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Take off Your Mask and Live Your Legacy Forward with Jeff Saperstein

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Legacy isn’t necessarily in the past. If we could reverse-engineer our lives with a focus on how we want to show up, and how others experience us, we could create our legacy on purpose, explains business consultant and career coach, Jeff Saperstein. In this paradigm we are living into our lives with the end in mind: How do you want to be remembered? What do you want to be remembered for? Because the truth is you get to choose, and you are creating your legacy every day in what you say and do and how you say and do it.

Jeff goes on to highlight the extreme toll we pay when we compartmentalize our lives and believe we can show up in various roles differently. For example, if we create a work persona that is different than our ‘at home’ persona, and may be different, still, from our ‘out with friends’ persona, we are wasting a lot of effort and energy in playing those roles, which inevitably leads to burn-out.

The determining factor is our awareness and willingness to be internally directed – aligned with our values, beliefs, and desires, rather than allowing external agents and forces to decide who we will be and how we will show up. First, of course, one has to have thought into and defined his or her core values and made the decision to stand by them regardless of the situation or people involved.

This is, in effect, intentionally choosing to take off our masks and stand in our authentic power. Then we get to embody our values in our everyday behaviors, words, and actions.

Laura and Jeff go on to discuss the prevalence of ‘contrived urgency,’ the prevailing behavior of being busy for busy-ness’ sake; of trying to to do it all and having it all done by tomorrow! Jeff encourages us to be a whole person through focus and specifics and spend some time in reflection on each facet of our lives: work, family, friends, spirituality, finance, health, etc… and recognize where we are in alignment and doing well, or have developed thinking and behaviors that are disharmonious to what we want to create for our lives.

They go on to dive into some of the tools they both use with coaching clients to help them see and understand the clues to recognizing and developing each person’s unique strengths for greater contribution and satisfaction in life and work.

As they near the end of their conversation, Jeff offers this wisdom: First uncover, then discover yourself! Meaning each of us has to peel back the layers to see all that lies within us, then discover what it means, what it allows us to offer, and become… and know that along the way it sometimes requires unlearning and relearning beliefs, ideas, behaviors that will serve us in healthier ways… so we can live our legacy forward – on purpose and with intention!

You can learn more about these ideas and the tools Jeff and Laura use at these links:

Jeff on Facebook
Jeff online
Jeff on LinkedIn
Jeff’s Podcast – Interconnected Individuals
Carla Harris TED Talk – Finding a Sponsor
The Start-Up of You book
StrengthsFinder
Explore Strengths with Laura

Jeff’s Bio

Jeff Saperstein helps highly educated, high performance, business professionals transition to find work that matters to them. Jeff is a San Francisco Bay Area based business consultant, author, university teacher, career coach, and podcaster, who empowers people to navigate their careers to lead a successful, happier life.

Jeff is particularly attuned to mirroring and reflecting feelings, emotions, and awareness in his intuitive listening ability and to connect the dots. He has a three-stage approach to coaching: self-awareness for your operational values and aspirations; market reality exploration; and building you network and online presence to bring the right opportunities to you.

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Reflecting on life-changing decisions…Here’s one of mine

As part of the growth plan I am working my way through, I have recently spent some time reflecting on my association with the John Maxwell Team and the value it’s brought to my life.
Several people have told me they wished they could do some of what I’m doing and asked me about my experience with the John Maxwell Team. After returning from Guatemala my (already great) opinion about the JMT is at a new level. What we took part of in Guatemala was “Historic.” John’s Influence and his team at Equip ( his other company) along with two other organizations ( LaRed and Guatemala Prospera) are the reason this amazing Transformation has begun in Guatemala.
Think about this: Three people trained 150 of us coaches over two-and-a-half days. We were then deployed, along with a translator, to go out and teach four-hour work shops sitting in small circles with military, city and country government officials, faculties of schools, clergy, hospital administrators, doctors and nurses, business men and women, and community leaders; we taught them how to facilitate interactive roundtable discussions on the the topics of Laws of Growth and Values, like forgiveness, listening skills, and others.
Gua Natl Civil Police June13 sm  (Me with the National Civil Police, Guatemala City, Guatemala, June 2013, at the end of our session)
In three days we reached ~19,000 people and left them trained and equipped to facilitate a 30-week follow-up using this same process in their areas of influence and with their families.
It was an amazing, life-changing experience! I don’t know if you can imagine but each one of the participants (captains & generals of armies in uniform, city mayors, doctors, clergy, etc) had to get “real” and be “transparent” rating themselves from 1-10 on how they were at, for instance, “listening” or “forgiving others. ” Then they had to say aloud what specific action steps they were going to take in the coming week to improve their performance in that area.
I’ve never seen such transparency. The stories of what happened were crazy-awesome! When people get real and want to grow, TRANSFORMATION begins.
As of mid-August, 45,000 (yes, 45,000!) others were going through this transformation process in small groups led by the people we taught in June.
I’m still on ‘cloud nine’ about the whole thing. Our own country could so benefit from this process. Third world countries don’t have the distractions we have and they want help to bring hope to their future generations. From the president down to the young people, the whole country is in pursuit of hope. Although this was not a faith-based effort per se, all the principles, laws, and values we taught come directly from the wisdom found in the pages of the Bible.
If you are looking for a personal leadership growth track (speaking, coaching, teaching, etc…), want to move toward growing a business, or be a part of a transformational, powerful organization, you can make that a reality for yourself by joining the John Maxwell Team. Give me a call. I can walk you through the process for enrolling, the investment, and the amazing benefits of joining this team.
It truly is the best thing I’ve done for myself in at least 10 years!
I look forward to hearing from you.
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Intentional Leadership — D1, W4, M8 — Change

How strong is your self-confidence when it comes to changing the future?

The Steve Jobs movie has just been released. Have you seen it? I have not, yet. However, I think it’s safe to say Steve Jobs is well known as a game-changer in the computing industry to be sure. In fact, he has had tremendous influence over how we work and play…personal computing, iPod, iPad, iPhone, computer animation. Regardless of what some might say about his leadership style, the man had a vision and the drive to move it to reality. And, as a result, the way we live, connect, and interact with a variety of media has been forever changed.

When he was younger, he dreamed of a creating a home computer, but didn’t know how. He persuaded a friend to help him. Together, they created the first compact personal computer. Unfortunately, no one knew about it! They were unknowns, with almost no money and not reputation or credibility in their industry. Jobs sold his Volkswagen to finance Apple Computers. It wasn’t an overnight transformation, but it was a success, and I think most of us know  a lot of the rest of the story.

Are you aware that Jobs was inspired by a calligraphy course he took, and this is why, today, we have so many fonts to choose from with our Apple computers? He didn’t want people’s creativity to be limited to the old, boring, sans-serif fonts…and we benefited from that vision, as well.

Jobs and Wozniak were pioneers in their field. They envisioned change and made it happen. As they began to have some early successes, their confidence grew and they (eventually just Jobs) moved on to bigger challenges, enacting more and more change in how we compute, connect, listen to music, view other kinds of media, and create.

It’s my opinion that Steve Jobs will forever be remembered as a world-renowned leader.

Today, spend some time in reflection — think back to a time when you successfully brought about change. What gave you the courage to move forward?

What did you need to do to stay on track?

How did it give you confidence for other changes in your future?

What can you learn from the experience that will propel you even further in the days, months, and years ahead?

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