not only allows us to  accomplish something but it also gives us the needed perspective to deal with all the things that are beyond our control.

To quote another Covey principle:  WIN WIN

The one incredibly good thing about a down cycle is that it always forces us to separate what is important in life from what is not. 

This is a very opportune time for you to be incredibly honest with yourself and ask the hard question How Much Is Enough?   What do I really need to be fulfilled and content in my life?  Take some time on this and make sure you cover every area of your life, personal, family, career, friends, faith and community.

For most of us as Americans we have never had to answer this question before.  We have been told the sky is the limit and if you work hard enough you can accomplish anything you want.

I am in no way condoning anything less than your personal best in every area of your life.  However, I am bringing into question a consumer driven philosophy of life that is more concerned with quantity of things than quality of relationships.

For too many of us we have been living out the script that someone else has written for us.  It could be a parent, peers, corporate culture or society in general.  Now is the time to write our own script that includes our own definition of success in life.

Contentment and gratitude are two incredibly important core values in life.  If you do not know the answer to How Much Is Enough, then I am afraid you will never truly experience them.

We all enjoy the experience of some organization or person who goes the extra mile and delivers high quality personal service.  In a day when most companies either put you on a phone tree from hell or only allow contact through email it is really nice when another person is simply pleasant and nice.

Mobile Travel Guide declares themselves as the gold standard of travel ratings and reviews.  They rate hotels and restaurants on a system of one to five stars based on their performance.  When you see their sign and there are at least three to the coveted five stars rating you know that the experience will be a good one.

Every day when we all go out into the public world of work and our daily to do list we interact with lots of other people.  Most of the time, we really try very hard to be courteous and polite to others especially if they are customers, suppliers, co workers or friends.  We give, give, and give to other people all day until we are emotionally spent by the time we head home.

When I evaluate my customer service rating at home I have to admit many times I would not receive even one star much less three to five. I treat the people I care about the most with the least amount of patience and kindness. 

If the Mobile staff were to interview the people who are the closest to you how many stars would you receive?  I am going to do whatever it takes to consistently improve my score.  How about you?

All of us feel like we have too many things to do and not enough time to do them.  We have priorities in many different areas: our career, family, relationships, entertainment, faith and own personal life.  We also fulfill many roles as employees, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers, and friends just to name a few.

Somehow we have developed this concept that true happiness and success comes when all of these areas and roles are in perfect balance.  It is as if they all have equal percentages of our time, energy and passion.

Realistically we all know that is an impossible goal to accomplish. Our career alone demands a ever growing disproportionate amount of our time and if you have a newborn child in your house all bets are off including time to sleep.

To me a balanced life means that all of these areas as well as our different roles will constantly be changing in the amount of resources they demand.  The critical factor is not to let anything that is important in your life be totally neglected to the point that you are now failing in that area because all of the other things have drained you to the point you have nothing left to give.

When you reach that point and we all do from time to time we must reprioritize our lives so that everything important gets its slot on our calendars.  This will mean that something else will have to get less or be eliminated all together.

Believe it or not sometimes we need to not go to the new latest and greatest parenting conference and just stay at home and play with our children.  Life can be crazy and its demands will change with each new day.

When you have the character and courage to assume the responsibility of leading your total life you will make sure that nothing major falls through the cracks.  Enjoy your day!!

When negative things are happening in your life and you feel like you are in a deep hole and cannot see how to get out there are three key personal leadership disciplines that will help you get your positive momentum back.

The first is perspective.  When things are not going well today it is very important to put the present in the context of the long look that includes both the past and the future.  All of life both the good and the bad tend to run in cycles.  You cannot choose many times the circumstances about what happens to you but it is your responsibility to choose how you respond to them. 

Adversity in life will either make you a better person or a bitter one and that choice is within your control.  The key thing about your past is you must learn from it but never live in it.  Failure never has to be final unless we let it.

The same is true about the future.  You can choose to watch the news 3 hours a day and live with fear, worry and doubt or you can be grateful for what you have and face the future with hope and a positive attitude. 

The second personal leadership discipline in dealing with change is priorities.  The one incredibly good thing about a down cycle is that it always forces us to separate what is important in life from what is not. 

We must start by not asking the question what have I lost but what do I still have?  I would encourage you to write down everything that is still in your life that is important and when you see it all you will be amazed by how blessed you really are.

Someone has well said the tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon but we wait so long to begin it.  Regardless of your age or stage of life this dramatic period of change we are all going through is the perfect time for you to decide how you want to spend the rest of your life.  If you need some help get a life coach to walk through this process with you.

The third discipline to deal with change is to be proactive.  When some people face dramatic change they choose to live in denial as if this is not really happening to me.  On the other extreme others know the change is real to the point of becoming emotionally depressed about their new state of life.

I must assume personal responsibility to change myself first and start leading myself by making good daily decisions before my life can begin to turn around in different direction.  The only way to do that is to do what you can with what you have right where you are and do it today with all your heart.