Tag Archives: writing

You Have A Legacy To Leave – Your Own Story

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Like many of you I am an unremarkable person. That sounds modest, but I mean it in the sense that I am no celebrity – I am just one of millions of people who do their ‘thing’ on a daily basis, and that ‘thing’ is fairly normal, certainly to those in the same industry and related fields. Such people tell stories to each other and never consider whether, or how much, people outside their fields will find their lives interesting. But we all have a story to tell.

Recently it occurred to me that as much as I loved and respected my father, and we had a very good relationship, my knowledge of who he was “pre-DC” was lacking. I knew he served in WWII as an aircraft mechanic on a Typhoon squadron, and I knew he’d been an electrical engineer with a power supplier until he retired. I had heard a couple of amusing stories, but he died many years ago and I realise I knew less than I should.

I have five beautiful grandchildren. I had my own kids when we were young and they pretty much experienced a lot of my policing life with me, but none of them know the full story. So I decided to write an autobiography. I knew I had a few funny stories to tell and I figured they might find them amusing. So I began. I am 100 pages of A4 in, and I am only up to 1990 – 28 years old. Most of what I have written is based on memory and from before I kept a real diary, so the remaining 32 years are going to fill a lot more pages because i am diarised up the wazoo. And every memory disclosed sparks another tale, regardless of the records, so I keep having to go back and fill an older chapter with a new tale of derring-do – or embarrassment.

And I realised that this is not just an ego-trip – it’s my legacy. Every story can, in some way, provide a life lesson to my descendants.

People tend to provide life lessons when a situation demands, but wouldn’t it always be better to provide the lessons in advance of the challenges they can solve?

This book – which I will publish on Amazon but only so that I can give hard copies to my family, you can ignore it if you want! – will be an opportunity to give my kids the wisdom it took me 60 years to learn. Yes, The Three Resolutions book contains my philosophy on life from which they can learn, but the autobiography will be the background detail as to why I needed them!

My suggestion this week, therefore, is that you consider writing down your own life story so that those who you love, and will love, and who will wonder who you are and what you did, won’t have to listen to vague recollections of others – they can have a first-hand account.

If that isn’t a Legacy, I don’t know what is.

Why I write what I write.

28 Tuesday Jul 2020

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“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.” Louise May Alcott

I sat in my chair this morning, wondering whether the books that I write will ever receive the attention and interest that I desire – all writers want to be a ‘success’ – and then I read the above paragraph and realised that success or not, writing my books is personally rewarding and informative.

When we write, there is a lot ourselves in the result. And not necessarily the ‘us’ that existed when we set out to create, but the ‘us’ that we became as we went through the process of researching, drafting, refining and finalising what was finally put into the public domain. I know from my own crafting of The Three Resolutions that I have become more disciplined, congruent, competent and other-people centred than I was when I began exploring the concepts.

Zig Ziglar felt the same when he wrote ‘See You At The Top’. He tells in its pages of how he weighed several dozen pounds more than a personal development speaker and writer ought to, and part of the writing process was to slim down and get fitter so as to be seen to be what he professed he ought. Yes. I did that, too. Think of me as the less fundamentalist equivalent of that ex-smoker who evangelises at anyone who lights up.

So while I would welcome some interest in my philosophical and practical musings on self-leadership, and my experienced and researched counsel on time management for police colleagues, I haven’t in any sense failed just because I’m not as famous as Stephen Covey and David Allen.

I won’t achieve their levels of success and brilliance. But I can aspire, like Alcott, to do my best to apply what I have learned and about what I have written. If only because of my firm belief that what I learned – about the principles and about myself – make the whole effort worthwhile.

What are you doing to get even better than you are?

Available HERE