Most leaders spend their careers building influence outward — and very little time examining what’s driving them from within.
This piece explores a single exercise that changes that: writing your own eulogy. Not as a morbid thought experiment, but as a precision tool for closing the gap between stated values and lived behavior. Research shows that only 10–15% of leaders are genuinely self-aware — and that self-awareness is the single strongest predictor of leadership effectiveness. The leaders who do this work don’t just lead better at the office. They lead better everywhere that matters.
Legacy isn’t built in milestone moments. It’s built in ordinary ones — and it starts with the courage to look honestly at the gap between who you are and who you intend to be.
One of my favorite things I get to do is hold space for leaders to do the deep work.
Not the strategy work. Not the KPI work. The real work — the kind that changes how you show up on a Tuesday afternoon when no one is watching.
One of the most powerful ways I facilitate that is through a single question:
What do you want people to say about you when you’re gone?
I know. It sounds deep. But that’s the point.
Legacy Isn’t What You Think It Is
We tend to think about legacy as something we earn at the end of a career. A final chapter. A plaque on a wall. A park named after us.
But legacy doesn’t work that way. Legacy isn’t what you get 20 or 30 years from now. Legacy is created by how you show up in the present moment. It’s the moments you stack, one by one, that build the life and leadership you’ll be remembered for.
Here’s the other thing most people miss: legacy can be driven by the ego, or it can be driven by love. It can be used to fill a void, or it can be used to extend one. The distinction matters more than most leaders realize.
When I work with a group of executives, I often take them through an exercise where they write out their own eulogy. I ask them to write out, in their own words, what they’d want said about them at the end of their lives. I ask them to write it out as a speech. What they accomplished. What they did for others. The impact they made — on their families, their communities, their organizations.
It’s not a morbid exercise. It’s a clarity exercise.
The Moment That Stopped the Room
I was recently facilitating this exercise with a group of senior leaders. When we finished writing, I gave everyone the chance to share something that came through — an insight, a feeling, whatever was sitting with them.
One person volunteered to read his entire eulogy out loud.
It was about his kids. The mistakes he’d made. The flaws he carried. The lessons he’d learned. The ways he’d tried to show up for them — and the ways he hadn’t. It was raw, and it was real, and the room felt it.
Then another leader raised his hand. He wasn’t going to read his. But he had something he needed to say.
“I wrote this whole thing and I barely mentioned my family at all. I have two kids. And I care more about what my industry thinks of me than my own kids.”
He was almost in tears. You could feel the grief in it.
The grief of living and leading out of alignment.
Awareness Is the Access Point
What did that exercise do for him?
It created awareness.
As Carl Jung said, “Until we bring the unconscious to the conscious, it runs our life and we call it fate.”
That leader had been making choices — thousands of small choices — that were quietly out of alignment with what he actually valued. Not because he didn’t care. But because the unconscious patterns were running the show.
The moment he saw it clearly, everything changed. Not because he had a new strategy. Not because someone gave him a framework. But because he could finally see the gap between who he was being and who he actually wanted to be.
Research by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10–15% actually are — and that self-awareness is the strongest single predictor of leadership effectiveness. With that awareness, he could make a new choice.
To show up differently. To lead with more intention. To build a legacy he’d be proud of — not just in the boardroom, but at the dinner table.
This Isn’t About Neglecting Your Work
Let me be direct about something, because I know how high-performers think.
This isn’t about abandoning your ambitions or going soft on your standards. The awareness you gain from this kind of work doesn’t make you less effective. It makes you more intentional — which makes you better at everything.
And here’s what I’ve come to believe after working with leaders across industries: the better parent you are, the better leader you are. The better partner. The better human. When we carry this kind of awareness into every relationship, every conversation, every decision, it compounds.
It doesn’t mean every moment is perfect. It means you’re present in the moments that matter. It means you’re choosing how you show up instead of defaulting to habit.
That’s the work. And it starts not with a new system or a better calendar, but with a question:
If someone stood up today and said everything they needed to say about you — what would you want them to say?
Write it down. Be honest.
Then ask yourself: am I living that?
The Legacy Practice
I’ll leave you with three questions to sit with:
Who are the people whose experience of you matters most? Name them. Not titles or industries. People.
What would they say about you today? Not what you hope they’d say. What they actually would.
What’s one thing you could do differently, starting today, to close that gap?
Legacy isn’t built in milestone moments. It’s built in the ordinary ones. The conversation you have at the end of a hard day. The decision you make when no one’s watching. The way you listen when someone needs to feel heard.
Moment by moment. That’s where legacy lives.
