Legacy Builders believe that the future generation can benefit from their experiences. They are excellent at spotting talents to mentor, coach, and train. They understand that helping others sometimes require helping them to break the cycle of complacency, underachievement, self-pity, and giving-up easily.
Legacy Builders help others to view their possibilities from a new perspective. They understand that over time, legacy building will involve many marathons geared at formulating new foundations on which to build and new paradigms from which to think. It will also involve a few sprints in between, to ensure those in their charge move quickly to grasp opportunities for learning, growth, and development.
BREAK
Legacy Builders do not allow failures to break them, as a result of past failures, they experience exponential growth because they are willing to try and try, and try again until they succeed. This gives them the opportunity to use their stories to help others break their cycle of failures, and to move beyond their current capabilities by embracing the key learnings from each failure.
Breaking the failure pattern is key to legacy building. The more devastating the failure, the more there is to learn from why what went wrong, went wrong. This is how we break the cycle, we delve into the "why", and when we find it, we ensure that it does not block our path to success in the future. Sometimes we cannot rid ourselves of the "why", but we can mitigate it's impact.
RE-SHAPE
Legacy Builders pay close attention to "who" and "what" they are shaping. They understand that fixing what is broken does not always mean fixing a person's outlook, but the process they need to follow. They use the process to shape the perspective. Because the goal is building a solid foundation or structure, they understand that giving others guidelines and examples to follow, is the best way to re-shape their mindset to think success instead of the probability of another failure.
RE-CREATE
Ultimately, legacy building is about creating something that will last or keep on giving. Whatever we create as legacy builders, is ultimately a reflection of how carefully we went about the breaking and re-shaping process.
Permit me to use an analogy to reinforce this point. I'm a big fan of HGTV, and the programs I watch the most, are those involving difficult renovations. The process usually involved demolition (breaking), a new design (re-shaping), and hard work to bring the new design to live (re-creating).
I also observe that from the outside, most of the structures looks quite ok, with a few exceptions where one could see that the roof needed to be replaced. This reminds me that we cannot decide that someone is not worth our effort by the way they appear, we have to explore what's going on the inside to know what is required to help that person rise above their circumstances. The transformation and functionality will happen when we address both the mind and how it impacts the mindset.
Legacy builders therefore, understand the high degree of determination and commitment it takes to support other through changes. Like the renovators, their goal is not only re-creating something more functional than before but a foundation that will endure future changes and challenges. They are not content with quick fixes, they ensure that long after they are gone, the people they invest in, are able to function on their new found foundation, and are able to use their learnings to help others break, re-shape and re-create their lives and careers.